Celebrating unions : an empirical study of notions about church marriage rituals

The last 60 years, the practice of marriage and living together has changed radically. People no longer live with their parents until their wedding, after which the start a new family. They marry only after several years of cohabitation. In many cases, they do not marry at all. Furthermore, the number of couples who opt for a church wedding has declined as well. In this dissertation, we explore people's notions about church wedding rituals and their conceptions of marriage, the relation between people's notions towards church marriage rituals and their religious socialisation, to what extend this relation is influenced by their conceptions of marriage. The respondents of our study are all participants of a Roman Catholic church wedding ritual. Our study comprised questions about the social and temporal goals of the ritual, its form, its participants and their experience of the separate rites. The results indicate that participants experience the church wedding ritual as a reconstruction of the identity of the marital couple. The ritual provides for both a transcendent and an immanent reconstruction by looking at the origin of the couple's relationship in a personal and a religious way.The notions about church wedding rituals are mostly influenced by people's religious socialisation, but to some extend this influence can be explained by their conceptions of marriage, especially their notions about the form and participants of the ritual