A more concrete title might be more suitable like, “My christian family is struggling to stay together and I am looking for ideas”.
There may be a middle ground like attending the celebration and not the ceremony.
I would attend or do 2 as described. Here is my reasoning.
Contextually according to religions a marriage is not just (a) a relationship between two people, it’s also (b) a spiritual relationship, and (c) a covenant with god.
For A, B and C. As far as the religion is concerned A is “possible”, B is not, and c is not.
For these reasons, it would be blasphemous to “attend a child’s wedding” in the sense that you are asking them to do.
Further consideration. As a parent you are supposed to love a child unconditionally. The agreement you make is to raise them into adults that can take care of themselves. This “daughter” is no longer a child, and as a consequence can make their own choices (like marrying a girlfriend). On top of that, sometimes children can do things that can cause adults to disown them. For two examples: pulling a gun on your parent, getting addicted to drugs and stealing their property.
While I think those two examples are quite serious, you have to think contextually about pulling a gun on the religion and marriage as pulling the trigger as being relevant to this situation.
Strictly speaking, the parent-child relationship can be thought of as the same as any other interpersonal relationship with a few extra strings and caveats. If you had a friend who slapped you across the face every time you met up with them, first thing. As a greeting. you’d probably stop seeing them so often.
If you are finding it hard to understand what they are going through, these analogies might have helped. And yes, they sound ridiculous from your perspective, but from their perspective the daughter is forsaking the religion. It’s a death/hell sentence. That’s a big deal.
My advice to you is to look at pro-gay christians for guidance to bring that branch into your lives. “God loves all of his children” is a saying that gets passed around. That may come in handy.
If you want them to change their mind, I would make sure to listen to them and be compassionate to the stress they would be going through. I want to emphasise that it’s not the daughter’s job to do that and external (professional) counselling and mediation could be handy here.
To that end—consider for each party, what outcomes they may want. It may look something like this.
Daughter: My parents to accept who I am and be happy for me. My parents to openly attend my wedding.
Parents: My daughter to not go to hell in the eyes of my religion My daughter to not embarrass us by getting married and making us attend.
Yourself: My family to be able to all be in the same room together without tension around. My family to not fall apart.
Then take these outcomes or in fact the real ones, to mediation. And talk about how to get to those goals.
A more concrete title might be more suitable like, “My christian family is struggling to stay together and I am looking for ideas”.
There may be a middle ground like attending the celebration and not the ceremony.
I would attend or do 2 as described. Here is my reasoning.
Contextually according to religions a marriage is not just (a) a relationship between two people, it’s also (b) a spiritual relationship, and (c) a covenant with god.
For A, B and C. As far as the religion is concerned A is “possible”, B is not, and c is not.
For these reasons, it would be blasphemous to “attend a child’s wedding” in the sense that you are asking them to do.
Further consideration. As a parent you are supposed to love a child unconditionally. The agreement you make is to raise them into adults that can take care of themselves. This “daughter” is no longer a child, and as a consequence can make their own choices (like marrying a girlfriend). On top of that, sometimes children can do things that can cause adults to disown them. For two examples: pulling a gun on your parent, getting addicted to drugs and stealing their property.
While I think those two examples are quite serious, you have to think contextually about pulling a gun on the religion and marriage as pulling the trigger as being relevant to this situation.
Strictly speaking, the parent-child relationship can be thought of as the same as any other interpersonal relationship with a few extra strings and caveats. If you had a friend who slapped you across the face every time you met up with them, first thing. As a greeting. you’d probably stop seeing them so often.
If you are finding it hard to understand what they are going through, these analogies might have helped. And yes, they sound ridiculous from your perspective, but from their perspective the daughter is forsaking the religion. It’s a death/hell sentence. That’s a big deal.
My advice to you is to look at pro-gay christians for guidance to bring that branch into your lives. “God loves all of his children” is a saying that gets passed around. That may come in handy.
If you want them to change their mind, I would make sure to listen to them and be compassionate to the stress they would be going through. I want to emphasise that it’s not the daughter’s job to do that and external (professional) counselling and mediation could be handy here.
To that end—consider for each party, what outcomes they may want. It may look something like this.
Daughter:
My parents to accept who I am and be happy for me.
My parents to openly attend my wedding.
Parents:
My daughter to not go to hell in the eyes of my religion
My daughter to not embarrass us by getting married and making us attend.
Yourself:
My family to be able to all be in the same room together without tension around.
My family to not fall apart.
Then take these outcomes or in fact the real ones, to mediation. And talk about how to get to those goals.
Good luck (PM me if you would like to chat)