I've attended many religious wedding ceremonies in the past. Some are longer or more intense than others, but for the most part, they're all pretty much the same. When I attended one last weekend, I got what I was expecting: chanting, droned group responses, choreographed standing and sitting rituals, and embarrassingly little information about the couple for whom we had gathered. With experience comes wisdom, and during this lap around the Christian nuptial track I noticed something that hadn't quite struck me before. Somewhere between losing count of the references to God vs. references to the real-life people whose love we were celebrating (I got to about 60 to 2) and being warned about the "lies of the secular world", I realized that I was sitting right in the middle of an infomercial.
The sales pitch isn't obvious or in-your-face. The priest doesn't Billy Mays his product nor throw in a bonus soul for the first 50 customers. The sale is much more subtle than that.
Hidden among the promises the participants (I'd have forgotten their names had I not known them personally) make to each other is the promise to raise their children in the faith. This is a promise to the Church, to God, that the newlyweds will commit their children to the Church's particular religion from birth. Baptism, Sunday school, communion, confirmation. The Church is locking in customers before they exist - if Coca Cola or Pepsi could figure out how to hook their product up in utero they still wouldn't beat the promise of yet-to-be-conceived people. Cable companies offer discounts to people who sign up a certain distance in the future; cruise lines offer you a discount on a future cruise if you commit to it today; it's no wonder Churches want to get their commitments early.
Implicit in the requirement to make this promise is the idea that a child allowed to make his own choices may choose to follow one of the hundreds of other religions available to him or, worse, no religion at all. Being forced to compare religions (or denominations within one religion) forces you to evaluate them objectively without having an emotional attachment to one in particular. That's not to say that freedom to choose a religion leads to atheism, but at the very least a child that's free to choose is more likely to choose the one that suits him best, not the one that his parents committed him to before he was old enough to join the fallopian swim team.
As a parent of two young children, I can say that I have big dreams for them and that I will do my best to share my experiences and values with them. I have literally no idea what choices they will make in the next five minutes, much less when they're old enough to choose a spiritual path. I wouldn't dare promise their loyalty to anyone or any idea; to do so would diminish their individuality. I can no more choose their religion than I can choose their future spouse; to do otherwise would be controlling to the extreme or, at the very least, shameless indoctrination.
If people were given the chance to embark on their own spiritual journeys, they might be more sympathetic to those who choose to follow a different path. I have no way of knowing which path(s) my children will choose; I can only hope that one day they thank me for not allowing anyone to call spiritual 'dibs' on them before they were born.
