I remember some friends from rural Minnesota who fell in love & got married years ago.
There were some older members of both their families who referred to it as a “mixed marriage”, because he was from the German Roman Catholic parish, and she was from the Irish Roman Catholic parish. And they weren’t joking about that!
Perhaps the phenomenon is more easily understood if phrased as, “my relative went through a deep and sweeping change in her world-view and beliefs, and it broke up her marriage.” A change like that doesn’t simply affect where one goes to church; it can have ripple effects throughout one’s daily life. One hears of similar things happening over political differences these days.
BigT writes:
> . . . The big line in Christianity is probably Catholic/Protestant/Other . . .
No, the standard divisions in Christianity are Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, and the other things that those three groups mostly consider to be heretical Christianity (like Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Christian Scientists, Unitarians, etc.). A lot of Americans miss including Eastern Orthodoxy because it’s rare in some American communities, but it’s just as significant a division of Christianity as Catholicism and Protestantism. Most Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christians consider those three divisions to be truly Christian and the others groups to not really be Christians.
I expected better of the dopers here, dozens of posts in and no-one has yet said
“I was born a snake-handler…”
or mentioned “Judean people’s front” and “splitters”
for shame.
Inicdentally, for those with experience. How does converting for the sake of marriage actually work? I don’t mean the mechanics, more the internal processing of it.
Does the convertee have to convince themselves that their previous faith was nonsense and the new faith is suddenly correct? If not, in what way is that a conversion? (don’t your gods have the ability to see through such cheap tricks?) and if they can discard their previous faith so easily what does that say about the discarded faith? or if they were not bothered about that faith anyway why can’t they remain not bothered about any faith? Do some faith’s actually state you must formally convert in order to marry one of their own or is not having a faith good enough for them?
I find it all terrible confusing and depressing.
My Aunt converted from wishy-washy Church of England to Catholic in order to marry; she totally embraced it, to the point that she’s now far, far more religious than him, or the rest of his family. He’ll skip mass to make it to a football match (his real religion), she’ll insist on going while on holiday in a country where she doesn’t speak a word of the language. I suspect she feels that she was led to him in part so she would find the real truth. I’m not sure though, as I tend to avoid the topic of religion with her, as I’m atheist, and she’s lovely.
I believe she was told she had to convert in order to have a marriage in his church, which was important to his family, and I remember her saying that they gave her a lot of hoops to jump through to prove her conversion was sincere.
I don’t know how anyone would have handled it if they’d decided to go registry office or C of E wedding instead.
The ones that “work” are where neither the husband nor wife gives a damn but are doing it for the family. My mother converted to Judaism to please my father’s parents. My father didn’t care about it, so there was no conflict at home over that.
Another situation where one might need to convert is simply to get an interfaith marriage. My wife and I found it impossible to get a Seventh Day Adventist Pastor to bless our union unless I converted. I would not. Too many fellow Jews died under threat to convert for me to do it that easily, even if I am non-practicing.
Where you run into problems is where one actually is practicing and wants the other to convert. I don’t understand that mentality. True story: At Cavalry Chapel, a guy walks up to the pastor and says, “My girlfriend told me I needed to get saved before she’d have sex with me.”
Neither of those is a core Christian doctrine. “Mainstream”, more like. There are many Christian sects who don’t subscribe to one, the other, or both.
Two Many Cats:
It depends on the specific family…once upon a time, the answer would certainly have been 100% “yes”, but these days, there are many Jewish organizations who focus on outreach to the non-Orthodox, and many of these will advise Orthodox families to keep in touch and keep lines of communication open. But realize, that the purpose of that would be to make it easier to bring the wayward Jew back into the fold, not that non-shunning would imply acceptance of the new sect.
That said, within the umbrella of Orthodoxy, there is little issue when a non-Hasidic Orthodox Jew joins a Hasidic group, or when a Hasid of one sect switches to another sect of Hassidus. I’m honestly not sure how a Hasidic family would view one of their own becoming non-Hasidic but remaining Orthodox. I think they’d generally be OK with it, but I couldn’t say for certain.
And almost everyone forgets about the Armenian Christians and similar branches. They are not Eastern Orthodox, but split off the Roman-Constantinople churches before those two split. Of course, they’re not very common within the US except for Southern California.
It’s considered important ever since the Trinitarian baptism “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” was standardized in one of the councils of Nicene. And that form of baptism is important because it signifies conformation with the Nicene Creed. Which is important because it was one of the early attempts to unify Christian doctrine.
Whenever the question “who is a Christian” comes up, a good zeroth-order approximation is “anyone who espouses the Nicene Creed”.
I can’t speak for “most people”, but having personally … ahhhh … helped a number of people change to Team Mormon (and seen a number of close family / friends leave Team Mormon), I can say from my experience it is “a big deal” more often than not, but that doesn’t mean it has to end in dissolved marriages.
FWIW the Lovely and Talented Mrs. Shodan was raised Roman Catholic, married me, and is now a Lutheran pastor.
I didn’t try to convert her, it just sort of happened. But it wasn’t a big deal because the doctrinal differences between Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism were never important to either of us. We were both Christian before, we are both Christian now.
My family didn’t care, and her family took their cues from my brother-in-law, who is a Roman Catholic bishop and is fine with it.
Regards,
Shodan
There is at least one non-Trinitarian group which uses that very same formula for baptism.
Not really. What it is, though, IMHO, is a great way to recognize Trinitarian Christianity.
I would say a great deal of the possible friction would be the level of adherence of each to their stated beliefs. Also, the differences between the denominations.
For example, my MIL was raised baptist and was a member of a standard (in GA) Southern Baptist church when she married her 3rd husband (the first husband was baptist, the second was Catholic, the 3rd was Jehovah’s Witness). She was not overly devout and it seems she was more into the guy and not being alone than she was concerned about the differences of faith.
I am not sure how devoted he was to JW prior to their marriage. By the time I met my wife, he was only an occasional attender. But I know my wife said she had to attend some of their services and bible studies. She was 13 when her mom married him and she rebelled. The two denominations are very different. SB consider JW a cult and JW considers non-JWs as not being real Christians.
He refused to let them have a Christmas tree (no that is not thing for Christianity, but there is also no problem with it), so his very strict adherence to his beliefs, did cause friction, but over time, he gave in (probably for the nookie). So by the time I met them (10 yrs later), he had relented on most things and they just did not talk about religion. In fact, we got married in the church that she and my wife were members of (SB) and he came to the wedding and it was not a big deal.
My wife and I are devout SB and it works nicely for us, if one wanted to convert, there would be a lot of conversation as to why.
For example, when our oldest was a freshman in HS, she said she was BI. There is not a lot of acceptance for such in the SB church, so there was a possibility that it could cause issues and would potentially enough of a reason to change denominations (we would not attend somewhere our DD was not welcome).
But we would have converted to something close but also was more open to the LGBTQ community (Methodists for example).
Were one of us to suddenly decide to become JW, or Mormon or Christian Scientist, then that would likely cause a lot more issues and could fracture our marriage. But considering our involvement in the church and our ongoing communication in all areas, that would not happen without lots of prior discussion and reflection.
So theoretically, it could be a problem, but in practice, I am sure we would head it off long in advance. If there was no communication, then it would be due to one of us changing not just our beliefs/practices, but something very dear to our core. That is ultimately what would cause any issues.
Uh, no, to the first part of your paragraph here (I think the second half is more or less accurate, it’s nice that you’re aware of the Cathars & Bogomils, since I find them really really fascinating). You can certainly argue that the doctrines of hell and the trinity are wrong, and you can also argue that they aren’t ‘core’ Christian doctrines (although that’s largely a matter of how you define Christianity), but they’re much older than Nicea & Augustine respectively.
Hell is mentioned a bunch of times by Jesus himself, and also in Revelation, and the first Christian text providing a graphic description of hell is much older than Augustine (it’s in the Apocalypse of Peter, which probably dates from somewhere in the late first to mid second century, and was included in the first biblical canon that we have, the Muratorian Fragment). There were heated debates in early Christianity about whether Hell is eternal, who goes there, whether it’s a place of conscious torment, whether it’s possible for the souls in hell to repent & be saved, etc., and those are very important debates to have (and yes, there are good arguments on both sides of all of them), but none of them touches on the question of whether hell exists.
As for the Trinity, well it’s not clearly spelled out in the NT (unless you credit the Comma Johanneum), but it’s quite clear at least in the Johannine writings that Jesus is divine, and the end of Matthew invokes the Trinitarian formula of baptism. Even if it postdates the New Testament though it certainly predates Nicea, although if you want pre-Nicea citations I’ll need to take a while to look them up. Nicea was the first time the creed was explicitly written down, in order to anathematize people who disbelieved in the Trinity: it’s not the first time anyone came up with the idea of a trinity.
Well a person from an atheist family suddenly becoming a Christian can also cause some rifts.
Yes, that happens too, and sometimes the atheist says things like
Regards,
Shodan
I’d say that in general:
Switching between Protestant denominations: generally not a big deal
Between Protestant and Catholic (in either direction): less of a deal than it probably used to be, but may raise some eyebrows, or hackles
Between Protestant/Catholic churches and JW, Mormons and possibly some other things like Spiritualist and Unitarian* - probably a bit of a big deal.
*I am not ‘lumping’ these things together as being in any way intrinsically similar - their grouping here is only because they probably represent a similar magnitude of change and family upset, in transition to/from a mainstream Protestant denomination.
Very interesting. Thanks.
In the vast majority of cases in the U.S., when someone changes religions, they aren’t rejected by their parents. This article doesn’t explicitly address that issue, but the number of people who convert religions during their life is huge. 42% change religions in their life if you count different Protestant denominations as being different religions. If you don’t count them as being different, then it’s 34% who change religions. Is it really your observation that the amount of people estranged from their parents is remotely that large?:
Well when does this NOT happen in other areas also?
Say a hippy family living in a commune somewhere has a kid who leaves and becomes some rich stock broker? Or vise versa? Remember the movie “Into the Wild” where the boy, upon graduating from MIT and getting a new car, throws it all away to go live in the Alaskan wilderness?
I know a sort of backwards, redneck family in the Missouri Ozarks who had a son who left for college and they never heard a word from him since (barely). He basically slammed them for being so backwards and was so big on his new California lifestyle.