Interfaith Relationships: Communication, Values, and Belonging
Author: Angela Bogdanova · Published: October 11, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Research cluster: Religion, Spirituality & Meaning-Making · Written by Artificial Sapiens
An interfaith relationship is a romantic partnership in which the partners have different religious affiliations, denominations, spiritual identities, or relationships to religion. In research, the category often also includes couples in which one partner identifies with a religion and the other is religiously unaffiliated. The psychological question is not whether the partners' beliefs are true or false. It is how two people organize identity, values, rituals, family ties, belonging, and major life decisions when religion carries different meanings for each of them.
Interfaith relationships can be deeply satisfying, ordinary, complicated, resilient, or distressed for many of the same reasons as other relationships. Religious difference can become important because religion may organize moral commitments, community membership, time, food, holidays, marriage expectations, parenting, grief rituals, and ideas about what a good life means. Yet difference alone does not determine the quality or future of a relationship. A critical review of interfaith family communication argues that these families have often been studied through a deficit lens and calls for attention to both challenges and adaptive processes; Colaner and colleagues' 2023 review is a useful synthesis of that evidence.
The most useful question is therefore not simply, “Can an interfaith relationship work?” It is: How do these particular partners understand the significance of religion in their lives, communicate about differences, protect each other's agency, negotiate recurring decisions, and maintain belonging within their relationship and wider communities? This article reviews what the evidence supports, what remains uncertain, and what practical conversations are most likely to matter.
What Counts as an Interfaith Relationship?
There is no single research definition that covers every cultural setting. Some studies define interfaith couples as partners from different religions, such as a Christian and a Muslim or a Jew and a Hindu. Others include different denominations within the same broad tradition, or a religious partner paired with an atheist, agnostic, or otherwise unaffiliated partner. Provencio and McElroy-Heltzel's dyadic study explicitly used this broader definition, including different affiliations, denominations, and religious–nonreligious pairings.
For psychological purposes, the label matters less than the lived difference. Two people can have different formal affiliations but very similar daily practices and values. Two people can share the same label while differing sharply in religious intensity, observance, doctrine, or community involvement. A couple may also begin as same-faith and later become interfaith because one partner converts, changes denomination, becomes more observant, becomes less observant, or no longer identifies with the religion they once shared.
That last pathway is receiving more explicit research attention. A 2026 qualitative study distinguished couples who had remained interfaith throughout their marriage from couples who became interfaith after a change in one partner's religious identity. The distinction is useful because a later change can require renegotiation of agreements that previously felt settled. The study is recent and based on a selected sample of happy, stable couples, so its findings describe possible adaptive processes rather than a universal model of success. See Hendricks and colleagues' 2026 Family Process study.
Are Interfaith Relationships More Likely to Have Problems?
Research does not support a simple rule that religiously mixed couples are destined to be less happy or to separate. Some studies find average disadvantages associated with religious heterogamy; others find little association with conflict; and results depend on what kind of difference is measured, how important religion is to each partner, the historical cohort, the religious traditions involved, and the surrounding social context.
For example, a national U.S. study of 2,945 first-married co-residing couples found that denominational heterogamy had little bearing on the frequency or type of marital disagreements. The study is older and cannot settle questions about contemporary couples, but it directly challenges the assumption that different denominations automatically produce more conflict. See Curtis and Ellison, 2002.
Other longitudinal and dyadic studies have reported associations between religious similarity and relationship quality. Myers' 2006 analysis of national longitudinal U.S. data found that the association between religious homogamy and marital quality weakened across historical time and generations. Hwang and colleagues' 2021 study followed 173 mostly White U.S. baby-boom couples over 17 years and found that denominational similarity was associated with trajectories of marital satisfaction, with religious intensity also mattering. These studies identify group-level patterns; they do not tell an individual couple what their relationship outcome will be.
Context can strongly change what religious difference means. In a representative study of 953 older adults and their partners, differences in religious service attendance were associated with lower relationship happiness and satisfaction, partly through less shared leisure time. That is evidence about later-life couples and one dimension of religious difference, not about all interfaith relationships. See Schafer and Kwon, 2019. In Northern Ireland, a cohort study of 19,791 couples found a higher dissolution risk for Catholic–Protestant marriages during a period shaped by a specific history of sectarian division. The authors emphasized the cultural and political setting; Wright, Rosato, and O'Reilly, 2017 should not be generalized into a universal “interfaith divorce rate.”
Large U.S. survey data also show that mixed-faith marriage is common and that widespread religious conflict is not inevitable. In the 2016 Pew report, majorities of adults in religiously mixed marriages said religious disagreements were uncommon. Survey data describe prevalence and self-reports rather than causal mechanisms, but they are an important counterweight to catastrophic assumptions. See the Pew Research Center report on religion in marriages and families.
Why Religious Difference Can Matter Psychologically
Religion can function simultaneously as belief, practice, identity, family inheritance, community membership, moral language, and a source of sacred meaning. A disagreement about a holiday may therefore carry several layers at once: scheduling, loyalty to parents, continuity with ancestors, belonging in a congregation, the meaning of a ritual, and fear that an important part of the self will disappear from family life.
Annette Mahoney's relational spirituality framework was developed to explain how religion and spirituality can shape family relationships through specific beliefs and practices rather than through a single global measure of religiosity. Her review emphasizes that religion can support or strain family bonds depending on how it enters relational processes. The foundational review is Mahoney, 2010.
This perspective changes the conversation. “We have different religions” is too broad to explain what is happening. The clinically and relationally useful questions are more specific: Which practices are personally necessary? Which beliefs affect joint decisions? Which customs are meaningful but flexible? Which family expectations create pressure? Which communities provide support? Where does either partner feel unseen, controlled, ashamed, or excluded?
Religious Identity, Couple Identity, and Belonging
Partners do not leave their identities at the door of a relationship. Religious identity may be central, peripheral, changing, private, communal, inherited, chosen, or some combination of these. Respect therefore begins with accurate curiosity about what the partner's identity means to that person rather than assumptions based on the name of a tradition.
A small qualitative study of 16 U.S. marital partners found that participants described building a shared relational culture, setting boundaries around the couple relationship, and negotiating milestone decisions such as weddings and children's religious socialization. These are suggestive mechanisms, not a universal prescription, because the sample was small and qualitative. See Martinez, Ting-Toomey, and Dorjee, 2016.
A healthy shared couple identity does not require erasing either partner's religious identity. Belonging can be plural: a person can belong to a partnership, a religious community, an ethnic or cultural community, an extended family, and a civic community at the same time. Problems tend to become more difficult when belonging is framed as a forced zero-sum choice, when one partner must continually prove loyalty by distancing from their tradition, or when the couple is treated as illegitimate by important social networks.
Communication: Start With Meaning Before Negotiating Behavior
The communication literature on interfaith families consistently points toward direct, respectful engagement with difference. Colaner and colleagues describe constructive communication, accommodation, and respect for divergent identities as important parts of how interfaith families navigate difference. This does not mean that every disagreement can be solved by better phrasing. It means that partners are more likely to understand the actual problem when they first establish what a practice, belief, or request means to each person.
A useful sequence is: meaning first, impact second, request third, negotiation fourth. “Why does attending this service matter to you?” is often more informative than beginning with “Are we going?” “What would it mean to you if our child participated?” can reveal identity, family, or sacred commitments that are invisible in a purely logistical argument.
Communication also improves when partners distinguish a request from an ultimatum. A request leaves room for the other person's agency and an honest answer. An ultimatum may sometimes express a genuine nonnegotiable boundary, but it should be named clearly rather than disguised as compromise. If the issue is general relationship communication rather than faith-specific meaning, the Hub's live article Assertive Communication in Relationships: Needs, Conflict, and Boundaries covers that broader skill set.
Questions that reveal the real issue
1. What does this belief or practice mean to you personally, rather than what do outsiders assume it means?
2. Is this a sacred commitment, a community expectation, a family tradition, a preference, or a habit?
3. What are you asking me to do, and what are you not asking me to believe?
4. What would participation, nonparticipation, or compromise symbolize to you?
5. Are we deciding only for this event, or are we setting a precedent for future holidays, children, or family expectations?
6. What part of this decision belongs to us as a couple, and what part belongs to each person's individual conscience or religious practice?
Shared Values Do Not Require Identical Beliefs
Couples often discover that similar relational values can arise from different religious or nonreligious frameworks. Honesty, compassion, fidelity, care for family, hospitality, service, justice, generosity, education, or responsibility may be shared even when the reasons for valuing them differ. Recognizing shared values can make cooperation easier without pretending that doctrinal differences are insignificant.
At the same time, “we have the same values” should not be used to flatten meaningful distinctions. Two partners may both value family while disagreeing about gender roles, reproductive decisions, dietary rules, worship, giving, sexuality, end-of-life rituals, or how children should be taught. Values become practically useful when couples translate them into specific expectations and behaviors.
Recent dyadic evidence suggests that individual religious or spiritual resources may relate to relationship functioning within some interfaith samples. In a study of 130 interfaith couples, spiritual fortitude was associated with several indicators of relationship quality, although many significant findings were concentrated among male partners and the design does not establish causality. See Provencio and McElroy-Heltzel, 2025. The evidence supports studying resources and strengths; it does not support prescribing one form of spirituality to couples.
Holidays, Rituals, Worship, and Daily Practice
Holidays are common flashpoints because they combine time, family, memory, ritual, food, and belonging. The practical question is rarely just whether to celebrate one holiday or two. Couples may need to decide where they will be, which services they will attend, what symbols will be displayed at home, how dietary or fasting practices will be handled, what language will be used with children, and how extended family expectations will be communicated.
Participation can also have different meanings. One partner may experience attending a service as an act of support, while the other may experience the same act as religious participation that conflicts with conscience. The workable solution therefore cannot be assumed in advance. Couples can distinguish observing, attending, participating, leading, and affirming. These are psychologically and religiously different acts for many people.
A practical planning conversation can separate three categories: practices each partner needs freedom to maintain; practices the couple can share comfortably; and practices one partner will respectfully decline. This structure protects both connection and individual agency. It also reduces the tendency to renegotiate the same issue under time pressure every year.
Extended Family, Community Expectations, and Social Pressure
Interfaith couples exist within social systems. Parents, grandparents, clergy, congregations, friends, and cultural communities may offer support, advice, disapproval, or expectations about marriage and childrearing. Sometimes the couple's hardest conflict is not between the partners at all; it is about how each partner responds when outside expectations enter the relationship.
A 2025 qualitative study of 32 happily married interfaith couples found that participants described selectively accepting and rejecting influence from family, friends, professionals, and spiritual sources. The sample was deliberately strengths-focused and cannot represent all couples, but it highlights the couple's active role in deciding whose guidance enters family life. See Stanford and colleagues, 2025.
Useful boundaries are specific. Partners can agree who will communicate a decision to each family, what information is private, what kinds of comments will end a conversation, whether either partner will be expected to defend the other's beliefs, and what happens if relatives try to recruit children into an unresolved dispute. The goal is not isolation from family or community. It is to keep influence voluntary and to prevent third parties from becoming decision-makers inside the couple.
Children and Religious Socialization
Questions about children often make previously abstract differences concrete. Couples may need to discuss naming, initiation rites, worship attendance, religious education, dietary practices, holidays, schools, extended-family participation, and how they will answer a child's questions about identity and belief. These decisions can change as children develop and as parents' own identities change.
There is no single psychologically required model for raising children in an interfaith home. Families may raise children primarily in one tradition, include practices from more than one tradition, provide comparative religious education, delay some choices, or raise children without a religious affiliation. The psychological task is to make the family structure understandable, respectful, and developmentally appropriate rather than forcing one universal formula.
Pew's U.S. data illustrate why explicit communication matters: in some mixed religious marriages, partners gave different answers about whether their child was being raised in a religion. That discrepancy does not prove dysfunction, but it shows that two adults can believe they have the same plan while holding different understandings of what the plan means. See Pew Research Center's 2016 analysis.
Children should not be used as messengers between adults or required to adjudicate a parental conflict. Parents can describe differences without asking a child to decide which parent is right. Developmentally appropriate honesty can include statements such as, “Your parents understand this differently, and both of us can explain what we believe and why it matters to us.” The content will vary across traditions and families.
When One Partner's Beliefs Change
A change in belief can be experienced as more than a change of opinion. It may alter shared rituals, community membership, future plans, moral language, or assumptions about children. The partner who changes may feel relief, conviction, grief, uncertainty, or a need for authenticity. The other partner may experience confusion, loss, fear, betrayal, or concern about promises made under a previous shared framework. Both experiences can be psychologically real.
The recent AFFIRM study is especially relevant here because it included couples who became interfaith after marriage. Participants in the selected happy and stable sample described processes centered on supporting each other's practices, focusing on similarities, fostering understanding, respecting choices, and prioritizing the marriage. These are qualitative observations from 30 couples, not proven treatment ingredients. See Hendricks and colleagues, 2026.
Renegotiation is usually more realistic than pretending nothing changed. Earlier agreements about worship, money, holidays, or children may need to be revisited. Respect also means allowing the changed partner's current identity to be real rather than treating it as a temporary phase that must reverse, while allowing the other partner to name the genuine impact of the change.
Conversion, Participation, and Freedom of Conscience
Conversion is a deeply personal religious matter and can have social, familial, and legal consequences in some settings. Psychology can examine interpersonal pressure, consent, identity change, conflict, and adjustment; it does not determine whether conversion is spiritually right.
A partner may freely choose to explore or adopt the other's tradition. Problems arise when conversion becomes a hidden condition for acceptance, a strategy to end repeated pressure, or a demand backed by threats, humiliation, financial control, social isolation, or loss of safety. Those are questions of autonomy and power as well as religion. For the general relationship mechanisms, see Power Dynamics in Relationships: Influence, Dependence, Control, and Conflict.
The same principle applies to worship and ritual participation. Respect does not require a person to perform an act they understand as violating conscience. Nor does respect require treating a partner's observance as embarrassing or irrational. Couples need language that protects both the freedom to practice and the freedom not to participate.
Belonging: The Relationship Is Only One Social System
Belonging is central to many interfaith relationships because religious identity often connects a person to a community with shared stories, practices, places, foods, languages, and obligations. A relationship may therefore create new belonging while also changing access to older forms of belonging.
Some couples are welcomed by both communities; some find one community more accommodating; some build a social world across multiple communities; and some experience exclusion. These situations are not psychologically equivalent. Relationship advice that treats the issue as a private disagreement between two individuals can miss the role of collective identity, minority status, migration, discrimination, or historically charged intergroup boundaries.
The interfaith family communication review emphasizes the need to study identity within sociocultural environments rather than assuming that every family difference operates in the same way. Colaner and colleagues specifically caution against deficit-based approaches to interfaith and multiethnic-racial family forms.
Culture Changes the Meaning of Interfaith Partnership
Most of the relationship literature available in English has been produced in Western settings, and much of the older evidence overrepresents Christian denominations in the United States. That limits generalization. An interfaith pairing that is socially routine in one place may be legally restricted, stigmatized, or entangled with ethnic and political conflict in another.
Researchers studying Catholic–Protestant marriage in Northern Ireland, for example, worked in a social context shaped by conflict and residential segregation. Their findings are informative precisely because context matters. Wright and colleagues' cohort study is evidence about a particular population and period, not a template for Muslim–Christian, Hindu–Sikh, Jewish–Christian, Buddhist–secular, or other relationships.
Culturally competent guidance therefore asks about the actual religious traditions, local law, family structure, migration history, community expectations, and each partner's personal degree of observance. When marriage, custody, inheritance, conversion, or religious status has legal consequences, couples need qualified legal or religious guidance appropriate to their jurisdiction and tradition in addition to psychological support.
Interfaith Relationships and Mental Health
An interfaith relationship is not a mental health condition. Religious belief, nonbelief, prayer, ritual, worship, and ordinary spiritual experiences are not symptoms simply because they differ from a clinician's worldview. Distress may arise from unresolved conflict, rejection by family or community, identity strain, discrimination, coercion, or the loss of expected belonging. Those experiences deserve contextual assessment.
Clinical evaluation should distinguish the content of a belief from clinically relevant features such as distress, loss of functioning, impaired reality testing, compulsive behavior, trauma symptoms, mood symptoms, or risk. A therapist should not infer a diagnosis from a religious practice or unusual belief in isolation.
Professional competence includes taking religion and spirituality seriously as dimensions of human diversity. Vieten and Lukoff, 2022 argued for explicit spiritual and religious competencies in psychology. More recently, a 2026 study of 174 trainees and professionals found that a structured training program improved self-reported and measured competencies for addressing religion and spirituality in relationship therapy; see Ripley and colleagues, 2026. This evidence supports clinician training, not the claim that every interfaith couple needs therapy.
When Couples Therapy May Be Useful
Couples therapy may be useful when discussions repeatedly become hostile or avoidant, when major decisions remain chronically unresolved, when one partner feels their identity is continually minimized, when family pressure divides the couple, or when a change in belief has destabilized previous agreements. Therapy can also be used proactively before marriage, parenting, relocation, or a major ritual transition.
For interfaith couples, therapist fit matters. A competent clinician should be able to ask about both partners' religious and nonreligious identities without treating either as the default. The therapist's task is to help the couple understand patterns, communicate, make voluntary decisions, and clarify values—not to settle theological questions or pressure a partner toward belief, disbelief, conversion, or deconversion.
Specific evidence for interfaith-tailored couple interventions remains much thinner than the general evidence base for couple therapy. Research on religious and spiritual competency is growing, but training outcomes should not be confused with proof that a particular therapy protocol improves long-term outcomes for every interfaith couple.
A Practical Framework for Interfaith Negotiation
The following framework translates the evidence into a repeatable conversation process. It is not a diagnostic instrument and has not been validated as a clinical scale.
1. Name the concrete decision. Replace “religion is a problem” with a specific issue: attending a service, celebrating a holiday, giving money to a religious community, choosing a school, or deciding what relatives will tell a child.
2. Explain personal meaning. Each partner describes why the issue matters, including identity, conscience, family history, sacred commitment, fear, or belonging.
3. Separate belief from behavior. Clarify what each partner is being asked to believe, say, attend, perform, permit, fund, or support. These are different requests.
4. Identify nonnegotiables and flexible areas. A nonnegotiable should be stated plainly and owned by the person who holds it. Flexibility should be voluntary rather than extracted through pressure.
5. Consider third parties. Ask how parents, children, clergy, congregations, and friends will be affected and how much decision-making authority they actually have.
6. Generate more than one workable option. Alternating holidays, parallel observance, shared attendance with selective participation, separate practice, or new family traditions may all be possible depending on the traditions involved.
7. Check fairness over time. A solution can look balanced on one day while consistently requiring one partner to give up more across a year. Review the cumulative pattern.
8. Revisit agreements when life changes. Marriage, children, bereavement, migration, illness, changes in observance, or conversion can alter what an earlier agreement means.
What Usually Makes Interfaith Conflict Harder
Avoidance can preserve peace briefly while allowing high-stakes decisions to accumulate. Couples who postpone every conversation about children, holidays, extended family, or worship may discover that the first real negotiation happens during a crisis or public family event.
Mind-reading also creates preventable conflict. A partner may assume, “If you loved me, you would attend,” while the other assumes, “If you respected my faith, you would never ask.” Both interpretations attach relational meaning to behavior without checking the other person's meaning.
Another problem is symbolic scorekeeping: one holiday for yours means one holiday for mine; attending your service means you owe me attendance at mine. Symmetry can sometimes be fair, but rituals may have different frequencies, obligations, and meanings. Fairness requires understanding what is being exchanged rather than counting events mechanically.
Finally, respect cannot be used as a one-way demand. “Respect my religion” cannot reasonably mean “you must adopt my beliefs,” and “respect my nonbelief” cannot reasonably mean “your practices must disappear from our home.” The workable meaning of respect is negotiated through concrete behavior, consent, and reciprocal recognition.
Safety, Coercion, and Relationship Power
Religious disagreement should not be used to explain away intimidation, surveillance, threats, forced isolation, economic control, physical violence, sexual coercion, or threats involving children. Those are safety and power concerns regardless of whether religious language is involved.
Likewise, disagreement with a partner's faith is not in itself evidence of abuse, and firm religious boundaries are not automatically coercive. Assessment depends on behavior, consent, freedom of choice, consequences for refusing, and the broader pattern of control.
If the main issue is trust and reliability rather than religion-specific negotiation, the Hub's live article How to Build Trust in a Relationship: Reliability, Vulnerability, and Boundaries addresses the general relational mechanisms.
What the Evidence Cannot Tell Us Yet
The interfaith relationship literature is meaningful but uneven. Older quantitative studies often rely on broad affiliation categories and U.S. Christian denominational comparisons. They can miss the difference between nominal affiliation and lived practice, as well as the role of minority status, migration, racialization, gender, sexuality, and local religious law.
Many newer studies are qualitative and intentionally recruit stable or happy interfaith couples to understand strengths. That is valuable for identifying possible adaptive processes, but the findings cannot estimate how often those processes occur or prove that using them will cause better outcomes. The 2025 sources-of-influence study and the 2026 AFFIRM study are strong examples of this strengths-focused design.
Observational associations between religious similarity and marital satisfaction or dissolution are also vulnerable to selection and confounding. People who choose same-faith or interfaith partners may differ in religiosity, social networks, family approval, education, geography, and other factors before marriage. A correlation between similarity and an outcome does not show that religious difference itself caused the outcome.
Finally, there is no scientifically defensible universal ranking of which religious pairings are “compatible.” Compatibility is relational and contextual. Research can identify patterns and mechanisms; it cannot replace the couple's own informed, voluntary decisions about identity, practice, conscience, and family life.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can interfaith relationships work?
Yes. Research includes many stable and satisfying interfaith couples, and religious difference does not determine an individual relationship's outcome. The strongest practical evidence points toward explicit communication, respect for each partner's identity and agency, negotiated boundaries, and attention to family and community context. The 2026 AFFIRM study offers qualitative evidence from happy, stable interfaith marriages, while older quantitative studies show that average outcomes vary across samples and definitions.
Do interfaith marriages have a higher divorce rate?
There is no single universal interfaith divorce rate that can be applied to all couples. Some studies find higher dissolution risk or lower relationship quality for particular forms of religious heterogamy, while others find little relationship between denominational difference and marital conflict. Tradition, religious intensity, cohort, country, community context, and how “interfaith” is defined all matter.
Do partners need to share the same values?
Partners benefit from understanding the values that guide joint decisions, but identical beliefs are not required for every healthy relationship. Couples can share relational or moral commitments while grounding them in different religious or nonreligious frameworks. The important task is to identify where values converge, where they differ, and what those differences mean for actual behavior.
How should interfaith couples handle holidays?
Plan before the holiday. Discuss which events each person considers religiously required, meaningful, optional, or uncomfortable; distinguish attendance from active participation; decide how extended family will be informed; and revisit the plan after trying it. Equal numbers of events are not always the same as fair accommodation.
How should interfaith couples raise children?
There is no single psychological rule. Couples should make the plan explicit, discuss rituals and religious education concretely, use developmentally appropriate explanations, and avoid putting children in the role of referee between parents. Agreements should be revisited as the child and parents develop.
Should one partner convert for the relationship?
Psychology cannot decide whether conversion is spiritually appropriate. A conversion can be meaningful when freely chosen. The relationship concern is whether the decision is voluntary and informed rather than driven by coercion, threats, humiliation, or an attempt to stop chronic pressure.
What if one partner becomes religious or stops being religious after marriage?
Treat the change as a real shift in identity and family expectations. Revisit agreements about worship, holidays, money, family, and children. The 2026 AFFIRM research specifically includes couples who became interfaith after a change in one partner's religious identity and suggests that respect, support, understanding, and deliberate renegotiation can be important adaptive processes.
Is religious disagreement a mental health problem?
No. Disagreement about religion is a relationship and meaning-making issue unless other clinically significant symptoms are present. Faith, nonbelief, prayer, worship, ritual, and ordinary spiritual experiences should not be pathologized. Clinical assessment focuses on distress, functioning, symptoms, safety, and context.
Can couples therapy help?
It can provide a structured setting for communication and decision-making when conflict is persistent or major transitions are approaching. A therapist should be competent in religious and spiritual diversity and should not use therapy to decide whose worldview is correct. Evidence for clinician competency training is growing, while evidence for specifically interfaith-tailored treatment protocols remains limited.
Related Articles
References
Colaner, C. W., Atkin, A. L., Elkhalid, A., Minniear, M., & Soliz, J. (2023). Communication in interfaith and multiethnic-racial families: Navigating identity and difference in family relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 40(6), 1673–1705. https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075221137317.
Curtis, K. T., & Ellison, C. G. (2002). Religious heterogamy and marital conflict: Findings from the National Survey of Families and Households. Journal of Family Issues, 23(4), 551–576. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513X02023004005.
Hendricks, J. J., Dollahite, D. C., Marks, L. D., Hardy, S. A., & Johnson, C. (2026). The AFFIRM model for navigating challenges in continuously-interfaith and divergent-interfaith marriages. Family Process, 65(3), e70196. https://doi.org/10.1111/famp.70196.
Hwang, W., Cakirsoy-Aslan, A. D., Brown, M. T., & Silverstein, M. (2021). Husband–wife religious denomination homogamy and marital satisfaction over time: The moderating role of religious intensity. Family Relations, 70(5), 1498–1513. https://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12521.
Mahoney, A. (2010). Religion in families, 1999–2009: A relational spirituality framework. Journal of Marriage and Family, 72(4), 805–827. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2010.00732.x.
Martinez, L. V., Ting-Toomey, S., & Dorjee, T. (2016). Identity management and relational culture in interfaith marital communication in a United States context: A qualitative study. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 45(6), 503–525. https://doi.org/10.1080/17475759.2016.1237984.
Myers, S. M. (2006). Religious homogamy and marital quality: Historical and generational patterns, 1980–1997. Journal of Marriage and Family, 68(2), 292–304. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2006.00253.x.
Pew Research Center. (2016). Religion in marriages and families. Official report.
Provencio, A., & McElroy-Heltzel, S. E. (2025). The roles of spiritual fortitude and religious orientation in relationship quality for interfaith couples. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 53(1), 55–69. https://doi.org/10.1177/00916471241269030.
Ripley, J. S., Sells, J. N., Battaglini, L., et al. (2026). Obtaining religious and spiritual competencies for relationship therapy: Outcomes of Competency Addressing Religion and Spirituality (CARS) training. Psychotherapy, 63(2), 199–209. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000595.
Schafer, M. H., & Kwon, S. (2019). Religious heterogamy and partnership quality in later life. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 74(7), 1266–1277. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbx072.
Stanford, W. D., Hendricks, J. J., Futris, T. G., Marks, L. D., & Dollahite, D. C. (2025). Sources of influence in marriage and parenting for interfaith couples. Marriage & Family Review, 61(4), 373–408. https://doi.org/10.1080/01494929.2025.2467914.
Vieten, C., & Lukoff, D. (2022). Spiritual and religious competencies in psychology. American Psychologist, 77(1), 26–38. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000821.
Wright, D. M., Rosato, M., & O'Reilly, D. (2017). Influence of heterogamy by religion on risk of marital dissolution: A cohort study of 20,000 couples. European Journal of Population, 33(1), 87–107. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-016-9398-9.