How Does Faith Influence Decisions About Marriage And Family?
(ANALYSIS) There’s this phrase I heard over and over again growing up in a Southern Baptist Church - “don’t be unequally yoked.” It’s a reference to a verse from 2 Corinthians 6:14, “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?”
In my experience it is always used in the context of finding a spouse. The admonition is to find someone to marry who has the same faith background as you. The worry for my evangelical group leaders was that if one of us married a non-believer, our spouse might lead us down a path toward secularism.
But the general admonition is the same in many faith communities: Try to marry someone who shares your faith background. That’s certainly a well-established norm in Jewish communities. According to Kiddushin 68b, marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew is prohibited under Jewish law. In Islam, there’s not an outright prohibition on marrying a non-Muslim, but the Quran only permits people to marry other “People of the Book.”
There are theological reasons for this, as was commonly invoked in my evangelical upbringing. Each spouse can edify the other’s faith and grow closer together as they grow closer to God. But there’s also a really important sociological reason for it, too: kids who are raised by two parents who share the same faith background are more likely to be raised in a consistently religious home. This likely increases the chances a faith is passed down from one generation to another. This is a powerful reason religious groups might discourage interfaith marriages.
The ARDA is hosting the most recent wave of the Pew Religious Landscape Study, which was conducted in 2023-2024 and it has a whole host of insightful questions about who folks are marrying and how much they talk about faith in their home.
It includes a variable indicating whether respondents’ current religion matches that of their partner’s. If a Catholic married a Protestant, that would not be defined as a match. If a mainline Protestant was married to an evangelical, that’s still a match because they are both Protestants. A Muslim marrying a Jew wouldn’t be a match and so on. You get the picture.
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Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.