Beloved Strangers: Interfaith Families in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Beloved Strangers: Interfaith Families in Nineteenth-Century America. By Anne C. Rose. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2001. Pp. xiii, 288. $39.95.)

Beloved Strangers examines twenty-six interfaith (i.e., Catholic, Protestant, Jewish) couples in eighteen extended families who married between 1815 and 1917. Sixteen of the twenty-six couples considered have a Catholic partner (fourteen Catholics marry Protestants, two Catholics marry Jews); three of the Catholic partners are grooms and thirteen are brides. The families considered are middle class and articulate. The twenty-six interfaith couples represent every section of the United States except the far west, but the majority of the couples are from the Middle States and New England. The names of many of the couples and extended families would be familiar to students of United States history, and some, for example, William Tecumseh Sherman (U.S. general), Stephen A. Douglas (U.S. senator), Joel Chandler Harris (author of Uncle Remus), and Charles S. Peirce (philosopher), are well known. The study is based primarily on an extensive examination of letters and family manuscripts (in several archival collections) and some personal publications. Seventy-eight pages of thorough endnotes enable readers to track the author's sources.

Through a close examination of the interfaith marriages the author illustrates how American family life adapted to liberalism, individualism, diversity, and an open society. Fiction and journalism dealing with interfaith marriage published contemporaneously with the lives of the couples described is employed skillfully to illustrate the correspondence between what was occurring in the couples' lives and in American culture. The changing attitudes and pastoral accommodations of religious leaders to interfaith marriage are linked with the developments revealed by the "thick description" of the eighteen extended families. Professor Rose's narrative skill and mastery of the family manuscripts will give readers a sense that they are part of these families, as they live out the challenges and joys of interfaith marriage.

The tone of Beloved Strangers is favorable to interfaith marriages. "Rather than spell the end of religion," the author finds that interfaith marriages "hastened lay-centered and experimental forms of practice." In most of the twenty-six couples, faith was transformed but not lost, and family attachments successfully withstood religious difference. Religious difference itself becomes less of a difference as the study proceeds. Toward the end of the nineteenth century ethnicity, class, and ideology become more significant differences for the couples considered than religion.

Although Catholic interfaith marriages, Catholic pastoral instruction on interfaith marriage, and Catholic fiction describing interfaith marriage are considered, the author never specifically notes that Catholics believe marriage between the baptized is a sacrament. Some explanation of the Catholic theology of marriage would provide a context for several Catholic observations such as the quotation from Casti Connubii, "to make their marriage as nearly as possible approach to the archetype of Christ and the Church" (p. 135). Readers who are unfamiliar with the Catholic theology of marriage will be hard pressed to tell when observations described in the book are standard and when they are overwrought. Bishop Joseph Projectus Machebeuf's remarks (generously copied for the reviewer by the Notre Dame Archives) are accurately described by the author, but his remarks are overwrought. On the other hand, the quotation from Casti Connubii is a typical Catholic way of saying marriage is a living, visible witness of the relationship between Christ and the Church.

Beloved Strangers makes a valuable contribution to the study of American family history, and its extensive endnotes will provide a helpful guide to family papers in archives for researchers. American Catholic Church historians will find that it illuminates a personal dimension of American Catholic life that is infrequently considered. Pastors, marriage counselors, and theologians will find much of interest here. It could be just the right book for a campus minister to suggest when preparing two historians for an interfaith marriage.