My wife and I, atheists both, were married in a chapel in Las Vegas. I doubt that counts, since Vegas chapels aren’t regularly used for ceremonies of any particular denomination.
One cool thing about the Vegas wedding was, the ministers usually have a few dozen different ceremonies all memorized, so we just told ours we wanted a non-religious ceremony, and that was that, easy as pie. I doubt anyone even noticed that there was no mention of God or any “blessing” going on.
The husband of my best friend is… not so much an atheist as “cold” (heck, any warm blood in that marriage is provided by the wife). They got a Church wedding because it was the only way she’d get married - being able to raise any kids Catholic was essential to her. The only people who took Comunion were the bride, myself and my mother.
Asking for a religious ceremony of a religion both spouses actively disbelieve seems quite disrespectful to me; of course if the priest/pastor/whatever decides it’s ok to have non-religious ceremonies in their venue, that’s also their right… but if I’m told to go to the Jesuits at noon, I don’t expect the ceremony to be officiated by a Justice of the Peace. The reason that “it’s pretty” was the reason Isabel Preysler wanted to be able to have her third wedding be a religious ceremony: her first marriage got annulled for “immaturity of the bride”, the second because “she does not believe in sacramental marriage”… yet she wanted to have a bishop because “it’s pretty”. Spare me! If you want to get married in a pretty place or have a pretty ceremony, it should be in a way and place that doesn’t make a travesty of other people’s beliefs.
It’s a bit more relaxed in Scotland, and getting hitched outdoors is fine (although a bit of a risk IMO)
Atheists married in a church checking in. It’s a ready-made venue that pleases the crowd, then ten minutes later, off to another destination for the party.
But for some reason, I’m against having a church funeral–even though churches are also ready-made for them. Maybe the theological tension is just too great while everyone is sizing you up and wondering where your soul is.
I think the assumption that it pleases the crowd is wrong. I was Christian until my mid-twenties - and many of my friends were pagans/atheists. And every time one of them went and got married in a Christian church, it didn’t “please” me. I often was understanding - this is what their family wanted. But in many of those cases the pagan or atheist was “closeted” to their family. I was pleased when my pagan friends got married in a park, or when my atheists friends chose a courthouse. I was uncomfortable when they chose a church. The level of uncomfortable depending on how Christian the church was (non-denominational college chapel very different from Roman Catholic Church that fought Vatican II tooth and nail), if either party getting married was even marginally Christian, how much of the location/service decision was being driven by “we need to make Grandma happy” and how much was “oh, the Church is so pretty and will show off my dress well” and how vocally anti-Christian the couple had been.
(In the aforementioned case, we had the bride wanting the pretty church, a very vocally anti-Christian couple, a RCC priest who was not at all compromising on the JESUS! in the wedding and took the opportunity to insult non-Catholics (which both the bride and groom were - perhaps he knew and was as disappointed as I was). However, I do believe the Grandma factor was at work.)
Athiest here. My first wedding was in the Catholic Church to suit the bride’s mother. I had to attend “precana” (sp?) lessons where the elderly priest told me I was the first athiest he’d met.
My second wedding was at home, performed by clergy (because in Maryland, USA at that time weddings had to be performed either by a Judge inside a courtroom or else by a clergy person). We got a Unitarian, which allows the ceremony to be practically free of religion.
My athiest daughter married in Pennsylvania, where the law allows Judges to perform weddings outside of courtrooms. But the only allowable Judge insisted on making the service a deeply religious one, so she opted for (you guessed it) another Unitarian.
My feelings:
If you’re only doing it for the asthetics, there are plenty of places that you can hold a lovely wedding. My friend did hers in a park behind her house. She had a pretty arbor and flowers on the chairs, etc. It was really charming.
The marriage only lasted 4 months but it was one of the prettiest weddings I’ve ever attended!
Colophon, I’m a little unclear if, by “in a church” you mean that you’d ask a religious officiant to marry you in their church/congregation, or just that you would like to rent out a church building as a venue. To me those are two different things, but the second (just renting a venue) sounds like a win-win for everyone. There’s a fair number of non-denominational chapels around here, often historical sites or on university campuses, and I couldn’t see a thing wrong with that, especially if the fee goes to a non-profit. And if an active congregation wants to rent their space for non-religious purposes, well, good for them for being efficient! So long as its clear that its just a space rental and this doesn’t violate their beliefs, I think its a nice way to interact with the larger community.
If you are thinking of using a Christian officiant, well, I think whether a ceremony is appropriate is between the couple and the minister, as a guest I would politely assume that you all had been honest and worked it out. Probably because I’m Catholic, but my thought is that the minister agrees to it then its not my place to criticize. I’d probably be a little confused, though.
Not in the US (but in every state that allows them they’re simply marriage by another name). New Zealand allows straight couples to have a civil union instead of a marriage or if married to “convert” to a civil union (didn’t Helen Clark do that 
).
If you were getting some good or service in return for your “donation”, it’s not tax deductible.
My wife and I are not specifically atheists, just not Christian. I am more atheist and my wife is pretty much just not sure about religiousness. We were planning our wedding to be outside in the country at a family member’s house, but when we ended up going through with it, we were getting married in the spring and it was cold or raining every day. We got married in the church my mother is a member of, and it is the one I was a member of when I was younger.
We were getting married in a small town where we grew up, so the truth is that there was no building to use other than the church or the high school. We talked to them about it and they were very understanding that we wanted to use less religious things and more of just wedding things.
I felt that it was a little weird, but it was no big deal. I’ve gone to weddings in churches, so why not have mine in there?
Brendon Small
I am an atheist and I did not get married in a church. I got married in a park. But the officiant was a Unitarian minister.
There are lots of places other than churches to get married. If I were gonna do it again, I’d get married in the botanic gardens. (However, I am not gonna do it again, I’m still married from the first time.)
Re: the things required in the US to get married… I think there are still some states that require blood tests, too. We went to NY, in part to get away from that crap.
Nope. It wouldn’t have been a really big deal, because it’s essentially as meaningless as smearing blue mud into my navel — i.e. something I might do to fit in with the natives, though it has no personal significance for me — but I felt weird about adopting more religious trappings than I absolutely had to.
My wife is Japanese, so she had no problem with excluding certain things, though she did roll her eyes at the fact that I was putting myself through more trouble than I had to by excluding most professional officiants on the basis that they’re almost all religious. In Japan Western-style weddings are way more form than substance; the real marriage part, no matter what your religion, is registering the union at the government office. Only about 1% of the population (or less) is Christian, but a whole bunch of people like playing dress-up costume ball. Some foreigners make good money for performing marriages despite having no other real qualifications than looking appropriately foreign.
We planned our wedding for the US because the key members of her family can afford to travel while most of mine can’t. (That ended up being a really good thing as my father had to get surgery for esophagus cancer so close to the wedding that we weren’t sure he’d be able to make even the relatively short drive there.) It was also about 1/2 the price of a normal marriage in Japan, with the kind of site that would have been impossible here without an overpaid CEO-type salary to draw on.
My best friend in the US, who I’ve known since high school, was registered as a minister for a wedding he did a couple of years ago for another friend — convenient, that — and served as our officiant. We wrote our own vows, with no mention of religious stuff, instead we wrote things we actually cared about. We did a ring exchange and vow (that tradition in Europe goes back at least to the Romans). I chose a couple of quotes I liked from Kahlil Gibran, which are beautiful and spiritual-y without being at all tied to any particular religion, as a framework for my buddy to use in planning the ceremony. My uncle, who is a professional musician, played some music for background and procession. If I do say so myself, the ceremony was pretty frigging cool, as well as having the virtue of being only about 30–40 minutes long.
We had the wedding outside, under a decorated arch, in a very pretty park near Monterey that’s right on the coast, with a great view. The reception was in a great bed and breakfast nearby. All her friends said that our pictures looked like something from a TV drama or movie, and she’s had at least two serious inquiries from friends about whether she would help them plan a US wedding when they get married. All in all, the wedding looked awesome, felt good for all of us, and was more meaningful than a more traditional wedding run by a professional officiant would have been.
Also, praise Og and Al Gore for creating the internet, because we managed to plan the whole thing by ourselves using websites and email. I wished about halfway into it that we’d gotten a wedding planner (she would have paid for herself in time alone in an extremely short time) but getting everything done from overseas would have been close to impossible without it.
But who suffers if a non-religious person (willingly) gets married in a church? It isn’t as if including a nonbeliever in a ceremony taints the whole building, making it impossible for True Believers to ever get married there too. What you dismiss as the “grandma factor” I consider to be an important sign of courtesy for others, especially older folks and relatives-to-be. If I had insisted on a secular venue, not only would I have broken my FIL’s heart (he was so thrilled to marry his oldest son in his own church), but tongues would have been wagging for months in the home towns of both me and my husband. Sure, those tongues would belong to small-minded people, but why should I make my own family and my brand-new in-laws bear the brunt of that, just so I could indulge myself by putting my religious views ahead of everyone else’s well-being?
I’ve been married twice. The first was a simple civil in a courtroom with the judge and a couple witnesses.
The second wedding was in the tiny little church her family attended for years. The service was done by a very nice and funny old British priest. Really nice guy.
I did have a slight issue with the two foot tall grotesque dead Jesus on the wall in the room we had our reception, but whatever.
I told my 2nd wife I didn’t care where we had it… I let her pick.
I considered it for about ten minutes. I would have liked to have been married in the church that my great great grandmother was baptised in, married in and is now buried behind. On the other hand, I wasn’t prepared to have a religious ceremony because that would have made me feel like a hypocrite - I wanted that church only as a building that had significance to my family. I rang and spoke to the minister to see if we could “hire the venue”, so to speak - pay a donation or whatever to use it for the afternoon and have a celebrant come in to perform the ceremony. Unfortunately - but as was quite within their rights - they didn’t allow that. Additionally, they required all couples marrying in their church to attend an … eight? week course (one or two nights a week) to prepare them for marriage. As we would have been travelling from interstate, this was not feasible. Then, of course, my grandmother kicked up a ruckus about not being able to attend if it wasn’t held locally, so we dropped the idea of travelling to that location altogether and married in the local gardens instead.
Mrs. J. and I were married in the University of Iowa chapel, the ceremony performed by a noted criminal attorney named Leon (serving as Justice of the Peace).
It was a nice setting, and the cross-examination was brief with no God mentions. 
I’m not a believer, but it rubs me the wrong way when people want to take advantage of the trappings without committing to the beliefs. It’s not just a pretty backdrop, it’s a house of worship. If it’s a case of pleasing family, then that bothers me much less, because it comes from good and loving intentions. But if it’s just a case of “Oh, how quaint this little church is!,” it starts giving me the heebie-jeebies. It somehow seems disrespectful to have a secular event in a sacred place.