For too many American Orthodox Christians, the mixed-marriage conventional wisdom follows this line of reasoning. In our pluralistic society, we cannot avoid the fact that most of our youth will choose spouses who have had a different religious upbringing. With these unions comes an inevitable dilution and disintegration of the practices of the Orthodox Faith. The Greek Orthodox version of the typical harangue sounds something like this: “My boy Costa married a xeni (stranger, outsider, foreigner) and now he doesn’t come to Church!”

I don’t buy it.

My mother became Orthodox because of marriage. So did my father-in-law. So did my mother-in-law’s mother-the first or one of the first converts in Jacksonville, Florida. Yia-Yia (Greek for “grandmother”) could not have been more white-bread. She grew up a Methodist in Hendersonville, North Carolina. Her grandfather was a sergeant in the Confederate Army who fought under General Lee at Appomattox. All three embraced Orthodoxy at a time when the Liturgy was perfomed completely in the Greek langauge and there was no strategy for Church growth like small groups or Wednesday evening Bible studies.

My family’s witness confirms what I have seen in parish ministry. Whenever the Orthodox partner in a marriage is strong in his or her beliefs, the non-Orthodox spouse develops almost immediate admiration for the Orthodox Church. Very often this esteem leads to conversion and when it doesn’t there is usually at least a sense of respect for the Orthodox way.

Mixed-marriages in America expose a problem, and it’s not that Vassiliki is engaged to a blonde named Bubba. Protestant and Roman Catholic fiancés are not leading our young away from the Church. We are the source of the problem. We raise young people who are lukewarm in their faith. ~Fr. Aris Metrakos, Orthodoxy Today

This is a thorny problem, especially for Orthodox in the West, where we are a very small religious minority. With respect, while Fr. Aris is surely right to insist that all Orthodox could stand to be more dedicated and faithful, it is undoubtedly a mistake to think that marriage between confessions does not lead to a certain slackening in keeping Orthodox traditions and observances. This would be more of a problem, I suppose, in jurisdictions where fasts are kept more strictly as a general practice–but then it is also in those jurisdictions where conversion of the non-Orthodox intended will more often precede the wedding.

But the loss of some observances has to be expected in such cases, which is why they cause such consternation. For every anecdote Fr. Aris could produce from his own family history, I suspect many more could be produced to affirm the opposite. Of course, it would be ideal for every Orthodox person to be strong and dedicated to the Faith, causing his spouse eventually to respect and love the Orthodox Church, but this certainly imposes something of an unusual burden on the Orthodox spouse, perhaps more than is always wise or sound from a pastoral perspective.

I expect that this diminution of Orthodox practice is particularly true when Orthodox men marry non-Orthodox women. The generic quote Fr. Aris cites suggests as much–the perception there is that the xeni “took” the woman’s son away from the Church, and I suspect this generic idea could be confirmed with a number of examples. In my admittedly limited experience, and again admittedly in the Russian Church Abroad, I have never heard tell of a woman leaving Orthodoxy to marry, but it is always the man who converts to marry her. Conversely, you do not hear many stories of women converting to Orthodoxy to marry, but you will hear more than a few laments about the adverse effect of Orthodox men marrying non-Orthodox.

Why would this be a particular problem for the maintenance of Orthodox practices? It is already proverbial among American Orthodox, as among many others, that men are much more lax in church attendance and in keeping up the parishes–how much more will this be the case for a man when he does not have an Orthodox wife spurring him and his children on? Of course, the man should be the head of the household and should be the one leading and spurring on his family, but it is fair to say that this is not always the case and that the responsibilities in keeping up the domestic church and the life of the parish very often fall disproportionately to the women. It seems to me that this is the pastoral situation at hand, regardless of whether it should be this way.

One problem at the heart of the matter would have to be the reason why the non-Orthodox spouse chooses not to convert, since this is what creates the “mixed” situation. But whatever that reason, it seems to me that the problem would become most acute once there are children, especially when it comes to teaching the children about Christianity and taking them to church. Presumably, the non-Orthodox spouse (for the sake of convenience, to avoid these lengthy circumlocutions of “non-Orthodox spouse,” let’s say it is the woman) will not be adamant about rejecting some things in Orthodoxy, or else she would probably not have married an Orthodox man, but it seems possible that she might not want to teach some traditions, such as the veneration of icons or pannykhidas, or if she did there might be sharp disagreements over the meaning of these traditions. In some cases, the very piety and virtue that might make the woman an excellent wife also stem from her devotion to another tradition that she has no desire to give up, which serves as a sort of two-edged sword in these marriages.

This is the source of the sort of confusion and strife in family life that can often result in a watering down or cessation of religious habits. Disagreement about how children will be raised can be a source of estrangement of both spouses from their respective traditions, as the prospect of each attending different churches (or, what, attending each other’s church on alternating weeks?) or choosing one church in which the children will be raised can discourage church attendance or the raising of children in any church. The logic can often be, for those spouses who cannot resolve the disagreement, that nothing is better than something that I cannot accept. This seems to me to be a real danger, and a cause of considerable trouble.

Ultimately, this ambiguity must have its origins in a deficient appreciation for Orthodox ecclesiology and the ecclesiological parallels of marriage–“mixed” marriages occur because of the minority position of Orthodox in the West, which has encouraged an extremely lax view of ecclesiological boundaries for pragmatic reasons of an often dubious nature and likewise has allowed some Orthodox to marry without also being united in the same Church, which only underscores the lack of real, ecclesiological unity in the married couple. While there are undoubtedly good reasons to exercise oikonomia in many cases, there must be more of an answer to this problem than exhorting people to be more faithful. Of course, we should exhort one another within reason and serve as examples to one another, but also arrange things in such a way that these “mixed” marriages are vehicles for leading more people to Orthodoxy rather than causes for spiritually fruitless relationships.