October 2, 2026
This is a question I asked myself at the beginning of my first pastorate in the northern Bluegrass region of Kentucky. As a brand new, wet-behind-the-ears pastor I found myself at a crossroads regarding weddings. My wife, Joanna, and I had been befriended by a deacon and his wife who went out of their way to make us feel at home when we were both far from home.
Joanna, who was pregnant with our first daughter, was far removed from her parents in South Georgia and my family had been transplanted from England in East Tennessee. During that first year I was asked to perform two weddings for this deacon’s children.
First, his son wanted to marry a Jewish girl. Although she was willing to meet with me to discuss becoming a Christian, she was unwilling to make that commitment to Christ. Within weeks, his sister asked me to perform a wedding for her and her agnostic fiancé, and he was unwilling to discuss becoming a Christian although they both had graduated from a Baptist college.
Needless to say, before declining to perform their ceremonies, I had to ask and answer this question: Why do you decline to perform weddings for couples who are not both Christians?
This question has become ever more pointed and, I believe, relevant in the shifting sands of our cultural milieu.
We read on a contemporary Christian website these straightforward words: “For a Christian to marry a non-Christian is not really an option if the Christian is to remain obedient to the Lord … A Christian considering marriage has some clear guidance in II Corinthians 6:14 which says, ‘Do not be yoked together with unbelievers.”
That is crystal clear, but then the writer goes on to admit: “To be fair to the text, II Cor. 6 does not specifically mention marriage, but it certainly has implications for marriage. What closer yoke can there be than the marriage bond?” I subscribed to that position back in 1974, and still do almost 50 years later. The question is: Why?
As the writer states, we must always “be fair to the text,” to what the Bible says, and we have overwhelming evidence today of how far professed Christians can stray away from what the Bible clearly and unmistakably teaches as being God’s will for our lives.
The Bible emphasizes the importance of being “in the world but not of the world,” and how the chosen people of God were “called out” (the ekklesia) to be a somewhat separate light in a dark world.
When they failed to hold to God’s standards of right and wrong, allowing themselves to compromise away much of their faith and morality, trouble ensued. We read in I Kings 1:1-6 how the wisest of men, King Solomon, chose to be unequally yoked with foreign wives who “turned his heart away from God.” Deuteronomy 22:10 is a simple but powerful illustration of not being unequally yoked, or in its context of vss. 5-10 not being unnaturally yoked: “Do not plow with an ox and a donkey together.”
The Apostle Paul zeroes in on not being unequally yoked in II Cor. 6:14-16a which contains five rhetorical questions:
What partnership is there between righteousness and lawlessness (no commitment to God’s Laws)?
What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever?” He drives home here what he freely quotes in vs. 17 how believers are to “come out from among them (an unbelieving people) and be separate, says the Lord.”
While performing a wedding ceremony, a specifically Christian ceremony, I always refer to marriage between the oldest and best relationship between two human beings united in faith, hope and love. I even ask the bride and groom to reaffirm their commitment to Christ, believing that my authority to perform weddings is as a Christian minister. This being the case underscores my belief and practice of not performing weddings for those who are, Biblically speaking, “unequally yoked.”
To go with the Biblical admonition we have a reasonable reason for not being “unequally yoked” that is also supported by Proverbs 27:17 (“as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another”) and I Thessalonians 5:11 (“encourage one another and build each other up as you are already doing.”
Christian partners can sharpen and build up each other’s faith, hope and love. Every married person knows that we need all the support and encouragement we can get from our spouse, and that, pragmatically speaking, includes the spiritual, emotional, mental, and moral dimension of our lives. As a pastor who has performed hundreds of weddings, I am painfully aware that I have tied some “slip knots” in which those marriages later came “untied.” There is no reasonable doubt that “equally yoked” couples have a far better chance of success which behooves me to emphasize in word and practice.
We must not stop here without clarifying what John MacArthur alludes to when he writes in his commentary on II Cor. 6:14-17 that “the familiar command to separate in this passage is frequently both misunderstood and violated.” He plainly states that separation does not mean “retreating completely from the world into monasticism. And separating from unbelievers does not … mean divorcing an unbelieving spouse. Biblical separation certainly does not cancel the church’s responsibility to ‘go into the world and preach the gospel to all creation’ (Mark 16:15).”
Being Christians certainly means going into the world to work and minister, witness and share, but it does not mean bringing the world’s non-Biblical and anti-Biblical views and norms into our churches and homes.
I close with one commentator’s wise warning about what happens when we embrace “unequal yokeness” in this age of “wokeness."
"Instead of a match made in heaven, (more likely) it will be a mismatch made on earth …”
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Dr. Paul R. Baxter is the mission strategist for Georgia's Pine Mountain Baptist Association.
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