We Count. We Just Weren’t Counted.

More on Pew’s Jewish Americans in 2020

For generations, interfaith families who felt excluded, misunderstood, or disrespected by Jewish clergy or institutions, have found other homes. Some gravitated to Unitarian-Universalism, which draws on many religions. Some added Buddhism, or Sufism, or Paganism, to their spiritual practice. And for more than a quarter of a century now, interfaith families have been building their own dual-practice communities in which to honor both Judaism and Christianity.

But very few of these people with complex religious practices (and I have studied hundreds of them) stopped practicing Judaism altogether, or stopped calling themselves Jews.

The irony is that Jews who did stop practicing Judaism altogether are considered Jewish in the new Pew study of Jewish Americans in 2020, as long as they don’t claim a second religion. But if you claim two religions, you forfeit your right to have Pew consider you part of the Jewish community. They excluded 200,000 adults who filled out the survey but claim Judaism and another religion.

This approach is not going to help draw interfaith families closer to Jewish institutions or communities. The Pew study betrays a failure to understand the fluid and non-binary religious complexity of Jews today—of our families, our practices, our identities, our affiliations. And that failure contributes to a misunderstanding of the overall size and diversity of the Jewish community.

A lot has been written about interfaith families in this Pew study already, including by me. But in the weeks since the study was released, I have continued mulling it over, or stewing really, trying to figure out why I feel the study does not capture the American Judaism I know and love. And I have come to the realization that those 200,000 Jews who were actually tallied and then excluded by Pew are only a small fraction of those who were excluded. And that is because many of us never would have finished the survey.

Let me explain.

Imagine you are Jewish and Buddhist, or Jewish and Wiccan, or Jewish and married to a Quaker and giving your children an interfaith education. In short, imagine you are a Jew who is a multiple religious practitioner, or raising multiple religious practitioners. (There is an entire academic literature on multiple religious belonging. I have been the keynote speaker at an international conference on the topic).

Now, imagine sitting down to fill out the Pew survey online, and being faced by a barrage of questions about how you feel about Israel, a country that does not allow interfaith marriage, or allow interfaith couples to be buried together, or accept patrinileal Jews as Jews, or accept Reform conversions. Or, imagine your answer to the religious identity question is, “It’s complicated,” for any number of reasons. In section A on the survey, one third of the questions are about Israel. In section B, half of the questions (or eight questions) mention Israel. Oh, and then in section G, there are “a few questions” on Israel.

Personally, I would have clicked away long before section G. I would not have completed the survey. And neither would a lot of the Jews I know who are raising interfaith kids. And neither would many of the young Jewish activists for Palestinian rights. (Of the people who did complete the Pew survey and qualified to count as Jews, less than half said they feel attached to Israel). The Jewishness we are creating together does not depend on Israel as an identity marker.

Any institution that is trying to understand my Jewishness, while putting that amount of emphasis on a country that doesn’t accept me as a Jew, and while excluding Jews who practice Buddhism or Wicca, is not ready to understand my Jewishness. And, any such institution is not ready to understand the Jewishness of a significant percentage of young progressive Jews in America. They are not ready to understand that virtually all of us in the non-Orthodox Jewish world in America now have extended interfaith families, filled with a kaleidoscope of Jewish practices, identities, and affiliations. And whether or not you choose to count us, we are taking the demographic lead.

How can we fix this?

Honestly, to get better data, data that describes the realities of young progressive Jews in America, and their almost universally interfaith families, we have to wait for new funders to fund new studies. We need studies without the patriarchal “continuity” narrative, and without loyalty to Israel dominating the questions. To fund these new studies, we have to wait for generational or self-made wealth from progressive adult interfaith kids, and from those who are themselves Jewish and Buddhist, or Jewish and Unitarian, or Jewish and Quaker. Or just Jewish, and just insistent on human rights for Palestinians. We are waiting for investment in this inspirational future–a future with all of us who claim Judaism, together creating a path forward for our complex selves, and for our complex families, and for this beautiful and ancient religion.

Journalist Susan Katz Miller is an interfaith families consultant and the author of Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family (2013), and The Interfaith Family Journal (2019).

Jewish Americans (and Interfaith Families) in 2020

Trying to survey the Jewish community is an important, and thankless, task.

Today, Pew Research released their first national study of the Jewish American landscape since 2013. Every assumption, every question, every result, will be scrutinized and debated for years to come.

For interfaith families, there is not really a whole lot that is new to report. In fact, more intriguing and detailed data and analysis has been released elsewhere recently. But I’ll get to that in a moment.

From the point of view of interfaith families, it is important to remember that virtually all studies of interfaith families and the Jewish community, including this Pew report, are funded by Jewish foundations or institutions. So the framework is built on the concerns and questions of institutional Judaism in America. As a result, there are a lot of questions that will feel archaic or beside-the-point to a lot of young American Jews, and to a lot of interfaith families. There’s a lot about relationships to Israel. There’s a lot about participating in traditional Jewish ritual and membership. There are gendered analyses about the role of the mother and the father.

Some two dozen rabbis are thanked in the Pew report acknowledgements, including those notorious for opposing interfaith marriage. It all feels fraught, and weighed down, with traditional Jewish continuity narratives, given how mixed a multitude we are now.

What does this mean for interfaith families? Many of us were excluded from the study. Pew classified people as Jewish, Jewish background, or Jewish affinity, with the bulk of the study focused only on those deemed “Jewish.” Pew created a complex set of rules based on parentage, upbringing, and current identity, for deciding which category to put each person.

• Regardless of their Jewish parentage or Jewish upbringing, anyone who claimed to be both Jewish and Buddhist, or Jewish and Unitarian-Universalist, or Jewish and Pagan, or Jewish and any other religion, was excluded from counting as Jewish, and from the body of this study.
• Someone who claims Jewish cultural identity but no religious identity, and has only one Jewish grandparent, was counted as Jewish if they were raised Jewish.
• Someone who claims Jewish cultural identity but no religious identity, and has only one Jewish grandparent, but was not raised Jewish, was counted only as having Jewish affinity.

Pew did include in their overall Jewish population what they estimate are 200,000 children being raised in Judaism and another religion. However, they excluded an estimated 200,000 adults who identify as Jewish and another religion. Pew’s explanation: “This accounts for the uncertainty inherent in projecting how children will identify when they grow up; some children who are raised as Jewish and another religion go on to identify, in adulthood, solely as Jewish.”

Pew cautions us not to compare this year’s study directly with their last study of Jews in America in 2013. In part this is because they have shifted their sampling from phone calls, to written and online responses. It is not immediately clear to me why the percentage of interfaith couples raising children with more than one religion would have gone down from 25% in 2013 to 12% in 2020. I suspect this has something to do with the increasing number of multi-generational interfaith families being excluded from the “Jewish” category.

What I do know is that the 12% figure does not align with my experience as someone who works full-time supporting interfaith families, nor does it align with recent individual community studies. Anecdotally, one group of Reform rabbis told me that about 50% of the interfaith couples they are now marrying want to “do both.” And recently, I was contacted by two Reform rabbis to speak to a group of interfaith couples, after the rabbis discovered that all of the couples in their group were intending to “do both.”

Even though they are funded by Jewish communities, some recent studies of specific regions align more closely than today’s Pew study with my experience of the growing awareness that you can, indeed, give interfaith children an interfaith education.

In Toronto, 44% of interfaith couples with one Jewish parent are raising kids “with two religious heritages” (as opposed to 39% raising kids exclusively Jewish), according to a 2020 report. This detailed report on interfaith families in Toronto appears to have drawn heavily on my work, revealing texture and nuance, and I will return to it in another post.

Another survey done last year in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts (including Amherst and Northampton), found 46% of interfaith couples with one Jewish parent are raising kids “Jewish and another religion,” (as opposed to 33% raising them exclusively Jewish by religion).  And in Minnesota’s Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St Paul), a 2019 study found 34% of interfaith couples with one Jewish parent raising children with two religions, while 16% were raising them exclusively Jewish by religion. Not surprisingly, studies (many older) of the big cities in the East with many deep-rooted Jewish institutions found smaller percentages (many of them 11-18%) of interfaith families “doing both.”

Later this week, the new Pew report will be analyzed by Jewish interfaith family professionals in an online briefing. I intend to listen to that session, and hope to report back here on anything new or noteworthy. Stay tuned.

Journalist Susan Katz Miller is an interfaith families speaker, consultant, and coach, and author of Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family (2015), and The Interfaith Family Journal (2019). Follow her on twitter @susankatzmiller.

What Do Interfaith Families Want From Rabbis?

Photo by Susan Katz Miller

 

Over at the Forward, I published an Op-Ed today as part of a recent series of opinions on rabbinic officiation and interfaith marriage. Take a look on their site if you want to engage in the discussion there. Or read it here…

 

In the most recent round of wrestling over interfaith marriage, we have heard from rabbis, academics and community leaders. As someone in the middle generation of a three-generation interfaith family, one founded in 1960 when my Jewish father married my Protestant mother, I thought it might be useful to weigh in. In doing so, I draw not only on my own experience, but also on the experiences of over 300 interfaith family members across the country who were surveyed for my book Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family.

As a Reform Jew, and a “patrilineal Jew” to boot, it could be (and has been) argued that I do not have standing to comment on what seems to be a watershed moment in the Conservative (and possibly even Orthodox) movement. But from my perspective, we still need to make progress on engaging with interfaith families in all the movements, and in post-denominational Judaism(s).

My interest lies in trying to explain what we, the interfaith families, want from Judaism. Of course I cannot speak for all interfaith families. Some have turned away from Judaism altogether, for any number of reasons — including longtime systemic exclusion. Others want to be quietly incorporated into Jewish communities without being called out as different in any way. They may be happy to put aside the other religion in the family, with the intention of creating “exclusively Jewish” homes.

But according to the 2013 Pew study, only 20 percent of Jewish parents in interfaith partnerships are raising children “Jewish only” by religion, whereas 25 percent are raising children “partly Jewish by religion and partly something else.” These are my people. We are not “doing nothing,” we are “doing both.” But we cannot do it alone.

So here is how you, the rabbis and academics and community leaders, can support us and help us stay connected to Judaism, if you so choose:

1. We ask rabbis to help us to celebrate our weddings, welcome our babies, usher our children into adulthood and officiate at our funerals. We want to engage with the history and culture and liturgies of Judaism, and forge bonds of affection for Judaism in our children. Watching the loving relationship of my children (who only had one Jewish grandparent) with Rabbi Harold White, may his memory be a blessing, was one of the greatest gifts of being part of a community of interfaith families led by a rabbi and a minister. (Rabbi White left the Conservative movement over the interfaith marriage issue decades ago. He should be remembered in the current struggle as the pioneer that he was.)

2. We ask rabbis to co-officiate at these life-cycle ceremonies. Our partners and spouses want to feel represented as equals in these key transitional moments. We are not afraid to have our extended families, including our children, see that we honor Unitarian Universalism, or Buddhism, or Catholicism. If we cannot have co-officiating clergy, many of us will choose secular celebrants.

3. We ask religious institutions and clergy not to force us to make promises about how we will raise theoretical future children. We have no way of knowing whether we will feel exactly the same way about religion five or ten years down the road. We may well shift in our thinking about single-faith religious education, or interfaith education, or no religious education. Often, these decisions have as much to do with what kind of welcoming communities are available geographically as they do with theology. What we know is that religious beliefs and practices are intensely personal, and many of us do not maintain the same religious affiliations throughout a lifetime.

4. We ask Jewish institutions to educate our interfaith children, whether or not we are raising them in monofaith households. (In truth, we believe that all people can benefit from interfaith education in order to become better bridge-builders.) Reform Judaism, for example, needs to overturn the policy excluding these children from Jewish education, as Edmund Case has bravely stated in a recent column. Every interfaith child, no matter how they are labeled by parents, knows that they have extended family members from more than one religion. We do not do any great service to children in denying them basic religious literacy, or segregating them and keeping them ignorant about the religions in their family trees. Because, as the poet Kahlil Gibran wrote, all children grow up to make their own choices in life: “You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts.”

 

Susan Katz Miller’s book, Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family is available now in paperback, hardcover and eBook from Beacon Press.

 

 

Interfaith Families in the Pews: Q & A with Reverend Vicky Eastland

 

Photo: Susan Katz Miller

 

 

While reporting my recent article in The Washington Post on Brookville’s Multifaith Campus on Long Island, I ended up with a lot of material that did not make it into the story. As an unofficial historian of the interfaith family communities movement, one of my goals is to record and preserve as much of our ongoing story as possible. Below, I share an extended interview with the minister at Brookville Church, Reverend Vicky Eastland. Here, she discusses her role as a Reformed Church in America minister, in the context of Brookville’s Multifaith Campus—a joint project of the Brookville Church, The New Synagogue of Long Island, the Muslim Reformed Movement Organization, and the Interfaith Family Community of Long Island.

 

Susan Katz Miller (SKM): When the search committee first contacted you about coming to Brookville as the new pastor, the Interfaith Community already had a close relationship with the church there. What was your first impression of this relationship?

Rev. Vicky Eastland (VE): Initially, one of the reasons Brookville was interested in me was because I was one of the founding members of an interfaith council in upstate New York where I was pastoring a church at the time: we met to do community service and events together. When I heard the word interfaith, that’s what I thought of. It wasn’t until I received a series of questions the church wanted me to answer on paper that I realized it was about interfaith families. I still had no idea what this interfaith families community was, that was connected to the church.

SKM: I know Pam Gawley (co-founder with Sarah Cirker of the Interfaith Community of Long Island) has said she may be the only Jewish woman to serve on a church search committee for a new pastor.

VE: When I showed up for my second interview, I was really quite surprised because the search team of the church stepped aside and let Pam and Sarah lead the interview. It ended up being a great experience for all of us. I remember one of the search team members saying something that has stayed with me: “We’re not just looking for the next pastor, we’re looking for someone to take us further in our relationship with the Interfaith Community.” This was an integral part of helping them decide who the next pastor would be.

SKM: The Interfaith Community of Long Island, which was founded to support Jewish and Christian interfaith families, now holds their interfaith Sunday School at Brookville, and these interfaith families attend the church service at Brookville on a specific Sunday each month, as part of their interfaith education program. Do the theological differences between Judaism and Christianity pose a challenge for you in those services?

VE: The most challenging aspect for me since I’ve been at Brookville is surrounding the Sacrament of Communion. Personally, I don’t think we should turn anyone away from an experience with God, so I understand opening the communion table to non-Christians. But the wording in the Reformed Church in  America (RCA) liturgy is very Christocentric. I was using that liturgy, and I had a Catholic woman ask me, “Can you please not use those words? My husband who is Jewish feels like all Christians are blaming him for the crucifixion of Christ.” There were Sundays when I left the service, and I started crying because I felt like something I said was offensive to someone from IFC. But then there was pushback from other Christians who were saying, “We don’t want you to take those words out.” But for a while I did, because I don’t think anything should be excluding people who want to be there.

In my second year, we moved IFC Sunday to a non-communion Sunday, and I’ve gone back to the RCA language for communion. Pam Gawley, who is Jewish, told me, “We want this to be authentically Christian.” We’re all on this journey together. And the Catholic woman who was worried about how her Jewish husband feels? That husband actually participates now in communion.

Last Sunday was Easter Sunday. I was very Christocentric in my sermon–but its hard not to be on Resurrection Sunday. That cognitive dissonance that I had in the first year, I don’t  have so much anymore. In the service I said, “I know there are people who are with us today that aren’t Christian, and don’t believe what we’re saying here, and that’s okay.” A Jewish mom came up to me afterwards in tears, and said she was so moved to be acknowledged. It was not planned: it just came out of me.

SKM: I know the Muslim study group had been meeting at Brookville Church on Sunday afternoons for many years, but how did it become integrated into the Multifaith Campus?

VE: When I got there in the fall of 2013, I realized the rabbi, Rabbi Stuart Paris, had never met the Muslim leader, Dr. Sultan Abdulhameed. I started doing introductions, friendships formed, and we realized our individual missions were so similar–we all wanted to bring reform to our specific faiths. None of our groups is exclusive, anyone is welcome at any of the groups. Then we said let’s do something together, around a holiday not based on any of our faiths.

That first Thanksgiving together was the highlight of my entire ministry career. We started out with our new Brookville Multifaith Campus sign dedication, on the lawn of the church. One of the members from the Muslim community did the call to prayer in Arabic  outside on the PA system. We had about 200 people, the maximum we can fit into the chapel, and there wasn’t a dry eye. Dr. Sultan said he’d been to a lot of these interfaith Thanksgiving services where the representatives each preach from their own holy scripture, and it feels almost like a competitive situation. So he suggested that instead we preach from each other’s holy scriptures. I ended up preaching from the Quran, Dr Sultan from the Torah, and Rabbi Stuart from the New Testament. That’s what we’ve done ever  since—this year was our third Thanksgiving together.

Since that first Thanksgiving, I have traveled to the Sultanate of  Oman, a Muslim majority nation in the Middle East , and I have  had a lot more exposure to the Muslim faith. The Quran has come alive to me in ways I never would have imagined. We’ve been talking with the IFC about how to add an Islamic unit to the interfaith Sunday School curriculum. For now, we’ve decided to wait until there are more young Muslim interfaith families in the IFC community.

SKM: As the Brookville Multifaith Campus becomes established, do you see this as a template for other communities?

VE: We’re now at the point where I’m starting to form a team with people from members of all four communities, to work on becoming a 501c3 (non-profit institution). The long-range hope is that that this will turn into a model that will change the makeup of our church. I believe that’s the direction all houses of faith should move in. I think it’s a model that everyone should look at.

Many churches, here and across the country, have been shrinking, even closing. Recently, I met with a group of clergy from Long Island. They came to learn about what we’re doing–how it’s working, why it’s working, and what we’re doing that’s making it so successful. We all need to wake up and realize that we’re becoming a more integrated society. How is that going to play out in our houses of  faith? Clergy can no longer bury their heads in the sand and pretend that the needs of interfaith families are not important. We have to find ways to meet their spiritual needs. Ours is a model that others can follow.

 

Susan Katz Miller is the author of Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family, from Beacon Press. She works as an interfaith families consultant, speaker, and coach. Follow her on twitter @beingboth.

 

Interfaith Family Lens: Obama at the Mosque

 

President Obama gave a moving speech about inclusion and preventing extremism at the Islamic Society of Baltimore yesterday. I saw this event, his first visit to a US mosque, through the lens of an adult interfaith child, a lens that President Obama inevitably shares. Every interfaith child (actually, every human being) has the right to choose a religious identity, and Barack Obama made a clear choice to be a Christian. As someone born into an interfaith family, as someone who has had to defend my own religious identity, I empathize with the constant battle President Obama must fight against those who try to mislabel him. My hope is that after he steps down, he will be able to speak more freely about the ways in which his interfaith family background has inspired him as a bridge-builder and peacemaker in the world.

Back in 2009, I wrote the following on this blog:

While he did not know his Muslim biological father, growing up with knowledge of this family connection can have a strong effect on an interfaith child’s identity. Even more important was his experience as a boy in Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, with a Muslim stepfather. Obama is both a practicing Christian and someone raised with an intimate knowledge of Islam. I celebrate his interfaithness, and see that the world has already benefited from it.

Listening to the speech yesterday, one phrase in particular caught my attention. Here is the slightly inexact quote as tweeted by Rep. Keith Ellison, the progressive Democratic congressman from Minnesota, who was there at the mosque:

Rep. Keith Ellison ‏@keithellison Woodlawn, MD “We are one American family and when any part of it is made to feel separate or excluded it tears at fabric of whole American family” BHO

The point the President is making here is that we must counter the recent rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric and actions. But note the metaphor: he describes America as a giant interfaith family. President Obama’s own extended interfaith family is Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and Jewish in two different branches. And Rep. Ellison, who chose this sentence to tweet, is a Muslim-American from an extended interfaith family. He was brought up Catholic, has a brother who is a Protestant pastor, and raised his children as Muslims in the context of an interfaith marriage.

My point here is that we are all moving together into a world of greater religious complexity and interconnection. I see the formative interfaith family experiences of our elected officials inspiring more effective interfaith diplomacy, and the desire to reduce religious violence in the world. I heard this theme the very first time I heard Obama speak, in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention. I look forward to hearing him speak out even more boldly after his term is over. And now, it looks like our next Democratic presidential nominee will be either a Christian woman with a Jewish son-in-law, or a Jewish man with a Catholic wife. Either way, it seems our nominee will see the world through an interfaith family lens.

Susan Katz Miller’s book, Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family is available now in hardcover, paperback and eBook from Beacon Press.

My Parliament of the World’s Religions

Tibetan Buddhist monks make a sand mandala

Indigenous people getting ready for the opening procession

For four days last week, I was immersed in an extraordinary community created by the Parliament of the World’s Religions: almost 10,000 people converged on Salt Lake City from around the world to learn about each other, pray for peace, and talk about saving the planet. The week was rich and dense with intercultural experiences. At dawn, I stood in a sacred circle with Ute people around a fire of wood and sage, gazing up at the Wasatch mountains beyond the highrises. I reclined on pillows with women in a conference room transformed into a red tent. And I learned a traditional Maori greeting from Grandmother Rose (Dr. Rangimarie Turuki Arikirangi Rose Pere), who came all the way from New Zealand to speak truth to power about corporate greed and climate change.

I heard inspiring speakers including Jane Goodall, Maryanne Williamson, Madea Benjamin, Joan Brown Campbell, Tariq Ramadan, Chief Arvol Lookinghorse, and Allan Boesak. And, I delighted in the inscrutable pop-up happenings that make the Parliament so much more lively and radically inclusive than an academic conference: the folks dressed in light-up angel wings, the young men in clown costumes dancing under a disco ball suspended on a long stick. The Parliament includes the sublime, and the ridiculous. Christian writer G. K. Chesterton gave it the snarky epithet: “a pantheon for pantheists.” But more accurately, it is an encounter of pantheists, monotheists, atheists, and everyone else.

Langar with friends

One of the highlights of the Parliament for me occurred each day, when I took off my shoes, covered my head with my scarf, and enjoyed a free vegetarian meal served by the Sikh community in an extraordinary act of community service called langar, designed to uphold the principle of equality of all people. Whether sitting cross-legged on the floor at langar, or standing and watching the Tibetan Buddhist monks make a sand mandala, I got to meet people I never would have met otherwise, because at Parliament, everyone talks to everyone else in a spirit of openness. I also got to hang out with longtime friends who converged from my interfaith word (including emma’s revolution, Melody Fox Ahmed, Jackie Fuller, Katie Gordon, Victor Grezes, Katherine Rand, Sean Rose). And I finally met interfaith twitter buddies I had never met in person, including Vickie Garlock, Tahil Sharma, Simran Jeet Singh, Ellie Anders).

Mormon Temple, Salt Lake City

Each Parliament is different, marked by time and place. Because we were in the Great Basin, this Parliament provided a strong opportunity to engage with indigenous American religious traditions from throughout the West and Canada. It also, of course, provided an opportunity to experience the center of the Mormon world. On my last day, suffering conference burnout, I stumbled out of the Salt Palace and walked up to Temple Square. There, I entered the 19th-century Assembly Hall and chatted with a young woman on her mission with the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints (the LDS Church) as she explained her faith. Then, I headed into the spectacular Mormon Tabernacle to witness music and dance from a dozen different religious traditions on Sacred Music night. Judaism, my primary religion, was represented by a group of rabbis positioned all through the Tabernacle who blew long shofars together at the invocation, and by a multi-faith choir of local children who led thousands of people in singing a Shlomo Carlebach nigun (a mystical wordless tune).

Multi-faith children’s choir in the Mormon Tabernacle

You never really know when or where you will have a Parliament experience again. So far, only a handful have been held (Chicago 1893, Chicago 1993, Cape Town 1999, Barcelona 2004, and Melbourne 2009). Parliament organizers announced their intention to hold the next one in two years, although we don’t yet know where. Wherever it is, whenever it is, I don’t intend to miss it.

Susan Katz Miller’s book, Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family is available now in hardcover, paperback and eBook from Beacon Press.

Let Us Check More Than One Religion Box

Imagine for a moment that you are a teenager, arriving at college for your first year, and that you come from an interfaith family. Perhaps you were raised in one religion, but now, you feel drawn to explore the other religion in your family background. Or perhaps you were raised with both religions, and plan to stay connected to both. Or perhaps you were raised with neither religion, but now plan to explore both family religions, or all religions.

Now, imagine you are handed a survey and asked to choose one religion, and only one religion, as your identity. Your only other choices are to choose “none,” or “other religion,” or to skip the question altogether.

I went through this thought experiment as I read “The American Freshman,” an annual report released earlier this month, based on a survey of more than 150,000 college freshmen in the annual CIRP (Cooperative Institutional Research Program) survey, produced by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA.

The survey only allows students to pick one religion as their “religious preference.” I suggest that as a result of this restriction, the researchers are missing an opportunity to better understand the changing landscape of American religious identity. As summarized recently by Robert P. Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute, that landscape includes the following: one in five Americans is religiously unaffiliated, a quarter of the unaffiliated still see themselves as religious, one in six Americans follow the teachings or practices of more than one religion, and about one quarter have a spouse or partner of another religious background.

This year’s American Freshman survey found that nearly 28% of the students chose “none” as their religious preference, up from some 15% in 1971. And yet, more than 16% of these “religious nones” in 2014 rated their own spirituality as “above average” or in the highest ten percent. I asked Kevin Eagan, the director of HERI, for additional information on the students who came from interfaith families. In 1973, about 22% of students reported having parents with two different religions or denominations (or having one parent with no religion). By 2014, almost 30% had such “religiously discordant” parents.

When I asked whether the researchers had considered allowing students to check more than one religious preference, Eagan replied in an email:
“Unlike race/ethnicity, we have not heard feedback from students or institutions that respondents have felt boxed in by restricting them to just one preference for religion.” I can only reply that both my college-student daughter and my college-bound son do feel boxed in, as do I. And based on the college students I surveyed and interviewed for Being Both, my book on interfaith families, I suspect we’re not the only ones.

I also asked Eagan what he thought of the idea that students from interfaith families would check “none” if they could not check more than one box. “I would think that students who wanted to check multiple religions would either skip the question entirely (i.e., be coded as missing data) or choose the option of ‘other religion’ rather than choose ‘none’,” Eagan wrote me.

As someone who claims an identity formed by both my Jewish and my Christian heritage, I would not choose “other religion,” a category that seems designed for Sikhs or Jains or Pagans. Interfaith is not a religion: it is an identity based on the synergy and symbiosis of two distinct family religions. Often, those of us honoring both family religions are accused of trying to form a new religion. In order to avoid feeding this kind of concern, I would make a point of not checking the “other religion” box. My 18-year-old son says, “At least checking ‘other’ sends the message that they need to expand their options.” But does it send that message?

The choice to just skip the question creates the unfortunate result that people with complex religious identities from interfaith families will not be counted or included in the study results on religious identity. And we are tired of not counting. I agree that some students might just skip this question since there would be no way to express their true religious preferences within the parameters of the survey. My argument is that by allowing them to check more than one box, researchers would be able to gather data to better understand the religious identity of these students.

Why would students who feel connected to more than one religion choose “none”? Those of us who are interfaith children grow up hearing “you can’t be both” and “if you try to do both, you’re really nothing,” and being told that clergy, or religious texts, do not accept the existence of interfaith families. A survey that does not allow students to check two or more religion boxes, but does allow them to check “none,” effectively steers respondents from interfaith families to the “none” box. And yet, this is clearly an uncomfortable box for interfaith children who celebrate more than one religion. My 18-year-old son explains, ” ‘None’ strips you of your religion. They’re saying that because you don’t fit into one of our categories, you can’t have any religion.”

There’s a simple solution to all of this. Allow students to check more than one box. Allow them to check both Buddhist and Jewish. Allow them to check, whether or not you agree that it is a valid choice, Jewish and Catholic. The results will be more complex, perhaps harder to summarize. And more true.

 

This essay was first published on Huffington Post.

Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family is available now in hardcover, paperback and eBook from Beacon Press.

 

New Year’s Interfaith Gratitude: 9 Shout-Outs

In this New Year, at the start of 2015, I want to try to thank everyone who supported Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family in 2014, the first full year since publication and the year of the paperback launch. In particular, I want to thank the following (overlapping) nine communities for engaging with interfaith families celebrating more than one religion:

1. Jewish Communities. When I began work on Being Both ten years ago, almost no one in Jewish leadership wanted to acknowledge families providing interfaith education to interfaith children. But this year, I was invited to explain Being Both in more than one synagogue and Jewish Community Center and in multiple Jewish media outlets. And I became one of the respondents for the Jewish Daily Forward‘s interfaith advice column. I also had the privilege of addressing two groups of rabbis (in Chicago and Maryland), who listened intently, asked hard questions, and I hope went away understanding how Jewish communities could benefit from engaging with the 25% of Jews in interfaith marriages who have chosen to raise children in both family religions. One rabbi told me, “Fifty percent of the interfaith couples I marry now say they plan to do both. Your book represents the reality we are facing–we are only just beginning to figure out how to grapple with this.”

2. Unitarian-Universalist (UU) Communities. I was so very fortunate to be published by Beacon Press, a venerable non-profit press promoting “freedom of speech and thought; diversity, religious pluralism, and anti-racism; and respect for diversity in all areas of life.” Not everyone realizes that Beacon Press is affiliated with the Unitarian-Universalist Association (UUA). I often say that no other press, religious or commercial, was brave enough to publish my book. Historically, many interfaith families have found community in UU congregations, and this year, I began speaking at UU communities. I look forward to attending the UU General Assembly in Portland, Oregon, next June.

3. Muslim and Hindu allies. While Being Both is primarily about Jewish and Christian interfaith families, it also includes Muslims and Hindus in interfaith marriages, and I hope it will be helpful to people of all religions, going forward. This year, I have really enjoyed interacting with interfaith activists of many religions and worldviews on Twitter, and at conferences. Specifically, I want to shout out here to those who have engaged with or reviewed Being Both, including Muslim interfaith parent Reza Aslan, Hindu interfaith spouse Fred Eaker, Shailaja Rao who advocates for Hindu/Muslim couples and other interfaith families in Asia, and several Muslimah interfaith activists who posted Being Both reviews or features.

4. Atheist and secular humanist allies. Marriages between religious and nonreligious people are a growing cohort. I share the perspective with many humanist writers that it is possible and even beneficial to expose children to more than one religion and worldview, realizing that all children grow up to make their own decisions about belief and affiliation. This year, I particularly appreciated interactions with Humanistic Rabbi Adam Chalom, Faithiest author Chris Stedman, and In Faith and In Doubt author Dale McGowan. I look forward to speaking in the coming year at Ethical Society, Sunday Assembly, Humanistic Jewish, and college organizations such as the Secular Student Alliance, about the overlapping experiences of humanists and people from interfaith families.

5. My home, greater Washington DC. I am so grateful to live in a book-loving city, the kind of city that hosted a packed Being Both launch event at Politics & Prose. I’m also grateful to live in a city where families who want interfaith education for their interfaith children have the support of the Interfaith Families Project of Greater Washington. Coming up this year in greater DC, look for a talk in March at the venerable Bethesda Writer’s Center. There’s always space on the calendar for local talks, so contact me if your DC-area university, community, or book group wants to host a Being Both event.

6. The great city of New York. The birthplace of the original Interfaith Community for interfaith families, New York has supported this movement, and Being Both, from the beginning. In March, I’ll be in The City for panels at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park, and at Union Theological Seminary uptown. Be sure to check the susankatzmiller.com event page for updates.

7. The great city of Chicago. My trip to Chicago this year to celebrate Being Both with the Interfaith Family School and The Union School for Interfaith Families strengthened my bonds with the other major city providing interfaith education for interfaith children. In Chicagoland, I also loved interacting with Rabbi Ari Moffic and interfaithfamily.com, with David Dault and the Things Not Seen podcast, and with Kol Hadash Humanistic Congregation.

8. The great state of California. On the West Coast, I loved reconnecting with the founders of the original interfaith families community in the Bay Area including Oscar Rosenbloom and Alicia Torre, meeting the staff at the charming Book Passage in Marin, catching up with longtime friend and author Julia Flynn Siler, and interacting with  interfaithfamily.com San Francisco, the Silicon Valley JCC, and Claremont School of Theology friends who study complex religious identity. On January 10th, I’ll be back in Claremont CA to speak at Claremont Lincoln University. Join me!

9. And finally, to my extended interfaith family, including my husband, my two interfaith kids, my pioneering interfaith parents, and my siblings, in-laws, nieces, nephews and cousins, whether Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Quaker, Buddhist, atheist, or all, or none, of the above. Thank you, once again, for demonstrating what a big, loving, interfaith family can be.

Christmas and Hanukkah: 2014 Round-Up

This year, Hanukkah ends just in time to give a day of breathing space between the eight-day celebration and the arrival of Christmas. This is how I like my December holidays: completely separate in space and time, while connected by the common threads of family togetherness, feasting, singing, and light at the winter solstice. And this year, the two holidays are just close enough that we will get to light candles for the final night of Hanukkah, and then also celebrate Christmas, with my interfaith parents and all my siblings.

It’s a busy time of year for interfaith parents, and it’s also busy for me as a source for stories on interfaith parenting. This year, I allowed a reporter to also interview my son for the first time, for a story on the blog of the PBS Newshour. This story features a Hindu and Christian family, as well as my family, as we move into a less binary interfaith landscape. They also published three of my photos, including the one of the Hanukkah menorah above. Go take a look. (Also, to catch up on the debate over use of the word hanukiyah versus “Hanukkah menorah”, search my twitter feed @beingboth).

I have an essay entitled “How Not to Spoil Your Interfaith Kids at Christmas and Hanukkah,” my debut on the Jewish parenting site Kveller.com. In this piece, I describe the efforts in our interfaith family to keep the gift-giving under control.

And in my most recent response on The Seesaw, the Jewish Daily Forward‘s interfaith families advice column, I advise a Jewish dad who is feeling uncomfortable when his interfaith kid gets to celebrate Christmas. My response, “Let it go!”

Over at Beacon Press, in case you missed it, you can read my essay on “An Interfaith Child’s Christmas and Hanukkah” on Beacon Broadside. Also, you can order books direct from the publisher through the end of the month at 20% off (with free shipping) with the code GIFT20 . Some of my favorite recent Beacon Press books in the religion/worldview category include Faithiest by Chris Stedman, Acts of Faith by Eboo Patel, A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects by S. Brent Plate, and a new gift edition of Victor Frankl’s classic Man’s Search for Meaning.

To browse through the many, many, many posts I have written on Hanukkah and Christmas over the years, on this blog and on Huffington, just type Christmas Hanukkah in the search box on this blog.

And in the new year, I’m looking forward to giving a public lecture at Claremont Lincoln University, in Claremont CA, on January 10th. Let your friends and family in the LA area know that they are welcome to attend.

I am sorry to see this year, the first full year with Being Both, the book–a year filled with lovely book adventures and important conversations with so many of you about interfaith families–come to an end. So here’s to more of the same in 2015! And in the last few days of 2014, may all your latkes be warm, and may all your lights be bright, as we head into, and then out of, the darkest days of winter.

Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family by Susan Katz Miller, a great holiday gift available now in hardcover, paperback and eBook from Beacon Press.

7 Ways for Interfaith Families to Find Community

This year, I posted my annual roundup of communities that welcome interfaith families over on my Huffington Post blog, in order to reach more interfaith families looking for comfortable spiritual or religious or secular homes. I hope you’ll take a look. It includes mention of Jewish, Humanistic Jewish, Ethical Society, Unitarian-Univeralist and interfaith family communities…

Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky are about to become interfaith parents. And as interfaith parents, they are about to face an ongoing series of decisions about the religious affiliation and education of their interfaith children. This time of year, with the nip of autumn in the air to remind us of the passage of time, and the Jewish High Holidays fast approaching (September 24th and October 3rd), many interfaith families are making the annual decision on whether to affiliate with a church, a synagogue, or neither. Or both…  Click here to continue