The Southern Baptist cafeteria
An ongoing series of posts while I’m writing In Faith and In Doubt, a book on the secular/religious mixed marriage.
A few weeks ago I wrote about the difference between official Catholic doctrine and the actual beliefs of most Catholics. Later on I’ll write about the wide variation in nonreligious beliefs. Today it’s a quick peek in the Southern Baptist cafeteria.
There’s a Southern Baptist church in Fort Worth, Texas that holds the Letter of Baptism for my wife Becca. She was willingly baptized into the church as an adult in 1990, the year before our wedding, with her fiancé in attendance.
She was not a Mainline Protestant when we married — by affiliation, she was a Protestant Evangelical. If she ascribed to every piece of the denomination’s creed, the Baptist Faith and Message, we could still easily have been friends, but I doubt we would have dated, much less married. She agreed with many elements of that creed, but the Baptist Faith and Message includes a few important things that I was pretty sure Becca wouldn’t ever have endorsed, any more than I would endorse every tweet of Richard Dawkins.
I printed out the BF&M and asked Becca which of its positions she remembered holding true at that time, and which she would have rejected. Here’s a sample of her response:
She believed there is only one God and that he is perfect, all-powerful, and all-knowing. But she never believed that man brought sin into the human race by disobedience, nor that “as soon as [people] are capable of moral action, they become transgressors and are under condemnation.”
She believed that Christ was the son of God, but not that he was born of a virgin, nor that salvation is available only through him achat cialis.
She did not agree that “all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy.”
She did believe that baptism is “the believer’s death to sin, the burial of the old life, and the resurrection to walk in newness of life in Christ Jesus,” as well as a testimony to “faith in the final resurrection of the dead.”
But she didn’t believe it is “the duty and privilege of every follower of Christ” to evangelize others to the faith.
She agreed that “Christians should oppose racism, every form of greed, selfishness, and vice,” “work to provide for the orphaned, the needy, the abused, the aged, the helpless, and the sick,” and “do all in their power to put an end to war.” But she did not agree that homosexuality is a form of “sexual immorality,” that Christians should “speak on behalf of the unborn,” nor that the strict definition of marriage should be “the uniting of one man and one woman.”
One of the statements of the Baptist Faith and Message that surprises outsiders (and insiders, come to that) is clear support for church-state separation. “Church and state should be separate,” it says, and “the state has no right to impose penalties for religious opinions of any kind.” She agreed.
As for marriage and parenting, she never believed that it was her place to “submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ,” nor that she had “the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation.”
The contents of her cafeteria tray made her a perfect representative of the Evangelical Left, who affirm the basics (atonement, incarnation, resurrection) but reject the conservative social platform of the evangelical churches.
The moral of the story? Aside from the God-and-Jesus theological frame, my own tray of humanist values and beliefs wasn’t all that different from Becca’s. And when she dumped theology off her tray nine years ago, most of her values stayed put.
The cover
I really wondered what direction the publisher would go for this cover, and once again, the design team at AMACOM Books did me proud.
Every cover design process gives me hives. So far they’ve all turned out really well: The non-praying mother-child hands of Parenting Beyond Belief, the curious kid on Raising Freethinkers, the solo questioner on Voices of Unbelief, and the nautilus on Atheism For Dummies… So many ways to go wrong on these topics, and every time they’ve gotten it right.
But for this one, I didn’t even know what to recommend to them. How do you capture the religious side of the topic without evoking a specific religion? How do you depict the nonreligious side? I didn’t want any cheese-bag thing like one person standing outside of a church, holding hands with someone inside. I wanted something that included people without being heteronormative. Racial diversity. Positive. Interesting. Something that evoked warmth and affection and normalcy without being boring. Some reference to parenting would be good, since so many of the issues relate to that.
I gathered my notes over the course of several weeks. Then suddenly my editor sent the cover you see here, saying, “Here’s the jacket. I hope you like it!”
Wha…here’s the jacket?! My heart sank. I steeled myself to roll back a creative process that had already run its course without me.
I clicked on the attachment…and fell in love.
Crafty buggers. They skirted the questions about depicting religion by not depicting religion, or irreligion. You don’t have to — it’s in the title! It never would have occurred to me to do that, which is why design is best left to designers.
It’s interesting, fun, warm, informal, personal, affectionate. The anonymity is awesome. Didn’t get racial diversity, but it’s at least deniably heteronormative.
I’m happy. Onward.
Engage paddle drive!
A series of short posts while I’m writing a book on the secular/religious mixed marriage.
Ever pedal a paddleboat? No you haven’t. No you haven’t, because the pedals on those damn things are attached to nothing. It’s like the DOOR CLOSE button on an elevator, or the pedestrian crossing button — just there to make you feel relevant to the outcome. Forward progress in a paddleboat is a fluke, more to do with random currents or the Butterfly Effect than anything you’re doing.
But you tell yourself you had fun, and that the other side of the lake didn’t look that interesting anyhow.
The first half of every book project feels like that to me. Then the paddles catch. Funny thing: no matter how long the contract is, it happens right around the halfway point. I had about 20 weeks to write Atheism For Dummies, pedaled like a sumbitch for the first ten weeks, then caught a nice tailwind in the eleventh week.
I have a year for this one, 52 weeks. Last week was Week 27…and yesterday the pedals actually engaged the paddles, and I’m flying across the effing lake.
It won’t last, but for now, woohooooo!
STATURDAY: More inclusive, period
The Riley survey (conducted for Naomi Schaefer Riley’s book ‘Til Faith Do Us Part) asked married respondents to choose between the following statements:
1. It is better for everyone involved if a married couple have the same religion.
2. What really matters is that a married couple have the same values regardless of their religion.
An overwhelming majority (79 percent) chose #2.
This apparently irritates the author, who was after all writing a book saying mixed-belief marriage is a bad idea. So having sampled the public opinion, Riley then derides it: “Americans…are not willing to put religion ahead of ‘common values,’ a more inclusive-sounding phrase.”
No, it’s not “more inclusive-sounding” — it’s more inclusive, kind of period. And putting “common values” in scare-quotes doesn’t change that.
It’s encouraging to see so many people, including religious believers, agreeing that common values can be found outside of a single tradition. That’s why successful mixed-belief marriages are much more common than Riley and other proponents of same-faith marriage would have you believe.
The Chill Grandma
Continuing to plow through the survey data, and I’ve come across a surprising result that relates to extended family.
Of the four sides of our own extended family, one is gone, one is a mix of secular and religious, and two are very religious in belief and practice. Yet Becca and I have experienced very little interference or pressure regarding religion or our kids’ upbringing.
I’ve always assumed that was a rare and lucky thing. Some of the stories I hear from nonreligious parents make my toes curl. Shunning, tirades, threats, using kids as a wedge, pitting one family member against another, I’ve heard it all.
But if the survey is any indication, our situation may be lucky, but it isn’t uncommon at all. When asked to identify any sources of tension or conflict in their secular/religious marriage, just ten percent of respondents identified “Extended family pressure, actions, or concerns.”
Ten percent.
I actually started wondering about this last year when I asked people in one of my secular parenting workshops to raise their hands if they’d experienced pressure or conflict from religious extended family. In a crowd of about fifty, maybe 7 or 8 hands went up. Curious, I asked the same thing in the next workshop. Same result.
Given my work, you’d think I would already have had a clear view of the issue. But my skewed perception results from something I’ve mentioned before called the news paradox. You hear about something terrible on the news, or in your inbox, and you think it’s something to worry about. But the fact that it’s on the news means it is newsworthy, which in most cases means it’s rare and you don’t have to worry about it. Car crashes happen every day, so they don’t usually make the news. Plane crashes are rare, and we hear about each and every one in graphic detail. So we race down the freeway, risking a very common death, but fear air travel, the safest of all major modes.
I get a constant stream of emails from secular parents struggling with extended family issues, but I almost never hear from parents saying, “Grandma’s still being great about the religion thing. Thought you’d like to know.”
For those who do experience it, extended family pressure can be a huge and important problem, and the book will address ways to manage such pressure and conflict productively. But it’s good and important to put it in perspective, especially if that can help people to be less fearful of entering a secular/religious mixed marriage.
And we have a title!
The process of naming this book was longer than the process of naming my kids. But it’s done, and I’m very happy with it.
I like titles concise and accurate, but also with a little poetry. Parenting Beyond Belief also happened after a long process, and I love it.
The title of this book had to reference marriage generally and the secular/religious marriage in particular. It had to be as inclusive as possible, not only on the religious side but on the secular side as well. It isn’t just a book about Christians marrying atheists, for example. But it also couldn’t be overly broad (referring to “Nones” or the “unaffiliated,” for example, which includes many believers).
I liked the idea of a title that evoked the wedding vows about accepting each other no matter what. “For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health,” that sort of thing. This book is about secular and religious partners accepting their differences of belief. After toying with awkward, non-poetic things like “In Belief and in Disbelief,” we opted for the poetic concision of In Faith and in Doubt. The subtitle, as usual, brings the specifics: How religious believers and nonbelievers can create strong marriages and happy families.
There are no perfect options, but this one splits the many goalposts as well as I can imagine.
STATURDAY: Mixed-belief marriages by age group
![old-couple-holding-hands[1]](http://parentingbeyondbelief.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/old-couple-holding-hands1.jpg)
Younger people are statistically more comfortable with mixed marriages of all kinds, including race and religion. So it seems counterintuitive that the likelihood of marrying someone of a different worldview actually increases with age at marriage:
• Married between age 16-25: 48% are in mixed-belief marriages
• Married between age 26-35: 58% are in mixed-belief marriages
• Married between age 36-45: 66% are in mixed-belief marriages
It makes more sense when you consider two things: (1) The very religious often marry young, and (2) the older you are, the more likely you are to have mingled with people of different religious beliefs. Your pool of potentials tends to get much more diverse during and after college (or once you start your career) than it was when you were 18.
(Stats from Riley Interfaith Marriage Survey, conducted for ‘Til Faith Do Us Part by Naomi Schaefer Riley, Oxford Univ. Press, 2013.)
Finding the book
A series of short posts while I’m writing a book on the secular/religious mixed marriage.
While I’m writing this one, I’m continuously “finding the book” — trying to refine my own sense of what the finished product will look like. Harder than usual, since this is mostly new ground.
The chapter structure has been one of the challenges. The book is not just tips for having the baptism conversation or dealing with pressure from the mother-in-law. That’s part of it, but there’s also a lot of big picture content that needs to be layered around those issues.
Here’s the current plan:
1. Intro/Big Pic
I start with a snapshot of my own wedding and the thoughts in my head as I married the Southern Baptist woman of my dreams. Pull back to examine the scary literature on mixed-belief marriage. Dissect that lit to find a strong tendency to exaggerate or spin (or completely disregard) research, or use research well past its expiration date, in order to sustain the idea that couples must share beliefs. Replace that hypothesis with a more positive one supported by current research. Establish the unique framework of the secular/religious marriage.
2. Meet the Believers
What it means to be an individual believer today, and how that differs from the popular perception. The wide spectrum of actual belief and practice (as opposed to official doctrine), and the enormous and growing overlap with secular values.
3. Meet the Nonbelievers
What it means to be an individual nonbeliever today, and how that differs from the popular perception. The wide spectrum of approaches and tone among the nonreligious, and the enormous and growing common ground with religious progressives.
4. Meet the Mix
This sprawling middle section is where my survey data will spread their wings. A frame-by-frame look at the secular/religious marriage as revealed in that survey and in individual interviews. How the flavor of the mix (Catholic vs. Jewish vs. Evangelical vs. Mainline Protestant vs. Hindu vs. Islamic on the religious side, anti-theist vs. academic atheist vs. ritual atheist etc. on the nonreligious side) and the intensity with which those labels are held affect the issues that arise.
5. The Issues
A series of short sections describing individual issues in the secular/religious marriage, including extended family pressure, wedding, churchgoing, family identity, parenting issues (from baptism to child autonomy to rites of passage and churchgoing/Sunday school for the kids), communication, divorce, and funeral/memorial planning.
6. For Better
Survey respondents were asked to name any specific positives or benefits they have derived from being in a marriage that bridges the widest belief gap of all. After the long section on challenges, the book ends with a look at the very encouraging responses to that one question.
Catholics in the mix
The secular/religious mixed marriage survey is now closed, and the data diving begins…
We ended up with over 700 respondents from 46 states, seven Canadian provinces, and 20 other countries. A lot of good, rich, in-depth answers that I’ll gradually dole out in the blog.
One interesting bit is the Catholic connection. According to the survey, the most common childhood religion for people in secular/religious marriages by far is Catholicism (22%) — more than twice the number of Baptist upbringings, which comes in second at 10 percent. The most common current identity for the religious partner is also Catholic.
Haven’t drilled down into the switching data yet, but I’ll bet many of the mixed couples were both Catholic when they married, then one fell away. That would fit the results of the religion-switching study the Pew Forum did several years ago — the Pew-Switching Study, as it were — which showed that 25 percent of the religiously unaffiliated are former Catholics.
Here’s a graphic representation of the Pew study (click to enlarge):
(Courtesy of Michael Spencer.)
Positive
A series of short posts while I’m writing a book on the secular/religious mixed marriage.
I’m going to spend over a hundred pages of the book looking at the specific problems and tensions that can arise when one partner is religious and the other is not and suggesting ways to address and overcome them.
Sometimes it just can’t be done — the negatives of the mix overwhelm the relationship and bring it to an end.
But in many cases, couples not only find their way through the challenges but can name specific advantages to marrying across that gap. The last chapter looks at those benefits, drawn mostly from a single open question near the end of the survey. I’ve been swimming in those answers all day today, and oh, the water’s fine.
The answers fall into about a dozen categories. I’m not going to get into the deets until the survey closes, but it’s really encouraging stuff — and a nice antidote to the long shelf of books claiming there’s nothing but grief in the mix.
