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A Religious Community-Based Approach to Wedding within the Framework of the Romanian Traditional Village. In the collective thought specific to the traditional village, marriage is an essential act of human transformation, set by the natural development of the individual but also by the social fabric of the community.  Each of the two actors is the expressions of separate roles and statuses, expressed in the dual system of the exchange: one side receives a member and certain goods while the other gives them away.
In the traditional village (but also in the present one to a great degree), marriage involves a large economic importance.
For the new couple to be recognized and accepted by the community, certain church imposed rules were to be followed: for instance, marriage was forbidden through to third degree relatives. Religious marriage was compulsory but there were also cases when couples would become married religiously when they already had children. The custom of calling out loud in the church was an important moment in establishing and organizing the future wedding; these calls eventually became a sort of public institution which served as a moral court of law. Another important decision taken by the church was to establish the days weddings could take place on. Most field research show the fact that in the first half of the last century weddings were performed in Salaj County villages on Thursdays and/or Fridays. The explanation for this is that the wedding was to be consumed before Sunday, which was fully reserved to church.
Religious marriage or Christian marriage is an act carried out under God’s blessing and takes place in the church, making the union between the two official. For the church, marriage is a sacred moment: the Sacred Moment of Marriage or Wedding is one of the seven Sacred Moments.
Wedding folklore is – most likely – the most important section of the Romanian folklore, just as complex as the wedding sequence itself.
As a conclusion, from the perspective of field research and not only theoretical approach, one can say that wedding involves a multi-discipline and trans-discipline approach, surpassing ethnography and folklore, requiring economical, judicial, political, demographic, mentality, and religious observations; this theoretical and applicative approach to marriage turn any serious research into a vast anthropological study.

Keywords: traditional village, marriage, wedding, religious marriage, wedding folklore.