ClobberBlog | Mormonism, Evangelical Christianity

Bridget Jack Meyers, an evangelical Christian who lives outside Chicago, married her husband, Paul, a Mormon, only after a lot of counseling and a lot of research. Meyers, a student at the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, jokes that there aren’t a lot of books on evangelical-Mormon marriages. So she looked at ones on Christian-Jewish relationships. “A lot of the advice was to pick a religion and raise [the kids] in one. But neither one of us wanted to give up ours,” she said. So the couple agreed to raise their children in both faiths, letting them choose their own path at some point.

Shortly before their first anniversary, her husband walked out. Meyers, who writes about her interfaith family at ClobberBlog.com, explained in one posting: “He claimed that I had been a perfect wife and he had no complaints about me, but he was having second thoughts about a lifetime of interfaith marriage. He had decided that he wanted to get married in the temple and have his children be sealed to him, and he wanted to raise his children in the church, so he thought it would be best if we went our separate ways before any children entered into the union.”

The two reconciled and, according to Meyers, religion wasn’t the only issue. Still, it’s clear to her that these questions are lurking. “We didn’t account for all the ways that the different religions will affect our children,” she told me. Mormons typically baptize children around age 8. But Meyers believes that is too young. Since her daughter is only 3, she says, “I’m not getting worked up over it yet.” But she worries that if they wait too long, her child will be ostracized in the Mormon church.

As for the long term, she tries not to “religiously manipulate” her daughter. But Meyers knows she will be disappointed if her daughter chooses her husband’s church.