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My (Atheist) Wedding Ceremony

By: Ross

I’m really blogging this off-the-cuff so bear with me if I ramble a little bit.

The Problem (A Moderately Long Story)

I’m getting married in July so my fiancée, Jennie, and I have obviously had to give a bit of thought to how we want our wedding ceremony to go.  This has not been a particularly straight-forward issue, since, though we are both atheists, we were also both raised in (at least ostensibly) religious families and almost all of the wedding ceremonies we have been to or participated in have been religious in nature and were presided over by a religious leader.  So right off, there’s the issue of not having any exposure to any non-religious weddings.  We were, of course, familiar with the fact that you can receive a non-religious wedding in a courthouse, but that isn’t really the vibe we want.  Essentially, we want to have what, in all respects, looks like your typical wedding with all your friends/family assembled and a person leading the ceremony.  We just don’t want the ceremony to be religious.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania doesn’t make this particularly easy.  You probably need a  law degree just to sort it all out, but my brief perusal of the pertinent laws suggests to me that only clergy, mayors, judges, justices of the peace, etc. can legally preside over a wedding that isn’t taking place in a courthouse or city hall.  Another part of the issue is that Jennie and I want to know and value the person who is marrying us.  I don’t happen to be friends with any mayors, judges, justices of the peace, etc.  In this context, it has occurred to me that there is a certain state discrimination against the non-religious in this regard.  Religious people who go to church (temple, mosque, etc.) are likely to know and feel close with their clergy-person, whom they are likely to get to marry them.  For non-religious folks, the state basically says “Too bad—if you want someone you know to marry you, join a church!”

In the beginning, Jennie and I considered having the minister at her parents’ church do our wedding ceremony, providing she was willing to do a non-religious ceremony.  Jennie emailed her and asked her about it, and she said that she would have to meet with us first and talk about it before she could decide whether she would be willing to officiate a non-religious ceremony, something she had never done before.  One of the questions she wanted us to be able to answer was “Why get married at all if not for religious reasons?”

We couldn’t set up the meeting for a while because of schedule constraints, so we had a lot of time to think about it.  Ultimately, we decided to go another direction, and I’m really happy with the decision that we made.

Our decision was motivated by a pretty basic desire: we want to be married by someone who is overwhelmingly excited about our wedding/marriage and who wouldn’t hesitate when asked to officiate.  We, further, think that almost no religious official would fit that bill, because the religious view is that love comes from God.  For my part, I was exceedingly uncomfortable with religion having any part in the wedding ceremony, even as the ostensible source of the officiant’s legal authority, because religion has no role in my life.  I was also concerned that having a religious official presiding may be taken by my guests as my implicit endorsement of religion (e.g., “he’s atheist but he still thinks religion is ok”), and the fact is that I generally disapprove of religion insofar as I disapprove of all forms of unreason.

The Solution

It’s a funny thing that Jennie and I were looking for people who are excited to participate in our wedding, whom we value greatly, and who share, or at least understand, many of our core values and we couldn’t seem to find them anywhere.  It turns out that they were right under our noses, as they likely are for anyone who is getting married—those are the exact qualifications for a best man or maid-of-honor.  So our ultimate solution was to enlist my brother, Joe (co-author of this blog), and Jennie’s sister, Sarah, to co-officiate our wedding ceremony as well as being best man and maid of honor. [As a side note, we’re really grateful to both of them for being willing to do this].  We’ll either get married in a courthouse the day before the wedding to make it legal, or we’ll get married under Joe’s authority as an atheist minister (go figure) of the Universal Life Church, an online site that will ordain pretty much anyone to perform marriages in approximately 2 minutes.  Jennie and I will be writing all of the content of our wedding ceremony so that it fully reflects our values and only our values.   I’m super-pumped!

Next up: Wedding Cakes!