In Faith and In Doubt: How Religious Believers and Nonbelievers Can Create Strong Marriages and Loving Families

I spent most of my life as a believing Mormon, and I married another believing Mormon. After painful, many years long a crisis of faith, I picked up this book hoping for strategies that would helped my now mixed-belief marriage work. I have very mixed feelings about it for couples in similar situations.McGowan is an atheist, and has had a very successful marriage to a believing Christian. To write this book, he ran a fairly large study of people in mixed belief marriages to find out what made them work and what made them fail. He shares some encouraging results- mixed belief marriages are not necessarily more likely to fail.Unfortunately for me, it was also a very painful read, and I think many Mormon/former-Mormon couples will have a similar experience. As I read the worst failure stories, I could see many of my own experiences mirrored. For example, when one partner in a fundamentalist Baptist couple became atheist, the believing spouse felt betrayed, felt that a covenant was broken, and feared the family was in danger of hell. The devastation this person experienced was way too close to home (it sounded like my wife's experience). The anger and frustration felt by the other spouse was painfully familiar, too. This couple was NOT able to work through their differences, and eventually divorced.The examples he gives of marriages that worked well felt foreign to me in most cases. They usually involve a very non-literal, non-fundamentalist believer. My spouse is a deep thinker, and nuanced in her religious views. I consider her thoughtful, but not "non-literal". I think she'd agree. She's a literal believer, so making compromises he suggests, like going to a UU church, won't work.He does make a very good point about the necessity for both partners to be non-dogmatic. His way of explaining dogmatism was really helpful, too. This was most helpful for me in examining myself. It made me analyze my own thought processes and level of open minded-ness. It's not very helpful to use his criteria to evaluate my spouse, though.McGowan has a few pieces of very good, important advice, especially regarding not wanting to convert your spouse and being respectful of his/her faith journey no matter how it turns out. A strong desire to convert the other is a major failure factor. This has been critical in my marriage. Read, this, and make sure you apply it to YOU. YOU need to be non-dogmatic. I especially loved the advice about accepting "the ultimate compliment"- meaning, your spouse believes that you as a non-believer probably won't go to hell, or as a believer are actually a decent, intelligent person. You don't have to agree on these things to be OK with each other.I think his best chapter is the one about raising kids. It's excellent, especially since I've had no other examples to look at of mixed belief marriages with kids. His advice to keep hell (or other scare tactics) out of a child's teaching is great. He has a great strategy for making sure kids know that they can search for truth, pick any set of beliefs, or change their minds as often as they need to, and still be fully loved and accepted by the family. He makes a big deal about being on the same page with your spouse and coming to an agreement on how kids should be raised. I hadn't thought through most of this as clearly as he put it. My wife even liked a lot of the ideas when I talked to her about it.The tone is very important to mention. Lots of amazon reviewers say that the believing spouses enjoyed and found the book helpful. I believe them, but I bet they are very non-literal believers. A small number of more literal reviewers found it offensive. I think a believing Mormon who is still hurting from loss and a feeling of betrayal will definitely be offended. McGowan really does try to be inclusive, but he just can't see his own bias creeping in. He spends too much time telling faith crisis stories, and doesn't give equal time to conversion stories. He never portrays believers as deep thinkers. You get the feeling that he is nice to believers, but doesn't really understand them. The worst part is that toward the end he reveals that after many years, his wife eventually de-converted, too. That felt like an ambush, and I felt mislead. It's subtle, but I could not recommend the book to my wife. Instead, I told her a lot about the useful parts, and warned her that she would likely find the book alienating. We talked about things I liked and didn't like. I think that was the best approach.Sadly, a lot of this book was pretty depressing for me. When he talked about the factors that brought success, I saw only a few of them in my marriage. When he talked about the factors that brought failure, I felt I could relate with lots of them. It was hard to get through. I had to stop and start a couple of times because it was a little overwhelming. In fact, I totally skipped the chapter about divorce. That was just too painful, since I was looking for something encouraging that would help me make things work. To be honest, I got into a pretty bad emotional state while reading parts of this book. It actually reduced my hope for a happy family. At the same time, other parts did give great, encouraging advice for having respectful family relations, honoring each person's journey, including everyone, and being non-judgmental and non-dogmatic. This stuff is, like I said, critical.Overall, I had to grit my teeth at his data and stories in order to get through it. I had to tell myself that my marriage is NOT like any of the stories, and I don't HAVE to be like those people. In truth, I'm pretty lucky, because my wife is a believer, but she really listens to me and thinks I'm a good person, despite our differing beliefs. She's got my back. I think she's perfectly intelligent, moral and a good human being. I'd defend her, too. It was hard to get here, though, and sometimes things are still very hard. I think if I had read this book earlier in my faith crisis it might have made divorce sound more appealing. It could possibly have made me feel like there was no to make things good.So, there you have it! It might be useful for some of you, especially if you have already settled into a stable, fairly happy situation and just want strategies for raising kids or other specific issues. If your marriage is currently in crisis because of faith differences, I would not recommend it. To be honest, I think this book would be more useful to someone who is CONSIDERING a mixed faith marriage, rather than someone who unexpectedly ended up in one.

I’ve been an enthusiastic reader of Dale McGowan‘s books for a few years now. He has found a very relevant niche (secular family life) and has filled it with compassion, knowledge, and humor. In Faith and in Doubt moves a bit away from parenting as a focus to another important and underserved question: mixed marriages. Specifically, marriages in which one spouse is a religious believer and the other isn’t. I’m in such a marriage.McGowan has personal experience with “secular/religious marriage” (his preferred term for the phenomenon), and we read several stories about how he and his wife, Becca, started a relationship with different beliefs and how their beliefs challenged them and changed over the years of their relationship. What makes the book valuable, though, is that McGowan didn’t base his thoughts on just his personal relationship or a few anecdotal other relationships.Instead, he conducted an online survey of participants in secular/religious marriages (contacted mostly through atheist and skeptical social media) that collected information from nearly 1000 different relationships (and, in some cases, former relationships) in a wide variety of combinations and levels of success. By collecting this much data, McGowan’s message that secular/religious marriage are not inherently doomed has a lot of support.McGowan starts with a review of the scant previous literature on the topic of secular/religious marriages that shows a different conclusion: that they are doomed to be miserable and short. However, McGowan points out that the authors of those books generally had a vested interest; they were usually conservative practitioners of more exclusionary faiths, trying to scare their fellow believers away from mixed marriages. In contrast, by looking at the results of a broad survey of real-life examples of these marriages, McGowan demonstrates that the doom-and-gloom isn’t warranted.To demonstrate how various factors played out for other couples, McGowan provides chapter-length profiles of a variety of different combinations: a liberal Southern Baptist married to an increasingly-atheist-oriented agnostic, a secular American and a South African Hindu, a Southern Baptist couple in which the husband deconverted, an atheist and a liberal Catholic who compromised on Unitarianism, a couple that switched places, etc. Some of these couples were able to build strong relationships without much difficulty, some fell apart completely under the strain of change, and for some the difference in religion was just one of many cultural issues.With these examples and the results of the survey under his belt, McGowan uses the last half of the book to dive deeply into a variety of specific aspects of relationships, from the initial discovery of difference to the wedding to holidays to kids, etc. McGowan does a very good job at presenting good advice and principles and then establishing his point with stories from his life or the lives of the couple he profiled in the second section of the book.The book ends on a hopeful note, pointing out that successful secular/religious marriages give the partners better understandings of each other’s worldviews and can both soften fundamentalist belief on one end and give relief to religious resentment on the other. Further, since secular/religious couples have had to worth through the religious issues through compassion, communication, and compromise, they are often in a better shape than others to whether the other types of crises that inevitably affect long-term relationships.In conclusion, a secular/religious marriage needs a solid foundation of trust, shared values, and communication. Both partners have to be willing to make compromises. It may not compatible with all theisms (or even all atheisms), but it can work through focus on shared values. It isn’t guaranteed to work, but it isn’t nearly as foolhardy as some would have us believe.

The author, McGowan, notes there are various books on interfaith marriages (IM), but very few on secular/religious (S/R) marriages. The challenges are very similar but the divorce rate is not greater in S/R marriages than in interfaith or the general population divorce rate. He discusses how religious concepts of faith and societal changes are impacting these marriages also, making such marriages more palatable and successful. His chapters on "Meet the Believers" and "Meet the Nonbelievers" helps to understand each group and the changes that are happening in each group. He then gives various case studies of marriage difficulties and resolutions and even some that chose to disolve the marriage. His primary point is to focus on "values" rather than "beliefs" for those who really seek to make their marriage work in spite of differing religious orientations. He says: “...a change of mind isn’t the goal. Reducing tension is.” This can be a very helpful read for those who find themselves in such marriages, and also can be a great resource for marriage therapists.

I appreciated this book. You truly have to love someone unconditionally and be your own person in order to make a relationship between a believer and non-believer work. I was reading this book at the time my bf broke up with me for not being a Christian, even though he knew I was an atheist beforehand and he claimed to have leaned toward atheism. The people in the book who make it work do not allow religion to affect their relationship.

Decent book. I think he tries to be as balanced as possible but it very much has a humanist slant to it. It's an alright Introductory book. It's not as scientific as he says though.

I found this book helped me consider many aspects of my relationships both with my partner and in general. I enjoyed the book and will definitely be reading others by him.