We officiate ceremonies where one partner is a committed Christian and the other isn't religious at all. Neither of them is doing anything wrong by marrying the other, and neither of them needs us to pretend the difference doesn't exist. It does. The question isn't whether it matters. It's whether you've talked about how.
Where it actually shows up
Not usually in a single dramatic conversation. In the ordinary texture of a week. Whether you pray before dinner. Whether Sunday mornings are church or sleep in. What gets said when a child asks "do we believe in God." Whose parents you spend which holidays with, and what those parents assume the wedding, and the marriage, will look like. The disagreement rarely arrives as a fight about theology. It arrives as a hundred small logistical decisions that theology quietly sits underneath.
The conversation worth having before the wedding, not after
Ask each other plainly: what do you actually want our life to look like on an ordinary Tuesday and an ordinary Sunday. Not what you're willing to tolerate. What you actually want. Then ask what happens if we have children, specifically, not in the abstract. Will they be raised in a faith. Whose. What happens if one of us changes our mind about any of this in ten years, because people do.
These conversations are uncomfortable precisely because the honest answers might not match. That discomfort now is far cheaper than discovering the mismatch three years in, with kids on the way and nobody having said any of this out loud.
What we're not going to tell you
We're not going to tell you this kind of marriage can't work, because we've watched several work well. We're also not going to pretend it's the same as marrying someone who shares your convictions, because it isn't, and couples who skip the hard conversation because they don't want to hear a difficult answer tend to be the ones who struggle later. The couples who do this well are the ones who treated the difference as something to navigate together rather than something to avoid mentioning.
If you're the believing partner
You don't get to expect your fiance to arrive at your convictions on your timeline, or as a condition of the marriage. Real faith isn't produced by pressure from a spouse, and trying tends to produce resentment instead of belief. What you can ask for honestly is respect for what your faith actually requires of you, room to practice it, and an honest conversation about how children will be raised, rather than an assumption that gets settled by default years from now.
If you're the partner who isn't religious
You're not required to pretend to believe something you don't, at the ceremony or anywhere else, and a good officiant will build a wedding that's honest about that rather than performing faith on your behalf. What's worth offering in return is genuine respect for what matters to your partner, rather than treating their convictions as a phase or a preference you're waiting out.
We're glad to talk through what a ceremony looks like when the two of you don't share a faith. It doesn't have to erase either of you.
Written by Matt Perry, wedding officiant and Lead Pastor of Love Church San Diego.