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Rabbi DrJonathan Romain is minister of the Maidenhead Synagogue. For a number of years he has been involved in the pastoral care of Jewish-Christian marriages. He addressed the spring meeting of the Association of Interchurch Families at Heythrop College, London, in March 1998 on this topic, and he kindly gave us the following text.
Twelve years ago Mary and Daniel fell in love. They shared everything, except religion. When they wanted to become engaged, Mary’s parents refused to let her marry a non-Catholic, while Daniel’s parents were equally adamant that he should not marry outside the Jewish faith. The couple split up. If their tale had ended there, it would have been a relatively common one, reflecting the fate of many couples from different religious backgrounds. However, although Daniel went away and married someone of his own faith, it proved an unsuccessful match and ended in divorce. He returned to his home town and, to his surprise, found Mary still living there. This time, they allowed no external factors to cut across their togetherness, and they now have two children. Both regard the marriage as blissfully happy, and only regret the twelve years that they needlessly spent apart.
Their story will be seen by some as the triumph of love over tradition. Others will see it as a religious disaster, typical of the demise of the family unit sharing the same faith and passing it on to the next generation. Curiously, even secular parents feel alarmed when their offspring marry out of the faith.
Blurring distinctions?
The issue of mixed-faith marriage is particularly delicate for interfaith groups. In some ways it poses a threat to one of the cardinal principles, that mutual respect for each other’s faith should not lead to a blurring of the distinctions between religions. We attend each other’s services, but there is little attempt to hold joint prayers, with the compromises this entails. If this concern applies to liturgy, it must apply even more to conjugal unions.
At the same time, however, the phenomenon of mixed-faith marriages is an obvious area for interfaith discussion. Here is a practical and immediate issue between the faiths that is crying out for a response. When a couple from two different traditions choose to set up home and establish family life together, a range of complicated problems are encountered. Where better to examine them than in an inter-faith forum? It offers knowledge of both traditions, combined with respect for each other’s religious integrity, along with the trust that arises from years of working closely together.
The need to respond to the situation does not necessarily indicate approval. Many religious leaders express a strong preference for a marriage between two people professing the same faith. It ensures a united family sharing the same religious values and participating in the same religious practices. It means there is a likelihood of the faith being handed on successfully to the next generation. It can be argued that it also gives the marriage a better chance of survival, being less prone to the tensions that can arise in a mixed-faith household.
Jewish concerns
From a Jewish point of view, there are additional concerns. Judaism, so often described as “a way of life”, is intimately bound up with domestic rituals. It is actively celebrated at home, in daily observance of dietary laws and weekly customs associated with the Sabbath. Many Jewish festivals take place as much in the home as they do in synagogue. It can be very difficult to maintain such Jewish practices when only one partner is of the faith.
There is also a problem of numerical survival. The Jewish community in Britain is very small, some 330,000 people. Mixed-faith marriage could lead to a high dropout rate and seriously endanger the continuity of British Jewry. Put dramatically, it could prove to be a kiss of death.
In the past, it was common for Jews who had married out of the faith to be ostracised by their family and the rest of the Jewish community. Typical of many parents’ reaction was that of Tevye, in Fiddler on the Roof, who refused to acknowledge his daughter after she married a non-Jew. Many Jewish parents today feel equally strongly, although they may reluctantly come to terms with the situation rather than lose contact with their offspring.
An upward trend
It must be understood, therefore, that for both religious and demographic reasons mixed-faith marriage is anathema to many. However, all the signs are that it is an upward trend. Figures based on the discrepancy between Jews born in the late 1950s and early 1960s who would have been expected statistically to marry in synagogue in the early 1980s, and those who actually did so, suggest that one in three Jews are marrying out of the faith.
Some consider that public discussion of mixed-faith marriage is detrimental in that it appears to condone the trend and encourages others to follow suit. However, such marriages are occurring on a large scale, and have done for several decades. There is no merit in pretending a problem does not exist if everyone knows it does; the only result is to delay the possibility of any solution.
Such an attitude also assumes that people wilfully enter such relationships in deliberate rejection of their religious traditions. This is mistaken. Many of those concerned would have been content to have married a member of their own faith. It was a matter of chance that the person they met at college, at work, or at a friend’s party, was from a different religious background. Moreover, they often see no contradiction between their love for a person from a different faith and their attachment to their own religious roots. They are surprised and hurt when told they have betrayed their heritage and can have no part in communal life.
Practical problems
The practical difficulties that confront mixed-faith couples are immense. The wedding preparations are often blighted by the thorny question of where the marriage can take place. Sometimes there are legal obstacles: for instance, synagogues in Britain are empowered by Act of Parliament to marry only “persons both professing the Jewish Religion”, rendering a mixed-faith ceremony impossible a priori. Alternatively, the minister of a church may be unable or unwilling to alter the form of the marriage service substantially, and so some of the liturgy is unacceptable to the non-Christian side. Indeed, the mere fact that the wedding is to be held in the religious building of one partner can be enough to cause threats of a boycott by members of the other partner’s family. The result is that many couples who had always envisaged a “white wedding”, or who, however lapsed, still wanted God’s blessing upon their union, are forced to settle for a Register Office ceremony. Thus they start off with a disappointment and with the religious differences making an early impact.
The arrival of children complicates the situation even further, for immediate decisions have to be made, particularly if the child is a boy – does one baptise him, circumcise him, perform neither ceremony, or both? What should be a joyous event can be soured by the couple, or their families, pulling in different directions. Moreover, it is then that many people suddenly remember the religious images of their own childhood, however limited, and wish to recreate them for their offspring. A mixed-faith couple will have different memories – Christmas trees, or Hanukkah candles, Easter eggs, or Passover meal. Some couples find these mutually enriching, others feel ill at ease and this can alienate one partner from spouse and children.
The religious education of the children presents another quandary. Sometimes it is settled by whichever of the partners feels the more strongly about his/her faith. Alternatively, it is a haphazard mixture of both religions, with the children emerging more tolerant of religious differences, but less certain of their own religious identity. Another parental option is to ban religion from the home on the grounds that it is divisive, with the guilt-assuaging concession that “the children can make their own choice when they are older”. In reality most children never do, for one can only choose from a position of knowledge, not from a vacuum.
The issue carries on till the very end of life. Where are the partners to be buried – separately in the cemeteries of their own faith, or together in non-consecrated ground? Many couples opt for cremation as a way of side-stepping the territorial problem. Even so, who should officiate at the ceremony? The minister from the faith of the partner who died would perform the last rites appropriate to his/her tradition, but the minister of the partner who survived might be better able to help in dealing with the bereavement.
A positive view
Amid all the problems, it should also be noted that many mixed-faith couples do make a success of their marriages. The old warnings that “it will all end in tears” have no statistical foundation. Some unions are blissfully content, others manage as well or as badly as do most marriages, and some collapse under the extra strains. Much depends on the individual couple and the energy and sensitivity that the partners invest in the relationship.
This has been confirmed by many who have attended the annual seminars for mixed-faith couples that I help run at the Sternberg Centre in London. They report that their marriages have a better chance of success than those of many same-faith couples because, unlike them, they have not been able to sail into marriage unthinkingly, but have had to examine every aspect of their life together well past the wedding day – children, relations with in-laws, how they would spend weekends. The result may have been a lot of painful discussion, but also a much stronger understanding of each other and a better basis for the future. Equally common was the remark that: “Our situation has made both of us take our individual religious heritage more seriously – we know it will stand or fall by what we each do. In a same-faith marriage, I would have left it to my partner to provide the religious input. Now I bother too, and do much more than I would have done otherwise.”
In many cases, the lifestyle and attitude of a mixed-faith couple reflects a much more general trend – that religion has become “privatised”, a matter for each individual rather than a family concern. The adage, “The family that prays together, stays together”, is no longer regarded as true. Many ministers know that it is often only one partner in a marriage who comes to worship, with the other partner being indifferent to religion. What difference, then, if that other partner is not doing the shopping but attending a service elsewhere? Indeed, some couples would claim that their religious mix was positively desirable, both enriching their own lives and helping to break down barriers in society at large. If one is commanded to “Love your neighbours as yourself”, they argue, then why not marry them as well?
Couple and community
The dilemmas raised by mixed-faith relationships are shared by ministers. When an engaged couple explain that they are very much in love and genuinely compatible, many ministers feel torn by conflicting interests. They know that the couple may be right and may lead a blissfully happy life together. Yet they also have to consider the wider community and the dictates of their faith. The desire to respond constructively to the individuals before them has to be balanced by not betraying their own principles. This was the stimulus to the recent publication of my book Till Faith Us Do Part (Harper-Collins, Fount Paperback, £5.99). It is an attempt to reach out to mixed-faith couples and offer help, encouraging each of them to maintain their religious loyalty without compromising their partner or undermining their marriage. It is honest about the difficulties but positive about the solutions.
No doubt some criticise the book as condoning mixed-faith marriage, but it is a response to an already existing situation, and one that began accelerating as far back as the 1940s. In an increasingly integrated and multi-faith society mixed-faith marriages will continue to rise. Ministers of all faiths are faced with a stark choice: lose touch with growing numbers who no longer feel welcome because they have married out of the faith, or revise the traditional attitudes to mixed-faith couples and find ways of retaining their religious involvement.
Jonathan Romain
6.2.10-11
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Published by the Association of Interchurch Families, England
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