The silence of the leaders

I feel frustrated tonight. I’ve just finished reading Bridging the Divide: The Continuing Conversation Between a Mormon and an Evangelical by Dr. Robert Millet and Rev. Greg Johnson, and within it was this passage (p. 101):

Question: You both advocate the need for greater understanding and friendship between persons of different faiths. Do you draw the line at marriage?

[Millet]: In all honesty, we would both draw the line at marriage, for both theological and practical reasons. Practically speaking, the traditions of a Mormon lifestyle and the traditions of an Evangelical lifestyle will inevitably create conflict, and this is not the kind of environment in which children should be brought up. We would say the same to a Catholic-Protestant wedding or a theist-atheist wedding for that matter. Additionally, there are enough differences between our faiths, as we have suggested, that the attempt to blend our doctrinal differences in the intimacy required by marriage, that is, to be “unequally yoked together,” would be extremely difficult and usually painful.

This post is not an attack on what Millet and Greg have said in their book. In fact, when I last wrote to Greg a few months ago and mentioned I was married to a Mormon now, he immediately put me in touch with an evangelical woman he knew who was in an LDS-evangelical interfaith marriage on account of her having left the LDS church. So the first thing he did was to try and provide me with guidance and a connection.¹

My frustration is that, when it comes to LDS interfaith marriages, this is where the dialogueALWAYS ends. “It’s not a good idea, don’t do it.” Tell me, LDS and evangelical leaders, when you encounter a single mother who has never been married and needs help raising her child in the faith, do you spiritually advise her on how fornication is bad? “Fornication is bad, it leads to children out of wedlock.” Wouldn’t that be awesome advice for that situation?

I have bad news for all of the LDS, evangelical and other Christian leaders of the world today: it does not matter how much you tell people not to do it, LDS interfaith marriages are going to happen. They’re going to happen because people convert in or out of the LDS faith after getting married. They’re going to happen because people aren’t very serious about their faiths when they get married and experience revival later on. They’re going to happen because people are weak and they want to be loved and sometimes you just can’t (or don’t) say no to those beautiful blue eyes even though you know they come attached to a religion you reject.

And frankly, it does not really matter why they happen. What matters is that people in LDS interfaith marriages need love and support from their church families. They need practical, hands-on advice on how to strengthen their marriages and make them work within the frameworks of both religions, not generic platitudes about praying and reading the scriptures together. Since I’ve started this blog they’ve been talking to me, and I’ve heard their pain and their worries. You don’t hear them because they’re afraid of your condemnation, but they talk to me, and the reason they talk to me is because you’re not listening.

Don’t believe me? Do a search for “LDS interfaith marriage” or “Mormon interfaith marriage” and see whose blog comes up first. Why am I leading the charge? LDS leaders, evangelical leaders, do you realize you’re leaving an entire potential ministry in the hands of someone who plays World of Warcraft and would starve without a can opener?! Why isn’t someone with a degree in ministry or counseling covering this?

Hate to sound dramatic, but I see no one else standing in the gap, so here I am.

Stop telling people not to do LDS interfaith marriages and start telling people how to handle them once the deed has been done. That’s all I ask.

¹ This was back when my mom first died, so I kinda sorta never wrote back to the nice lady, and now I would feel awkward e-mailing her back after so long. But I should have.

Comments

The silence of the leaders — 9 Comments

Rob Perkins on February 11, 2009 at 10:07 AM said:

I say tell them enough so that when they do it they do it all eyes open. Even then I think it’s gonna take a marvelously open minded pair of people to make it work.
Eric on February 11, 2009 at 10:46 AM said:

Yes, it can work, as I know from experience (although we are no longer a mixed-faith couple). But there are probably some theological limits involved. I think it would extremely difficult in a situation where the evangelical believed that the Mormon was going to go to hell (or that the kids would do the same if they became LDS), or if the Mormon was unable to see the great amount of truth that can be found in a non-LDS church, or didn’t believe that the Spirit doesn’t work through other faiths. At the least, you need to be able to pray together as equals.

And like RP says, you need to be able to go into it with your eyes wide open. Marriage is hard enough as it is without religious differences.
Seth R. on February 11, 2009 at 1:12 PM said:

On the other hand, I’ve seen some same-faith marriages that were seriously much more screwed up than some mixed-faith marriages I’ve seen.
Bridget Jack Meyers on February 11, 2009 at 5:14 PM said:

So Eric, I’m curious, how did you come to be in an interfaith marriage to start out with?
Eric on February 12, 2009 at 9:08 AM said:

BJM asked:

I’m curious, how did you come to be in an interfaith marriage to start out with?

What can I say? I was smitten, and it was mutual. We found that we had a lot in common, and ourvalues were almost identical. And that’s something that even a lot of same-faith marriages don’t have.To be honest about it, we didn’t really talk much about the interfaith aspects of the marriage all that much, and I don’t have much to add to the dialogue about how to make it work. (Also, I value my privacy, even when writing pseudonymously.) It certainly helped, though, that by the time we married, I no longer identified much with evangelicalism for various reasons; among other things, I was disenchanted with seeing salvation treated as an event, not a process. In the early years, she compromised on things like family church attendance much more than I did; so for a long time, the kids were raised in mainline Protestantism. Eventually, that became unsustainable for her, which prompted me in turn to look into LDS claims.There was much I found attractive in the LDS faith, such as its semi-universalism, which I already believed. My conversion to LDS Christianity was a slow one; ultimately I saw a richness in LDS history, theology and soteriology that I hadn’t experienced elsewhere.
Bridget Jack Meyers on February 12, 2009 at 12:32 PM said:

What can I say? I was smitten, and it was mutual.

I like this line of reasoning!

Thanks for sharing your story Eric, I appreciate it, and I hope you know I did not mean to pry or anything. I was just curious.
Eric on February 12, 2009 at 1:20 PM said:

Curiosity is a good thing. I suspect that neither of us would be where we are today if we didn’t have it!
Laura on February 14, 2009 at 7:14 AM said:

Both my parents were raised Christian, but I was not raised in any religion at all. Until I met you and Paul, I’d never even thought about “mixed marriage” in terms of faith. I didn’t expect either that there would be such disparagement between Christians of different sects (or branches, denominations… not even sure of the proper word) getting married.

I do understand the Mormon interfaith marriage being far more tricky. They have the belief in levels of salvation, yes? To not marry in the temple means your wife and children won’t be bound to you in death? I add question marks because I don’t know if I’m remembering that right. Do other denominations of Christianity have differences that might be difficult to reconcile in marriage?
Bridget Jack Meyers on February 14, 2009 at 9:43 AM said:

That’s essentially correct, Laura.

Any combination of Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox might have some level of interfaith difficulty. Usually different denominations of Protestants can be blended easily enough.

LDS interfaith marriages are particularly trying mostly because the LDS church has such specific beliefs about the eternal nature of the family unit.

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