Balanced Advice for Interfaith Families

Today, you can read a Q and A with me over on a blog called Moms Are Human. Blogger Elizabeth Katz (no relation) is a young intermarried mom who contacted me for more information on the “both” option for interfaith families.

Maybe because my interfaith identity often means I see more than one viewpoint on an issue, I try not to go bossing interfaith couples around:  I do not rank the choices interfaith families have, or label any of them problematic. I understand interfaith families choosing Judaism. I also understand interfaith families choosing Christianity, or Islam, or Buddhism…

If, on this blog, I continue to highlight the full exploration of both family religions, I do this because it is the journey of my own children, and the one I am best qualified to describe in real time. But also, I emphasize this option because it is the least understood, with little support from religious institutions, and little presence in the media or cyberspace.  As an interfaith child and a journalist, I feel compelled to provide counterweight: I am keenly aware of issues of balance. And so I blog to disseminate the existence of the “both” option, but I do not claim that it is the right option for everyone.

I  understand that alliance with religious institutions, and allegiance to a particular belief system, practically obligates a blogger to advocate one option over other options. Because independent interfaith communities do not prescribe to a particular set of beliefs,  we do not feel compelled to urge families to adopt a particular religious label (though some members of independent interfaith communities do label their children as Jewish, for instance, while still wanting their children educated in both religious traditions).

In the end, in spite of my ambivalence about giving advice, I did respond to Elizabeth’s request to provide specific strategies that will be helpful in raising interfaith children, no matter what choices a couple makes.

Summer Fiction: Interfaith Love Story

We now have three generations of voracious readers in my family: I am sandwiched between my book-loving mother, and my book-loving teenage daughter. Rather than going to the library, my mother buys novels and then recycles them to us, in a heroic effort to keep her local independent bookstore from going under. Each time I visit her, I find a stack of books next to the guest bed, and  stuff them in my carry-on.

This summer, I scored a wonderful new hardback novel, and before I could get at it, my daughter grabbed it off my book pile. “I didn’t realize until I was hooked that this is an OLD PEOPLE love story,” she remarked a few hours later, peering at me with wide eyes from behind the half-finished novel. True enough, the main characters in Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand are mature, but they are also funny, intellectual, and engaged in a passionate interfaith love story. My daughter raced through the book–then I did the same.

For years, I have been reviewing new interfaith fiction, while the list of non-fiction on interfaith love remains frustratingly short. For some reason, our fiction writers recognize love across cultural and religious barriers as a central theme in our globalizing culture, a very contemporary theme with ancient resonance. The treatment in fiction of these issues can be far more nuanced, more elegant, and more sympathetic than the territorial posturing of non-fiction writers, who usually have an axe or two to grind on the subject of interfaith marriage.

In any case, I urge you to immediately buy, borrow, or (sigh) download Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, an utterly engaging first novel by British author Helen Simonson, an expatriate now living outside Washington. In her book, Major Pettigrew, a very proper, lonely widower, falls for Mrs. Ali, a Muslim Pakistani widow and the shopkeeper in their tiny English village. Adventures both hilarious and poignant ensue.

At one point, Mrs. Ali flees the village, and the village Vicar delivers to Major Pettigrew words that many of us, in interfaith families, will find all too familiar. He attempts to comfort the Major, saying:  “…it’s for the best, believe me.”  He goes on to describe the interfaith couples he has married, and the opposition they face from their own families, and how they come to him for guidance. “They want me to promise they’ll be together in heaven, when the truth is I can’t even offer both a plot in the cemetery. They expect me to soft-pedal Jesus as if he’s just one of many possible options.”

Simonson touches on some very real issues here. Many cemeteries exclude interfaith couples from family plots. Many Christian clergy, and family members, fret that the Christian partner in an interfaith marriage will abandon Jesus, or that the non-Christian partner will not go to heaven.

Simonson’s characters are complex, never one-dimensional, and I even felt a bit of sympathy for the Vicar–he represents one of the last vestiges of a cultural empire, trying to toe a fast-vanishing line as he makes his best case against interfaith love. But (spoiler alert!) I was relieved to discover that he cannot stop the Major, in the end, from loving or pursuing Mrs. Ali. Those of us in happy interfaith families will be anxious to discover whether or not this charming couple will prevail, and join our ranks.  Thanks for passing this book on, Mom!

Defending Interfaith Families

 

A tidal wave of new interfaith blogposts is washing through the internet. This is a good thing, even though I don’t agree with some of the postings. I  have been paddling around the cyber-ocean for the last day or two, frantically commenting here and there, and it seemed like time to gather some of the recent links for my readers in one place.

One impetus for all the new blog posts  is the impending interfaith wedding (at the end of this month) of Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky. Who will officiate? What choices will they make as an interfaith couple (and eventually, as interfaith parents)? One of the longer and more thoughtful pieces, by a religion blogger on Politics Daily, was marred by a link to the recent shoddy and very slanted Washington Post opinion piece  attacking interfaith marriages, by an affiliate of a think tank called the ”Institue for American Values” (though the Post did not even acknowledge this affiliation).

 The Post piece purported to show that divorce is higher among interfaith couples, by twisting the flimsy research to fit this assertion, and the Politics Daily blogger repeated the assertion as fact. One really lousy opinion piece, now linked and held up as proof that interfaith marriages fail. It makes me nostalgic (I am a former Newsweek fact-checker) for the rigor and standards of old-school print journalism.

Meanwhile, apparently coincidentally,  a piece defending raising children with both religions by one Kate Fridkis appeared in the Huffington Post. The author is an interfaith child who chose Judaism and is engaged to a Christian. Apparently, she got to know the Interfaith Community in New York City as a teacher in their religious education program. Unfortunately, her blog post had that breezy, cute tone many young bloggers seem to favor. Partly as a result, her post fell prey to an attack from Ed Case of interfaithfamily.com (a website encouraging “Jewish choices”).

Case offers nothing but anecdotal evidence to assert the superiority of choosing one religion over choosing both. And he makes a serious misstep in this paragraph:

Fridkis writes that “a growing number of people are unwilling to give up their religious tradition just because their partner has a different one.” I question whether she has any data to back up that statement. She may be right that there is a trend in that direction – but I hope she isn’t. 
 

Oops. It’s one thing to argue that interfaith couples should choose Judaism for their children. It’s another thing to say you hope people will give up their religion when they intermarry–that’s not the usual stance, in my experience, at interfaithfamily.com.

Case’s post, in turn, stimulated a passionate defense of the “both” option from a (sadly, anonymous) blogger over at a site called fiftypercenters.com, written by a collective of interfaith bloggers (some born as interfaith children, some intermarried). In the past, I have found their orientation to be far more than 50% Jewish. So I was delighted when the blogger known as “Princess Max” posted a detailed rebuttal to Case, calling his post patronizing.  Though I also understand that interfaithfamily.com is caught between a rock (Jewish institutional acceptance and support) and a hard place (the reality of the growing and thriving independent interfaith communities movement).

Anyway, if you are raising your happy children with both religions, or if you are simply in a happy interfaith marriage, I encourage you to go out and post your own comments on any, or all, of these blogs. If we do not want to be ignored, or patronized, or mischaracterized, or misunderstood, we have to continue to speak up.

Roger Williams, My Bat Mitzvah, and the “Lively Experiment”

Sometimes I feel like such an interfaith rebel, I want to run away into the wilderness and start my own colony–a place where people can define their own religious identities as they please. Roger Williams did exactly that back in 1636, when he created the colony that became Rhode Island.

Williams arrived in the Massachusetts Bay colony as a Puritan in 1631, fleeing the religious oppression by the Church of England. But his restless spiritual quest, and his vision of complete separation of church and state, led him to bounce from Plymouth to Salem, leave the Puritans and found the first Baptist church in the Americas, and ultimately, to break from any and all religious institutions. In 1635, the Puritans convicted him of sedition and heresy for his “diverse, new and dangerous opinions.”

Williams fled south on foot through the winter snow and threw himself on the mercy of American Indian sachems, who harbored and supported him. Williams learned the Naragansett language (he already spoke French, Dutch, Latin and Hebrew), and eventually wrote the first English book on an American Indian tongue (in 1640, but still in print today). He also defended the rights of Indians to compensation for their lands, and attempted (ultimately without sucess) to prevent the slavery of Africans in his visionary colony. Ultimately, this colony founded on the idea of religious freedom and pluralism became the refuge of famed religious dissident Anne Hutchinson and the anabaptists, Quakers, Jews, and any others who chafed under Puritan law.

Last week, I drove into Providence to deliver my teenage daughter to a summer college program, and as the elegant white marble dome of the Rhode Island state capitol rose into view above the city, my thoughts returned to Roger Williams. The dome rests on an inscription from the 1663 charter from England’s King Charles II granting Williams the right “To hold forth a lively experiment that a most flourishing civil state may stand and best be maintained with full liberty in religious concernments.”

As a Bostonian Jew steeped in colonial history, and an interfaith child drawn to “out of the box” religious ideas, I discovered Roger Williams early on. In 1973, as part of my Bat Mitzvah preparation, I visited and wrote a research report on the oldest synagogue in America, the Touro Synagoge, built in Rhode Island in 1763. The synagogue was built by the descendants of fifteen Sephardic Jewish families who heard of Williams and his “lively experiement” and came to Rhode Island in 1658 seeking the opportunity to freely practice their religion.

More than 350 years after Williams ran off to join the Naragansetts, we are still struggling to protect and strengthen what he named the “wall of separation” between church and state. Just this week, I read an interesting perspective on the topic from that very thoughtful Pagan blog, The Wild Hunt. Meanwhile, the progressive Jewish world is filled this morning with expressions of relief that Israel has at least postponed a bill that would put more power into the hands of ultra-Orthodox rabbis to regulate who is considered Jewish under state law.

Five years after my Bat Mitzvah, I ended up moving from Boston to Providence for college. As students exploring our new city, my friends and I would often frolic through Prospect Park, where the statue of Roger Williams overlooks Providence, his hand suspended in the air, blessing the “lively experiment” he created. At the time, I thought it was hilarious when friends scaled the statue to place a yo-yo hanging on a string from the statue’s oustretched hand. Now, in my sentimental middle-age, this prank seems shockingly irreverent. In building communities to welcome and provide refuge to interfaith families, we have few guides and heroes. Roger Williams is surely one of them.

Cultural Christianity, Boston Brown Bread, and Airport Security

I just returned from a summer trip to Massachusetts (where I was born and raised) and Rhode Island (where I went to college). It got me thinking about my roots as a New Englander, and as a sort of cultural Christian. Many Jews and non-Jews understand the idea of cultural Judaism: the concept that someone may not be a religious Jew, may be an atheist, and yet may feel defined by the foodways and language and customs of a particular Jewish civilization (most commonly, the Ashkenazi Jewish culture from Eastern Europe that predominates in the U.S.).

On the other hand, the idea that one could be a cultural (as opposed to religious) Christian is relatively new and more contentious. Much of what I see (through my Jewish lens) as Christian culture is perceived by Christians (and even non-Christians) to be not ethnic, but simply neutral, or the “American” norm. I understand. Growing up in New England, I was not strongly aware of the Puritan flavor of my culture: it was all I had ever experienced. I could not have described what is unique about New England culture until I went away, and lived in the (more Jewish) culture of New York City, and in a Muslim country, and a Catholic country, and then came back to see New England through the eyes of a visitor.

Now, when I return to my childhood home, I see that my parents chose a classic Protestant New England village in which to raise their children, with a town hall graced by a white steeple, overlooking a town green designed for grazing community sheep. As (half) Jews in this context, we were exotic. I grew up subconsciously conforming: wearing Fair Isle sweaters, corduroys, kilts. An interfaith pioneer, my mother agreed to raise us as Jews. But she took advantage of the (less stringent) Reform Judaism of the 1960s, to steep us in (very unkosher) New England cuisine. A wonderful cook to this day, she fed us on clam chowder with bacon, baked scrod, steamed clams, lobster rolls, cornbread baked in a cast-iron mold into the shape of little ears of corn, and B&M Brown Bread with baked beans.

B&M Brown Bread, a New England tradition,  comes in the form of a cylinder, in a can. “Why would anyone eat that?” recoils my husband, a New Jersey native. Because it’s delicious! The dark, sweet, moist bread contains all natural ingredients straight from the Pilgrim and American Indian larder: rye flour, corn meal, molasses, buttermilk, raisins. You steam the bread in a can, because the Indians and Pilgrims cooked this way, over a fire. My friend Marika from Vermont remembers her mother (a pioneering Episcopal priest) making it from scratch: you can steam the bread in a special cylindrical mold, or with Protestant Yankee thrift,  in an old coffee can.

My mother served brown bread as part of the traditional New England Saturday supper with baked beans (made with salt pork, mustard and molasses) and hot dogs. Or as a snack spread with cream cheese. You can order the canned bread, along with a lot of other nostalgic New England fare, from the Vermont Country Store.

Marika and I were reminiscing with my mother recently about our shared nostalgia for brown bread. So when I arrived at my childhood home outside Boston this week, my mother presented me with two one-pound cans of B&M Brown Bread: one for me and one for Marika. They filled about half of my rolling carry-on bag, but their mere existence on the earth, in an era of globalization and homogenization, delighted me. I cannot wait for my children to come home from camp, so that I can initiate them into this aspect of their New England heritage. The cans of bread fit right in with my agenda of uncovering and celebrating the deep and specific connections to every culture and religion in their complex backgrounds.

At the Providence airport, the two huge cans stopped the conveyor belt instantly, as the security officer struggled to devine the meaning of the X-ray picture on his screen. “It’s B&M Brown Bread!” I exclaimed, panicked that I would lose my treasure. My heart sank as a second security officer in rubber gloves removed my bag from the luggage stream and called me over to an inspection table. He lifted a can and turned to me with a grave expression. “I’m sorry miss, but it’s near break time, so I’m going to have to confiscate one of the two cans you have here.”  

Flustered, I did not digest his meaning, nor notice at first the twinkle in his eye.  ”But there’s no liquid in the can!” I protested in anguish. “What is the rule against brown bread?”

He slowly repeated himself, and I finally saw the glimmer of a smile behind his stern voice, “It’s near break time, so we’re going to take one of these cans of bread here.”

With a huge relieved grin, I finally caught on to the joke. I knew that travelers were not supposed to josh with airport security (for instance, about the possibility of using canned brown bread as a weapon). It had not occurred to me that the security officers would allow themselves to play a  joke on me. As I zipped the two precious cans back safely into my bag, I was suffused with the warmth of embarassment, but also the warmth of sharing this quirky love for canned bread with the security officer–my fellow New Englander. And I was thankful to my mother for raising us with love for the particularities of this culture, and for my children for existing, so that I can pass this love on.

Walking to Church: Sabbath and Shabbat

On Sunday morning, my husband’s family decided to walk to the chapel in the beach community where they have been summering for generations. I was pleased when my teenage daughter agreed to walk with us and attend the service. As much as I love our community of interfaith families, as much as I believe that community to be just as “authentic” as ancient religions, I also believe it is essential to expose my children to synagogues and churches. Whenever we visit a synagogue or church, I use these occasions to deliver some (not so) stealth religious education on ritual and customs, to reinforce ties to family history and culture, and to create space for my children to feel comfortable in diverse sacred spaces.

And so we set off into a glorious Fourth of July morning, the air sweet with lilacs, the intense blue of hydrangeas set off against the weathered grey shingles of the summer cottages in the lanes. Despite the very Anglo-Saxon Protestant setting, I could not help feeling like a family of Orthodox Jews strolling to shul. While I love to claim my bothness, as someone who was raised as a Jew and still identifies myself as a Jew, I have a strong tendency to compare and contrast any new religious experience with Jewish practice. Anyway, on the walk to church, I suddenly understood the deep pleasure of walking to synagogue. Walking, observing the Sabbath with our bodies, we were on a family pilgrimage, removed from the household, chores and work. You can argue about the logic or pragmatism of the Orthodox prohibition against driving on Shabbat. But you can’t really argue against the tonic of a good family walk.

But when we got to the church steps, I felt a momentary and involuntary skittishness, even though the official greeters were old family friends and could not have been more pleasant and welcoming. I did not grow up going to churches:  entering a church will never feel completely natural to me. The problem is not so much theological—I understand Jesus as a great metaphor, just as most of my liberal, progressive Christian friends do, and I am open to studying his words and discussing his inspiring life. The problem is the weight of history, culture, and the lingering effects of my own narrow and defensive religious education.

I don’t want my children to feel the way I do: I want them to be able to feel at home in a church, if they end up finding churches that feed their souls, or nurture their families. So I sat in the pew, feeling vaguely “other,” but taking pleasure in the fact that my daughter now sees the list of three-digit numbers posted behind the pulpit, numbers that would have mystified me at her age, and understands them as representing the hymns in today’s service. Without glancing at me, she reaches for the red hymnal, and with simple grace and confidence, finds the opening hymn.

Interfaith in New Orleans

I have a mystical, spiritual connection to New Orleans, even though, somehow, I’ve never been there. I imagine New Orleans as a city where “being both” comes naturally: being both French and English-speaking, being both American Indian and African-American, being both Catholic and an adherent of the great West African religious traditions.

But also, readers of this blog know the story of my great-grandparents, a Rabbi and a Jewish orphan who met and married in New Orleans. Their grandson, my father, still plays jazz piano at the age of 86, and the haunting melody to “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?” was part of the soundtrack of my childhood.

So somehow, it seemed like fate when a poignant and beautifully-written blog by an intermarried woman in New Orleans began sending new readers to “On Being Both,” last week. To understand why I write this blog, read her post on discovering “On Being Both.”

My goal in writing here has always been to support the members of interfaith families in feeling whole, proud, balanced:  to encourage them to fully explore their religious and cultural ancestries. Those of us in Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Boston, Denver and a handful of other cities are lucky to have thriving interfaith family communities to support us. Elsewhere, people who want to raise children with access to both religions still need to struggle to find religious institutions to accommodate this radical notion, or at least to look the other way. I admit that I hope to inspire isolated families to build new interfaith communities, so that more children grow up internalizing a positive attitude about their dual birthrights.

I will turn fifty this year, and I am already planning a trip to New Orleans  to celebrate, and to research the story of my great-grandparents. While I am there, I plan to do whatever I can to support the interfaith families of New Orleans in their “bothness.”

“Being Both” as a Political Liability: Nikki Haley’s Religions

I find myself in the very odd position today of empathizing with a Republican gubernatorial candidate from South Carolina. Yes, I speak of Nikki Haley, who hopes to win  her state’s primary tomorrow. Haley was born Nimrata Nikki Randhawa and raised in a Sikh family from India, but converted to Christianity at age 24 and was baptized as a Methodist. What’s interesting to me is the degree to which her perceived religious “bothness” is being used against her by political opponents.

Haley “admits” that she and her husband went through two wedding ceremonies—one Christian, one Sikh. And she has the chutzpah to continue to celebrate Sikh holidays with her extended family. Sounds familiar to many of us in interfaith America. One Pastor Ray Popham of something called the Oasis Church International told CNN: “I think she needs to be straight up with people, if she is both. If she believes that you can be both, then she should say that up front.”

It comes as no surprise that there are still regions of America where proving your Christianity is important in the political arena. President Obama certainly learned that lesson early on. I can only imagine what folks like Pastor Popham think of the idea that one could somehow be both Christian and Sikh. What really interests me in this story is the growing acknowledgement that there is even a possibility of identifying with more than one religion, of believing in both (even if the acknowledgement is tinged with the implication that dual-identity is wrong-headed).

I am exhilarated by the inevitable conclusion that the demographic reality of bothness is lapping at the feet of even the most conservative and Christian Americans.  I realize that Nikki Haley probably needs to deny her “bothness” right now and assert that she is 100% Christian through and through, if she wants to get elected.  And I probably hate Haley’s positions on all sorts of issues–afterall, she has been endorsed by Sarah Palin. But I can’t resist the urge here to send out a message of support to her as an interfaith person.

Nikki, you are not alone. Like more and more of Americans, you are both, by virtue of family history and personal experience, whether the Pastor Pophams of this world like it or not, in fact, whether you like it or not. Interfaith families are everywhere now, not just in New York and Washington and Boston, but in Utah and Iowa and South Carolina. We welcome you, and encourage you to claim your right to being both.

Tuned to the “Bothness” Frequency

As I write this morning, I’m also watching the Wold Cup match between Japan and Cameroon. I was living in West Africa in 1990 when Cameroon emerged as the first African team to make it to the quarter-finals. I became a lifelong soccer fan in those moments when the entire continent would go silent, huddled around televisions powered by car batteries, and then cheer in unison at each goal.

Why am I writing about soccer? Because no matter what I’m doing, I seem to be inadvertently tuned in to a frequency broadcasting the growing “bothness” of our world. Just now, I heard the announcers mention that one of the Ghanaian players is half-German. He’s both. And one of the Japanese players was born in the soccer-obsessed nation of Brazil. He’s both too. Increasingly, we’re all on the bothness spectrum, whether through intermarriage, immigration, adoption or simply through choosing to ally ourselves in new ways, through purposeful. global recombination.

Also this week, I tuned in to the “bothness frequency” when Diane Ives and Jon Lickerman, my fellow members of the Interfaith Families Project, got a letter published in the Washington Post testifying to the strength of interfaith marriages and families supported by our community and to the exuberant “bothness” of their son.

And also this week, I attended the Network of Spiritual Progressives conference in Washington, and tuned in to the bothness frequency as I heard speaker after speaker testify to the importance of “breaking down boundaries,” “crossing borders” and “embracing the other.” While not everyone engaged in interfaith dialogue likes to acknowledge this, interfaith families walk this walk every day. The proliferation of official interfaith conferences and organizations creates a constant hum on the bothness frequency, even though many do not (want to) understand what they hear this way.

Earlier this month, the bothness frequency came in loud and clear as I read the bewildered response of a Jewish blogger to Orthodox Rabbi Brad Hirschfeld’s realistic and open-hearted acknowledgement of families raising their children with both religions. The blogger notes with discomfort the Rabbi’s “relaxed attitude towards syncretism,” as if all religions were not, by nature and throughout history, inherently syncretic. The fact is that more and more members of the clergy are beginning to understand that interfaith communities are not going away, and may even have some merit.

Finally, one of my favorite bloggers, MaNishtana, wrote a powerful post this week about his own bothness: he is an African-American, and a Jew. His words reflect and amplify and resonate for all of us who are both, in all of our many ways of being both. He’s broadcasting loud and clear on the bothness frequency. Check it out.

Successful Interfaith Marriages Ignored Once Again

In yesterday’s Washington Post, an author named Naomi Schaefer Riley wrote an extremely opinionated attack on interfaith marriage, stating that such marriages “can be tragic” and that “tsk-tsking grandmothers may be right.” I have so many problems with the way this article was written, it’s hard to know where to start.

First of all, Riley devotes her first several paragraphs to the (old) news of the Reyes case, a spectacular interfaith divorce that has already been widely covered in the press and blogosphere. This was not a case of an interfaith marriage gone bad, as much as it was a case of two people in a really, really ugly divorce using religion as a weapon. It is outrageous to imply that the Reyes case is common or indicative of any trend.

Second of all, Riley did not even bother to declare her own biases. This should have been an ethical problem for the Post editors, but never mind that. Every statement by anyone about interfaith marriage is colored by the experience of the person making the statement. Is Riley trying to defend her own choices? Is she, for instance, a Jewish woman married to a Christian, raising children Jewish, as Ms. Reyes tried to do?  I guess we’ll have to wait for the “online chat” with the author this afternoon to find out. But in my experience, writers rarely cover this topic unless it stems from personal experience. And at this point in America, every person with an extended Jewish family has personal experience with this topic.

The heart of Ms. Riley’s “argument” is that divorce is inevitably more common among intermarried couples, a statement that has been made by those “tsking grandmothers” for generations now, based on scanty data, and studies that are often conducted by researchers with a very strong anti-intermarriage bias.

The data Riley references is extremely shaky. One study dates back 17 years–before the advent of communities designed for interfaith families, and before many Jewish institutions began to accept and welcome interfaith families. When she does cite a more recent study, she cherry-picks from the results, pointing out two particular scenarios under which interfaith marriages have higher divorce rates, and ignoring the actual conclusion in this study. The abstract reads, “Theological beliefs and the belief dissimilarity of spouses have little effect on the likelihood of dissolution ((of marriage)) over time.”

That sure makes sense to me. Our rabbi and minister have seen hundreds of interfaith couples put their children through our dual-religious education program over the past 15 years. Of these hundreds of couples, our minister notes, three couples have gotten divorced–and one of those three couples got back together.  Statistically, we’re a bunch of ridiculously happy interfaith marriages over here, getting ignored by researchers and writers. Part of what makes our marriages strong, I believe, is the experience of building our interfaith community together.

Interfaith divorces can happen, as in the Reyes case, when one parent or the other cannot abide being held to a promise made before marriage to raise children in the other partner’s religion. That doesn’t happen in an interfaith families community, where both parents are free to fully share their religion with the children. Interfaith divorces can happen when couples feel lost, alone, without a community to support them. That doesn’t happen in an interfaith families community, where both members of the couple have equal standing in a community that fully supports their choice to intermarry.

Obviously, I have a bias based on my own experience in our vibrant interfaith community. I am very open about that bias.  But I  also know a bunch of very happy interfaith families now raising Jewish children, in Jewish communities that have been working hard to fully include them. The statistics Riley relies on, even the more recent ones, do not reflect where interfaith families are right now in this journey, or where we are heading. It is a shame that the Washington Post gave such prominent display to a piece infused with outdated research, and a strangely antiquated attitude.