About ten years ago, when the trickle of deconversions began to flow into a river, evangelicals began getting all heated up about what they called unequally yoked couples. The term means a mixed-faith marriage, particularly one in which one partner is evangelical and the other an atheist. Evangelicals began slavering at the mouth to vilify those who deconverted, which influenced a lot of truly heartbreaking breakups that never really had to happen.
Between evangelicals’ ramped-up demonization of deconversion and their general ignorance about the people who’d left the tribe, a lot of good relationships ended that didn’t really need to end.
Today, we’ll go through a very short history of the beginning—and surprisingly anticlimactic, dribbling end—of the Christian Right’s war on mixed-faith marriages. And then, we’ll see a hardline Catholic gal who apparently wants to start that war up again over a TV show about a Jewish rabbi and an agnostic podcaster.
Seriously, I couldn’t make something up that could compete with that one’s idiocy!
(I have an entire tag for the original Unequally Yoked Club series! PS: If I asked you to guess how many times I mistyped “rabbi” as “rabbit” today and you answered “125% of the time cuz I know for a fact that you also mistyped the corrections several times,” you’d win.)
(This post went live on Patreon on 10/15/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and should be available now to anyone!)
SITREP: The new Unequally Yoked Club reboot begins here!
Last week, some Catholic lady named Sunny Hostin expressed an opinion about mixed-faith couples. If you’re wondering, she does not approve at all.
Since about 2014, Hostin has been part of a popular American morning talk-show called The View. And she is an extremely fervent conservative Catholic. There is barely a whisker’s width of difference between such Catholics and today’s hardline fundagelicals, so they generally get fused together in one lump. She’s also been married for a very long time to the same man. I feel like I’m on very safe ground in assuming that he is also Catholic.
Last week, Sunny Hostin decided that mixed-faith marriages “probably won’t work” unless one person converts to the other’s faith/non-faith. If you’re wondering, the entire topic came up while the hosts of The View discussed a new show out about a fictional mixed-faith relationship that doesn’t even involve Christianity. One of the main characters is a Jewish rabbi; the other is an agnostic podcaster. Hilarity ensues when they fall for each other.
Nobody wanted Sunny Hostin’s ill-informed opinion about the unequally yoked, either
In the new Netflix show Nobody Wants This, the Jewish rabbi and the agnostic podcaster try to make a romantic relationship work. The title of the show proved spectacularly prescient in more ways than one, because Hostin immediately weighed in on how unlikely such a pairing was in the opinion of Queen Her:
“One in two marriages end in divorce for various reasons, I’m just saying for various reasons. I know when I was looking for a potential mate, number one on the list was that I wanted to marry another Catholic. I wanted to raise my children in the faith, I wanted to have those things in common, I wanted to go to church together, I wanted to have the sacraments together,” Hostin said of finding her husband, Manny. “I did have a list of things, and I do think that those commonalities, including values and morals, but religion is a big one.”
Reflecting back on the romantic TV series, Hostin said, “You’re talking about not only a rabbi, but someone who doesn’t believe that there is a god. I think that’s a little bit of a dealbreaker if you’re the rabbi’s mom.” [. . .]
Later, cohost Alyssa Farah Griffin introduced the idea that the Jewish faith is open to converts, with Hostin doubling down and saying, “That’s why she’d have to convert.” [Source: ET]
I highly recommend you check out the source on that quote to see how Whoopi Goldberg immediately owned Hostin. I think the ownage annoyed Hostin, too, because this is her last jab at both Goldberg and the topic before the break:
Goldberg attempted to throw the show to a commercial break, telling the audience, “If this is happening with you, you’ll figure it out, or you won’t and you’ll move on,” before Hostin looked into the camera and said, “And you’ll move on because your marriage probably won’t work.”
Goldberg won that entire round hands down.
This isn’t a new squabble, of course. It’s just another skirmish in the hardline Christian Right’s war on the Unequally Yoked Club. Hostin being a conservative Catholic doesn’t change a thing. She parroted evangelical talking lines the whole way to the commercial break.
A quick history of the Unequally Yoked Club
For some years, a trickle of evangelicals had been deconverting from Christianity. By the 2000s, they began deconverting in growing numbers. Most of the early birds were Gen Xers and the oldest Millennials. A majority were also men, but it didn’t seem at the time like an overwhelming imbalance. As well, most of these ex-Christians ended up agnostics or atheists (or both) rather than filtering into other religions entirely.
Most importantly, most of these ex-Christians were married. That meant their marriages catapulted into strange new territory the moment their fervent evangelical spouses realized what had happened.
The conventional wisdom at the time held that mixed-faith relationships were absolutely impossible, especially among TRUE CHRISTIANS™ and heathens. This was a bedrock belief as far back as I can remember. If you weren’t aware of the ex-Christian or fundagelical scene at the time, you wouldn’t even believe me if I told you just how demonized ex-Christians were. It was extreme!
And it was absolutely disgusting.
At the time, evangelical leaders made it a serious risk even to reveal deconversion to another evangelical. It could result in the loss of everything. Just as a start, the ex-Christian could count on losing their spouse. But they might also lose their kids, home, job, community standing, everything.
(To me at least, evangelicals’ behavior toward apostates became one of many good reasons to reject Christianity.)
In response to all this bizarre vilification, a bunch of married ex-Christians I knew began calling themselves the Unequally Yoked Club. I loved that name. So when I began writing about mixed-faith marriages, I chose that name for the series.
Apostates needed support; newly-unequally yoked evangelicals needed real advice
As far as I can remember, I was just about the only heathen writing regularly about the topic. All other writers were themselves fervently evangelical—and almost always women married to ex-Christians. Accordingly, their advice and suggestions ranged from useless to abusive.
Just to give you an idea of how bad their advice could get, one such unequally-yoked woman wrote in 2015:
Ask him if he feels it would be appropriate in your marriage to treat each other with respect? The word respect might grab his attention.
Ask him if he feels it would be appropriate if the two of you had sex? Again, he might be listening to you now!
Ask him if he feels it would be appropriate if the two of you were kind to one another?
If a husband says no to all of these basic marital questions then I’d ask him why he’s staying in the marriage? Why hasn’t he left you yet? Is a marriage filled with strife, contentions, void of love and physical intimacy the type of marriage he’s always dreamed of?
That bit at the end is exactly what that writer thinks a mixed-faith marriage is like. To her, it is absolute hell marked by “strife [and] contentions.” It is lacking in kindness, respect, and intimacy. It is “void of love.”
But it didn’t have to be that way.
In reality, evangelicals in that situation at the time made a lot of trouble in their marriages. Literally all of the deconverted spouses I knew were doing their best to walk on eggshells and show respect for their spouse’s beliefs. Alas, ex-Christians rarely if ever received the same consideration in return.
Evangelicals’ conceptualization of marriages between two atheists wasn’t much kinder. Nor had it ever been. See: the weirdly evangelical marriages of atheists in both the 2008 movie Fireproof [source] and the 1986 novel This Present Darkness [source 2].
Where evangelicals get the entire idea of being unequally yoked
Back then, many evangelical leaders seriously taught that deconversion sliced away an ex-Christian’s capacity for love, morality, kindness, self-sacrifice, fidelity, and more. That’s why they insisted that TRUE CHRISTIANS™ needed to be equally yoked. This Christianese means pairing up with another TRUE CHRISTIAN™, since obviously only another TRUE CHRISTIAN™ has the capacity for any kind of lasting, harmonious relationship. They get this idea from 2 Corinthians 6:14:
Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?
Real loving, right?
[Narrator: It was not.]
Because of this teaching, evangelicals were scared to enter into relationships in which they’d be unequally yoked. They were equally scared to remain in a relationship that became unequally yoked.
Evangelical leaders pushed this teaching hard. As a result, the TRUE CHRISTIAN™ spouses of many ex-Christians insta-dumped apostates as soon as the deconversion was revealed. Around that time, I even heard many evangelical women in this situation say they wished their husbands had just physically abused them rather than deconverted!
Again, I know all this sounds absolutely crazy. And it is. But I’m serious! It was what evangelicals were like back then. This happened. It happened all the fucking time.
But then, a funny thing happened on the way to divorce court
This situation went on for years, starting at least by the mid-1990s. The fight heated up quite a bit around 2015, when evangelicals finally accepted that their entire religion was in a serious decline.
Indeed, 2015 turned out to be a very special year for evangelicals. Their desperation to recover their lost dominance exposed their absolute worst traits to the entire world. Despite their desperation, though, the next three years or so ushered in a lot of cultural changes that they didn’t like at all. Their culture changed so quickly that when we reviewed the 2014 movie Christian Mingle a couple of years after it came out, the evangelical dating world had already changed to the point of me calling the movie “alternate reality.”
By 2018, almost every evangelical could name a few ex-Christians in their social circles—or on their social media friends lists.
As a result of this cultural shift, more and more evangelicals cautiously tested the waters with ex-Christians. More importantly, they maintained their relationships with apostates. Fewer evangelicals instantly dumped, ghosted, and shunned ex-Christians. And more and more evangelicals realized that their friend/family member/loved one was still the same. That person’s religious beliefs and/or labels had changed, yes. But their person was still there.
That cautious acceptance spilled over from friendships to romantic relationships.
During this same timeframe, single evangelical women began having significant trouble finding mates within evangelicalism. They began to look more curiously upon heathen men. At the same time, people who were already married seemed way more willing to keep the marriage and try to work things out. They didn’t just break up immediately.
At last, a sea change had occurred in evangelicals’ perception of mixed-faith marriages. If these couples could just get past an initial bumpy ride as they redistributed emotional weight, their marriage had a good shot at surviving.
Begun, the new war on the unequally yoked has
Since 2018, the last time we examined the concept of unequally yoked couples within evangelicalism, that sea change is largely complete. I’d reckon that in 2024, every evangelical in America knows lots of people who have deconverted. That might go double for the younger evangelicals, the Zoomers. It might go triple for the Alphas.
In a few years, it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that a young evangelical knows more people who aren’t Christian than who are!
But there’s still a steady drumbeat of war echoing from evangelical leadership ranks (and, of course, from the ranks of those who dearly want to be leaders) about the supposed dangers of marrying someone who isn’t completely fervent about Jesusing.
They have a lot to worry about, as it happens. We’ll cover their specific fears another day. (I talked about them in earlier posts in the series, but that was years ago. Maybe we’re due for another look!) For now, just know that this war on the unequally yoked is not in the least accidental or coming out of left field.
Setting another evangelical up as the only possible marriage option
Most of the time, evangelical leaders simply pretend like no evangelical can ever find happiness with someone who isn’t just as into the fandom as they are.
In 2019, two evangelicals presented the world with matching his-n-hers requirement lists. Hers was simple and bulleted:
* Loves God more than anything
* Physically attracted to each other
* Similar maturity level
* No current addictions (includes pornography)
Her male counterpart mostly blamed young evangelical men for demanding “saints” with no flaws as wives. He ends his post with adjectives that I’m sure were no accident:
Maybe there’s a girl who’s been on your mind while you read this post; a girl who, now that I mention it, has been on your mind an awful lot lately; a beautiful, holy woman that you haven’t yet had the courage to pursue.
Beautiful and holy! Wowza!
Of course, that same year someone lamented how totally impossible evangelical women’s expectations are for evangelical men to meet. Jeez, y’all, if they could marry perfect evangelical men, they “would probably place too much trust in him.” They “would miss out on ‘godly learnings.'” Obviously, that would be just disastrous! She ends her post by placing “The Love of God” at the top of the list of requirements for a marriage to have “UNITY.” Yes, she wrote it in all caps like that. (Incidentally, according to her bio that gal works for RZIM. After its founder, Ravi Zacharias, died, we all found out he was actually a major sex abuser enabled by his entire staff.)
The odds aren’t good, but the goods are definitely odd
I strongly suspect this renewal of vitriol about being unequally yoked comes from the dating troubles of today’s evangelicals. Here’s what one evangelical guy had to say about dating in 2021:
But with the secular women i have dated, i feel like we’re actually able to communicate. Nobody runs and hides behind their faith but instead speak to each other like adults. When things aren’t working or they aren’t interested, they tell me why. [. . .]
Christian women don’t ask me about my divorce or why i’m divorced…. They aren’t interested in the particulars or how hard i have worked to grow from the experience. With secular women i have been met with grace and understanding.
Of course, he never quite figures out why evangelical women don’t “communicate” more clearly with the dysfunctional-authoritarian men in their tribe—many of whom have major anger-management issues and consider women to be inferior beings. (Here’s a hint.)
His post tracks very well with a Reddit post from this past July from a 31-year-old evangelical man:
As men we want to provide and protect
But we men I feel like we have become to busy and have fallen away from God and therfore put out of alignment with God as our master, the men as the head, and Women as our helper
And Christian Women pick up on that because it’s hard to submit to a man who is not submitting to God… [. . .] Women want a man who is involved in church, serves there regularly… preferably in the same ministry…
If you check out that link, don’t miss the comments. They devolve into hilariously overblown misogyny and woman-blaming almost immediately.
And the simple reality of how divorce wrecks evangelicals’ hunt for a spouse
Further, evangelicals continue to divorce at astonishing rates considering all their pious Jesus-osity. Overall, divorce rates are actually declining nationwide these past few years. However, evangelical-controlled states still lead the nation there. Check out these graphics from the Census website:
That said, I don’t reckon many people are surprised. With so many evangelicals divorcing, there are significantly more evangelical divorcees seeking new mates. As we just saw, men are having much the same difficulty women are, at least to a certain extent.
Perhaps evangelical women are simply more vocal about the problem. After all, the 2015 movie Only God Can had one subplot about a single mother who falls for her small church’s handsome pastor. Naturally, he fell for her too and they ended up marrying, because this movie pandered to older evangelical women. I don’t know of a Christian movie pandering to men in a similar situation. But I do know of a few older movies that involve atheist men being assholes to their TRUE CHRISTIAN™ girlfriends and wives: Left Behind; Let There Be Light; God’s Not Dead.
By 2023, evangelical women—even younger ones—began to resign themselves to never finding an evangelical husband. But they still tried to dictate what other evangelicals should avoid in an evangelical spouse:
If a man hasn’t thought about how his wife fits into his life and plans, he isn’t ready for marriage. And if he has expectations of her, he must not only identify those expectations and communicate them, but he must also provide everything she needs in order to thrive in her role. [Source]
Maybe she had a premonition of that recent Reddit thread.
The (Absolute) State of the Unequally Yoked Club 2024
Sunny Hostin’s poorly-considered declarations about mixed-faith marriages come at a very interesting time for evangelicals—even though she herself isn’t one. When I look at the state of evangelical dating and marriage in 2024, I see a few trends that began in 2018 intensifying:
- More and more voices howl into the void about the sheer importance of dating within evangelicalism only, of finding a super-fervent mate, and of placing beliefs and devotions at the forefront of all romantic relationships
- Evangelicals try to do that, but then they end up in deeply unhappy, troubled relationships because evangelical marriage rules simply do not work to produce happy, harmonious, successful relationships
- Because they are real people and not robots mindlessly following the Three Laws, evangelicals end these unhappy marriages through divorce (Jesus is always totes fine with it); however, as divorced single parents they’re extra invisible to potential mates within evangelicalism
- More and more evangelicals discover way better partners outside of evangelicalism than within it—but they still seem very reluctant to enter such relationships
- Those who continue to seek mates within the tribe get older and older as singles
- Evangelical men slip further into MRA-style communities that vilify and blame women for all their problems with relationships; they also drill down harder on the tribe’s rules for marriage, which—again—do not work (one creepy, weird outgrowth of that drilling down: a noted new vehemence about ending no-fault divorce and women’s right to vote)
- Aging evangelical women try to make their singleness sound like actually a great and Jesusy thing actually thankyouveryfuckingmuch; over time and as they grow steadily more invisible to desirable men, they reluctantly reconcile themselves with the idea of perhaps never having husbands and children of their own
- Meanwhile, the A-list young adults in church communities continue to pair off with an eye toward dynasty-building; other candidates for marriage continue to be absolutely invisible to them
- All of this vitriol does seem to keep very fervent evangelicals of both sexes from entering mixed-faith marriages, despite some early encouraging signs of greater intermarriage; I’m wondering if evangelicals have winnowed out the less-authoritarian members, leaving the rest far less likely to step outside their leaders’ boundaries
- However, evangelical marriages wherein one partner deconstructs/deconverts still don’t seem to be dissolving by divorce as often as they did in the early days of evangelicals’ decline; it’s been a dog’s year since I heard of one dissolving without someone revealing an incompatible sexual orientation
- Remember, this entire time evangelicals keep losing members and dominance every year; this demonization of mixed-faith marriages isn’t exactly helping them to secure the existence of their people and a future for evangelical children (source)
The upshot of these trends
It seems very unlikely that all those young Zoomers in that one Calvinist/Reformed evangelical church will actually find the sweet, pretty, ultra-Jesusy, submissive little wives they want. They especially won’t if young women are leaving evangelicalism in larger numbers than young men. And they are.
In the entire article that inspired that earlier post, the writer mentions one young man with a brand-new girlfriend. He did not meet her at church, but through a college club. And I only saw a few young families with little children in the photos. Those photos reveal very few young women without partners in the pews.
However, I can tell you one thing. Evangelical Zoomer guys ain’t gonna suddenly notice the older evangelical women warming the pews next to them. They especially won’t marry them in great numbers.
That, at least, has stayed the same for a while.
Well, that and not realizing that Jesusing has nothing to do with making a marriage work. Or worse, realizing that what does work is completely independent of one’s religious beliefs.
NEXT UP: Evangelicals continue to fight to lower the tribe’s astronomical divorce rate. We’ll check in on them next to see how they’re doing with that. See you soon!
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