When Urtė Žukauskaitė-Zabukė and her future husband began planning their wedding, they found themselves caught between two options that neither fully reflected who they were.
A church wedding was not right for the nonreligious couple. A civil ceremony, they felt, lacked the personal meaning they wanted to express.
“We are not religious, and a religious marriage ceremony did not suit us,” Žukauskaitė-Zabukė recalled. “But the civil ceremony did not seem to communicate our values, either.”
Their experience ultimately helped inspire a growing movement in Lithuania that seeks greater recognition for secular life events, from weddings and births to funerals, as the country navigates changing attitudes toward religion and belief.
On World Humanist Day, celebrated annually on June 21, Lithuanian humanists argued that religion, particularly the Catholic faith, continues to occupy a privileged place in public life, leaving nonbelievers without equal access to some services and forms of recognition available to religious communities.
