Ask Richard: Atheist Asked to Include Religion When Performing a Wedding Ceremony

Alternately if they want Glenn to marry them, they might want to think about having 2 separate ceremonies. One where Glenn does the ceremony and you limit who you invite to those they would like to share it with. It can be as religious or non-religious as they want it to be and there is no false pretenses. Then later they get a real preacher to do the one for all the family. This would also get around any problem associated with the legality of Glenn performing the wedding.

If you value their friendship, don’t do it. Either that or wed them privately prior to the “official” ceremony and let them have a “man of the cloth” do the religious parts to appease their family. Like Jim and Pam did on The Office. Being hypocritical and/or deceiving everyone will only come back to bite you and/or your friends in the ass.

I agree it is not a good idea for Glenn, as an atheist, to perform a wedding where religious faith is to be included in the ceremony. It is too easy for some misunderstanding to detract from the beauty and solemness of the occasion.

An Atheist can say they hope their friends faith will strengthen their commitment to each other.

I can see where the faith my religious friends have in their God has made their life better. In some case I know where finding religious faith has saved the lives of friends, such as former drug addicts.

To have a source of faith that helps you believe your life can be better is important. Atheist and people of religious faith should be happy for any friend who has found that source, be it a god, or a force in nature like evolution.

” they want me to bring religion in at least superficially. ”

In what way, specifically, do they want to bring religion into the wedding ceremony conducted by an atheist?

Along those lines, is there anything that anyone can suggest as a reference for performing secular weddings? There are a few books and things out there, but if anyone has personal experience with any references, it would be helpful to know about.

I am also ordained and have politely declined requests to perform religious ceremonies. There are already plenty of religious celebrants available. I am reserved for non-religious ceremonies. I have to be true to myself above all and I cannot look at myself in the mirror with a hypocritical conscience. Those who care about me respect that.

I wouldn’t worry too much about the hypocrisy issue. There are ways to bring in religion without feeling like you’re doing something wrong. After all, you’re performing a service for someone else. It genuinely isn’t about you and what you believe.

But maybe my perspective is a little off what’s normal since I’m an attorney. I’m used to the idea of representing other people’s beliefs and interests without sharing them. Plus my mother is a church organist, and they play for every denomination under the sun without worrying about it. So that ethos has rubbed off on me.

What I would worry about is making sure that you don’t create a situation that’s ultimately more problematic for your friends than just plain having an atheistic wedding, or lying to a priest to get a religious ceremony. So I’d suggest finding out exactly what they’d like you to do in order to include religion, and thinking very carefully on how people will react to it. I think Mehta is correct that you will be asked about your beliefs. People will want to know what church you run, or what denomination you’re in, and what it teaches. Figure out whether your answers to those questions will give offense, or whether they’ll undermine your friend’s efforts to not fully come out of the closet.

That’s your biggest risk, in my opinion. You don’t want to cause problems for them.

Dan Barker says there are heaps of atheists pretending to be Christian priests.

Just get one of them.

I must say, I was a bit amazed to hear a prominent New Atheist admitting that the priesthood might have atheists in the closet.

Still, I hear there are pedophiles hiding in the priesthood as well.

Wait a minute!!!!!!!!

I agree with JulietEcho. Don’t say anything religious yourself, but get another religious person to say a nice fuzzy reading from the bible. One that mentions God about once, and is full of other nice stuff.

Or how about this one from 1 Corinthians 13: “Love is always patient and kind; it is never jealous, love is never boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it does not take offense, and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people’s sins but delights in the truth; it is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes. Love does not come to an end.”

The religious love that one, and it sounds nice.

And a slightly religious song stuffed in there for good measure.

If they want you to mention God in the actual vows or anything, then politely decline.

As long as we’re using military quotations, remember what army chaplains say when asked their religion: “yours.”

It’s possible to talk about religion without belonging to the religion. Performing religious rituals under false pretenses is a bit of a different story, but if they’re aware of your beliefs and are okay with you talking about religion anyway, I don’t see a problem. Since they asked an atheist friend, clearly they care more about the friend part than the religion part.

I would go with what a few others have suggested, having a religious counterpart to help out. Since the families are religious maybe get a brother or sister (assuming they aren’t both only children) to do a bible reading and lead a prayer.

Also be up front about your beliefs in a respectful way, say something like “The happy couple and I don’t share the same faith but we share a great friendship and I’m honored to be marrying them today. I’ve asked X to help me by reading a selection from the Bible and leading us in prayer.” Then continue on with the ceremony.

Noadi, I’m not sure that you even need to address your own faith during the ceremony. I think it’s probably better without doing so.

Those who know you’re an atheist will continue to know, and those who don’t, might not even think to wonder.

Personally, I would politely decline.

@carlie – My husband and I also had a completely secular wedding – I think what we loved most about it was having so many friends involved, through doing readings, playing music (a musician friend sang our “processional” & “recessional”), etc. The ceremony was officiated by a friend who was ordained through an organization accepted by our state. He’s UU and was awesome about crafting the kind of secular ceremony we wanted – he discussed with us at length about how we wanted our ceremony to celebrate the joining of two individuals and creating a larger community/family. Our friends are especially important to us as neither of us is very close to our blood relatives, so at the wedding he talked about how our coming together was more than just a joining of two people, it was about creating a larger community of people, bringing them together through their common bonds with the two of us, and how they would play a part in supporting and contributing to the growth of our marriage. He wove what we thought about marriage and partnership – how we valued our individuality and saw our partnership as 1+1=2, not 1+1=1, how we would take strength from each other and from the larger “family” created by our marriage and how our differences would inspire us to grow together and as individuals.

We also asked 4 friends to read short passages we had chosen – 2 of his choice, 2 of mine. I can never remember where his came from but they were lovely and spoke about how unions between two people are about building community and vulnerability. I chose a short passage from the Velveteen Rabbit about “being real” and another from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet about how both partners must be whole on their own before they can truly come together. I can’t find the source of the long version that we used in our ceremony, so here it is (apologies for the length!).

“Marriage is in many ways a simplification of life, and it naturally combines the strengths and wills of two young people so that, together, they seem to reach farther into the future than they did before. Above all, marriage is a new task and a new seriousness, – a new demand on the strength and generosity of each partner, and a great new danger for both.

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of their solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side by side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.

That is why this too must be the criterion for rejection or choice: whether you are willing to stand guard over someone else’s solitude, and whether you are able to set this same person at the gate of your own depths, which he learns of only through what steps forth, in holiday clothing, out of the great darkness.

Life is self-transformation, and human relationships, which are an extract of life, are the most changeable of all, they rise and fall from minute to minute, and lovers are those for whom no moment is like any another. There are such connections, an almost unbearable happiness, but they can occur only between very rich beings, between those who have become, each for his own sake, rich, calm, and concentrated; only if two worlds are wide and deep and individual can they be combined….”

I don’t think secular wedding ceremonies are complicated to put together at all. Work with an officiant who will craft the ceremony YOU want. I would guess that it helped alleviate any potential pressure from family about religion in the ceremony that we were footing 90% of the wedding costs ourselves – we pretty much made it clear that we were going to have the wedding that we wanted and if anyone was uncomfortable with that, they didn’t have to come.

The folks on here suggesting that the writer should be all butthurt about being asked to include religion are, frankly, coming across as a bit oversensitive. I’m not saying he should accept their request without serious consideration (and possibly some negotiation–the “Let a sibling do a reading” idea is a strong one), just that there’s no reason here to go hunting for offense.

I suspect the couple in question are, at most, lapsed churchgoers. After all, they didn’t have a minister on-hand to ask to perform the ceremony, and they didn’t just go to one of their parents and say, “Would Pastor Such-and-so perform our ceremony?”

So they probably don’t WANT a strongly religious ceremony, but realize that a completely secular one would entail throwing down the gauntlet to the rest of their clan. They are thus very likely caught between a rock and a hard place, and they turned to the letter-writer for help in wriggling out of it with their family relationships intact.

Even if he ultimately feels he cannot abide by their request, he should simply take the fact that they turned to him as the compliment it is, and offer to assist in whatever way he can without compromising his ethics. (Personally, I think that a ceremony where the religious elements come from someone else–a reading or two, the music–would be a fairly decent way to go, but the writer may still feel compromised with that.)

I don’t understand why the letter-writer shouldn’t perform the marriage…as an earlier poster said, military chaplains don’t say “Oh, I’m can’t do your last rites because I’m of a different faith”.

If they want him to reference their parents’ beardy sky god, he can. He doesn’t have to say its his faith or be dishonest in any way, unless that’s what hey ask for, and if that’s what they ask for I’d say THAT’S when you say no. But something to the effect of “They feel their faith in god and jebus will bless this marriage” is not dishonest, and he’s perfectly capable of saying it.

It was very nice of your friend to ask you even knowing your non-religious opinions. It won’t hurt to add a few religious things to make her family happy. Just oblige. Put your ego aside and be a good friend. You will be happier in the end. Good luck.