Children of the Religious Enlightenment: The Question of Interfaith Marriage in Nineteenth-Century America

Anne C. Rose. Beloved Strangers: Interfaith Families in Nineteenth-Century America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. xii + 288 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, and index. $42.00.

The biblical story of Ruth, a Moabite woman who marries the Israelite Boaz and adopts his religion, is a remarkable account of intermarriage in an ancient Jewish community that overwhelmingly proscribed such practice. The union of Ruth and Boaz is all the more anomalous given the specific Mosaic ban on intermarriage with Moabites for a period of ten generations. Yet to many readers in the predominately Christian context of American religious history, Ruth's story was less about intermarriage itself than about the results of her union—that she became the great-grandmother of David, and therefore, according to the Gospel of Matthew, a member of the direct lineage running from Abraham to Jesus Christ. The eighteenth-century New England theologian Jonathan Edwards viewed the story in this light, referring to "that marriage of Boaz with Ruth, whence sprang the Savior of the world." Equally important, Ruth became, in Edwards' estimation, "a type of the Gentile church, and also of every sincere convert": one who forsook all previous attachments in order to follow Christ. ¹ The nature of Ruth's prior faith commitments and the demands of her Moabite gods scarcely concerned Edwards or most other American interpreters, for whom Ruth became a model of willing religious conversion and successful assimilation.

In Beloved Strangers: Interfaith Families in Nineteenth-Century America, Anne C. Rose recovers the theme of intermarriage in all its social complexity, focusing on couples who retained separate religious identities through an often difficult process of day-to-day negotiation. Rose's sample of twenty-six families includes many elite figures who are well-known for other contributions to American history but whose interfaith marriages typically garner little more than a footnote, if that, in standard biographical reference works. She thus brings to light an important but heretofore neglected dimension of American religious pluralism in the nineteenth century. Intermarriage in the twentieth century, especially as it concerns American Jews, has received considerable attention in scholarly and popular works. Books such as Gabrielle Glaser, Strangers to the Tribe: Portraits of Interfaith Marriage (1997), Ellen Jaffe McClain, Embracing the Stranger: Intermarriage and the Future of the American Jewish Community (1995), and Paul R. Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America (1989), have explored recent history and the contemporary situation, while more general studies in the sociology of religion, such as Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (1988), have pointed to intermarriage as a factor in the declining importance of denominational identity. But intermarriage in the nineteenth century, apart from the extensive literature on race and miscegenation, has remained relatively unexplored until Rose's study.

The book's opening anecdote concerns William Tecumseh Sherman, whose leadership in the Union army in the Civil War has overshadowed his union to Ellen Ewing, a Roman Catholic. Born a Protestant, Sherman became a foster child of Ewing's parents after the death of his father. The Ewings had him baptized a Catholic, but as an adult, he never embraced the faith, which in letters to his wife he referred to as "your creed" and "your church." The severest test of his religious tolerance came when the couple's son Tom, favored by his father for a career as a lawyer, announced his intention to become a Catholic priest. Sherman confided to his daughter his bitterness toward the church, lamenting that all that he held most dear now belonged to "a power that heeds no claim but its own" (p. 4). Though family loyalty proved resilient in the end—Tom, a Jesuit, conducted the service upon his father's death—Sherman remained to his dying day, as Rose puts it, "caught in a web of religious ambivalence, where...