LIKE Hanukkah and Christmas, Passover and Easter, which recently coincided, can make for awkward moments for families that observe multiple religious traditions. For interfaith couples, the wedding season can also be a time for uncomfortable conversations: Who will solemnize our ceremony? Will God be mentioned — and if so, whose? Oh, and how will we raise our kids?
Before the 1960s, about 20 percent of married couples were in interfaith unions; of couples married in this century’s first decade, 45 percent were. (My definition includes Catholic-Protestant unions, marriages of mainline Protestants to evangelical Christians, and unions of those who affiliated with a religion and those who didn’t.)
Secular Americans welcome the rise of interfaith unions as a sign of societal progress. The relatively high rates of intermarriage of American Muslims, for example, suggest that their assimilation might resemble that of American Jews of earlier generations.
Even so, interfaith marriages often come with a heavy price. They are more likely than same-faith unions to be unhappy and, in some circumstances, to end in divorce. They also tend to diminish the strength of religious communities, as the devout are pulled away from bonds of tradition and orthodoxy by their nonmember spouses.
In 2010, I commissioned the polling firm YouGov to conduct a nationally representative survey of 2,450 Americans, adjusted to produce an oversampling of couples in interfaith marriages. It found such unions were becoming more common, without regard to geography, income or education level.
Jews were the most likely, and Mormons the least likely, to marry outside the faith. Muslims fell somewhere in the middle. But the likelihood of intermarriage could not be otherwise predicted by any demographic factor except age: The older you are when you wed, the more likely you are to marry outside your faith.
My survey found that 48 percent of people who married before age 25 were in interfaith unions — compared with 58 percent of people who wed between ages 26 and 35, and 67 percent of people who married between ages 36 and 45. (These couples married in various decades, and some were not in their first marriage.)
Those who marry in their 30s and 40s, especially educated professionals, are often at the most secular points in their lives. These couples tended to underestimate how faith can grow in importance as they got older and had children.
Remarkably, less than half of the interfaith couples in my survey said they’d discussed, before marrying, what faith they planned to raise their kids in. Almost four in five respondents (in both same-faith and interfaith marriages) thought having “the same values” was more important than having the same religion in making a marriage work.
The sentiment is understandable, even admirable, but often unrealistic. I found that interfaith couples were less satisfied than same-faith couples by a statistically significant margin — and that the more religiously active spouse (as measured by attendance at religious services) tended to be the unhappier one.
Certain faith pairings seem more likely to result in divorce. While roughly a third of all evangelicals’ marriages end in divorce, that figure climbs to nearly half for marriages between evangelicals and non-evangelicals. It is especially high (61 percent) for evangelicals married to someone with no religion. (My definition of interfaith marriage did not include couples from different evangelical, or different mainline, denominations.)
Evangelicals and black Protestants in interfaith marriages reported the least satisfaction. Mormons, remarkably, reported high levels of satisfaction — in interviews, some expressed confidence that their spouses would eventually convert. Catholics in interfaith marriages were no more likely to divorce than those married to other Catholics.
There were only 44 Jews in my sample, too small to draw definitive conclusions about their divorce rates, but the number for Jew-gentile marriages (35 percent) was more than double that for Jewish couples (16 percent).
Religious leaders I interviewed — and not only Jewish ones — were broadly worried about interfaith marriage. “We have an appalling number of evangelical pastors who will not preach and teach on the issue of interfaith marriage, but who will perform marriages for anyone who comes in,” Russell D. Moore, a leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, told me.
Jihad Turk, of the Islamic Center of Southern California, blamed interfaith marriage in part for declines in mosque attendance. L. Whitney Clayton, a Mormon elder, lamented that intra-faith marriage was hard to promote to those who don’t attend services regularly.
But the rise in interfaith marriage also has a significant upside. The political scientists Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, in their book “American Grace,” showed that the more Americans got to know people of another faith, the more they liked them. My research showed that marrying someone of another faith tended to improve one’s view of that faith.
I am no impartial observer. I’m a Conservative Jew married to a former Jehovah’s Witness, who is African-American. (We are raising our children Jewish.) Our country’s history of assimilation and tolerance is one reason I, a grandchild of Eastern European immigrants, can live as I do. It is why I could marry the man I wanted to, without fear of ostracism.
So while I recognize that the diminishment of religious institutions and a rise in marital instability could be among the long-term effects of interfaith marriages, I cannot wish for the tide to ebb. Nor do I think it will.
Source: NYTimes
We could do away with all this nonsense of “interfaith” problems by simply accepting the truth – ONE ALLAH (GOD), ONE RELIGION (ISLAM) – and we are ALL MUSLIMS. See, simple, isn’t it? No, not really – not as long as SATAN has his way. What a pity – humanity!
what pitiful religious bigotry proclaiming the supremacy of one’s world view instead of celebrating diversity and pluralism of ideas. This is fascism, only worse.
Mr. Deepak, why do you react so vehemently? Do your Vedas/Upanishad etc say anywhere that God is not ONE? Cite an example from the Vedas/Upanishads that said God is not one. And what do your holy books say: tell lies, cheat people, break promises, plunder others’ money or property, torture and kill others and so on? And what does Islam say? We shall be obliged if you throw some light on these topics and pinpoint the basic differences between YOUR holy books and OURS.
Mr. S. Ali. You need to get out of the religion box or at least keep it private. That is the realm of faith, and I am not here to establish the number of god/gods, one or half or a fraction thereof. We will find that out when we are dead, until then conscience, common decency and fairness will see us through better than quoting scriptures. The only point I made is acceptance and accommodating pluralism of ideas. You have no basis or reason to accuse me of reacting when it is your ideology that is hell bent on getting your way or the highway. In one of your posts you quoted Tagore in glorifying diversity, but now you say otherwise. That is quite interesting.
The basic difference since you ask and what I understand, is the Vedas or their commentaries the Upanishads are books on spirituality – a time capsule of man’s spiritual development and evolution over the ages. Hence, we transcend from polytheism to Unity of Godhead. These are the works of Rishis-sages over centuries and there is NO one size fits all religious dogma here. Indeed, there are streams of Atheism – Charvaka and Agnosticism, in them as well. Moreover, these do not claim to be revelations in totality and the purport is not to be a political system. Hence, the basic difference I would think is the Vedas are not dogmas about making it to heaven a la Abrahamic faiths, or with an agenda to convert the world into any ‘true’ religion. Indeed the concept of right or wrong religion do not exist in Vedic philosophy. Please understand I am not saying one is better or worse than the other here at all. Thanks.