Christian marrying a muslim

Christians shouldn't marry unbelievers.

jen76 said:

Thank you for the answers!
If the man is devout muslim and serious about his faith and the christian woman is also serious about her faith and both could not imagine to marry anyone else?
(They would also both live in a western country and not a muslim one)
But then this man wants to make the children muslims since birth and can't accept that they be anything else, unless when they grow up and can decide themselves as adults?
Should they then even think about having children at all?
The worry here is that what god thinks if the woman let her children be taught that jesus isn't the son of god and so on.

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I really think this situation, if it's for real, needs to be talked out with a counselor, with both persons in the relationship present.

Love can overcome many things, but religious disagreement about what to teach future children could lead to serious problems in the relationship. If there is a desire for children from one or both persons in the relationship, I don't think it's likely that desire is going to change for the sake of marital harmony.

There are a few possibilities. One, agree to rear the children in one religion. Two, expose the children to both religions, explaining the similarities & differences, letting them participate in both. Three, agree not to rear them in either religion. I think option three would be unrealistic with devout parents.

As noted, different denominations or strands of religions may teach different things regarding marriage, divorce, etc. Many Christians believe it would be wrong to marry a Muslim. Others would be fine with it. This is why both persons in the relationship really need to strongly consider their respective religious beliefs before choosing to marry.

Once again I'll say this: this really should be discussed with a counselor.

jen76 said:

What do you think of a christian woman marrying a muslim man?
What about, if they have children and comes the religion issue about children's religion?
Should the christian allow her children to become muslims since birth or not?
And if she allows, could we think that since all is god's will, they would become christians later in their lives if he (god) wills it?
(the view of mine is a christian one)
Tell me also your opinions about this whole subject.

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I don't reccommend it. I had a romance with a woman who had been wedded to a Muslim. There were numerous problems owing to their son.

I would vehemently be against it since I went through it myself. If he's as strict/devout as my ex, he probably wouldn't marry anyone other than a Muslimah anyway, due to the sake of the kids. I realised too late, that due to the sake of the salvation of the kids, what the condition of the home was like for them, I should never have married. It is oppressive, and fear-ridden, so I could not recommend it to a fellow sister in Christ.

Sometimes what we perceive as rose speckled love initially can sometimes turn and bite one's behind when your eyes are opened.

EnemyOfReason said:

As a former Muslim there are some issues with this I can spot out. Modern Muslims disregard this on the basis that Christianity breaks Tawhid, the defining element on why a Muslim is permitted to have a halal relationship with a Christian woman is on the basis of Tawhid and the Trinitarian doctrine violates this which is why pious Muslims or Mu'min would not allow this.

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Except the Qur'an very explicitly says that a Muslim man may marry a Christian.

smaneck said:

Except the Qur'an very explicitly says that a Muslim man may marry a Christian.

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You forget the technicality that they may only marry people of the book. The Christians are presumed to practice Tawhid but they aren't monotheists.

I know my Qur'an and my ahadith, I lived by it. Don't confused what is written unless taken holistically in scripture because there are always technicalities

EnemyOfReason said:

You forget the technicality that they may only marry people of the book.

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The Book is the Bible.

I know my Qur'an and my ahadith, I lived by it. Don't confused what is written unless taken holistically in scripture because there are always technicalities

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As you know ahadith are often used to overrule the Qur'an and when that doesn't work you always have the 'ulama.

smaneck said:

The Book is the Bible.



As you know ahadith are often used to overrule the Qur'an and when that doesn't work you always have the 'ulama.

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I am fully aware of this, where do you think the consensus of not marrying Christians comes from? It comes from the ulema!
The ulema only serves two purposes right now, divide Muslims and spread hate. The Islamic hierarchy(which should not exist to begin with) needs a religious enema

EnemyOfReason said:

The Islamic hierarchy(which should not exist to begin with) needs a religious enema

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Can't disagree with you there. Even the Prophet foresaw this:

`There will come a time for my people when there will remain nothing of the Qur'an except its outward form and nothing of Islam except its name and they will call themselves by this name even though they are the people furthest from it. The mosques will be full of people but they will be empty of right guidance. The religious leaders (Fuqaha) of that day will be the most evil religious leaders under the heavens; sedition and dissension will go out from them and to them will it return.' " -ibn Babuya, Thawab ul-A'mal

I have known Christian and Muslim couple(s)...I (my opinion) think it's a bad idea.

football5680 said:

Christians shouldn't marry unbelievers.

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I can almost hear the Muslims saying the same thing.

I would never marry a man who could 'legally' take another wife. Muslim law allows Muslim men to marry Christians and Jews, but does not allow Muslim women to do this. It also dictates that the children MUST be raised Muslim. Although I'm pretty sure they believe in the same God, there are differences in theology, especially about Jesus/Essa that I think would be irreconcilable in a marriage if both parties feel strongly about their faiths.

This is not allowed in my church, thanks be to God. We are in fact not even allowed to marry outside of the Oriental Orthodox communion, with the exception of marriages conducted in the patriarchal territory to Greeks (and this is more to the benefit of the Greeks than the Copts, as there are so few Greeks in Egypt in comparison; it is basically only in Alexandria that this is even an issue, due to the high number of mixed Coptic-Greek couples there...and I'm told by both Coptic and Greek friends that the children of such unions generally consider themselves to be Copts). It would be unthinkable for a Coptic person to willingly and intentionally marry a Muslim, though of course we lose a certain number (probably in the high hundreds to low thousands) per year to conversion to Islam anyway, some of which is for marriage (either to marry a Muslim partner or to avoid marrying an undesirable Christian one; or -- and this is more likely -- to get a divorce from the Muslim courts that would not be granted by the Church). Socially and canonically, however, it is forbidden and very strictly adhered to. I personally know a number of Coptic people who cannot receive communion because they broke this rule (though to marry other types of Christians, and in one case a Jewish woman, never a Muslim; I don't think most Coptic people would even want to marry a Muslim, no matter if they were allowed to or not). And the Western press has occasionally had a field day with what they see as the Church's draconian and regressive divorce laws, even going so far as to paint Coptic people (who are by and large quite supportive of the Church in this area; even the one Coptic person I know who did obtain a divorce said he supports the law as it is and wouldn't want more people to be able to get them) as somehow violent aggressors when this issue has occasionally cropped up. "Ooo, look at these crazy Coptic people! They won't let their children follow their hearts! They're going to react violently when their daughter marries a Muslim!" Ignoring that their daughters shouldn't be marrying Muslims in the first place, that kidnapping and forced marriage of Coptic girls to Muslims is a problem in Egypt, and that Muslims themselves have no problem flipping out and killing people and torching Coptic homes and businesses based on the mere unsubsntiated rumor that the opposite has happened and a Muslim girl has (God forbid) fallen in love with a Christian boy. We can't have that, now can we! Everything must be for Islam and Muslims, and nothing for Christians...even in their native country. Who the hell would want to marry someone from that religious community? I would rather die than marry a Muslim, for a whole host of reasons. Yuck. The very idea is nauseating in the extreme.

So of course I think this is the worst idea ever. You place yourself far away from your God, outside of your community, and into the hand of Satan, and for what? Your heart and its stupid feelings? That's pretty much it. Feelings are stupid. No marriage has ever survived on feelings. That's Hollywood movie claptrap. I'm not saying I don't understand the pull (obviously I'd rather be able to marry whoever I choose rather than be restricted to an Egyptian, Armenian, Ethiopian, etc...not that all of our traditional Orthodox people aren't lovely, and of course there are also converts such as myself, but you can't really rely on that), but come on now...you've to think about the long term. Assuming it even works out, which it probably won't, you'll be with your spouse for what -- 60, 70 years tops? And then what? What will you say when you are standing before the Just Judge and He asks you why you chose one of His creations over Him? There's nothing you can say, because that's inherently indefensible. Just don't do it.

jen76 said:

I don't know why, but i see a lot of hate here towards muslims.
Doesn't it say in the bible to love one another as we love ourselves?

"Who the hell would want to marry someone from that religious community? I would rather die than marry a Muslim, for a whole host of reasons. Yuck. The very idea is nauseating in the extreme."
I can see your hate towards muslims on what you wrote.

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I can see your ignorance of the reality of Middle Eastern Christianity in what you've written. I have not written anything that our own bishops and priests haven't made abundantly clear: We are not to marry Muslims. We are not to even want to marry Muslims. A Christian should only marry a Christian. NO exceptions. Am I supposed to to pretend as though reality is something other than what it is, or somehow our bishops are hateful just because you don't understand why any church would have such rules or such an outlook? It doesn't even apply to you if you're not Coptic Orthodox, but since I am, these are the rules we live by. Don't marry Muslims. Don't pretend that Islam is somehow a great thing that has been a source for social progress of the Christians. In Egypt our church has no choice but to work within what it's given, but nobody is seriously under the illusion that it's "hate" towards Muslims to insist that we handle our own affairs and not marry outsiders. It's the Islamic political establishment that has forced us to rely on the Church as a parallel political establishment anyway, so don't cry to me about how it's "hateful" to point out that that sucks and creates an inherently unfair system that actively rewards Christians who apostasize out of Islam's hatred of Christianity and desire to destroy it. That's reality whether you like it or not.

I don't think that jesus told us to hate those who are not christians.

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What are you talking about? This thread is about marriage. Surely you don't have to marry every type of person to prove that you don't hate them? There must be something in between. I don't hate anybody, and I'll thank you not to tell me that I do based on what you think of what I've written.

Doesn't it say in the bible to love even our enemies?

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And so we do. But we do not marry Muslims. The Bible also says not to marry unbelievers.

They are born from the same ancestors, since abraham had two sons and from the other came the muslim population.

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Most Egyptian Muslims are former Copts, yes. The Egyptians will tell you they are one people, and the number of actual Arabs (as opposed to Arabized Egyptians) has always been rather low. I don't know what that has to do with the subject of marrying Muslims. The donkeys of Muhammad gave the apostates a new ethnolinguistic identity and religious orientation; they didn't magically change their actual roots or background. And even then, Egypt has only been self-consciously Arab since the days of Nasser and the Arab Republic union with Syria. And there's nothing wrong with being an Arab, anyway. There have always been Arab Christians. The problem is in being Muslim. Islam is the wrong faith to have. I don't know a nicer way to put it. It is wrong to be Muslim and wrong to marry Muslims and wrong to pretend that either of those things are okay.

"You place yourself far away from your God, outside of your community, and into the hand of Satan, and for what? Your heart and its stupid feelings? That's pretty much it. Feelings are stupid. No marriage has ever survived on feelings. That's Hollywood movie claptrap."
My heart and my stupid feelings? Who are you to judge me? Anyway i think that the judging is god's job and nobody elses .

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The general 'you'. You as in "the person who does this". Not you the OP. I don't know you from Adam.

Also if there were no feelings, we would all be robots.

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Now that's not true. Doesn't the Bible say that the heart is deceitful, and it cannot be understood? I believe it does. Far from saying that feelings aren't really, we do know that feelings aren't trustworthy. You've had people in this thread who have already said that they've been in the exact situation that the original post is asking about, and they realized later that it was a mistake. That should tell you something. (And by no means is that limited to this question, either; nobody should just 'wing it' when it comes to marriage, no matter what the background of the pair.)

Besides it doesn't say it's a sin to marry non-christian, but if one marries then there might be just some suffering.

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It is a sin to live in schism from the Church. The Coptic Orthodox Church mandates that all marriages that occur within it be between two baptized Christians of the Orthodox faith of the three councils. Hence marrying outside of it places you outside of the church, i.e., in schism from it. So yes, in the eyes of my own church, it is. Again, this has no bearing on anyone else, but it does help explain why we take this matter very seriously. Getting married outside of the boundaries of the Church is no different than getting baptized, communed, or accepting any other sacrament in another church. Doing that means that you're accepting whatever faith they have, no matter how messed up it is (again, from the view of the Orthodox Church). That is not accepted, and yes, it is a sin. We don't just get to do whatever we want because we feel like it. If you love Christ, you will keep His commandments, and Christ our God commands that we remain on the narrow path (within the Church, not outside of it).

But if the person feels that this is the only person i have connection with and i love, then what's the problem?

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Maybe to you or whatever church you're in, there is no problem. That's not for me to judge. I am only saying that this is my view, and this is why I have it.

Of course we need to pray god to guide us and show what he wants.

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Of course.

And judging others won't help us..

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And that's not what I'm doing. I'm talking about my own Church and its rules, and explaining why they are as they are since I know they are different and much more strict than the rules of most other churches. I'm not saying "anyone who doesn't follow this way is damned forever" or what have you, only "this is what we do, and this is why we do it". I apologize if I did not make that clear enough and you took some of my post as a personal attack or hatred against whoever follows a different way. We don't hate anyone; we are just very strict in our rules, for the sake of our God and our faith and the souls of everyone in the Church.

Aryeh Jay said:

I can almost hear the Muslims saying the same thing.

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Can't believe you chimed in with that. I know a goy girl married a Jew. What she went through to make it happen - more work than earning a PhD!

Chesterton said:

Can't believe you chimed in with that. I know a goy girl married a Jew. What she went through to make it happen - more work than earning a PhD!

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Going to quote A League of Their Own here:

If it were easy, everybody would do it. It's the hard that makes it great.

Chesterton said:

Can't believe you chimed in with that. I know a goy girl married a Jew. What she went through to make it happen - more work than earning a PhD!

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And I know a Baptist that married a Catholic and he had to jump through the same hoops.


Because this was about Christianity and Muslims marring, I didn’t think that adding every religion and demolition that requires the children to be raised in a certain faith.


And… the girl who married the Jew had to go through a PhD dissertation, then she converted to Judaism, not really the same thing as a marriage between two separate faiths.

Aryeh Jay said:

...every religion and demolition...

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A Freudian slip? I asked you the other day about your religion's offshoots and you were much more polite.

Chesterton said:

A Freudian slip? I asked you the other day about your religion's offshoots and you were much more polite.

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Spell check more likely. Curse F7!!