Can Christians date non-Christians?

Question 11061.

Dating unbelievers is a question the Bible never addresses directly, for the simple reason that dating as we know it did not exist when Scripture was written. That has allowed a good deal of creative reasoning over the years, most of it arriving at the conclusion the person wanted before they started.

So we have to reason from principle rather than from proof text, and I think the principles point in one direction fairly clearly. Let me set out why, and then deal honestly with the harder cases.

Start with where it leads

The New Testament is unambiguous that a believer should marry only in the Lord. If that is the destination, then dating unbelievers is a road that either ends in disobedience or ends in heartbreak, and there is no third option that anybody has ever managed to explain to me.

Some will say they are only dating casually and marriage is not on the horizon. I understand the argument and I do not find it persuasive, because that is not how affection works. Nobody plans to fall in love. It happens while you are busy telling yourself it is not happening.

Paul’s warning about being unequally yoked is not restricted to marriage, though marriage is the sharpest application. The image concerns any binding partnership in which two are pulling under one yoke, and a serious romantic relationship is exactly that.

Consider what dating actually is. Whatever else it may be, it is a process for deciding whether to marry someone, conducted with increasing emotional investment along the way. If the answer to the marriage question is already settled, then dating unbelievers is a process you have entered knowing the outcome you are not permitted to reach.

The heart runs faster than the mind

Here is what I have watched happen more times than I can count. A believer begins dating unbelievers with every intention of keeping the relationship light and their convictions intact. Six months later the relationship is the most important thing in their life, and the convictions are the thing that has quietly moved.

This is not a failure of intelligence. It is how human beings are made. We become like what we love and we rationalise towards what we want, and Jeremiah 17:9 warns that the heart is deceitful above all things. The person best placed to deceive you about this relationship is you.

So the argument that you will be careful is precisely the argument I trust least. The people who ended up in painful marriages were all going to be careful too.

What dating unbelievers does to your walk

Something has to give. You cannot spend most of your emotional life with somebody for whom Jesus is irrelevant and expect your own devotion to remain unaffected. The relationship becomes a room in your life where God is not discussed, and rooms like that tend to expand.

There is usually a sexual pressure too, since the person you are with has no reason to accept a standard they do not believe in, and no framework for understanding why you would. That is not their fault. It is simply what happens when two people are operating from different accounts of what a body is for.

I have written about the wider question of physical boundaries in what the Bible says about cohabiting before marriage, and the pressures compound quickly once the foundation is already mixed.

There is also the matter of time. Dating unbelievers absorbs the years in which you might have been getting to know somebody you could actually marry, and those years do not come back. That is not a romantic argument, but it is a real one, and I have heard it made with some feeling by people in their late thirties.

But they are such a good person

They may well be, and I would never argue otherwise. Common grace is real, and there are unbelievers who are kinder, more patient and more generous than many Christians I know. That is a genuine rebuke to the church and I take it seriously.

But the issue is not whether they are nice. The issue is whether they can share the deepest part of your life. A lovely person who cannot pray with you, cannot grieve with you in hope, and does not understand why you would give away money you could have kept, is still someone you would be unequally yoked to.

Kindness is not the same as unity. Two people can be very fond of each other and still be walking in different directions, and marriage does not fix that. It welds it in place.

What about missionary dating?

The hope that dating will lead to conversion is well intentioned and usually disastrous. It puts you in the position of evangelist and girlfriend at once, which compromises both roles, and it gives the other person the strongest possible incentive to profess a faith they do not hold.

I have seen professions of faith made during courtship evaporate within two years of the wedding. I am not accusing anyone of deliberate deceit. People genuinely convince themselves under that kind of pressure, which is exactly why the pressure should not be applied.

If you want them saved, and I hope you do, the most loving thing you can do is to step back so that any decision they make about Jesus is about Jesus rather than about you.

Notice too what happens to your evangelism more widely. Once your closest unbelieving relationship is one you cannot speak plainly into, a habit of silence forms, and it does not stay in that one room. Dating unbelievers has a way of teaching a believer to keep quiet, and that lesson is hard to unlearn. 1 Peter 3:15 assumes we are ready to give a reason for our hope, and readiness is a habit like anything else.

Friendship is a different matter

None of this means Christians should avoid unbelievers socially. Jesus was accused of being a friend of tax collectors and sinners, and it was not a compliment his critics intended. A believer with no unbelieving friends has a mission problem, not a purity record.

The distinction is between friendship and romance. Friendship does not create the kind of binding that Paul warns about, and it is the ordinary way most people come to hear the gospel from someone they trust.

So keep the friendships and be honest about the moment one of them starts to change temperature. That moment always announces itself, and the choice is much easier before it than after.

Jesus prayed for his disciples not to be taken out of the world but to be kept from the evil one, which is exactly the balance we need. Withdrawal is not holiness and neither is naivety. Being in the world without being yoked to it is the line the New Testament draws, and it can be walked with a good deal more freedom than the nervous sometimes think. The prayer is at John 17:15.

Discerning genuine faith in a partner

There is a mirror problem worth naming. Some Christians avoid dating unbelievers only in a technical sense, choosing someone who identifies as a Christian but shows no sign of it, and then discover after the wedding that the label was the whole of it.

Look at the life rather than the label. Is there repentance, appetite for Scripture, commitment to a local church, willingness to be corrected? Is Jesus somebody they talk about when there is nothing to gain by it?

It is much easier to ask those questions early. Once affection is established, every answer gets graded generously, and the question of marrying an unbeliever arrives on your doorstep whether you meant it to or not.

If you are already in one

You may be reading this well past the point where the advice would have been easy. If so, I am not going to pretend there is a painless route out, and I am not going to pile on guilt for a decision already made.

Take it to God honestly and take it to somebody wise who knows you both. Ask what obedience looks like from here rather than what would have been ideal a year ago. Sometimes that means ending it, and the ending will hurt for a season and then it will not.

Whatever you decide, decide it in the light rather than alone. Relationships that cannot be discussed with mature believers are almost always relationships that have something to hide.

One more word to anyone in that position. If you end it, do it kindly and clearly, without leaving a door ajar for your own comfort. Half endings are cruel to the other person and they keep dating unbelievers alive as a live option in your own mind for months longer than necessary.

So, now what?

Settle the question before it becomes personal. Decide now, while nobody’s face is attached to it, what you will and will not do, because a conviction formed in advance is worth ten formed in the middle of a romance.

If you are drifting into something already, name it this week to someone who will tell you the truth. Dating unbelievers rarely feels like a decision at the time, which is precisely why it needs to be brought into the open before it becomes one by default.

And pray for a spouse if you want one, plainly and without embarrassment. God is not indifferent to that longing. What would change if you trusted him with this part of your life instead of quietly arranging it yourself?

“Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?”

2 Corinthians 6:14, ESV