I've tried both these and still get failure due to conflicts. At the end of my patience, I cloned master in another location, copied everything into the other branch and committed it. which let me continue. The "-X theirs" option should have done this for me, but it did not.
git merge -s recursive -X theirs master
error: 'merge' is not possible because you have unmerged files. hint: Fix them up in the work tree, hint: and then use 'git add/rm ' as hint: appropriate to mark resolution and make a commit, hint: or use 'git commit -a'. fatal: Exiting because of an unresolved conflict.