Unequally Yoked

June 14th, 2025

The idea of being unequally yoked is a kind of biblical idiom that seemed really, really strange. I even was uncomfortable with the phrase through my entire Christian life from 2004 to around 2022 when I stopped this who thing. Using a wierd phrase like "unequally yoked" is not the way regular people talk.

So what does being "unequally yoked" mean? The reference is from 2 Corinthians 6:14 in the bible, one of the many books of the New Testament written by the Apostle Paul, where it says, "Do not be yoked together with unbelievers for what to righteousness and wickedness have in common or what fellowship can light have with darkness." This cryptic passage is so commonly invoked that for many Christians, the meaning and implication is straightforward and can just roll off the tongue if one goes to church long enough. It's just such a basic conception for them. It's one of those bumper-sticker idioms that blends well when stuck on the shirt of a certain kind of Christian to the point where it doesn't shock the people who hear it. So if you have a certain kind of Christian in your life who just casually says "don't be unequally yoked" and you may be like "What are you talking about?" this post is for you.

Being unequally yoked is an agrarian metaphor that compares relationships of Christians to a team of oxen that are yoked together. For those who didn't grow up farming, you've probably at least seen movies with a team of oxen plowing a field or pulling a wagon or hauling freight. The idea is that if the oxen are not equally matched, they won't work together well, one can go too fast, or they distribute the work unevenly. The point is that the results the farmer wants from the oxen don't turn out the way that they want that work. So farmers need a team of oxen, presumably, that is according to the farmer "equally yoked."

This metaphorical meaning is typically found in the New International Version of the Bible, however, the New Revised Standard Version makes it much more clear: "Do not be mismatched with unbelievers." That's the message. If as a Christian, you want to be "spiritually successful" you have to associate and be paired with, so to speak, other Christians (typically the context is about marriage, but there's other contexts which I'll get to). The statement also implies that non-Christians (or in my experience, even progressive or liberal Christians) will disrupt or even destroy your spiritual progress. That's the really basic level of understanding the "unequally yoked" metaphor because it's right on the surface of the bible passage.

But let's look at this deeper because there's more to it than just Christians not getting close or married to non-Christians. In this passage, the Apostle Paul casts the Christian life into either or terms. It's so obvious that for Paul, the world is simply divided into believers and unbelievers. It is simply divided into Christians and non-Christian. You're a Christian or you're not. And that is the sum total of everybody.

As well, for Paul, associating with unbelievers can be destructive to a Christian's faith for many reasons. It can't be a source of learning from other cultures, other people who believe in other gods, or other organizations. It can't be a source of understanding an aethiest who teaches at a university. Associating with people who are different is simply something to be avoided because to Paul, those unbelievers are going to make Christians "fall away" or leave the faith (but in my experience, it was Christians themselves who drove me out). You should not be paired up with them.

And to take a much darker turn with this message, Paul casts Christians as righteous and describes the non-Christians as wicked or lawless, depending on the biblical translation you look at. He says Christians live in the light. They represent light while non-Christians live in the darkness or represent darkness. This stark contrast of Christian or non-Christian, righteousness and godliness or wickedness and lawlessness, light or darkness, casts Christians relationships (that in many ways are often very diverse particularily when Christians work regular jobs) in starkly oppositional terms. This thinking actively constructs the social world in "us versus them" terms. Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? Social existence is set up as a zero-sum game. And again, this is exactly what Paul says no holds bar!!

While this passage is brutal when it comes to our shared social life, so many people have experienced the receiving end of the passge since they are judged as non-Christians or non-believers (even if they are). If people are not percieved to be Christians or somebody thinks they are not real Christians or the right kind of Christian, then Christian people in their lives no longer associate with them because the Christians were taught that they would be unequally yoked. Sometimes people had to leave their immediate families on the grounds that they weren't true Christians, that to be associated with them was to be unequally yoked and a spiritual threat.

So many people, including myself, have experienced the loss of Christian communities that no longer accept me or my wife or both as Christian and essentially, we've been cast out and can no longer associate with people we loved because of the so-called threat we pose. We've mourned relationships that ended or were rocky as hell because of this perspective that those other people were a spouse but also a threat spiritually. This is the lived experience of how this passage works.

But interpretations of being "unequally yoked" get even worse historically speaking. Within white racist discourse, the command not to be unequally yoked was used within a context of presumed inequality of different races. The bible passage was used many times to legitimize all kinds of racist policies and practices. A society could not stand if "unequal" races were yoked together (that is, if they had equal rights or if they had equal access and so forth). They needed to remain separate. The language of light and dark in the passage was used crassly and literally to support this. Light and darkness could never mix together. White skin and dark skin cannot be equal and mixed together within a society. That's how very explicit this language was in the past and it still finds its way into many other forms of Christian discourse. It is still used and I still hear it used as leverage against interracial marriage. It's a softened racism that doesn't argue on the basis of biology or skin color, but with the use of the "cultural language" of a "chosen nation." No wonder we still have places in the Western world where different races still have deep cultural divides that can't be bridged. And when progressive folks try to unite together people, these two different cultural or "ethnic backgrounds" are still unequally yoked to each other and neither will benefit. And so, according to powerful authoritarian hi-control institutions and churches, they should remain separate.

This idea of being unequally yoked can potentially be used against any group that is viewed as inherently inferior and unequal by definition. In my experience, it is used to police relationships and sexuality so that any potential partners or dating partners or potential marriage material or whatever, who would potentially, according to those that hold authority, threaten one's sexual purity. They are a threat and you can't be unequally yoked with them. They are told that if one is a Christian and one is not, one will cause the other to give into sexual temptation. This passage is often used in particular against women who are viewed as having been "sexually impure," who are sexually active, who have lost or forfeited their virginity and now are not fit as equal spiritual partners with men who might otherwise date or marry them because of their sexuality and their sexual practices.

Using the term unequally yoked in this context is HORRIFIC discourse! Getting back to Paul's all or nothing logic, the language operates at the level of shared society and politics beyond these kind of individual level kinds of interactions. It legitimizes Christian nationalism! It signifies the idea that a "secular" government or society that is governed or a society that is not governed by solely Christian structures is unequal. To these nationalists, you can't have a society where Christians and non -Christians rule together, debate together, pass laws together, or live in the same polity because they are "unequally yoked." It's a society that will fail. Such a society is doomed. So the argument goes that only a Christian society can stand. So Paul's "us versus them" mentality takes on a chilling macro-level social form that goes beyond individual relationships and our attitudes to individual people or groups in our lives.

We cannot miss just how overstated and intense the things that Paul says in this context really are. We can't under-estimate how these biblical writings have done more than anyone else's writing to shape popular Christian consciousness. For Paul, this is a fundamental aspect of Christian identity. That's what Second Corinthians is about is maintaining what he sees as authentic Christian identity. And because Paul wrote it, being "unequally yoked" is right in the code of Christianity itself. It's at the heart of many articulations of the Christian faith. So if you've heard the phrase before, and it wasn't clear to you what it meant, but it made you grind your teeth in anger, I hope this helps to explain why.