Being Both: An Enduring Choice

Today, we consider a question I often hear from religious leaders:

• Will interfaith families still choose “both” if our traditional religious institutions become more welcoming and inclusive?

The unspoken corollary seems to be:

• Can I ignore this “being both” mishegas? It’s not really statistically significant, is it?

This question seems particularly relevant as the 10th anniversary of Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family approaches. Approaching the question from a Jewish perspective (which is how many people seem to approach the question), we benefit from the fact that Jewish organizations have spent a lot of time and resources producing data on Jewish demographics. At the Berman Jewish Data Bank, you can peruse the local community studies from cities and regions across the country. Recently, I spent some time pulling out the relevant statistic from the most recent studies, to try to understand how many interfaith couples are choosing to raise children with interfaith education, or “Jewish and another religion.”

And, indeed, a significant percentage of interfaith couples are still choosing this pathway.

How Married Interfaith Couples with One Jewish Partner are Raising Children

2021 Studies	Just Jewish	Jewish & Another Religion	Not Jewish
Louisville	23 %	27 %	48 %
LA*	42	23	35
Kansas City	35	14	45
Orlando	44	19	36

From the Berman Jewish Data Bank community studies
*when the partner of another religion claims a religion

The variation certainly relates to the different geographic settings, but also to different ways that samples were collected and questions asked. Notably, in Louisville KY, birthplace of my Jewish grandmother, more interfaith families were found to be raising children with Judaism and another religion (27%), than with Judaism alone (24%). In other recent studies, the percentage raising children with both religions was smaller, but still significant.

In LA, the researchers broke the interfaith families into two categories: Jews married to people claiming another religion, and Jews married to people of no religion. Not surprisingly, a much larger percentage of the partners of no religion were willing to raise “just Jewish” children. In LA alone, some 12,000 children are being raised Jewish and another religion.

The LA study was also notable in devoting a brief section to actually considering the question, “What does it mean when parents describe their children as being both Jewish and another religion?” But the response to the question is very brief. The researchers simply note that in this “both” group, “Few households attend any religious services regularly, whether Jewish or non-Jewish services.” The implication is that “both” is a synonym for “neither.” But as the person who has probably spent the most time observing and researching these families, that is simply false. Using service attendance as the primary indicator of religious or spiritual depth is archaic in 2022, when a profusion of online, DIY, and home-based religious and spiritual practices are flourishing, inside and outside the Jewish world.

But the bottom line here is that every recent Jewish communal study documents that the choice to give interfaith children an interfaith education cannot be ignored. And, as we will explore, there is every reason to believe that these studies undercounted the “being both” families.

Why Jewish Communal Studies Yield Skewed Data on Interfaith Families

The main issue with relying on these studies to document interfaith family life is that all of them were funded by Jewish foundations or organizations, ensuring a Jewish lens. For the most part, only the Jewish partners were interviewed. The religious identities of their partners are not even categorized (Catholic? Protestant? Hindu? Unitarian Universalist?).

A primary goal of most of these funders is to figure out how to increase the number of families “doing Jewish.” There is a reluctance to come to terms with what draws family to doing both. And thus there is no insight into what multiple religious practice looks like in these families–what it means, why it is valuable. Ironically, asking these questions could only help those who seek to increase Jewish engagement.

The most limiting factor in using these studies to think about “doing both, being both” families is the sampling. In order to make sure to reach as many Jews as possible, these studies used methods including identifying “Jewish” surnames, and outreach through Jewish organizations such as synagogues and Jewish schools. Obviously, these methods are less likely to reach interfaith families with Irish or South Asian surnames. And they are less likely to reach “doing both” families that have given up on Jewish institutions that keep excluding them, or who are just more interested in online and home-based practices, or who thrive on forming their own interfaith communities. None of these families are going to pop up on Jewish organizational lists.

Furthermore, these studies do not ask, “Why are you doing both?” So they provide no insight into whether or not these couples wanted to engage more deeply, and could not find welcoming communities. There is no consideration of the idea that these families may not feel a need to affiliate with traditional religious institutions for spiritual fulfillment, or even for community support.

It is clear that interfaith families doing both or being both have been, and are going to be, undercounted and misunderstood in these Jewish communal studies.

Nevertheless, even these Jewish communal studies show that we’re here, we’re demographically significant, and we’re not going anywhere.

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.

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.

Top Posts in 2020

My current jigsaw puzzle, also a mandala, also reminiscent of a covid sphere.

Does anyone else feel like these final days of 2020 are moving in slow motion?

We’re “on vacation” with nowhere to go, no one to see. The psychopathic demagogue in the White House is using every final moment of 2020 to wreak more havoc. The pandemic continues to roar through like a tidal wave, and lifeboat vaccines seem to sweep out of reach. Honestly, it is hard to focus on interfaith families (or anything). Though of course family, any family, every family, remains crucial in this time of unbearable stress and trauma.

So this was not a year for big accomplishments, unless you work in medicine or public health, or you are a teacher who managed to transition successfully to working online, or entirely outdoors. Myself, well, I sure did a lot of jigsaw puzzles–a “mindless pleasure” my family likes to indulge on vacation together, but something I had never let myself do alone at home before. Finding a missing piece, fitting the pieces together, is a balm now, and a meditative practice, and I see no reason to deny myself the hours of “unproductive” puzzling.

But I also feel I owe it to my readers to look back on this year as it ends, and think about how interfaith families are weathering this moment in history, a topic I wrote about here, and then here and here and here. What else? I gave some keynotes and talks that were supposed to be in person, on zoom instead–others got postponed.

Back in the spring, the facebook group I founded, the Network of Interfaith Family Groups (NIFG), got excited about meeting up on zoom, for awhile, until we all got zoomed out. And I helped some of those families connect to online worship and interfaith religious education for kids, through IFFP in DC, the Brookville Multifaith Campus, and the Family School in Chicago. So all of that was satisfying.

Especially, to be perfectly honest, the jigsaw puzzles!

After blogging for more than a decade, I took some months off, but then found a lot of energy for writing short reports and essays in the final weeks of the year. Since it launched in 2009, this blog has been visited by over 195,000 people, with over 366,000 views, and 382 essays on interfaith families.

My top posts in 2020 had nothing to do with the pandemic, and may surprise you:

1. The Interfaith Family of Kamala Harris. This was the feel-good story we all needed in 2020. An interfaith kid raised with both Christian and Hindu traditions grows up and marries a Jewish man, and goes to the White House! Surely this example of what I call an interfaith trifecta family will help to normalize the beauty of our complex, rich, multireligious heritages and extended families, going forward. While many in the Jewish (and South Asian) press wrote about Harris’s interfaith family from monofaith perspectives, this post got a lot of hits because I pointed out that we–those of us who grew up in interfaith families–are a demographic force to be reckoned with, and we are showing up in leadership positions, even at the very top now.
2. Ten Reasons to Teach Interfaith Children Both Religions. This is exactly what Kamala Harris’s mother did! I love that this little essay, written ten years ago now in 2010, continued to hold down the #2 spot for popularity on my blog ten years later in 2020. It lays out the argument in my first book for giving interfaith kids an interfaith education, in a condensed list of ten points. As a growing segment of the population is celebrating more than one religion, this post is only becoming more relevant.
3. Interfaith Marriage and the Rise of the Religious “Nones.” This is another older post (from 2012) that is only becoming more and more relevant with time. The religious “nones” (atheists, agnostics, the spiritual but not religious or SBNRs, anyone who doesn’t affiliate with a single religious identity anymore) continue to grow. Families spanning Christians and “nones” are the largest segment of interfaith families in the US, and the fastest-growing. Recently, I reviewed a new memoir, Blessed Are the Nones, that is a dispatch from this world. This is a topic I will return to in 2021, and beyond. So, onward through the unknown.

As pandemic fatigue sets in, keep your interfaith family safe–and that means keep everyone safe, because as I like to point out, we’re all interfaith families now. Keep your mask on outside your house. Stay inside, or outside in the wild, if you have that privilege. Me, I am trying to get beyond jigsaw puzzles, to some creative new endeavors. And that may or may not happen in 2021. And that’s okay.

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.

My (Interfaith) Decade, 2010-2019

Brittany Coast. Photo by Susan Katz Miller

This was a big decade for me. Both personally and professionally, the past ten years have featured dizzying highs and devastating lows, interwoven achievements and heartbreak. I am, frankly, exhausted just thinking back on it. And yet, it seems important to do just that–to try to gain perspective and a sure footing as I gaze out at the horizon of the next decade.

I have been laid low. I experienced more personal loss in this decade than in my whole previous half-century. The big, gorgeous, three-generation interfaith family I depicted in my first book, Being Both, changed dramatically. I lost my father, my mother, and my mother-in-law. I lost my teenage nephew. My husband and I each had to empty and sell multigenerational family homes, severing ties to two formative places in our entwined family history. And this year, we lost our 17-year-old dog.

And yet I wrote, and spoke, and advocated. Somehow, in this same decade, my experience as a journalist on three continents, and my lifetime in an interfaith family, all culminated in a new body of work. I felt called to document interfaith family life, and to speak up and speak out to defend the full diversity of our experiences. In this spirit, I published two books, including The Interfaith Family Journal this year, and ten years worth of essays (368 of them) on this blog. I published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and a dozen other media outlets. I was invited to speak in more than 30 cities in more than 15 different states and countries. And I founded the Network of Interfaith Family Groups, a national support hub for interfaith families celebrating two or more religions.

This work, making space for interfaith families, has often felt risky. I have received threats from organizations and individuals, and nasty attacks in the press. I have had people refuse to share a stage with me. At least one brave non-profit lost a funder because they invited me to speak. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that all of this tsuris (Yiddish for troubles) is over families that insist on loving across boundaries.

At the same time, this work continues to feel essential. And the work is not done. Interfaith families around the world are still in danger. Interfaith families in the US still face exclusion, misunderstanding, and intolerance. Meanwhile, many of us, interfaith and monofaith, are reevaluating traditional religious systems and institutions, seeking meaningful connections to carry forward.

I do see progress. After a decade of writing and speaking about the joys of being part of an interfaith family, about embracing each other, and about the benefits of interfaith education for all adults and children, I see these ideas catching on. Or at least they are now deemed worthy of debate. I see this progress in the Jewish institutional world, and in other religious, spiritual and humanist contexts.

And I do have hope. I see interfaith families inspiring and innovating new ways of being religious, spiritual, and humanist, going forward. In this decade, I have witnessed interfaith families coming together to create our own communities, use our own voices, and tell our own stories. As we begin to take on leadership roles in religious, spiritual, and secular arenas, it will become harder to talk about us, without us. May the skills and insights we have gained living as interfaith families benefit everyone, in all of our cultures, in all of our countries, as together we navigate 2020 and beyond.

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.

Eight Top Interfaith Family Posts of the Decade

Author Susan Katz Miller in Chicago in 2019

We are heading into a new decade (and the second decade for this blog). So I thought I would pause to think about the top interfaith family themes from 2009 to 2019, as represented by the most popular posts on this blog.

1. Muslim and Jewish: Interfaith on “Shahs of Sunset“ (24,879 views). This post gets a lot of hits because of the success of the frothy long-running reality show, with all its fake scripted scenes and whipped-up melodrama. But I like to think there is something valuable, and future forward, about what I describe as the “unusual depiction of a close circle of Jewish and Muslim (and Christian) friends.”
2. Ten Reasons to Teach Interfaith Children Both Religions (20,336 views). This is probably the foundational post on this blog, distilling the philosophy of interfaith families who want to give their children interfaith literacy. So I am glad it has remained a perennial top post, ever since 2010.
3. Life of Pi: Hindu, Christian and Muslim (17,890 views). As with half the posts on this top hits list, this one goes beyond the familiar Christian-and-Jewish binary. Life of Pi reflects the global reality in which multiple religious practice is common. And the popularity of the book, and movie, has introduced many people in the United States to theological and philosophical ideas raised by the complex forms of religious identity in Asia and elsewhere around the globe.
4. Successful Interfaith Marriage: Reza Aslan and Jessica Jackley (12,320 views). I was lucky to interview Reza and Jessica about their Muslim and Christian interfaith marriage for my first book. Later, they recorded a popular TED talk on the topic, and have begun writing about their interfaith family, so stay tuned. Muslim and Christian is one of the fastest-growing forms of interfaith family, as demonstrated by the Muslim Christian Interfaith Families group on facebook (which I helped to inspire!).
5. Advent, Christmas, Hanukkah, Welcome Yule! Interfaith Families Doing the Most (4477 views). I have written dozens of posts on the various “December holidays” and how they overlap and interplay from year to year, but this one touches on them all. It got a spike in views in 2011 when a light-hearted piece I published in Huffington Post resulted in a nasty response in the Forward. I wrote a letter back (and eventually received an apology). For me, this post signifies the fact that much of the institutional Jewish world still cannot accept that somewhere between 25% and 50% of interfaith Jewish families are practicing more than one religion.
6. Successful Interfaith Marriage: A Jewish and Muslim Wedding (4140 views). I love the fact that two of the posts in the “Successful Interfaith Marriage” series made it into this top eight, and neither actually centers on a Jewish and Christian family. This was the only top post written by a guest blogger, Rorri Geller-Mohammed, a social worker who runs a therapy practice focused on multiracial and multicultural families. I welcome guest bloggers, so contact me if you have anything you want to say to the world about being part of an interfaith family!
7. Blessing of the Interfaith Babies (3782 views). This is one in an ongoing series of essays that describe moments in the communal life of an interfaith families group–in this case the Interfaith Families Project of Greater Washington DC. I think it gets a lot of hits because there is very little out there about how to welcome interfaith children into the family. This post provides some rituals and strategies and thoughts on how to do it.
8. Interfaith Marriage: A Love Story (3154 views). As I write this, I see another pattern in this list. People are searching for examples of successful, loving interfaith relationships, and finding them on this blog. And it seems fitting that this post, a celebration of my parents on their 50th wedding anniversary, made it into the top eight. Now that they are both gone, I feel so very grateful that I wrote this post, and my first book, while they were still alive. Their example continues to inspire me as I begin to write about the next decade, from my new perspective as part of the eldest generation in my interfaith family.

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.

Heading to UUAGA, and Wild Goose

• 

In the coming weeks, I am excited about visiting two states new for me as a speaker: Washington state, and North Carolina.

First up is the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly (UUAGA) in Spokane, where I will host a Story Slam at 3pm, and sign books in the Exhibit Hall at 4:30pm, this Thursday June 20th. In part because both of my books are published by UU presses (Beacon Press, and Skinner House), I look forward to meeting up with longtime colleagues in the UU world. And I get a warm fuzzy feeling anytime I’m invited to speak in a UU environment. So, invite me to your UU community!

Often these days, I find the story slam format fulfilling. This is how it works: I give over much of my allotted time to the audience, and encourage people to describe the rich complexity of the benefits and challenges of being in an interfaith family, or claiming more than one religious or spiritual tradition. My intention has always been to foment rather than lead a movement, and to encourage others to write and speak from anywhere in the gorgeous constellation of complex religious, spiritual and secular families and identities. By sharing the literal stage, and inviting guest bloggers onto this virtual platform, I get to do that.

My next gig is in July, at the Wild Goose Festival in Hot Springs, North Carolina, outside Asheville. Wild Goose, originally inspired by the Greenbelt festival in the UK, has been compared to Burning Man, Woodstock, and an old-fashioned tent revival. The week-long festival draws thousands (many of them camping out) and includes music, art, craft brews, and top speakers (this year including Rev. William Barber–perhaps the greatest civil rights speaker of our time, the tattooed Lutheran firebrand Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber, and mystic Presidential candidate Marianne Williamson). Wild Goose is open to all, but was founded by and appeals to socially progressive Christians, often allied with what was the post-evangelical “emergent church” world. I am excited to immerse myself in this world for the first time, and introduce festival-goers to Being Both and The Interfaith Family Journal.

I’ll report back from these points west and south, and look forward to hearing from you as I line up more Interfaith Story Slams and other book talks and teaching gigs for the fall, and into 2020.

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 (forthcoming in 2019).

Being Both: 5th Birthday!

 

Five years ago today, Beacon Press published Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family. For me, that publication day was the culmination of three generations of experience in my interfaith family. And it was the moment when I took a stand, after a lifetime of hearing that interfaith families are problematic, for a more objective journalistic and academic treatment of the benefits and challenges of being an interfaith family. I also hoped to shift the interfaith family narrative away from straight white Jewish/Christian couples choosing one religion, to encompass the kaleidoscopic interfaith family reality of many religions, many family configurations, and many interfaith family choices.

With Kathie Lee, Hoda, and my teenage son.

These five years have been exhilarating, and at times magical. Being Both made it to The Today Show, The New York Times, NPR, CBS, Time, Salon, and over 100 other media outlets including newspapers, blogs, and podcasts. I was invited to speak about my work at the venerable American Academy of Religion, the Parliament of the World’s Religions, as a keynote speaker at the Unitarian-Universalist General Assembly, at colleges and universities, to groups of rabbis, and at seminaries.

I am so grateful to all of you who continue to buy the book, talk about it with friends and family, write online reviews, and invite me to speak and give workshops. As a result of your support, I believe that Being Both has made a difference in how religious institutions and clergy view interfaith families, and in how we as interfaith families think about ourselves.

Another goal, in writing Being Both, was to help spur a whole new interfaith family literature, making space for the voices of people from Muslim/Christian and Hindu/Sikh and Pagan/atheist families. Together, we are doing that. And Being Both is now cited in academic literature, and taught in universities and seminaries, helping to build a field of serious scholarship around the topics of interfaith families, multiple religious practice, and complex religious identities.

Meanwhile, a steady stream of interfaith couples and families began seeking me out as a consultant or coach. So, I founded the Network of Interfaith Family Groups (NIFG) on facebook, to help families celebrating more than one religion to find each other in regions across the country, and to meet up, or even form new interfaith family communities. And I helped to inspire a lively and growing Muslim/Christian interfaith family facebook group.

Eventually, I realized that I could not personally meet with every interfaith family, and that in order to help more interfaith couples and families, I needed to write another book. The Interfaith Family Journal (coming this March from Skinner House) is for any interfaith couple or family, living anywhere, with any two or more religions in the family tree. This workbook, filled with interactive exercises and creative activities, takes couples or families through a five-week process to help them figure out how to amplify the joys of being an interfaith family, and surf through the challenges with confidence.

I read once that five years is the perfect spacing between siblings, because each child gets the full attention of the parents. And we know that each child has unique needs and gifts. I think of Being Both as a lively and challenging child, filled with what my Jewish father would call chutzpah, and what my Protestant mother would have called “animal high spirits.” It’s a book that is hard to ignore, full of ideas and stories, daring to claim space in academia and in religious institutions for families celebrating more than one religion.

In contrast, I think of The Interfaith Family Journal as a highly sensitive and introverted child: observing, asking gentle but profound questions, reflecting back. Rather than staking out academic territory, the Journal is entirely devoted to meeting the needs of interfaith families who are desperately seeking an objective framework for moving forward, a practical resource based on my decades of experience.

And while this newborn Journal will be, in some sense, a younger sibling, it has a broader and more universal goal. It will serve the whole wide world of interfaith families, including any and all religions, single parents, adoptive parents, LGBTQ people in interfaith families, intercultural/interracial interfaith families, those who want to choose one religion, those who want to teach their children many religions, and religious nones.

Often, folks ask me, “What’s your next book about?”

This book, and the next, and the next, will be about interfaith families. I have an entire library of interfaith family books in my head, clamoring to be written. The interfaith family is my life’s work–the work I was born to do–and I intend to bring you as many of those books as I possibly can.

 

Susan Katz Miller is an interfaith families speaker, consultant, and coach, and author of The Interfaith Family Journal, and Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family.

Interfaith Families in the Jewish World

Philadelphia Sukkah, Leslie Sudock

 

How are interfaith families creating a new Jewish reality in America? That was the theme at the Interfaith Opportunity Summit in Philadelphia this week, organized by InterfaithFamily. The summit was attended by some 350 Jewish leaders: rabbis, Jewish educators, leading academics who study Judaism in America, and Jewish funders. I was honored to be invited to speak there about interfaith families celebrating both family religions.

I had just five minutes, and touched on these points:

• 25% of Jewish parents in interfaith relationships are raising children both, or “partially Jewish.” That’s more than the 20% raising interfaith children “Jewish only” by religion (Pew 2013). So the number of Jewish parents who want interfaith education for their interfaith children is significant, and growing.

• These “doing both” families want to engage with Judaism. So please engage with them, rather than excluding them from Jewish education because they also want interfaith education, or ignoring them with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about the other religion in their lives.

• Interfaith families doing both already exist in many Jewish communities. So the question is not whether you should include them, but how to acknowledge their presence, engage with them, and learn from them.

• Rather than always asking about the difficulties and challenges, be open to hearing about the joys in interfaith families. Think about how your community can benefit from interfaith families as highly skilled bridge-builders and peacemakers.

• Jewish leaders would benefit from working hand-in-hand with clergy from other religions to support interfaith families, rather than competing for souls.

• Nothing about us without us! We need more adult interfaith children involved in organizing these conferences, speaking on the panels, telling our own stories, and shifting the frame into the reality of the present. That means listening not only to adult interfaith children who claim “just Jewish” identities, but also to those who have complex, fluid, flexible, intersectional “Jewish and” identities, including people who are multiple religious practitioners.

These messages echo my New York Times Op-Ed, published when my book Being Both, and the Pew Report on Jewish Americans, came out simultaneously in 2013. What has changed three years later is that now I am in touch with Jewish leaders from across the country who are working with “doing both” families, who feel less conflicted about the idea, and who see the logic of including rather than excluding people who want to be part of the greater Jewish community.

Going forward, it is clear that interfaith parents who want interfaith education for their interfaith children are going to play a larger role in the Jewish world. The next question is which of the Jewish funding organizations at the summit will be visionary enough to invest in helping clergy, educators, seminaries, and Jewish communities to engage with this new reality. I stand ready to help, as a guide and interpreter, and as someone who has been thinking about these issues for a lifetime now.

(For more on the summit, see my tweets from the day on Storify here)

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 @susankatzmiller.

Jason Segel: Growing Up Interfaith, Then and Now

This week, on his “WTF” podcast, comedian Marc Maron conducts a long and thoughtful interview with actor and screenwriter Jason Segel (Freaks and Geeks, How I Met Your Mother, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Five Year Engagement, The Muppets). Segel has taken on an ambitious role, playing writer David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour, a film opening in theaters today. Wallace wrote the iconic, postmodern novel Infinite Jest in 1996, and committed suicide in 2008.

In the first half of the interview, Segel speaks at length about his childhood growing up with a Jewish father and a Christian mother, and his education in both religions. His parents sent him to a Christian school during the day, and to Hebrew school at night. As he describes it, “At Christian school you’re the Jewish kid, and at Hebrew school you’re the Christian kid. I think that’s the nature of groups,” he said. “And so everyone wants to compartmentalize people. And I think I decided at that point, like OK, its just me versus the world kind of.” Segel questions the decision made by his parents: “Neither of them are religious. So they made this decision that they were going to let me decide, which is like the dumbest thing you can do for a kid.

I write a lot about the idea that there are both challenges and benefits to growing up as part of an interfaith family. And, I write about the linked idea that whether your parents choose one religion, or both, or none, or a third religion, or all religions, there are going to be both challenges and benefits to each of those pathways. For many of us who grew up in earlier generations, when interfaith marriage was less common, and less tolerated, the challenges sometimes seemed more obvious than the benefits. But there is a danger in projecting those negative experiences into the present and future, when our children are growing up in a very different, much more fluid and flexible religious landscape.

So, I was frustrated to see that Haaretz, Israel’s oldest daily newspaper, picked up the podcast story and ran a piece today, leading with the idea of Segel growing up “half-Jewish and complete outsider” (their words). Clearly, by leading with this idea, the intent was to use Segel’s story as a cautionary tale, warning parents away from dual-faith education, or from interfaith marriage in general. So, I would like to make a few points in response:

1. I agree that it is not good to put pressure on interfaith children and make them feel they are uniquely burdened with the task of deciding on a religion. Those of us in interfaith families communities dedicated to raising children with both religions teach our children that they are interfaith, because they are born into interfaith families. And we teach them that all human beings grow up to decide on their own religious beliefs, practices, and affiliations.
2. Yes, it is a problem when religious communities exclude or marginalize interfaith kids. We need to continue to work on changing these attitudes and policies if we want interfaith families to remain engaged with religion, and to find supportive communities. And in an era when we have interfaith families are everywhere, parents and teachers need to be educating all children in order to eradicate religious bullying and put more emphasis on compassion and the Golden Rule.
3. Yes, it is a problem when interfaith kids grow up without any interfaith peers. But today, 25% of intermarried Jewish parents are raising children “partly Jewish and partly something else.” Progressive Jewish communities are filled with interfaith kids, many of them getting interfaith educations. So these kids look around and see a lot of other interfaith kids just like them. They don’t necessarily feel marginalized anymore. So those of us, like Segel, like me, who grew up in earlier generations, may find our experiences are not that relevant to parents making decisions about children born today.
4. Yes, it is essential for interfaith children to have support for integrating two (or more) cultures in their families, rather than bouncing back and forth between two separate religious worlds. Interfaith family communities provide that opportunity, in a context where all the kids are being raised with both religions. Going forward, we need clergy to work together, across religious boundaries, to share in collaborative support of interfaith families, rather than competing for souls and bodies in the pews. And this collaborative support is important, no matter what decisions those families make about religious labeling or religious education.
5. Segel tells the tragicomic story of being asked to stand up at his Christian school and explain his bar mitzvah, and then getting beat up the next day. In contrast, in Being Both, I tell the more recent story of Jared McGrath, an interfaith child raised in an interfaith families community, who attended Catholic school, and invited his classmates to hear him read from the Torah when he turned thirteen. It was a moving and educational experience for his classmates, and his extended family, and for Jared. No one got beat up.
6. Haaretz neglects to mention that in the interview, Segel speaks with great affection and appreciation about the fact that his parents are still together, that they have family get-togethers, that they are coming to his movie premiere. In my book, this is a successful interfaith family.

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.

A Millennial Perspective on Interfaith Marriage: When Unchurched Meets Unmosqued

Frank and Medina

 

 

(Note: Today I’m pleased to share this space with guest blogger Frank Fredericks.)

I recently read Susan Katz Miller’s Being Both, which is a practical, story-based guide on the many options interfaith couples have, with a particular focus on the feasibility of raising children in more than one faith tradition.

Being in an interfaith marriage of my own as a Millennial, I was fascinated by the different approaches offered, but at times felt like the discourse within its pages was for Gen X’ers, who are now raising children, whether toddlers or teens, and Boomers, the generation before them.  The challenges presented to them as interfaith couples include communal acceptance, birth and coming of age rituals, and ultimately identity in adulthood.  I believe Millennials will be facing slightly different challenges.

While reading, I reflected on my own marriage with Medina, who is a Muslim of Afghan and Mexican descent, and grew up in an interfaith household.  We are Millennials, both practicing in our respective faith traditions, but not particularly tied to specific congregations.  We believe, but our community of social interaction is wider than our religious community.  We both strongly identify with our religious communities, I as an evangelical Christian and Medina as a Muslim, but we are both extremely wary of institutions who claim to represent us.  We’re thus taking stock of what we want to give to our children when we begin, and what we’ll leave behind.

Reflecting on our own childhoods, I attended church, Christian schools, and even played guitar on worship team for both, while Medina attended mosque with her mother, and went to Islamic school after the regular school-day.  We both grew up fairly entrenched in our own traditions, but as adults no longer seek congregational life to experience the fruits of our religious traditions.

And it appears that Medina and I are representative of a larger trend of Millennials and religious practice. While the headlines often highlight the trend towards the growing non-religious identity among Millennials, there’s something else that’s equally telling: While two-thirds of Millennials identify with a religious tradition, only 22% of millennials actually attend weekly religious services.  In other words, the majority of Millennials religiously identify but do not belong to or regularly attend services with a congregation.  This has been referred to as the “unchurched” or the “unmosqued” movements, with a similar parallel for young Jews as well (granted, with a completely different construct for religious identity).

As a result, we’re not troubled by the same things Gen X interfaith and Boomer interfaith couples are.  We really don’t care at all about congregational acceptance. And like many people outside mainline Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish congregations, birth and coming of age rituals are simply not a part of our religious traditions.  Granted, some of this is denominational, but as interfaith relationships become more widespread, Millennials in interfaith couples will be much more likely to come from communities beyond Jews, Catholics and mainline Protestants, including my own evangelical tradition, which although the largest religious group in America, has historically been more insular.

But one can argue, all this non-institutional Millennial hogwash might simply be a phase.  Perhaps we too as a generation will return to the pews and prayer rugs when our firstborns shock us with the life-changing initiation to parenthood.  Interestingly, the research hints that some of us may never do so. In American Grace, by Robert Putnam and Joseph Campbell, they outline how not only are Millennials attending weekly religious services less than those belonging to older generations, but they are also attending at a lower rate than those generations did at the same age. Essentially, this means that though one’s likelihood to attend a house of worship increases as you get older, each subsequent generation is attending less frequently, even when adjusted for age. The big question is how close to the pattern Millennials will stay, once they become parents.

Even if Millennials in interfaith relationships stay out of congregations even after entering parenthood, we still face plenty of challenges. Like the generations before us, we must grapple with identity, family acceptance, and family tradition. In fact, in the absence of congregational liturgy, the challenge of feeling “authentic” in individual worship, balanced with shared family ritual, may be even more difficult to navigate.

So when Medina and I have our first child, we may not be able to take wholesale all of the wisdom from the interfaith generations before us. But we can learn from how they created new religious responses to a changing landscape, to forge the religious practices of the 21st Century. I’m sure more of Being Both will become relevant as those of us in my generation become parents. And I pray that our children will find our innovations on religious life applicable for them, when they too face a changing religious landscape, just as we learned from the generations before us.

 

Frank Fredericks is the founder of World Faith, a global interfaith development organization, and Mean Communications, a digital strategy firm. He’s the shockingly fortunate spouse of the wildly intelligent and beautiful Medina Fredericks. He tweets at @frankiefreds.