So… who am I, and what does dating “outside” the church mean? First, a little background:
I grew up in about as New Church a family as they come. As a preacher’s kid, I had the privilege of living the gypsy-esque lifestyle that is normal for any preacher’s family—in our case moving from Mitchellville, MD to Westville, South Africa before finally ending up in Kempton, PA. Through these moves, the New Church was always a strong focus in our day-to-day life, and I remember that our family had worship most weeknights at home and went to church pretty much every Sunday (religiously, you might even say).
For schooling, all three of my older brothers ended up going to “normal” public schools—although they might disagree with calling the uniformed, British, all-boys public high school that they went to, “normal.” I on the other hand managed to skip public school all together. Through careful planning, starting as a 5-year-old, I managed to go from Washington New Church School (Maryland) to Kainon New Church School (South Africa) to Kempton New Church School (Pennsylvania) to the Academy of the New Church (Bryn Athyn, PA), finally ending up at Bryn Athyn College of the New Church (Bryn Athyn, PA) for my freshman year and sophomore year of college. (You may notice a common suffix to all of these school titles.)
With religion classes a standard in the curriculums of all of the above, I mention my schooling only as a preface to illustrate the pervasiveness of New Church teachings that I was exposed to by the end of sophomore year in college. The specific doctrine relevant to this particular story, with which, by this stage, I was very familiar, is: you should not marry outside of the church (see, for example, Heaven and Hell n. 378). The very reasonable reason for this being that having the same religion is the most important criteria of which to be sure when getting married. This being the case, it’s probably best not to even date outside of the church.
And so, armed with this knowledge, after ending my final, 15th year of New Church education, I set forth to finish my college degree in the big, bad, secular world of Lehigh University. Astonishing as it may seem, I managed to remain safely single all the way through the final semester of my first year at Lehigh with no effort at all on my part! (The lack of effort may have been partially the reason.) As the second semester of my senior year came around, I was applying for jobs and working hard at not expending any more effort at actual classes; I was certain that with only three months left, there was not nearly enough time to find someone to date at Lehigh. Au Contraire! (All I’ll say at this point is be careful whom you tango with.)
So here I was, dating outside of the church, and man was (is) it fun! Here I had someone who I could agree with and understand on so many different, important topics such as how to treat other people, belief in God, and even the archaic idea that it's best to wait until after you’re married to have sex. (We had both sort of sadly given up a bit on finding someone else who believed that.)
As we walked and talked, naturally religion came up quite a bit and I ran into the first awesome thing about dating someone “outside” the church—you can learn so much about how you view things and what’s really important to you by having to explain your beliefs carefully to someone else when you really want them to understand not only what you believe about things, but why you believe them, too.
So, my new best friend grew up with a strong Christian background and we could talk about and agree on many things, but she certainly didn’t have my engrained New Church perspective or approach and as we continued to date, the question came up in my mind: do we have the “same” religion? This question became even trickier because I was (am) still unclear about what I believe on a lot of issues.
I’d like to take a quick pause for a moment here and verbally appreciate my parents during this time. Even though they strongly believe in the New Church and think it’s the right thing, they have been very supportive in never pressuring me to join the New Church; instead they’d really like for me and whoever I end up marrying to feel comfortable approaching the Lord together from the same religion, whatever that might be.
But what does “having the same religion” really mean? Looking at it one way, you could just say that the bare essentials are all that really matter, which in my mind are: Jesus Christ is the one God—the one source of Goodness, Truth, and Life—and we are supposed to do our best to live as He teaches in the Word every day of our lives. If those two things are the only things that truly are important, then things are all set. But what about other little details like these writings of Emanuel Swedenborg that I grew up with, that I certainly base a lot of my thinking off of, but am still not sure about? Would we need to agree on whether they’re divinely inspired vs. some good thoughts about how to understand the Word better? What about specifics on how kids might be taught and raised? What would the Lord think about this? I don’t know—I’m not sure.
What I think though, that’s a different story. I personally think that those two essentials (The Lord: check. Live good: check) pretty much do the trick. When any two people consider whether to get married or not, there are bound to be differences of interpretation, understanding, and beliefs, even if they grew up as next door neighbors and went to the same church and were taught by the same minister their whole life. The advantage of dating someone whose background is different is that you can’t take anything for granted and really have to consider and challenge everything that you believe.
Dating outside of the church? I’m a fan.
Garrett Smith currently resides in Harrisburg, PA where he works as an analyst for the Hershey Company. He is a recent graduate of Bryn Athyn College (’07, AA) and Lehigh University (’09) where he received his BA in Business - Supply Chain Management. To keep himself occupied at his bachelor pad in Harrisburg, Garrett enjoys barbequing with friends, singing with the Susquehanna Chorale, and he is currently participating in the Hershey Area Playhouse’s summer production of Hello, Dolly! He fills his weekends with various trips to hike, bike, or visit friends with his girlfriend. Garrett also likes playing the piano, trying new wines, and LOVES starting extensive debates on religion and politics with those close to him.