Religions, Norms, and the Mediatisation of Weddings

Finally, after more than an hour of impatiently waiting, the wedding couple enters the hall where the reception with 160 guests takes place. The guests, a mix of Algerian, Palestinian, and Swiss relatives and friends, begin to make high, trilling celebratory sounds, fluttering their tongues and lips while moving their fingers against their mouths, filling the room with joyful cheers for the newlyweds. The wedding photographer follows the couple closely, a challenging task among all the excitement. Amid the joyful noise, many guests raise their smartphones to capture the couple’s first appearance. The bride, in her white dress, and the groom, in his tuxedo, walk slowly, as if instructed not to rush so that both the professional photographer and the many amateurs can take their pictures. A Palestinian music group, dressed in traditional clothing, forms an honour guard for the couple. The celebration I attended in German-speaking Switzerland on 15 January 2025 confirmed this fact: the newlyweds are the shooting stars of the evening.

Weddings and photographs have long been intertwined, shaping and regulating each other. One might even suggest that without a picture, it scarcely feels as though the wedding truly happened. Yet, as this volume demonstrates, a wide range of other media such as clothing, food, music, and architectural settings also play a crucial role in this rite of passage (Höpflinger 2014). In a broad sense, media are thus understood to encompass not only images but also material and sensory dimensions. Accordingly, the communicative function of media is extended by their experiential and affective qualities. As David Morgan argues, “media have come to be understood as technologies of sensation, as embodied forms of participation in extended communities joined in imagination, feeling, taste, affinity, and affect” (Morgan 2013, p. 347). Building on this understanding, this volume examines the mediated dimensions of weddings from an interdisciplinary perspective, illuminating the complex interplay of symbols, materials, aesthetics, and cultural–religious practices in both past and present contexts. By placing a particular emphasis on religion, a dimension largely overlooked in existing wedding research, it addresses a notable gap in the field.

Weddings are a melting point of cultural production in which institutions, norms, and individual preferences interact (Höpflinger and Mäder 2018). It is a rite of passage from single to married life, a state in which a defined procedure regulates the interactions between the wedding couple and its wedding party. Arnold van Gennep discerns three steps in this rite of passage: preliminal, liminal, and postliminal rites. Different rites are carried out in each step: First, the individuals are separated from the previous world, the community, and each other (preliminal rites). They are now in a liminal phase before they are incorporated in postliminal rites to be transformed to their new status (Van Gennep 2019, p. 120). “To marry is to pass from one group of children or adolescent into an adult group, from a given clan to another, from one family to another, and often from one village to another” (Van Gennep 2019, pp. 123–24). The wedding party accompanies the couple in this transformation that takes place on different levels. In some countries and cultures, the bride changes her surname and adopts that of her husband, or vice versa. In some religious traditions, the husband becomes the head of the future family, while the wife is considered subordinate to him, while in others, the marital relationship is framed in terms of a more equal partnership.

A Regulated Transformation

Wedding traditions and customs are handed down and continually adapted to societal changes, as seen with same-sex marriage, which has been legalised in many countries in the 21st century, while others have yet to follow (HRC 2025). At the same time, the rite of passage conserves, revives, and introduces traditional practices from different cultural–religious contexts, like the white wedding dress or the fasting of the couple during the ceremony. It is often difficult to say where these symbolic practices originate. However, it is remarkable how intensely weddings apply symbolic communication to represent and visualise the transformation of the involved people from one state to another. Biologically, they stay the same, but socially, politically, legally, culturally, and religiously, they are not. The legal status may include, depending on the country’s law, that the couple become one tax entity, and the line of succession will change through marriage.

The transformation is not limited to these state-regulated aspects. In many religious and cultural contexts, marriage also entails a fundamental shift in both self-understanding and public perception from being a single individual to being part of a unified couple, with meanings that vary depending on the society in which the partners live. In many religious traditions and communities, marriage is regarded as the sole legitimate context for cohabiting with a partner in a sexual relationship, like in orthodox Judaism, Muslim communities, or in the Roman catholic church. Latter-day Saints even expect their members to marry (beyond death) because it is the most recognised lifestyle that enables the couple to enter into heaven with their offspring (Mäder 2024b). The idea that only a married person has reached one of the main goals in their lives is still widespread.

The wedding rite usually adheres to a familiar sequence of actions, though they may also incorporate less common ritual elements. In religious contexts, the ceremony itself is characterised by fixed participant roles and a high degree of regulation, which guarantees that each person understands their role within the ritual. A religious specialist, such as a priest, an imam, or a rabbi, usually guides the couple through the rite in the venue of the ceremony. Increasingly, however, religious weddings also take place outdoors, on beaches or in gardens. Civil weddings are conducted by a registrar, typically in a representative building or room that is festively decorated with floral arrangements. In both settings, the procedure is largely prescribed by the respective institution, religious or civil, with only a few elements that can be adapted to personal preferences. Family and friends typically recognise the ritual sequence from previous weddings or from their own. Their presence is not only an act of support for the couple, but also a moment in which they remember and, in a sense, might reaffirm their own wedding. The experience of the wedding, with their memory refreshed and supported by photos and videos afterwards, maintains the tradition but also mixes cultures and religions in a plural society (Mäder 2024c). It is therefore not surprising that, in the “Global North”, civil and religious weddings across different traditions share similar symbols, such as the exchange of rings or the first kiss. These moments become essential subjects for photographic capture (Mäder 2024a).

The Mediatisation of Wedding Norms

The current reprint, “Promising Images of Love: Religion, Norms, and the Mediatisation of Weddings”, focuses on wedding media and the mediatisation of weddings and religion. It examines the role of media in wedding festivities, specifically how they take part in meaning making, identity, and ritual transformation processes (Bezner 2002). The term media is understood broadly and plays a central role in communication processes, making it essential in religious practices in which the transcendent realm is constructed within the immanent here and now. In weddings, media encompass audio–visual forms such as photos, videos, paintings, and music. Material media also play a significant role: the wedding dress, the banquets, the wedding cake, and the architecture of the ceremony venue are all important elements to which considerable attention is devoted beyond just the preparation phase (Ouellette 2018). All of these forms of wedding media rely on specific technologies and practical knowledge. They contribute to the communicative processes through which weddings produce meaning, processes that are deeply intertwined with sensory perception (Pink 2022).

This media perspective is based on the scholarly paradigm of mediatisation (Bolin and Kopecka-Piech 2023; Kopecka-Piech 2022; Couldry and Hepp 2013; Cui 2019; Thomas 2015). It assumes that media communication and the media practices of individuals and communities shape and transform each other in reciprocal ways. People use media to express themselves in meaning-making practices; simultaneously, the media shape how people communicate in cultural and religious contexts. Wedding rites are therefore strongly mediatised, as each medium involved carries its own symbolic narrative: from the white dress denoting the bride’s innocence, to the flower bouquet symbolising fertility, to the rings that mark the couple’s new and eternal marital status. The ceremony venue itself signifies either the religious or civil sphere, while the banquet with music and dance offers a space to celebrate the transformation and to bring together the two families and social circles. Each of these media contributes its own story to the rite of passage. Wedding couples around the world connect through similar symbols like the wedding ring and the white dress and form a community with which they bond. In doing so, they reproduce cultural–religious norms that convey particular values (Strano 2006). These norms and values circulate not only among couples themselves, but also through the entertainment industry, for example, in wedding shows and films (Mbunyuza-Memani 2018; Hefner 2016; Segrin and Nabi 2002; Ingraham 2008; Boden 2001).

A Gendered Rite of Passage

Gender functions as an organising category throughout all stages of the rite: during preparation, ceremony, reception, and even the final moments of the celebration, participatory roles are commonly distributed according to gendered norms. In several cultures and religious traditions, a heteronormative binary paradigm has been or is dominant (Fetner and Heath 2016). Weddings therefore constitute a productive cultural–religious arena not only for reproducing gender norms, but also for challenging and renegotiating them (Lieu 2014). Wedding couples can easily play with these heteronormative codes by wearing the white bridal dress or the black smoking in different roles (Kimport 2012). By doing so, they question traditional values and reinterpret binary gender roles in the wedding rite. This chain of rewriting traditions with its norms and values shows how the past is connected with the present and reaches out to the future. Marc A. Ouellette notes that weddings take part in this process and even describes them as advertisements for future weddings and their norms, with photographs actively contributing to this function:

… since weddings are part of the advertising for weddings, the pictures become part of that recursive operation. The bride (especially) and the groom become the advertising for their own consumption in a clear cause-effect reversal. They are being sold a packaged version of themselves.

(Ouellette 2018)

Visual media play a central role in the handing down of wedding traditions and gender ideals. Couples and their guests remember the event by looking at photographs and videos. They not only meet their younger selves in the photos but also family members that might have passed away. The wedding dress, the flower bouquets, the ceremony, the wedding reception, and everything else is captured in these pictures. The rite of passage is thus stored in these wedding media forever and partly brought to life when the photographs are viewed.

Contributions to This Issue

We open this reprint with Carla Danani’s “Marriage as Institution”, which sets the theoretical foundation by exploring marriage as both a constraining structure and a fertile ethical space for human flourishing. The focus then moves into the contemporary political arena with Sabine Exner-Krikorian’s “The Introduction of Same-Sex Marriage in Germany–A Question of Conscience and/or Faith?”, which investigates how political and religious actors frame same-sex marriage through discourse strategies of conscience, showing how institutional norms enter public debate.

The reprint then widens its lens to diverse cultural and geographical perspectives. In “Six Rites of Allied Harmony”, Yu Wu and Zhidiankui Xu trace the Confucian shaping of ancient Chinese wedding rites across dynasties, while Atila Kartal, in “Cultural Codes of Marriage Rituals in Anatolia”, reveals how Islamic marriage, oral tradition, and ritual practice culminate in evolving interpretations of kinship and continuity. Turning to gender and sexuality, Benedikt Bauer’s “Wedding, Marriage, and Matrimony” offers church-historical case studies from the Reformation to the Moravian tradition, showing how concepts of marital union are mediated and regulated through gendered imagery. From there, Jörg Wettlaufer’s “Visual Representations of Weddings in the Middle Ages” looks further back into history, uncovering how medieval visual sources reveal legal, religious, and social norms embedded in wedding rituals.

Finally, the reprint turns to the contemporary lived experience of weddings through the lens of mediatisation. Paul Löffler’s “The Wedding and Its Medialization” offers a psychoanalytical perspective on weddings as sites of social identification, where media practices actively shape the ritual and the self-understanding of its participants. Extending this understanding of mediatisation into physical space, Mariateresa Giammetti’s “Inter-Religious Architecture for Wedding Spaces” demonstrates how architectural environments, whether religious, civil, or interfaith, mediate and structure the ritual experience, influencing identity and community formation. The reprint closes with Marie-Therese Mäder’s “For Ever and Ever the Perfect Wedding Picture”, which shows how wedding photography merges religious and secular aesthetics and creates a “visual enchantment” that continues to shape both memory and meaning. Taken together, these contributions reveal weddings as rich media ecologies that integrate environment, image, affect, and identity in contemporary cultural–religious life.

Looking Ahead: Future Research Directions

Future research on the mediatisation of weddings and religion should expand beyond European contexts and engage more deeply with “Global South” traditions to capture the global diversity of ritual practices. Comparative interreligious and transcultural studies are particularly promising as they can illuminate how different communities adapt and transform wedding rituals through media. Social media constitutes a further, distinct area of inquiry. Its growing use in wedding contexts fundamentally reshapes both the perception and documentation of these rites of passage. Social media posts diverge markedly from traditional wedding photographs, which are designed for durability and long-term retrieval. The ephemeral nature of these digital artefacts is likely to transform practices of remembrance, memory formation, and intergenerational transmission. Emerging technologies also call for systematic investigation: the increasing use of AI in wedding image production raises questions about authenticity, aesthetics, and the reshaping of visual norms. Moreover, intersectional perspectives including race, class, gender, and migration remain crucial in understanding how power structures shape access to wedding media, influence representational styles, and produce differentiated experiences of the wedding rite. Together, these directions open a rich field for analysing how mediatisation continues to transform one of the most symbolically charged rituals across cultures.