ADAM and Abigail met over a leaky kettle in a cubbyhole off the same staircase at their Cambridge college. Soon they appeared regularly in each other’s rooms, his on the first floor, hers on the fourth. And halfway through their first term they had become an item. Three years on they went their separate ways with their different degrees. But within a year Abigail had got her own flat, and Adam moved in. Seven years on they are desperate to get married but cannot sort out how.
They are of different faiths – Adam is an Anglican, Abigail is Jewish. And they are facing a chasm that too many religious institutions – Muslim, Christian and Jewish – have yet to bridge. It is the one area in which many of us are limping way behind the multicultural society and its norms by which most of our nominal adherents now live.
If the ozone layer and our physical climate have changed in the past decade or two, then the culture within which all our religious institutions operate has changed far more dramatically. It is as if the Equator has moved to the North Pole, and in nothing more so than marriage and its great rival, relationships.
After centuries and millennia of marrying only members of our own faiths, most of us have yet to offer services and ceremonies to the vast numbers of those who are now forging unions across the barriers.
In my limited experience, an “interfaith” marriage is a sure-fire path to “no faith” children.
Although, again in my limited experience, generally those who enter into an interfaith marriage are not particularly strong in their respective faiths in the first place.
I’m sure there are exceptions.
I was struck by the comment which I understood to mean that the Anglican church is willing to marry a couple even if only one of the partners is a Christian. Is this in fact the case? If so, this is not good at all. I know that this would never happen at my parish.
It seems that neither person’s ‘faith’ is strong enough to keep them from fornication. Why do they bother with religion?
One’s religious faith or lack of religious faith and/or one’s ethnicity provide ‘some sort of’ of ‘comfort zone’ and, hopefully, a ‘moral compass’ with which one lives out one’s life.
My religious faith is Christianity as organized, taught and expressed by the Church Catholic, in my case, Anglicanism. This is my heritage from my family and ancestors, directly and indirectly.
Ethnicity in those parts of the world where there are established ‘protocols’ and where there is an acceptance of a historical ‘status quo’ places restrictive boundaries upon inter-community marital relationships. In the industrialized/developed countries, these boundaries are often fluid and/or non-existant.
In fact, in the industrialized/developed countries, religion and ethnic differences are open to tacit and open derision, and therefore are treated with a contempt, that in itself, will ensure a cultural or religious reaction.
Throw into this devel’s brew of modern culture the fact that persons of different religious and ethnic background marry and have children
and you have situations in which the children of these relationships either grow up with little or no spiritual/moral instruction/guidance and which produce extreme theological confusion when these children seek to lead a spiritual life.
I think they should flip a coin.