Humanist marriage ceremonies in Poland: re-enchantment and four social constructions of the sacred

ABSTRACT

The article is based on empirical research on humanist (individualized and mostly secular) weddings conducted in Poland between the years 2016 and 2020. As an emerging new form of civic rituality, humanist marriage ceremonies affect the ritual landscape of Poland, and by doing so they change the status quo. One can perceive their appearance as a sign of secularization and detachment from the institutionalized religion of the dominant Catholic Church, but also other religious transformations encompassed by the term of re-enchantment, such as the emergence of less formalized, alternative spiritualities, and changes in the field of institutionalized religion, namely its privatization. In my analysis, I go beyond such binaries as religious/secular, sacred/profane, sacred/secular and demonstrate that humanist wedding ceremonies deploy four different kinds of the sacred (the character of these categories is analytical rather than substantial): religious-sacred; nonreligious-sacred; spiritual-sacred and secular-sacred.

KEYWORDS:

• Humanist wedding ceremonies
• Poland
• re-enchantment
• sacred
• secularization

Introduction

Humanist wedding ceremonies in Poland emerged in 2007, when the Polish Rationalist Association conducted an official humanist marriage ceremony for the first time, as an answer to the symbolic poverty of Polish civil marriage ceremonies and an attempt to counter the dominance of Catholicism. The significance of this fact is even clearer when taking account of the fact that the lack of ritual alternatives to Catholic rites of passage helps to maintain the institutional and symbolic dominance of Roman-Catholicism in Poland (Marody and Mandes 2017). Aware of this deficit, the secularist milieu in Poland has argued that such alternative rituals need to be forged in search of authenticity and to reduce the number of ‘fictitious Catholics’ (Agnosiewicz 2007). This is because, as advocates of humanist marriage ceremonies claim, civil marriage ceremonies are not a genuine ‘alternative’ for the religious rite, as they are devoid of meaning, too formal, and conventional, which makes them insufficient to symbolically mark the passage.

This is therefore an illustration of the fact that the process of secularization – a decline in the social significance of religion, a ‘gradual disaffiliation and growing indifference’ (Bruce 2018, 114) – is not identical to desacralization, understood as disenchantment (Jenkins 2000). Although secularization undermines the authority of institutionally specialized forms of religion (Luckmann 1967), secularized social life is not devoid of the sacred (Alexander, Lynch, and Sheldon 2013), which I understand as a social construction, not an ontological reality (see Knott 2013, 147), and as a category that is not exclusively religious, and means something that is ‘set apart’ from mundane everyday life and has to be ‘protected’ from any profanation (Lynch 2012, 23–24). However, secularization affects ‘the sacred’ and its manifestations (Thompson 1990, 164; see also Durkheim ((1912) 1995), as it is ‘remarkably plastic and shifts over the course of human history’ (Alexander, Lynch, and Sheldon 2013, 9). Therefore, nowadays the sacred is changing its shape and becoming more experimental and individualized (Berzano 2019; Luckmann 1967). It is recomposed in new forms, it exists in new ways, for example not only in, but also out of relation to God, and it is relocated within individual and social life (Taylor 2007, 437). In this article, I aim to shed light on such recomposition of the sacred using the example of humanist wedding ceremonies.

Secularization, but not desacralization

Various theories of religion and religiosity have tried to capture the changing religious landscape with dichotomic categories such as religious/secular, sacred/profane, or sacred/secular. However, such simple dichotomies are unable to comprehensively encompass the complexity of the social reality (see Testa, forthcoming), especially in pluralistic, dedifferentiated contexts (see Woodhead 2016).

Analysis of religiosity in Europe follows a general tendency whereby ‘religious practice decreases and religious identification holds on’ (Massignon 2007, 573–574). A Pew Research survey from 2018 showed that in Western Europe most people still identify themselves as Christian. Nevertheless, the identification level is decreasing in favor of the category of ‘non-religious’ (Cotter 2020, 26; Pew Research Center 2018). Also, sometimes drawing a clear demarcation line is impossible, as some religiously affiliated people describe themselves as atheists and agnostics (33% of Christians in Britain, for example) (Woodhead 2016, 43). This attitude of being neither religious nor self-consciously secular, called ‘fuzzy fidelity’ (Storm 2009; Voas 2009), manifests itself, among others, in an attitude of belonging without believing (see Demerath 2000; Kasselstrand 2015), but also ‘believing without belonging’ (see Davie 1994; Ganiel, 2019).

In a countervailing trend, people increasingly often declare they are ‘non-religious’, but in many cases identifying oneself as non-religious does not necessarily mean that someone is a militant, ‘hard’ atheist with a coherent worldview that can be placed within the ‘rationalist-materialist cognitive framework’ (Herbert and Bullock 2020, 3; see also Kasselstrand 2022, 42–45; Quack 2014, 444; Woodhead 2016, 43). Often it simply means a rejection of ‘authorized’ and ‘bureaucratized’ world religions (Woodhead 2016). Importantly, in Europe, most non-religious people do believe in some ‘spirit or life force’, rather than not believing in God or declaring more agnostic attitudes (Herbert and Bullock 2020, 3). This shows that drawing a clear demarcation line between categories like religious, spiritual, and non-religious is extremely difficult as the landscape is too complex, and boundaries are blurred.

Given the decline in declarations of religious beliefs, it is worth asking what meanings refill these empty spaces in people's lives (Herbert and Bullock 2020, 2; Quack 2014, 444), as the process of secularization does not mean merely ‘a decline’. It also affects the sacred, which changes its shape into more experimental and individualized forms (Berzano 2019, 4); it exists in new ways, for example not only in but also beyond relation to God, and it is relocated within individual and social life, so that one can also find ‘the sacred’ in ‘secular’ spheres (Taylor 2007, 437). Therefore, people, when forging their ‘private system [of meanings] of ultimate significance’ (Luckmann 1967, 105), increasingly often create a patchwork made from religious, spiritual, non-religious, and secular elements. Consequently, in the process of ‘dedifferentiation’ (see Woodhead 2016), the boundaries between the categories of, for instance, religious or secular, become less clear.

As some scholars (Cotter 2012; 2015, 188; 2020; Day, Vincett, and Cotter 2016) convincingly argue, in some contexts, the analysis gains greater explanatory power when it moves beyond binary pairs like religious-secular, non-religious/religious or sacred-profane. This inspired me to look at humanist marriage ceremonies through lenses of more complex and sensitive categories, like ‘religious sacred’ or ‘secular sacred’ (for more on the notion of ‘secular sacred’ see Anttonen 2000; Knott 2013).

This idea emerged during the analysis of the material, and it was not my aim to impose any pre-determined top-down concepts during data collection. When using terms such as ‘religion’, ‘non-religion’ or ‘secular’ as descriptive, relational and ‘mutually constitutive’ (Quack 2014), I intentionally avoid providing a priori, clear definitional boundaries between them (which is not that rare, see Weber ((1905) 2001) who did not provide any definition of religion in his work on entanglements of Protestantism and capitalism, claiming that such definition can be provided only ‘at the conclusion of the study)’. Moreover, the contemporary religious landscape, with cases of in-between identities and multiple belongings, challenges well-established theoretical categories (Day, Vincett, and Cotter 2016). Bearing in mind the main assumptions of the relational account (see Bourdieu 1998; Quack 2014), the distinguished categories of the religious/non-religious/secular/spiritual sacred are co-dependent, which makes it hard to outline clear-cut boundaries between them. For this reason, the arbitrariness of these divisions is unavoidable. One may therefore ask why Buddhism is considered to be a religious or spiritual phenomenon or argue that all secular concepts have roots in religious ones (see Schmitt (1922) 2005). It is therefore worth remembering that we should treat all concepts as context-dependent and abstract tools that should serve the analysis, and not as constraining, reified reality. Furthermore, in this article I use categories such as ‘religion’, ‘secular’, etc. as ‘sensitizing concepts’. This is because drawing rigid definitional boundaries would necessarily involve an extensive literature on the meaning, validity and socio-historical contexts from which ideas such as ‘religion’, ‘secularity’, ‘spirituality’/‘alternative spirituality’ and ‘nonreligion’ emerged (see for instance Ammerman 2013; Asad 1993; Chidester 2020; Voas and Bruce 2007), which goes far beyond the scope of the article.

The main theoretical framework for the research was Jeffrey Alexander's theory of social performance. The category of ‘sacred’ is at the heart of Alexander's cultural approach, as he, influenced by Émile Durkheim, emphasizes that the categories of sacred and profane are two binary categories that constantly and deeply structure social life¹ (Alexander, Lynch, and Sheldon 2013, 3). The Durkheimian sacred has two modalities: ‘socio-religious’² and ‘bio-economic’ (Mellor and Schilling 2016). The first means that through the process of sacralization, society's own rules and values become experienced as ‘other-worldly’, in the sense that they transcend biological existence of individuals, and the created ‘moral order’ seems to be external and absolute for individuals. The latter means, that ‘anything’, for example, symbols, objects or individuals, can be experienced as sacred: be ‘set apart’, be attributed radical symbolic distinctiveness, and generate effervescent emotions (Lynch 2012, 23; Mellor and Schilling 2016, 239).

The cultural approach distances itself from ontological concepts of the sacred (such as of Rudolph Otto or Mircea Eliade) (Lynch 2012; Mellor and Schilling 2016). It is more inclusive, in the sense that it recognizes the experience of people who do not have any religion as it acknowledges that the sacred can have not only strong, but also weak/non-existent other-worldly dimensions’ (Mellor and Schilling 2016, 238). In other words, the cultural approach opposes the reduction of the category of the sacred to the exclusively religious field (Alexander 2006; Knott 2013; Lynch 2012). It does not claim that sacred has an actually existing ‘ontological referent’, but that it is a social construction of ‘what people take to be absolute realities that have claims over their lives’ (Lynch 2012, 15).

In turn, nonreligion means something that functions in relationship of difference³ to religion and is contrary, but not contradictory, to it. This is because nonreligion does not simply denote everything that is ‘not religious’ (Lee 2012, 131; Quack 2014, 445) – its meaning, to a greater or lesser extent, depends on and is shaped in relation to religion (Quack 2014, 439). The category of ‘non-religious’ forces me to use a relational rather than functional concept of religion, and therefore, when I use the category of ‘religious’, I mean historical, institutionalized churches (see Woodhead 2016). By ‘spirituality’ I mean less institutionalized and hierarchical and more subjective and experiential phenomenon (Flanagan 2007; Heelas 2002) (again, it is difficult to find all-encompassing definition (see Holmes 2007; Streib and Klein 2016, 75–77)). ‘Secular’, meanwhile, evokes some kind of religious neutrality, as it means that ‘religion is not the primary or immediate reference point’ (Lee 2011, 3; cited in Cotter 2012).

Following this line of thought established by the cultural approach toward the sacred (Alexander 2006; Cotter 2015; Knott 2013; Lynch 2012), I noticed that, although humanism often refers to rationalism and promotes scientific methods of cognition (for instance, evolutionism instead of creationism), humanist ceremonies still refer to various kinds of ‘the sacred’. To elaborate on this, I implement the suggestion (Cotter 2012; 2015, 188; 2020; Day, Vincett, and Cotter 2016) to go beyond the binaries of religious-secular, sacred-profane, and sacred-secular. Inspired by this concept, I will show that humanist wedding ceremonies deploy four different kinds of the sacred. Firstly, the religious-sacred, which refers to elements of institutionalized, historical religions. Secondly, the secular sacred, which does not have any relationship to religion. Thirdly, the spiritual-sacred, which includes various elements of alternative spirituality and non-institutionalized beliefs in the ‘paranormal, superstitious, magical, and supernatural’ (Herbert and Bullock 2020, 3). And lastly, the non-religious sacred, involving and sacralizing elements that function in a relationship of opposition to religion.

One can, therefore, interpret the appearance of humanist marriages as a sign of the secularization of the ritual sphere, but also as an expression of the need for the sacred (see: Knott 2013) and a sign of re-enchantment, understood as ‘the cultural act of charging something (an object, a practice, a representation, a relation) with a magical, spiritual, transcendental, or uncanny dimension’ (Testa, forthcoming). Advocates of humanist ceremonies do not want to merely expunge religion from ceremonies. As mentioned above, secularization does not mean only ‘a decline’. The void left after detachment from institutional religion is filled with new meanings, but also with old ones, yet in more experimental forms. The overarching question of this article is therefore: What kind of constructions of the sacred can one find in humanist marriage ceremonies conducted in Poland?

Research methodology

The article is based on material gathered during research conducted in the years 2016–2021. The analyzed data comes mainly from narrative interviews (19) with the main actors in marriage ceremonies, the couples. All of my interviewees had had a humanist marriage ceremony held in Poland and were selected by snowball sampling. At each wedding, at least one of the spouses was a Pole. Humanist wedding ceremonies in Poland are particularly common among binational couples as a result of spreading there from abroad but also due to a kind of pragmatism because such ceremonies allow them to avoid some difficulties in handling bureaucratic affairs (see Rejowska 2021). Among the other nationalities were American, Australian, British, and Moldovan. One couple was homosexual. Most of the interviewees were in their mid-thirties. The youngest participant was 28 and the oldest 46. All of my interviewees were members of the middle class. They were relatively rich in economic and/or cultural capital. This is because ‘distinctiveness’ instead of ‘lavish consumption’, in general, has become a more important feature of contemporary middle-class weddings. Younger and working-class people are generally more inclined to have a standard, ‘normal’ – as they sometimes call it – traditional wedding (Carter and Duncan 2017, 5). Most of my interviewees lived in cities, either in Poland or abroad: Derby, Krakow, Warsaw, the Silesian Metropolis (Tychy and Zabrze), London, Vienna, and Melbourne.

Many of the interviewed couples had some kind of creative occupation. Among them were ‘cultural producers’: graphic designers, architects, musicians, an illustrator, a sculptor, a dancer, and a journalist. There were also executives and managers, programers and people working in IT, as well as academics, a wedding coordinator, a coordinator of commercial photographic sessions, and a bio-energotherapist.

I have also drawn from data gathered during semi-structured interviews (10) with humanist celebrants. Additionally, I conducted qualitative content analysis of scripts from humanist ceremonies (46), and observations of humanist marriage ceremonies (8). In the cases of one-third of the interviewed couples (five of 17), I had attended their wedding ceremony, and after some time we met to talk about the event. In this paper, I mainly refer to the interviews with couples and celebrants.

The religious-sacred

One can locate humanist marriage ceremonies somewhere on the continuum between ‘the secular’ and ‘non-religious’ as humanism is composed of a number of threads (see Cotter 2020, 38). Humanist ceremonies refer to secularity in the sense that supporters of them perceive humanist weddings ceremonies as an alternative to their civil (secular) counterpart, but filled with ‘meanings’ (Cotter 2020, 30; Rejowska 2021), and they are part of the program to promote secularism. Humanist rites of passage are non-religious as humanism is ‘not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality’ (International Humanist and Ethical Union 1996; Rejowska 2021). Despite their secular or non-religious character, sometimes humanist wedding ceremonies still contain elements borrowed from institutionalized, historical religions. These can appear for various reasons. Some couples decide against a church wedding, but they still consider themselves religious, often in a non-institutional way. As one of the celebrants commented, he was a little surprised that one couple wanted to include ‘The Hymn of Love’, but then it turned out that the bride believed that her husband had been ‘sent from God’. He did not know why they had not decided on a religious wedding, but one might guess that either they could not do so (because one of them had been divorced) or they were not religious in an institutionalized way:

She really wanted a quotation from Saint Paul's letter to the Corinthians. And I remember that for me that was a little bit strange perhaps, but on one hand okay, after all it's a beautiful rhetorical text, and on the other hand very traditional and also matching love (…). It's also religious, so if someone is religious and still wants to keep those elements, it is very recognizable (Edmund).

Sometimes references to God occur in humanist ceremonies, yet the concept of God is vague, making it appear ‘non-denominational’ (see Bellah 1988). Cyryl declared that he believes in God and included the words ‘so help me God’ in his vow. This phrase, at least in modern European history, is associated with Christianity. However, Cyryl did not feel he needed ‘any kind of intermediary institution, especially not a bureaucratic one’ – he meant the Catholic Church. In this case of ‘believing without belonging’ one can guess that his vision of God was at least to some extent filled with meanings borrowed from the institutional church. Similarly, Anna, from another couple, who had her ceremony in a forest clearing, said: ‘I follow the conviction that there is more God ‘outside’ of the church than ‘inside’. There is more God in nature, so it was okay for us’. Anna and Adam's ceremony included references to Slavic gods, but also to Jesus. As Anna commented: ‘it was (…) not strictly Catholic, not strictly Slavic, it was just ours’. When people mention particular gods or religious texts, they combine these references rather freely and create a patchwork that reflects a couple's worldview.

This shows that religion is still a schema for social actions (see Pasieka 2015). It provides social actors with some cultural scripts, though they are not always conscious of the influence of those scripts. In this sense, some symbols are especially appealing, and one might say the connotations they evoke function on a ‘primeval’ level. Social actors experience them as parts of ‘sacred collective representations that possess mysterious and inexplicable power’ (Alexander 2020a). Harry, one of the interviewees, suggested that the original meaning of such symbols could have been lost along the way, but that they still resonate with people on a subconscious level. He claimed that even people who declare themselves as non-religious navigate their actions following – even unconsciously – some religious symbolism because they are drawn to it:

Harry:

I’m gonna go off on a bit of a tangent, but, there is a strong connection between … between Jesus and the sun. (…). You know, because our earlier kind of … beliefs and worships were based around the sun, and the sun became the son of God, you know. (…) And in the Bible Jesus is referred to like on so many different occasions as the light, you know, the truth and the light, the light of the world, things like that.

Agata:

But did you have the sun there [at the top of the wedding altar], behind you, because of Jesus?

Harry:

No, no, but what I’m saying is that it's interesting that the sun was at the top of that altar, you know, so it's kind of like, although we think: ‘Oh, yeah, we are not religious’, or something like that, the sun made its way onto the altar like it was very important, you know? … So in some way, maybe without us knowing there was some kind of reference to some higher power.

When couples involve religion, these are usually elements of Judeo-Christian traditions. However, other inspirations also appear sometimes. For instance, Maja and Mikołaj decided to include elements of Buddhism. As Maja declared, Buddhism is the ‘religious philosophy’ that is closest to them. Similarly, Emilia and Ewa follow some beliefs of Buddhism. Emilia became a Buddhist by ‘taking refuge’.⁴ As Emilia said, she ‘changed my [her] Church at some point’. As she argued, her children have ‘two faiths’: Catholicism, from her ex-husband, and Buddhism, from her (her children took refuge too). For this reason, they decorated the setting with Tibetan prayer flags. I was also able to observe that their house was decorated with similar elements, like wall hangings and prayer flags.

Religious and other elements often create together a bricolage. For instance, at one of the weddings I observed Saint Paul's ‘Hymn of Love’ was combined with the theme song from The Lion King and they were performed right after one another. One can interpret such a patchwork as a sign of the diminishing impact of ‘regulative traditions’ understood as external constraints (see Gross 2005). Cultural forms have emancipated themselves from social control, and this allows for such variations (Douglas 1996). However, religion as a meaning-constitutive tradition, working internally by orienting people in a particular way (see Gross 2005), remains a valid source of patterns, and therefore social actors want to preserve some extracts from religious texts. This indicates that humanist wedding ceremonies in some cases are actually a manifestation of a move away from ritualism and formalism (Douglas 1996), often represented by institutional religions and their officials, rather than a sign of disenchantment and moving away from religious meaning-constitutive traditions (see Woodhead 2016).

The secular-sacred

Even though humanist ceremonies are secular, their main actors still want to express certain feelings such as love, gratitude, solemnity, awe, or reverence (Aston 2019, 91). Because the ‘meaning-constitutive tradition’ of the romantic narrative is still valid, love and intimacy remain feelings experienced as ‘sacred’ with sacralized notions such as ‘soul connection’, ‘soulmate’, and ‘true love’ (Gross 2005, 305). Connections between love and the sacred are a long-standing tradition in Western culture. If the sacred is something ‘set apart’ then, in the romantic relationship, the loved person is the one who is ‘set apart’ from other women or men. The significance of the person one loves is quite explicit in the cases of unrequited love, when the whole world seems to be meaningless without the loved person.

Many couples claimed that the wedding constituted a sacred experience for them. Gaja, for example, argued that, even though there were no references to God, the event maintained a ‘spiritual’ character, and it was still emotional. This is because the sacred can function not only in relation to God but also independently (Taylor 2007): As a sacred experience, the wedding and its symbols generated effervescent emotions. Here one can find three important elements of the Durkheimian theory of sacred: cognitive symbols, emotions, and ritual (Lynch 2012, 23–24):

And in my opinion too that is spiritual, it's very emotional, that kind of humanist wedding, but it's devoid of divinity, I’d say. There is the magic and the splendour that we make, we create, and not something dictated by rituals (Gaja).

Personalized elements are contrasted with rigid and ritualized ones. Gaja emphasized that ceremonies acquire a sacred character with the fact that people can imbue symbolic actions with the elements and meanings that for them have a superior form of importance and are part of the normative order. This is, therefore, a kind of ‘secular sacred’:

Agata:

Could you expand on that, in what sense is it ‘spiritual’?

Gaja:

I think that above all it differs from a civil wedding in that a civil wedding is bereft of any spiritual or metaphysical feelings. So in fact it's bereft of everything. It's a template that is reproduced. And for example for me a civil wedding is awful in a certain sense. [long pause] So what is the spirituality about? I think that it's about the relationship, which is then the most important thing and [long pause, thinks], and about it being us that actually create it.

It is the very relationship that is sacralized, as love has become a ‘post-religion’ and is the main focal point for contemporary society (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1990). The second factor that contributes to the sacralization of the event is the fact that it is an effect of the creative potential of the couple. The mechanical, bureaucratic civil ceremony is both secular and disenchanted, whereas the fact of creative involvement in the case of a humanist ceremony restores the sacrality and makes it sacred although secular.

Similarly, Helena claimed that their ceremony would not have been so meaningful if it had taken place in a church. The meaning of the ceremony has its roots in the fact that its elements are the result of a reflective choice:

Thanks to the fact that we were able to decide about these things, it really had meaning. (…). I think if I went to church, said all these things that I’ve always heard, some of them I agree with, some of them I don't, then I don't think it would have such meaning for me. It wouldn't have such, such impact (Helena).

In the background of these narratives there is an echo of anti-ritualism and critique of mechanical, disenchanted, automatic, and pre-stipulated rituals. This rejection of ritual and external forms is accompanied by a move toward authenticity and search for more universal ethical values (see Douglas 1996), as proposed by modern humanism.

The interviewed couples often distinguished between the ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’. These codes reflect the binary division of sacred and profane (see Alexander 2006) as authenticity is a catalyst for the sacred, which is why brand fetishists do not want to buy ‘fakes’ (Lah and Sušjan 2023), why pilgrims want to visit ‘authentic places’ such as the Holy Land (Belhassen, Caton, and Stewart 2008), and why fans of some pop-culture icons travel to sites ‘authenticated’ and made sacred by the very people visiting (Jang 2020). In the case I analyze here, what is considered ‘sacred’ is the couple's relationship and what is considered ‘profane’ is the interference of the external institutions that represent irrelevant and rejected values. The research participants often argued that they did not want to mix those two worlds: sacrum and profanum. As Harry explained:

It was kind of conflicting to have something that really meant a lot to me, which was my love for my wife, with something that meant nothing to me, which is a belief in God. That means zero to me. So, I didn't want to mix those two things.

Although, according to the interviewed couples, the older generation in the audience generally perceived the civil ceremony as ‘serious’, and as having ‘gravitas’ and performative power to create a ‘real’ marriage, many couples I spoke to treated it instead as a ‘necessary evil’ and something grotesque in its ‘seriousness’. Dominika laughed as she described how, when the official told them that ‘the mayor of the district [wójt gminy] joins in sending wishes’, they were not able to treat it seriously, especially as this was a random district with which they had no attachment. Significantly, the couples very often described their civil ceremony as ‘funny’:

It all went very fast, I remember that it actually took five minutes. We all had a good laugh, but when it came down to it, it took five minutes. Apart from the amusement, there weren't many emotions (Mikołaj).

In contrast, Maja said of the humanist ceremony that it enabled them to ‘recreate an atmosphere of secular ceremoniality together, and everyone liked that very much’. This sheds light on how couples regard both not-religious⁵ ceremonies: the civil and humanist ones. The civil ceremony represents the secular-profane; it belongs to the mundane⁶, emotionally uncharged everyday life (see Alexander, Lynch, and Sheldon 2013, 10). It is either ‘funny’ or grotesque. This is because it deploys ossified symbols and meanings that have lost their power.

Significantly, when speaking about the representatives of the state and symbols of statehood, the participants often used descriptions like ‘the lady with the neck chain’ (Maja) or ‘the official who wears the eagle’ (Gustaw, a celebrant). This kind of dismissive attitude indicates that such previously unifying, universal, and ‘charged’ symbols of statehood have lost at least part of their affective power in this situation. This also shows the symbolic poverty of civil rituals (which were either implemented or developed in the communist period as a counterweight to religious (Catholic) rituality).

Sometimes, when the couple and celebrant come to the place where the wedding ceremony will be performed, it has already been prepared by the restaurant or hotel service and the setting includes the table and the national emblem; however, the couples and celebrants are in fact not keen to have these elements, which allude to the civil ceremony and state. It seems that the interference of such institutions could ‘profane’ their love, therefore it has to be kept apart and protected (Alexander 2010, 329). Such logic of thinking is not surprising as there is a ‘‘sympathetic’ relationship’ between privatization (e.g., ‘pushing’ the relationship into the private sphere) and ‘‘sacralization’ of subjectivity’ (Luckmann 1990, 135). Because the status of the couple itself is sacred too, it is better when the vow is not mediated by any institution governed by rationalized and bureaucratic rules. As Gabriel stated:

The main motivation was that I had this feeling and such a strong conviction, (…), that this relationship between two people is something very intimate, personal. I have neither the need nor the desire to allow any institution, either official or ecclesiastical-religious, into it. (…) I wanted to do it in a way that would be authentic for us, and not somehow imposed externally.

The couples I interviewed perceived marriage not only as a legal contract but also as something set apart from mundane, bureaucratic reality and imbued with sacralized meanings that led it to function as ‘the secular sacred’ (Knott 2013), and therefore felt that a civil ceremony was an inappropriate form of celebration. Otherwise, the couples would not feel the need to ‘protect’ their event from the interference of the external, institutionalized authorities, or to include in the ceremony meaningful elements or principles such as equality between partners or independence.

Humanist wedding ceremonies constitute the secular-sacred also because, according to some research participants, these rites express some immanent interconnectedness between people, perceived as sacred although secular. As Helena added, as human beings, people share some universal values, unrelated to any particular religion. These universal values create the feeling of solidarity, ‘generic human bond’ (Turner 1991: 97) and a certain irreducible moral order:

It's like the fact that you’re humanist, two humans, you know, regardless, especially for us, because, Harry grew up, (…), Harry grew up in lots of different countries when he was a child, (…) and I obviously, I lived in Poland all my life, but then I also went to live in other countries, and I think when you do, you see that it's unimportant what you are, or what nationality you are, you are a human being, as Harry is saying, just because we are human beings, that's enough. So what? We can be of different nationalities, we can speak a different language, we can have a different religion, it is important that it's humanist, you know? That it's above those divisions. We have something in common because we are human beings. And those values are important to all of us. Like love, relationships, happiness, and things like that.

It is therefore various relationships of love or belonging that comprise the sacred (yet secular) character of the analyzed weddings. They are absolute, set apart realities, and the meaning of the ceremony is constructed around them. Also, love and belonging are sources of some ‘normative claims over the meanings and conduct of social life’ (Lynch 2012, 29), for example about being faithful, honest, or respectful. Misconduct against them (e.g., extramarital affair even though one promised to be faithful) would be perceived as profanation and pollution of the sacralized love and relationship.

Humanist ceremonies are not only future-oriented as the beginning of the new stage in life, but they also refer to both the real and the imagined past. Couples very often represent a kind of continuity and organic thinking and sacralize their close community. Sometimes they allude to their origins and roots. Harry has Scottish roots so he wore a kilt during the ceremony. He said that the fact he had it was ‘very tribal’. By wearing a kilt he wanted to highlight his identity and heritage: ‘That's the part of the family to me that is really important. That I am Celtic and that's what I bring to … it's part of myself to our, to our marriage as well’. In this case, the kilt was a materialization of emotions and sentiments, and served as a ‘totemic object’ (Alexander 2020b).

Individual memories also have an impact on the ceremony, for example, in the choice of cultural texts and means of symbolic production that appear at the wedding. They are also a source of sacralization. At Anna's and Adam's ceremony, everyone, including guests, was dressed in white. This idea also had roots in memories, as Anna's late father had wanted everyone to come to his funeral wearing white clothes: ‘We couldn't do that because we were not open enough [to such ideas]’. They had not fulfilled his desire, and according to Anna this was one of the intuitive reasons why they asked everyone to wear white at their own wedding ceremony, to somehow honor her father. Julia picked one of Sade's songs because her mother had listened to this singer when she was growing up: ‘That was one of my mum's favourites. It was sentimental for my childhood’.

Childhood provides inspiration and constitutes a factor that influences the choice of some cultural texts or requisites. References to one's childhood, roots and heritage have sacralizing potential. They create ‘chains of memory’ (Hervieu-Léger 2000) and build a bridge between the present and the past, as well as between the individuals and the community from which they originate. Interestingly, a song (Can You Feel the Love Tonight) from The Lion King appeared at two of the eight marriage ceremonies I observed (led by different celebrants, independent from each other). Both couples were in their thirties, and memories from their childhood prompted them to choose this love song. In the interview I asked Gaja why she had chosen this music, and she answered:

In general this is my childhood story. (…). The lyrics are beautiful, [laughs], it's a bit humorous too [laughs]. There are actually a few elements … [reflection] Gabriel is a Leo. (…). I somewhat felt that it resonated with me. And I’m crazy about dates and date symbols. The premiere of The Lion King remake was exactly on this day when we got married. Twenty-five years after the original was released. I thought: ‘It matters, it does.’

Gaja justified her choice not only by referring to childhood but also to signs of the zodiac, synchronicity, and symbolism of numbers, the components of the third kind of the sacred, namely ‘the spiritual-sacred’.

The spiritual-sacred

By this category I mean those convictions represented by research participants that seemed to somehow contradict rationalism, naturalism, and empiricism (with which humanism is often associated) and are common in the wide field of New Age/alternative spirituality. These are, for example, beliefs in cosmic interconnection and fate, and in some inner reality of which all religions are expressions (Heelas 1993, 104; Herbert and Bullock 2020). For example, Anna claimed that the obstacles that they encountered were some kind of ‘signs’ directing the course of their actions: ‘They were obstacles that guided us in some way, to a place that turned out to be perfect’ (Anna). In line with this narrative, it was a matter of destiny that they had a wedding of this particular type.

Sometimes the participants referred to some non-institutionalized divine powers, both transcendent and immanent. At Maja and Mikołaj's wedding ceremony they referred to impersonal, cosmic energy. During his speech, Mikołaj said to Maja: ‘You are my favourite manifestation of the cosmic energy of the universe and the world’. Later, during the interview, I suggested that at many religious wedding ceremonies God is one of the main reference points and asked them if they could point out something ‘analogous’ that replaced God. Maja and Mikołaj mentioned an impersonal force that permeates every aspect of life. According to them the main manifestation of this divine force is nature:

Mikołaj:

In the sense that I don't see God as being separate from me in any way. If something is God for us, then it is energy eternally creating and destroying at the same time, matter that circulates, and simply all that evanescence.

Maja:

Yes, nature in general.

Mikołaj:

So one of the manifestations of divinity, if we use that word at all, perhaps one of the most important manifestations at least on this planet is the nature that surrounds us.

Therefore, they reject the concept of a transcendent, personal God. It is rather an impersonal force that manifests itself in the cycles of death and rebirth:

Exactly, we don't do this separate, judging God. It doesn't quite sit with us and somehow we don't accept such views. It was divine enough that it was under a tree, for example, under which I’ll die one day and it will eat me and decompose me, I’ll bear fruit and someone else will eat me and I will be only my energy, I mean not mine, but the part that I occupied, will suddenly morph into something else. And I will occupy other parts on various levels of consciousness, or in fact without any consciousness – that's a different question (Mikołaj).

Mikołaj and Maja's account and belief in a kind of reincarnation and interconnection were inspired by their travels together to South America (where they ‘spent two months in Amazonia and drank ayahuasca with a family that has been doing it for generations’) and India (where they got to know their ‘shaman friend’). Inspirations and free borrowings from non-Western culturesare also popular in New Age spirituality. In turn, Anna and her husband's narrative was characterized by another conviction: that both institutional and non-institutional paths of various kinds can lead to the same immanent God – this is a common belief in New Age/new spirituality (see Heelas 1993), to which they seemed to be attached.⁷ Anna claimed that one can find God not only in buildings but also in nature. As she also told me: ‘The fact that we didn't have this wedding in a church doesn't make us less close to God. I will say more: to us, it was a spiritual experience, I thanked God that it turned out⁸ this way’.

I observed that some of the research participants assigned particular meanings to numbers and dates. Anna and Adam set their ceremony date for the time of the summer solstice (21 June). As Anna said, this is a special, blessed date. According to this view, performing rituals at the appropriate time boosts their effectiveness and performative power.

Gaja and Gabriel had their ceremony on 19 July at 16:16. They explained that this was the result of Gaja's focus on numbers (her husband commented that she is a ‘numeromaniac’):

16:16 also in a way came from the fact that when we arranged our first date, Gabriel proposed to meet at 19:19. (…) For me that was something interesting. In addition it was 19 December, so another 19. We wanted, or at least I did, for the wedding to be in 2019. [laughs] And on the 19th (Gaja).

Gaja described their weeding as ‘spiritual’ and ‘magical’. Throughout the interview, she said that she is ‘crazy about dates and date symbols’. She interpreted synchronicity and coincidences as meaningful (in contrast, Gabriel said it is ‘seeking signs by force’). In a similar vein, when arguing why she decided on a song from ‘The Lion King’ she said it ‘resonated with her’. And later, it turned out that the Lion King had its premiere on the day of their wedding. The verb she used – ‘to resonate’ [pol. rezonować] – is often used in Polish in the context of tarot readings, when the tarot reader says: ‘take the card that resonates with you’ (see Ntelia 2022). This also places the statement in a certain spiritual context. Words used by the couple to describe Gaja's focus on numbers, such as ‘crazy’ or ‘maniac’ suggest they perceive her inclination as something irrational and inexplicable. All this prompted me to interpret Gaja's attachment to numbers and her looking for some meaningful patterns as an example of the spiritual-sacred. However, one can quite easily imagine a situation in which these elements are not suffused with spiritual meanings, but create rather a secular-sacred. Moreover, the use of ‘special’ numbers can be completely disenchanted. For example, for Gabriel it was rather pure pragmatism that he wanted the wedding ceremony to start at 16:16. As he said, this would prevent people from being late. This shows that these categories of sacred are highly contextual, and that they create relative rather than absolute distinctions.

Participants of marriage ceremonies are often ‘tuned’ to seek some signs of abundance, or good and bad luck. During Helena and Harry's wedding ceremony, two storks flew over the participants. They enthusiastically recognized this as good signs of new offspring in the family. Later they saw a plane in the sky, which they interpreted as a good sign and meaningful coincidence as well:

Helena:

Because my dad used to be a pilot, it had a meaning.

Harry:

And your brother wanted to be a pilot.

Helena:

And my brother wanted to be a pilot, so for them also this was like a coincidence, but for them it had meaning. They were saying: ‘Oh, you know, this is good luck.’

Harry:

(…). It's kind of like, when you’re in that situation, you’re open, like your mind is more open, your heart is more open to find the meaning.

In a similar way, the participants in Anna and Adam's ceremony interpreted the appearance of a white butterfly as a sign of the presence of Anna's father, who had died some time previously. Anna told me that her friends took a picture of the white butterfly that flew during the ceremony: ‘They were convinced that my dad had flown in for the ceremony. Because my dad was you know, kind of ethereal, he wasn't from this earth, not from this planet’. The butterfly was white and Anna's father's hair was white, so they interpreted this similarity as a sign of Anna's father's presence. Therefore, although humanist marriage ceremonies are vastly secularized, they are not disenchanted.

One of the celebrants claimed that such ‘New Age’ elements are compatible with humanist weddings, as both put an emphasis on universalism rather than particularism:

Edmund

It would fit our ceremony and our ceremony would have been expanded with that, certainly.

A:

But in what sense would it fit?

Dawid:

By emphasizing our general … universalizing all the harmony, by adding elements that are culturally alien to us, so we’d make it New Age, perhaps that's not quite the right word, but expanding the palette of various traditions.

A:

For it to be more universal, right?

Dawid:

Yes, in my opinion that would be a good fit for many ceremonies.

It seems there is also some affinity between New Age practitioners’ beliefs and the views on humanist wedding ceremonies represented by the research participants, as they have a similar, slightly ambiguous attitude toward the pre-modern, modern, and post-modern (see Heelas 1993). Firstly, both humanist wedding ceremonies and New Age beliefs are inspired by imagined pre-modern religiosity. Secondly, they reject formalized religious institutions, which is also a rejection of modernity. On the other hand, fascination with the pre-modern was common for modern Romantic tradition, whereas emphasis on self-expression and self-realization is typical of post-modern times. Therefore, similarly to New Age practitioners, the supporters of humanist wedding ceremonies at the same time reject and draw upon (post)modernity.

New Age may also, however, seem to be ‘compatible’ with humanist weddings because of the high adaptative potential of New Age ideas. As a Pew Research Center survey (2018) shows, New Age beliefs are common among both religious and non-religious Americans. Similarly, in Europe, especially among younger people, those who declare themselves as non-religious are often either not atheists or combine atheism with beliefs in the ‘superstitious, paranormal, magical, and supernatural’ (Herbert and Bullock 2020). They therefore have beliefs that are common with those held by people explicitly declaring themselves as religious (Herbert and Bullock 2020, 3; 14). This can be a sign of pluralism typical not of ‘differentiation’ but ‘dedifferentiation’, resulting in a blurring of the boundaries, for instance between ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ (Woodhead 2016) and a recomposing of the sacred into new forms (Berzano 2019; Taylor 2007).

The non-religious sacred

These non-religious symbols, meanings or values are made sacred in the same process of ‘setting apart’ as the religious ones. By the non-religious sacred I mean those sacralized meanings that are constructed in (more explicit or implicit) opposition to the religious ones. The significance of the non-religious sacred ‘is more or less dependent on religion’ (Quack 2014, 439). References to scientific cognition, values such as autonomy and freedom, or the affirmation of the power of human reason, all make sense especially when they are articulated even in an implicit context of religion (in Poland mainly Catholicism), that in the view of many research participants is based on superstitious beliefs and subordinates human beings to an imagined supernatural power.

Humanism in Poland is often unwittingly positioned in opposition to Catholicism, and this particular creed is the main reference point for humanist rites. I asked Franciszka and Filip (as I did with all couples) why they wanted a humanist ceremony. The couple declared that as nonbelievers they did not want a Catholic ceremony. It was important for them, however, for the ceremony to be meaningful. As Franciszka told me: ‘It was important for it to be a ceremony based on values, and they didn't have to be Catholic values, just humanist values’. Indeed, despite the limited number of explicit references to humanism (see Rejowska 2021), many ceremonies allude to the values that one might interpret as ‘humanistic’, such as independence, egalitarianism, or belief in human agency. Sometimes more direct links between particular values and humanism are made. Then humanism is inscribed in the rationalist framework and the Enlightenment, as a philosophy that involves ‘moral development, respect for others, dignity, development of human knowledge, (…), and that's the most important thing for this humanist philosophy: to think’ (Gloria, a celebrant). Understood in this sense, humanism entails ethics of being ‘good without God’ (Engelke 2015) or without belonging to any particular institutionalized religion. This contrast between the emphasis on God and the emphasis on human was expressed, in one case, in a passage from Kurt Vonnegut's book Cat's Cradle, cited at the very first (documented) humanist wedding ceremony in Poland:

‘What is sacred to Bokononists?’ I asked after a while.

‘Not even God, as near as I can tell.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Just one thing.’

I made some guesses. ‘The ocean? The sun?’

‘Man’, said Frank. ‘That's all. Just man.’

In this excerpt, the sacredness of the human being is contrasted with the sacredness of God, and this clear opposition means that the overtone of the quote is non-religious in its character.

Most often, however, references to humanism are more implicit, for example, as already mentioned, it is expressed in the form of the affirmation of values and beliefs, which, in the view of humanists, are opposed to religious values. But humanism can also be expressed non-discursively: in the very arrangement of the ceremony that is focused on the couple, and not for example God, or sometimes it is also manifested through the ceremony's setting. For instance, the venue of the first documented heterosexual humanist marriage ceremony in Poland (performed by the Polish Rationalist Association on 9 December 2007) was the Museum of Industry and Agriculture in Warsaw, almost a century to the day after the Polish Association of Freethinkers was established in the same place (on 8 December 1907). Another couple had their ceremony in the roof garden of the Warsaw University Library, near a stone on which Albert Einstein's physical equations were engraved. As Olaf, the research participant, argued, he and his wife chose the place intentionally: ‘The place, (…) was a bit of an allusion to what is important to us in life’ (Olaf).

Sometimes such non-religious sacred meanings are articulated explicitly, although this seems to be quite rare (see Rejowska 2021):

There was a kind of manifesto, I’d never done anything like that before, literally a humanist-atheist-anarchist manifesto, you could say. Because they really wanted to (…) emphasize how important it [the humanist wedding] was, how much they were rebelling against the system (…) (Gloria, a celebrant).

Because humanist marriage ceremonies refer to some ‘universal human values’ (as often expressed by celebrants), in the research participants’ narratives humanism most often means a certain universalism. The equation of humanism with something that is universal often triggered comparisons and allusions to religion (as something particularistic). During the research I often encountered the narrative that humanist values are something that unifies people, while belonging to a particular religion constitutes a dividing factor:

I think it's important to recognize that there is a way of being spiritual amongst people, without being attached to a religion. I think maybe this is what we call, we maybe call it ‘humanistic’. I guess, maybe that's not so important, but we have to find a way, or start to find ways to love one another and to be with one another, without turning to any mainstream religious beliefs (Harry).

This narrative alludes to the understanding of humanism as a kind of ‘this-worldly transcendence’ (Luckmann 1990, 135), an ethical project with aims much wider than the mere popularization of humanist rites of passage, as it strives to build a democratic and open society, and humanist ceremonies are one of its tools.

The non-religious sacred was not expressed very explicitly. I attended ceremonies without any direct references to this philosophy. However, that does not seem to be only the case in Poland. Aston (2019) and Engelke (2015) describe a similar situation in the UK's humanist ceremonies (both weddings and funerals). The meaning of humanism is blurred for a number of reasons. It might be a deliberate marketing strategy to make humanist wedding ceremonies attractive for a wider range of consumers. The frequency and density of references to humanism have been changing over time. At the beginning of the functioning of humanist marriage ceremonies in Poland, according to some of the celebrants (Gloria; Gustaw), the ‘theoretical introduction’ to humanism was longer. After some time, however, celebrants adjusted to the demands of couples, who most often perceived such ‘theoretical’ references as too long and quite boring. Gustaw, a celebrant who previously worked for the Polish Rationalist Association observed that in comparison to the past, references to humanism have become rarer. It seems that such adjustment to the world and to mainstream society is a natural dynamic for groups that at the beginning rejected the mainstream world and functioned in some tension with the dominant culture. Thanks to this adjustment, they become more inclusive and more popular (see Niebuhr 1929). It seems that the popularization of humanist rites in Poland made their ideological background become blurred.

Certain structural conditions specific to the Polish context may also contribute to this fuzziness. In Poland, the wedding ceremony market (similarly to the religious scene) is not very pluralistic, with humanist weddings accounting for all the ‘alternative’ ceremonies. By comparison, the United States, for example, has the ‘Universal Life Church’, a non-denominational religious organization accepting people of all religions, within which anyone can be ordained as a wedding officiant (and such weddings have legal recognition). One can hypothesize that such a church in Poland would attract couples who are less attached to the ideas of humanism, secularism and the rationalist-materialist framework and more inclined toward personalization of the ceremony and expression of their individualized worldviews.

Finally, even those couples who somehow identify with humanist ideas do not necessarily want to express them explicitly. They argue that they do not want to simply replace the priest's sermon with a long speech on humanism by the celebrant. Both celebrants and couples are afraid that such a ceremony would become too similar to a religious one. Thus, paradoxically, the non-religious character of the ceremony ‘blocks’ an explicit appearance of non-religious elements, because non-religious people want to differ from religion, whereas the inclusion of non-religious ideological elements would make the ceremony similar to a religious one. One of the celebrants alluded to a quite common critique which holds that the propagators of humanism, especially of its more militant, atheist version, do not differ from religious believers (for example, critics of humanism compare Richard Dawkins to an ‘atheist fundamentalist’ (Engelke 2014, 293)), but simply emulate religion.

Moreover, such condensation and simplification of meanings is typical of ritual-like performative actions (Alexander 2006; Tambiah 1979). According to Alexander (2006), in the time of late modernity, elements of the performance are de-fused and fragmented. For a successful performance, its creators need to re-fuse those elements and refer to some charged symbols (Langer 1951) and unifying narrative. In Poland, however, modern humanism is poorly recognized and possesses limited power to unify people around its ideas. Its concepts therefore need to be translated into something more ‘tangible’, such as the couple's biography or the arrangement of the ceremony stressing the importance of individuals.

Conclusions

My findings resonate with Thomas Luckmann's conclusions that the contemporary pluralistic market of transcendencies is powered by four sources (Luckmann 1990, 135). According to Luckmann, these are mass media; churches that try to adapt to the new conditions; ‘the (…) carriers of nineteenth-century secular ideologies’; and new religious and spiritual communities that belong to the fold of 'New Age’. All these four sources provide narratives, myths, and cultural scripts for humanist weddings too. Firstly, mass media, including romantic comedies and coverage of weddings, are the source of the fairy tale, white wedding script and guidance for couples. This arouses a desire for ‘one special day’ and fuels the romantic narrative presenting love as a sacred experience. Secondly, as indicated in my research, institutional religion provides couples as well as celebrants with cultural texts and frameworks for (re)articulation. Sometimes social actors simply borrow some elements (for instance, they include Saint Paul's ‘Hymn of Love’), but sometimes they structure the ceremony in a relation of analogy and antipathy to institutional religion (see Alexander 2006). The third source indicated by Luckmann is ‘the residual carriers of nineteenth-century secular ideologies’. Although references to humanism and the Enlightenment are sometimes not explicit, they often constitute the background for the analyzed performances. And the last source is the broad field of ‘New Age’, syncretizing various religious as well as spiritual traditions and cultural narratives, such as elements of Eastern religions, psychological and therapeutic content, criticism of Western civilization, the ideas of a return to nature and of the interconnectedness of energies, as well as the belief that various spiritual paths and religions are ‘the expression of this same inner reality’ (Heelas 1993, 104).

The semantic fuzziness of categories such as sacred or secular results in the fact that scholars often identify secularization with desacralization (see Thompson 1990, 161). Yet ‘the sacred’ can also function beyond the religious field (Alexander, Lynch, and Sheldon 2013, 8; Knott 2013, 145). The categories of sacred and profane are two binary categories that constantly and deeply structure the whole of social life (Alexander, Lynch, and Sheldon 2013, 3). As Durkheim ((1912) 1995, 215) put it, in modern societies, the sacred has not been excluded from social life:

Now as in the past, we see that society never stops creating new sacred things. If society should happen to become infatuated with a man (…), then that man will be put in a class by himself and virtually deified.

Under the influence of secularization, the sacred has changed its forms, becoming more plastic, while it manifests itself in various ways: religious, spiritual, non-religious, and secular. As we have seen, even though in theory such ceremonies should be deeply embedded in the rationalist-materialist framework, they do not necessarily mean disenchantment and desacralization.

Humanist ceremonies are deeply informed by the philosophy of individualism. This stems from the fact that although individualism has spread down to other classes, it is an ideology that informs especially the middle class (Archer 1988, 219), and humanist weddings are popular among the middle class in particular. Also, it is especially the middle class who fulfill individualism through the greater ‘preference for uniqueness’ and emphasis on ‘self-actualization and personal choice’ (as contrasted with the greater emphasis on ‘self-reliance’ or ‘resisting influence’ among the working class) (Bowman, Kitayama, and Nisbett 2009, 880; 882). In humanist wedding ceremonies, free and personal choice is, firstly, sacralized, and secondly, a tool for further sacralization, given the contagious nature of the sacred (Durkheim (1912) 1995). In this way, whatever the provenance of the elements chosen by couples (e.g., religious or secular), they become saturated with meaning when they appear to be an effect of free choice and not some external coercions. In the Durkheimian spirit, one can say that humanist weddings are rituals of the middle class in which its members express and sanctify their own values, such as personal choice, self-expression, and freedom.

Regardless of the kind of the sacred to which the couples referred, humanist wedding ceremonies are a sign of a decreasing social relevance of institutionalized religion, which is the effect of secularization (Berzano 2019, 64; Bruce 2018, 105). My research participants were sometimes ‘religious without religion’ (Berzano 2019, 65) or ‘spiritual, but not religious’ (Fuller 2001). The couples sometimes referred to religious/spiritual worldviews, but in a freeway, unconstrained by any institution. If they invoked God, then most often this was with an abstract and non-denominational idea of a deity. This reveals that (non-)religious identities are difficult to demarcate straightforwardly and that secularization does not always entail disenchantment.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to all the couples I met during the research for sharing their stories with me and to the celebrants for helping me during my fieldwork. The article also greatly benefited from insightful comments from anonymous reviewers and the editors of the issue and of the journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Polish National Science Centre (grant number UMO-2018/29/N/HS6/01862). Proofreading of this publication has been supported by a grant from the Philosophical Faculty under the Strategic Programme Excellence Initiative at the Jagiellonian University.

Notes on contributors

Agata Rejowska

Agata Rejowska is an assistant professor at the Institute of Sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. In 2021 she was a visiting assistant in research at Yale University, Center for Cultural Sociology. In 2022 she received the Ministry of Science and Higher Education scholarship for outstanding young scholars. She has authored several peer-reviewed publications, including in the journals Sociology of Religion and Social Compass.

Notes

1 Nevertheless, it is worth remembering that Alexander substantially rereads and reworks Durkheim (see Lynch 2012).

2 ‘Religious’ in the Durkheimian sense of the word. As Durkheim claimed, through religion society is actually worshipping itself, and that in fact religious symbols represent social structures (see Lynch 2012, 20–25).

3 Some definitions of nonreligion, for example, that were proposed by Lois Lee (2011, 2), do not include humanism (and other phenomena such as rationalism or naturalism), because they are ‘ontologically autonomous from religion’ (Lee 2012, 131; cited in Quack 2014, 447). However, as Johannes Quack (2014, 447) argues, humanism and humanist groups ‘have distinct relationships with religious traditions’ and therefore should be included in the scope of research on nonreligion.

4 This practice is considered the starting point on the Buddhist path. By following this, a practitioner expresses his/her commitment to Buddhism.

5 I treat not-religious as a broader term that includes both secular and non-religious phenomena (see Quack 2014).

6 Sacred is expressed not only in relation and in opposition (Thompson 1990, 179) to profane, evil, or impure, but also in relation and in opposition to mundane, emotionally uncharged everyday life (see Alexander, Lynch, and Sheldon 2013, 10; Caillois 1959; Hertz 2009).

7 For example, after the interview they gave me gemstones along with brief instructions on how to prepare gem-infused water to drink, and how to ‘charge’ the gems with energy.

8 Due to the couple's religiosity and the expectations of the groom's parents (who are Polish, but moved to the United Kingdom, where Adam was brought up), initially they had considered a Catholic ceremony. However, because Anna was already divorced, they did not have this option.