McGowan - In faith and in doubt : how religious believers and nonbelievers can create strong marriages and loving families

In Faith and In Doubt

In Faith

and

In Doubt

How Religious Believers and Nonbelievers Can Create Strong Marriages and Loving Families

DALE McGOWAN

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McGowan, Dale.

In faith and in doubt : how religious believers and nonbelievers can create strong marriages and loving families / Dale McGowan.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8144-3372-0 (pbk.)

ISBN-10: 0-8144-3372-3 (pbk.)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8144-3373-7 (ebook)

1. Interfaith marriage. 2. Interfaith families. I. Title.

HQ1031.M3945 2014

306.84'3dc23

2014010124

2014 Dale McGowan

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

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Printing number

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Becca, who taught me how easy the mix could be

Thanks first and foremost to the more than 1,000 people who let me pry into their lives and marriages through the survey and interviews. Special thanks to Tom and Danielle, Arlene and Nate, Anna and Gary, Andrew and Lewis, Scott and Dhanya, Hope and David, Cassidy and Bill, and Evan and Cate, as well as Julie and Matthew and Kevin and Nora, the couples who were so generous in sharing their stories with me. You know your real names.

Special thanks to Cassidy McGillicuddy and Alise Wright for permission to reproduce first-person excerpts from their brilliant and insightful blog posts on this topic.

Mary Ellen Sikes was an invaluable partner in creating the McGowan-Sikes survey and analyzing the data. Without her brains and stamina, this book would be a ghost of itself.

Thanks to the staff at AMACOM, including Christina Parisi, who acquired the title, my patient editors, Ellen Kadin and Erika Spelman, project reviewer Chris Murray, and copyeditor Holly Fairbank, who stilled the waters of my citational chaos. My agent, Uwe Stender of TriadaUS, was excellent as always in securing the project.

Dave Muscato brought the University of Tennessee nonbeliever typology study to my attention, which provided the essential backbone for an entire chapter. Thanks as well to Christopher Silver and Thomas Coleman, the lead researchers in that seminal study, as well as Bruce Hunsberger and Bob Altemeyer, two of the pioneers in research on religious nonbelievers.

Many thanks to the staff of Foundation Beyond Belief for keeping things running and growing while my attention has been sorely split. A very .

Readers of my blog, The Meming of Life, were once again invaluable as sounding boards, including Rajat Jha, who helped me understand the complexities of both Hinduism and Hindi, and Caprice Niccoli, who coined the beautiful and economical word mixistential for the secular/religious mixed marriage. I chickened out of using it in the book, but I continue to think its the perfect word.

I am grateful as well to Dave Becker and Anna Minaya for help in unexpected ways, and to Mark Hulings for introducing me to Scrivener, which honestly saved my neck on this complex project.

Finally, all thanks and love to my wife, Becca, for endless support and a huge editorial contribution, as well as Connor, Erin, and Delaney, our terrific kids.

If major religious differences doom a marriage, mine should have been toe-tagged at the altar. Our religious differences were arguably as major as they could get.

Ours wasnt a marriage of people with two different religions. That has real challenges, of course, but theres also a clearer starting point for two believersnamely, God. As one religious friend of mine in an interreligious marriage told me years ago, We both believe in God. The rest is fine print. When two religious traditions are blended, graces become less denominational, Jesus might be replaced with our Lord, shared history and practice are emphasized, and differences are minimized. The Christmas tree sprouts a Star of David. Its not always easy, but there are well-trod bridges across that kind of divide.

Ours was different. We were squinting at each other across an even bigger belief gapthe one between religious belief and disbelief, between a committed Christian believer and an equally committed atheist.

I was never a conventional religious believer, and by the time I approached that altar in a century-old church in San Francisco, Id identified as an atheist for 15 years. I read the Bible critically at 13 and debated preachers in the college plaza at 19. I was a vocal critic of many aspects of religion and still am.

Given all of those alarm bells, why was I crying tears of joy as she came down the aisle? Why was she smiling as she approached me? And why are we still happily married 23 years and three children later?

The short answer is that people are more interesting than their labels. The long answer is this book.

Dont think that we entered this mixed marriage with eyes open and a plan in hand. We were both oblivious to the garment-rending literature on mixed-belief marriage, the scores of articles and books that would have told us just how terrible an idea it is to marry someone whose answers to ultimate questions differ dramatically from yours.

Wed been happily married about ten years when I stumbled on the first of the articles telling me we shouldnt be. Marrying outside of your own belief system is an epic blunder, it said, one that leads inevitably to unhappiness, divorce, and bitter regret.