Interfaith marriage is a good thing. Love should overcome everything including faith. But this is not always the case. According to an article in the Economist people are not prepared for an interfaith marriage possible problem. So let’s discuss those issues.
Problem: Some men and women of different faiths don't count on their religious differences getting in the way of their marriage. Apparently, A Roman Catholic man fearing that his daughter would not go to heaven if left un-baptized was given a court order saying if he ever did it again that he would go to prison. The reason was because his wife was Jewish and he had already promised to raise the child as a Jew. As a result a divorce occurred leading to joint religious rights. Interfaith marriages are more likely to end in divorce. Usually child birth brings people back to their faith and then the questions arise over which faith the child should be raised. Usually it is the mother’s faith that supersedes the fathers, but many do not discuss such issues out of fear. Fear of looking intolerant and even un-romantic. So the obvious solution is to discuss it before it is too late.
Interfaith marriage is common: About 45% of marriages are of two people with different faiths and the numbers are rising. These include people who are of different faiths or parts of a faith where their faiths "clash seriously". Even if you exclude the different denominations from the statistic the marriage rate is still at 36%. We Americans are apparently more likely to marry a person of a different faith than a person of a different political party. Why is this trend occurring? Well according to Ms. Schaefer Riley (she is Jewish and is married to an agnostic Jehovah's Witness) people are marring later in life. After a period of being single and on their own, peoples family traditions generally fall away. As such some people who marry into a different faith convert, but that is not always the case.
Conclusion: I want interfaith marriages to survive. So I ask for all couples who are different faiths to discuss their differences early to avoid such problems. I personally, if I am to meet and marry someone of a different faith, would ask that the child be raised in both faiths and decide for themselves which faith to follow when they are old enough. If they want both and they feel they can reconcile the differences then I would support that to. However, we must also be careful as from my perspective a lot of my friends from interfaith marriages have become atheist out of the confusion reconciling the differences between the faiths and the promotion by secularists that faith causes war and death. It is not a faiths fault that a war occurs; it is the people who try to justify the act of murder who are at fault there. In any case, interfaith marriage I believe is a good thing. With this, just like the market place of ideas we will be able to root out the silly parts of faiths that we find untruthful or false. Let us face facts, we all agree on a lot of things when it comes to faith like helping the poor, and such. So in this I find that we are all correct and incorrect at the same time and that the differences are the issues that must be resolved. Maybe, just maybe, interfaith marriages will be the cure to such ills.
No comments:
Post a Comment