Sure, why not

Writing a bit about infant baptism today, and the discussions parents in a secular/religious mixed marriage have about it, and the discussion Becca and I had when our oldest was new.

I said I’d prefer not to have him baptized. She said that was fine. But would it be okay if we just had him dedicated instead? she asked. You know…for Grandma?

Sure, why not.

Among the many things I didn’t know then was what a dedication actually entailed. I was just thinking “Baptism Lite,” a nice compromise. I was being flexible, not a bad thing.

And the little ceremony was actually fine…until, as we stood in the front of the semi-megachurch we attended at the time, the minister turned to us and said

In presenting this child for dedication, you are hereby witnessing to your own personal Christian faith. Dale and Rebekah, do you announce your faith in Jesus Christ, and show that you want to study Him, know Him, love Him, and serve Him as His disciple, and that you want your child to do the same? Do you pledge to teach your child, as soon as he is able to learn, the nature of this holy sacrament; watch over his education, that he may not be led astray; direct his feet to the sanctuary; restrain him from evil associates and habits; and bring him up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord?

Or words to that effect.

Becca squeezed my hand, hard. It was not a squeeze of joy at the Precious Moment® we were witnessing in our child’s life. I knew that. It was a squeeze that said, Oh shit, my love, I didn’t know, I promise I didn’t, and if you can find it in your heart to lie like a damn rug in this moment, I swear that I will never, ever ask you to do this again for any other children we may have.

I squeezed back, and together we turned to the minister and said

Sure, why not.

Or words to that effect.

(Share your own baptism/dedication stories here.)

So I peek

The secular/religious mixed marriage survey will close in three weeks. I’m itching to see the results. So I peek. Don’t judge me.

So far we have respondents from 40 U.S. states plus D.C. and five Canadian provinces, plus a fair number from other countries. I won’t discuss specifics until the survey closes, but I can say…wow. I’m riveted by this.

A picture of the secular/religious marriage is emerging that has never been seen before. There are some clear patterns — what tends to cause tension and what doesn’t (you may be surprised), how much it matters whether your views were different at the beginning of the marriage or someone changed along the way, whether and how kids complicate things (take a guess), and much more. Some isn’t surprising, but lot of it really is.

I’ll be assisted in the analysis of the survey by Mary Ellen Sikes of American Secular Census which, if you’re secular and haven’t taken it, you should definitely take.

But first! If you are in a secular/religious marriage and haven’t taken MY survey, get to it before it closes on the 31st…and tell your friends!

The mixing of America

An ongoing series of five-minute short posts while I’m writing a book on the secular/religious mixed marriage.

If you’re in a mixed-belief marriage of any kind, here’s an arresting thought: you probably wouldn’t have been had you married in the 1950s.

Mixed belief marriages in the U.S. have more than doubled in number since then, up from 20 to 45 percent. The main reason is that we’re less segregated by religion.

It was much more common in the past for people to grow up in religiously uniform neighborhoods created by immigration patterns and social and economic stratification. If you grew up Baptist in Birmingham in the 1950s, you could get well into your twenties before you met a non-Baptist…if then. Same for a Catholic in South Boston, or an Orthodox Jew in Borough Park, Brooklyn. Your pool of potential mates is drawn from the people you know, obviously, so most people married within their own faith.

It’s more common now for kids to grow up in neighborhoods and schools that are religiously mixed to a greater degree. Greater physical and social mobility and more people going to college means more of us are cheek-and-jowl with all kinds of difference. The pool of potential mates now includes more people of different religions and none, so mixed-belief marriages inevitably go up in number.

Flavors of nonbelief

Religious belief in America has been studied from every angle in enormous detail. That makes it possible to get beyond misleading statements like “Southern Baptists believe…” to find out what individual Southern Baptists say they actually believe, and in what percentages, and with what intensities.

It’s like the difference between red/blue political maps and John Nelson’s perspective-rattling purple map.

But researchers have barely begun to measure seculars in the same way. Even when we’re not lumped into the pointless “Nones” category, surveys seldom drill down to get at the details of what we hold true, much less the intensities and attitudes that accompany those opinions. The Hunsberger/Altemeyer study is one of the few exceptions, though with an n that small, it’s more of a sounding than anything. A good sounding, but still limited (as they acknowledge).

A crucial part of my current book is drawing out the hidden diversity in labels, and I’ve struggled to match the available detail on the religious side with similar data on the secular side. Now a recent study by Christopher Silver at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga comes to the rescue with a much larger n (1,153) and exactly the kind of drill-down typology I was looking for. It nicely overthrows the common misconception that nonbelievers come in just one flavor — Dawkolate.

More on those flavors later.