Ben Higgins and Lauren Bushnell are in an interesting situation — they’re engaged, but they actually barely know each other. They met on The Bachelor, he proposed, and now we’re seeing the slowly moving road to the altar on Ben & Lauren: Happily Ever After. When he was on The Bachelor, Ben Higgins made it a point to discuss his faith and how important his Christian roots were to him. Now that he's set to wed his season's winner, fans may wonder if Lauren Bushnell is religious, too.
Religion is very important to Ben. Hailing from Warsaw, Indiana, and currently living in Denver, Colorado, Ben was raised with the church. He worked as an intern at the Warsaw Community Church in his youth, and he served as a director for a faith-based volunteer association in Cuzco, Peru, when he was in college. Ben also has a tattoo that’s dedicated to his faith. It’s a quote from Proverbs 16:3 that says, “Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and he will establish your plans.” Ben is not the first religious person ever to be on The Bachelor or The Bachelorette — Jake Pavelka, Sean Lowe, and Emily Maynard came before him — but it’s worth it to note that Ben was very honest in wanting a woman who participated in and respected his faith. That’s fair enough.
After some digging around on the Internet, I admit that I couldn’t really find anything reputable about Lauren’s religious tendencies. Her Twitter biography says “fiancée, daughter, sister, believer,” so I assume that means that she does believe in God and is a Christian. That’s just me extrapolating from the bio — I’m not sure if it’s true. Lauren could be a religious person, but she may not be comfortable sharing that part of herself with the world. She went on a reality television show and got engaged in front of hundreds of millions of people, but religion is very personal to people. Lauren’s not obligated to share the way she prays (or doesn’t).
Whatever her religious affiliation, Ben seems comfortable with it. Ben and Lauren have just known each other a year (filming for The Bachelor wrapped last October), and they’ve made it very clear in various interviews that, right now, they’re trying to set as solid a foundation for a marriage as they can. You get engaged in six weeks or so on The Bachelor, but that doesn’t mean that you have to get married six weeks later. These two are taking their time. In an interview with E! News, Lauren said that she and Ben are in couple’s therapy and that it didn’t mean they were in trouble. "It was more preventative,” she said. “We want to have a really solid foundation, and we want to address certain problems maybe before they even exist and just have that third party to help us through pre-marriage and engagement and being a new couple."
Ben and Lauren are totally going about their engagement in the right way, taking their time to discuss all of the issues that are important to them — this could include religion, too. They’re charting their own course for marriage, and I think that will set them up for a long life of love and success.
Images: Josh Vertucci/Freeform
