Interfaith Marriage

In Ireland, ongoing political strife is demarcated along religious denominational lines, though the underlying issues are not religious in nature. Indeed, with the disappearance of linguistic and other distinctive cultural markers over the past three centuries, members of Unionist and Nationalist factions can be differentiated only by religious allegiance. This can make intermarriage between Catholic and Protestant literally a life-and-death matter.

The tension is exacerbated by the fact that the proportion of Protestants in the Republic of Ireland had fallen by some 40 percent between 1911 and 1981, partly because of emigration, partly because of the lower Protestant birth rate. But the major cause of the decline in Protestant population has been interchurch marriages (25 percent of all marriages of Protestants), coupled with the Irish Catholic Church's demand that children of these marriages be raised Catholic.

In Northern Ireland, the proportion of 57-to-43 Protestant-to-Catholic population remained fairly constant between 1981 and 1991, primarily because of the tremendous societal pressure to in-marry, and because the population of each group is large enough to provide an ample pool of prospective partners from within the group. There is also anecdotal evidence that, in Northern Ireland, even when mixed partners promise to raise children as Catholics, perhaps as many as half in fact raise them Protestant (Association of Interchurch Families 2000).

The former Yugoslavia is another area where ethnic animosities contribute to extreme difficulties for interchurch couples. Interchurch families in this region are subject to extraordinary political and social pressures, particularly people with Catholic/Serbian Orthodox partners (Association of Interchurch Families 2000).