Atheists and their weddings

I'm a civil wedding officiant. The majority of my weddings are non-religious with NO mention of a higher power. A non-denominational wedding acknowledges a non-specific God (not Protestant, Catholic, etc.).

Hopefully, you've found an officiant willing to work with you to create a ceremony that makes you and FH happy.

We have marriage commissioners here who all have base ceremonies that are completely secular and removed from any religion at all. I've seen my officiants ceremony and the only thing that we will be asking him to remove is the word "soul" at one point, as that's also not something we believe in and I'm wanting to avoid all things spiritual.

Yes! Our ceremony is going to be very simple. The general idea is that we are going to be promising to love and care for each other, and how excited we are to share our life experiences together for the rest of our lives. We aren't doing any sort of unity ceremony.

For us, the ceremony is meant for us to express to each other why we are getting married. It's about us, not any other obligation, whether that's to other people or a church.

We are having a justice of the peace officiate our ceremony (mostly because you can't have a friend or family member be ordained online in CT). She has absolutely no religious background, and performs weddings because she loves seeing people happy together. She has been extraordinarily helpful in guiding us through putting together a non-religious ceremony.

@Nancy T, we're in the heart of the Bible Belt so that might be my problem lol. We actually had one of our friends ordained because we were short on options for non-religious officiants.

Our ceremony will be completely non-religious, with no mention of god or a higher power. It actually wasn't too difficult to do. Our officiant does many weddings like this. The ceremony is about me and FH and our love for and commitments to each other, and is very beautifully worded. We are very pleased with it.

I am an atheist and we had a beautiful wedding ceremony. We hired a civil celebrant (similar to JOP -our county doesnt have JOPs) and had a completely non religious ceremony and awesome readings. Bonus: way cheaper than a church ceremony. Lots of ministers will do secular ceremonies but their websites and grammar was so atrocious I wouldn't hire them. And also didnt really want a minister at all. Its totally doable!

@Emily, I think a lot of our root issues with this come from our "help". Our parents and all of our siblings. We went to tour our venue (Big Cedar Lodge) and they kept trying to show me chapels that we could use instead of understanding that I just wanted a quiet balcony.

Oh the problems I'm going to have with this. First off I spent forever finding our officiant. We also live in the bible belt and there's like 3 companies that do it but they were way out of our budget and already booked for that day. We called the court house asking for JOPs. Apparently they don't do weddings outside of the court house anymore so we asked if they knew anyone to do a non-religious ceremony. They gave me 1 number and said he was it. Also my family is very religious so only a few of them know about my FH and I being atheist. The rest I just don't talk to enough for them to know. It's probably going to be very awkward at the wedding when god is not mentioned at all and we will not be praying over the food.

We told our officiant that there shouldn't be ANY mention of God, religion, etc. at our ceremony. I'm an athiest and FH is pretty close (I'll call him agnostic). We're keeping ours simple, light and funny.

@Mrs.Mayes, we had the same issue with officiants. I only found one in my area that was within budget and she wouldn't do a custom ceremony, even if I wrote everything out. It was frustrating.

You feel my pain and angst lol. I am hoping no one really notices the lack of religion in our ceremony. My grandmother will probably freak the eff out if she does.

Yeah, same here. My immediate family is extremely non-religious, FHs family are evangelical christians, but FH is more non-religioous than I am. The snide comments from FMIL about god not being part of our ceremony are never ending. Oh well, it is our day, and god will have no part in our marriage so there is no reason to involve him in our ceremony... She can just deal.

Our officiant is actually a Lutheran pastor, but she is AMAZING. She is a great friend of mine and she is more spiritual than religious. Her church is full of a bunch of free spirit hippies, and she has catered our ceremony to be completely non-religious.

I'm not an atheist but, we are completely not religious. I decided that I really wanted a meaningful and longer ceremony than just the 10-min nonsense. I looked at hundreds of ceremony scripts and picked and choose what I wanted and made OUR perfect ceremony.

Im not an atheist. Nor do i believe in God. I have nothing about his in my service. I told my officiant no religious readings, that's what i got. My mom wanted me to marry in a church, but i can't remember the last time she went to church without a special occasion i.e wedding, funeral, baptism.

Manders, your friend may have to sign the license as "Rev. so-and-so"

I'm Christian and my FH is Buddhist, but neither of us are very religious so we want to have a non-religious ceremony. Unfortunately my father has said before that it's not a real marriage unless God is mentioned so we have decided that we will stick that word in there somewhere. We said either one of our BP will sneeze and we can both say "God bless you" or we will have the officiant say "I now pronounce you man and wife....God". We just went to a non-religious wedding that had a long message about the universe. The overall message was great, but the length was sooooo long. It felt like a science class. Ours will be short and to the point. "Love is great. Do you love her? Do you love him? Awesome. Rings. Kiss. On to the Thai water ceremony, everyone!"

@Nancy T, I'll have to look when I get home and see what the packet says. They gave me a ton of stuff when we got our license since it won't be in a church. My friend is the one pictured below so it will be weird to see him as "Rev. Blah blah blah" lol

(That's a scarf on his head, not a turban, just fyi! We had worked a 14 hour day at this point lol)

@Melissa, that made me laugh.

"...pronounce you man and wife... GOD!" lol I wouldn't be able to kiss FH, I'd be laughing after that.

@michele, "Im not an atheist. Nor do i believe in God." ummm ... what?? If you don't believe in God, you're an atheist.

So I have little to contribute other than to say my FH is an atheist but he is perfectly fine with us having a Jewish ceremony. The only God we'll really be praying to is the God of wine haha, just kidding! But there is a fun part where we get the 7 blessings and we both drink a sip of wine.

We actually couldn't really find a rabbi that would do an intermarriage ceremony for a reasonable price, so we decided to have a friend of ours do the ceremony instead. I think anyone who can't find the right officiant should consider having a friend or family member do it.

@AugustBride, I'm glad your FH is really cool about it. I don't know if I could marry someone that fought me on a religious ceremony. I feel like faith (or lack of) is such a personal, deep thing for people. It's not something to fight over. I equate it to one person liking apples and another liking oranges lol. It doesn't affect me at all if FH wants to believe in a god, just as long as he respects me and my beliefs.

I honestly didn't have to convince him to have a religious ceremony. I completely respect his beliefs and would never try to change him at all. For me, it has more to do with tradition and celebrating holidays than anything else, we definitely won't be going to synagogue every week. Thing is - he grew up as a Catholic so he's been surrounded by religion throughout his childhood. I'd say he is actually excited about learning more on Judaism ..... he was literally looking up different sects of Judaism on Wikipedia last night!! :-D