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Chapter 4: Intimate Others Interfaith Families Making a Space for Religious Difference
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126 4 Intimate Others Interfaith Families Making a Space for Religious Difference Most interfaith work is a purposeful, intentional thing. Driven by intellectual passion, politics, or a commitment to community harmony, people of different religious identities find or create the structures that will allow them to explore their difference and find common purpose. But for interfaith couples, the work of dialogue is un-asked for and unmapped. It comes up in the messy daily life of families—what day to call off-limits for soccer practice, what to make for children’s lunches during Passover, how to decorate the house at holiday time, whether or not to serve wine at dinner . Most Americans who make up the 22 percent who marry outside their own religious tradition (American Religious Identification Survey [ARIS] 2001)1 come to this dialogue experience with no particular interest in interfaith dialogue (or perhaps even in religion itself), only in loving a particular person. For some, living with that difference involves nothing more than the ordinary negotiations of coupled existence; for others, interfaith dialogue becomes a matter of survival, raising profound questions about personal identity, family, and what to do with the gaps between the lives they expected to lead and the ones in which they find themselves. In the process, these families are creating a unique mode of interreligious encounter and experimentation that both reflects and advances important recent developments in American spirituality. Access to this site of interfaith encounter is not easy to come by. Domestic life is by definition private, unavailable for outsiders’ analysis except through the blurry snapshots taken by survey data, and through the limited insight that can be gleaned from the stories of family life others are willing to share—stories that are always filtered, of course, through the interpreter’s own experience of the complex dynamics of partnering, parenting, and negotiating religious identity. Demographic data on interfaith marriage—which religious groups are most likely to marry outside their faiths, sociological factors correlating with intermarriage, and the like—are available but of limited use. While they can tell us, for instance, that interfaith marriage is more common among Jews than Mormons, or among college graduates than those with high school educations, they cannot tell us what it is like to be a Jew married to a non-Jew, or how higher learning might reshape traditional religious views in such a way that marriage to a religious “other” becomes intelligible. Since the goal of this project is to understand interfaith encounters as they actually occur in real people’s lives, rather than how academics or religious institutions theorize about them, it is vital to hear from people actually living in interfaith partnerships. To that end, I draw here on two sets of primary data: a series of interviews I conducted with nine interfaith families, and an analysis of exchanges among interfaith families in online discussions. These conversations tell small stories that both enliven and challenge the big stories told by demographers and sociologists of religion, as well as the normative narratives put forth by religious institutions . They also offer a provocative counterpoint to established ideas about who gets involved in interfaith dialogue, why, and what happens when they do. Institutional Anxiety about Interfaith Marriage “For that would turn away your children from following me.” An assessment of attitudes toward interfaith marriage in America through the lens of television and popular films would lead to the conclusion that mixed marriages are everywhere, normal, and beautiful expressions of American ideals of inclusiveness and painless multiculturalism.2 If interfaith couples were to enter their relationships on this assumption, however , they would fast come up against a very different reality. Nearly every organized religious community endorses interfaith dialogue as a matter of good global citizenship. While different groups set different limits on INTIMATE OTHERS 127 [54.242.191.214] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:00 GMT) the specific topics and goals of dialogical work, all are generally agreed that mutual understanding and communal harmony are enhanced by intentional encounters with religious others. When it comes to interfaith marriages, however, the rhetoric of openness and tolerance often changes sharply. Interfaith partnering presses religious institutions to the limits of their interest in dialogue, because it takes place at the heart of religious identity formation and propagation: the family. Jewish and Christian Perspectives Jewish-Christian pairings are by far the most common interfaith combination in the United States today, and both traditions have developed...