Ryan Burge (Washington University), Who Marries Whom? Faith, Partners, and the Unequally Yoked:
There’s this phrase I heard over and over again growing up in a Southern Baptist Church – “don’t be unequally yoked.” It’s a reference to a verse from 2 Corinthians 6:14, “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?” In my experience it is always used in the context of finding a spouse. The admonition is to find someone to marry who has the same faith background as you. The worry for my evangelical group leaders was that if one of us married a non-believer, our spouse might lead us down a path toward secularism.
But the general admonition is the same in many faith communities: try to marry someone who shares your faith background. That’s certainly a well-established norm in Jewish communities. According to Kiddushin 68b, marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew is prohibited under Jewish law. In Islam, there’s not an outright prohibition on marrying a non-Muslim, but the Quran only permits people to marry other “People of the Book.”
There are theological reasons for this, as was commonly invoked in my evangelical upbringing. Each spouse can edify the other’s faith and grow closer together as they grow closer to God. But there’s also a really important sociological reason for it, too: kids who are raised by two parents who share the same faith background are more likely to be raised in a consistently religious home. This likely increases the chances a faith is passed down from one generation to another. This is a powerful reason religious groups might discourage interfaith marriages.
The ARDA is hosting the most recent wave of the Pew Religious Landscape Study, which was conducted in 2023-2024 and it has a whole host of insightful questions about who folks are marrying and how much they talk about faith in their home. It includes a variable indicating whether respondents’ current religion matches that of their partner’s. If a Catholic married a Protestant, that would not be defined as a match. If a mainline Protestant was married to an evangelical, that’s still a match because they are both Protestants. A Muslim marrying a Jew wouldn’t be a match and so on. You get the picture.
The groups most likely to marry someone of the same faith background are Hindus (86%), evangelicals (83%) and Latter-day Saints (81%). They are followed closely by Black Protestants at 79%. Then there’s a pretty noticeable gap and a whole bunch of traditions are clumped right around 70% including Catholics and the non-religious.
What really jumps out is that Jewish intermarriage rates are strikingly high. Only 58% of Jews marry a fellow Jew. Given Judaism’s strong norm against marrying outside the faith, it’s noteworthy that so many Jews find a partner from another religious background. …
One has to wonder how the rates of intermarriage will change based on a number of shifting societal patterns in the United States. With the rise of the nones religious individuals will have a smaller potential dating pool to draw from for a future mate. But because those who remain in faith communities tend to be “true believers,” their desire to find a partner from their own religious background will likely be heightened. These are two factors working in tension with each other. Whichever factor wins the day will say a lot about where American religion is headed in the coming decades.
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