The need for scholarship on Interfaith Marriage and Families

Numerous studies have emerged within the field of communication that delineates the importance and prevalence of religion for a family unit. Mostly, these studies show the importance and prevalence of religion for a family unit by simply examining the applicability of pre-established doctrine about family centrality. However, scholars of family communication have seldom considered explicating the importance of religion for the family unit in relation to external factors, or factors aside from the explicit teachings of family that religious doctrine states. One way researchers can test the importance of religion for a family sans applying religious doctrine is to examine interfaith marriages and families. Interfaith marriages and families test the importance of religious principles about family centrality because it entails the bond between individuals hailing from different faiths.

According to family communication professor Laurie Arliss, given that religion has played and continues to play such a integral role in United States national and local history, the emphasis on Interfaith marriage and impacts on families are studied to see how local and national courses of history is changing. On a local, familial level, religion contains essentially a set of pre-established rules principles about family centrality that are easily applied by many into their family lives. Most religions offer strong messages about centrality of the family because religious groups and organizations operate like a family unit, making it very easy for family units to intertwine with each other to provide emotional support for individual members. By providing individual emotional support, the family is not only able to maintain an intact, interdependent unit, but also able to deal with human mortality via a collective effort. If the religious mindset is uniform, then people have more strength to address the sensitive topic of human mortality. Therefore, family and religious groups typically deemphasize individual concerns in this fast-paced, individualistic economy and society. Individuals are asked to sacrifice for a certain group. Based on the craving for similarity religious and familial organizations express, the main motive both institutions strive to maintain is intergenerational ties. To maintain intergenerational ties is to promote similarity, executed by family members marrying within the same faith to pass traditions along future generations. With interfaith marriage on a steady rise, maintaining intergenerational ties will have more obstacles. Even more, the concept of intergenerational ties might have to be re-considered all together outside a religious light, something that scholars strive for when researching about interfaith families.

On a national level, there is a political motive that marrying within the same family has. According to Armado Rodriguez’s Intercultural Communication: an Ecological Approach, there are various frameworks of diversity each country operates by. One of the most prominent ones is known as “Pluralism”, or the need for peaceful coexistence of different interests, convictions and lifestyles, the imperative to acknowledge the diversity of and the need of interests to accommodate differences by engaging in good-faith negotiation. Pluralism, however, does not call for people to believe in every faith to be true. Rather, it aims to make religions mutually exclusive from each other, while its respective members respect its counterparts that they disagree with. The rise of interfaith marriage, however, threatens the existence of mutually exclusive religion, for the beliefs of each respective spouse are believed to taint each other to create new beliefs completely deviant from their own. This supposedly poses serious risks for the development of the couple’s offspring, because it would “confuse” them and their perceptions on life. Scholarship on interfaith family, however, aims to examine whether or not confusion actually proliferates among children of interfaith families. From these results, a bigger question can be extrapolated, and that is whether or not pluralism is fading or changing in the overall American context.

Demographics of Interfaith Marriage

It is hard to pinpoint the exact demographic statistics of interfaith families over a course of history, for each sector of faith has their own records of how many of their respective members commit to interfaith marriages. But the most common kind of interfaith marriage that took place over the decade in the United States and that continue to dominate at the moment is Jewish-Christian Marriages. According to a 2011 study conducted by Christopher P Scheitle and Buster G. Smith, 27.5% of Jewish people have committed to marriage outside of their faith, compared to Catholics and Protestants, which are two other major faiths of the United States that only have 26.2% and 18.8% of their members marrying outside of faith, respectively. At first, for most of the second half of the twentieth century, intermarriage was more of a topic of concern for the  Jews more than other religious groups due to worries from the Holocaust; Riley says that marrying a non-Jew would diminish their chances of survival and reproduction, given the scarce number of Jews left after the Holocaust. Yet Jews spotted the trend early, with a survey triggering alarm in 1990 when it claimed that more than half of American Jews were marrying out. After the 1990’s others have been catching up, with overall rates of such unions more than doubling. The 2001 American Religious Identification Survey reported that 27% Jews, 23% Catholics, 39% Buddhists, 18% Baptists, 21% Muslims, and 12% Mormons were married to a spouse with a different religious identification and 45% of marriages in the within the Christian religion were interdenominational. By 2010, the interfaith marriage rate in the United States rose over 42 percent.

The median age of interfaith marriage is also a very important factor to acknowledge. The average of the first marriage in the US as of 2010 is 27 for a woman and 29 for a man. Interfaith marriages, however, are more common among older couples: according to Riley, only 48% of people who were married in between ages 16-25 were interfaith, compared with 58% of people who were married between the ages of 26-35 and 67% between 36-45 years of age.

Characteristics of Interfaith Marriage

There are many terms and phrases associated with interfaith marriage. Positive terms have a wide range of connotations. Superficial connotations derive from words like “exotic” or “exquisite”. Other words and phrases, conversely, have humane connotations. News reporter Stanley Fish states many interfaith couples have “chosen the romanticism and the individualistic ethos of America over the demands of the communities that they have come from”. Therefore, when interfaith couples are asked to describe the positives of their bonds and family lives, they use phrases like  “liberating”, practicing through good faiths”, “it’s fine as long as we both believe in God”, or “we all have the same God”. All of these phrases rooted in the reality that all humans have the innate freedom of personal belief and religion.

Opponents to interfaith marriage, however, view this individualism as a negative obsession. Fish says that opponents call it an “obsession with tolerance at all costs”, or the fetish to celebrate and embrace all differences with no exceptions.  Giving no consideration to differences is exactly what opponents of interfaith marriage and families have. They believe that “Interfaith couples tend to marry without thinking through the practical implications of their religious differences” because of assuming that all humans are naturally “decent and tolerant people … [and that] they will not encounter difficulties being married to someone of another faith. 21% of Americans still believe that a happy marriage is a bond between the same religions because religion is an important part of individual identity. Those who marry outside the religion tend to be “less religious”, thus posing a genuine threat to religious organization. Interfaith couples tend to have less children and more likely to divorce due to the division in faith.

Trends in Ongoing Studies about Interfaith Families

Trends in ongoing expert discussion and study about interfaith households mostly surround its deficits. However, the extent of stigma depends on the independent variable that is being examined. Commonly, people would argue religious faith being the independent variable to the amount of stigma towards interfaith marriage, but studies have shown that in addition to faith, the amount of stigma against interfaith marriage is influenced by other complicating factors such as time, political belief, geography, ethnicity and race. One study that covered some of these complicating factors was a 2011 survey conducted by Allison Heard Sahl Christie D. Batson. Sahl and Batson examined whether or not religious and racial and personal differences in attitudes toward interfaith relationships are evident in the Bible Belt region of the United States. The results, predictably, showed that religious and racial trends emerge against interfaith association as the relationship between the couple deepens from friendship all the way to parenthood. Racially, whites were found more likely than blacks to oppose interfaith and interracial relationships at each level of intimacy. At the most intimate relationship level of parenthood/marriage, only 9% of blacks are opposed to interfaith marriage, while 31% of whites express opposition toward interfaith marriage. Religiously, Baptists are more likely than non-Baptists to oppose interfaith unions at each level of intimacy. At the friendship level, 12.6% of Baptists are opposed while only 9.4% of non-Baptists are opposed. However, as the relationship increases in intimacy, the religious gap in opposition also increases. Slightly more than 30% of Baptist adults oppose interfaith marriage compared to 20% of non-Baptist adults. Based on these results, passing time of the relationship is interestingly the independent variable, for as time progresses, dependent variables like race, religion and personality increase in negative intensity. Given the independent variable is time, we could re-examine the pre-conceived notion of religion as the primary determining factor of perception of interfaith marriage. Chronology could be a major concern expressed by all religions, culture and races.

While studies like that of Sahl and Batson try to exhume an independent variable having nothing to do with religious difference, other studies try to reinforce the common notion that stigmatization against interreligious marriage and families is caused by the faiths that are involved. Particularly, the nature of a certain religion not only determines the fate of an interfaith bond, but also the future of the children within the same family. Alberto Bisin, Giorgio Topa and Thierry Verdier observed marriage and socialization in a 2004 study. Predictably, they found a strong preference by members of each religious group for having children who share their own religious trait. Couples of interfaith matrimony marriage, too, do not have many problems in socializing their children, but what dictates the smoothness of socialization is the respective religions that compose the marital bond.  The study found that each faith had different intolerance parameters, or the extent of how accepting one religious member is of another faith. For instance, the intolerance parameter of Protestants with respect to Catholics and the one of Catholics with respect to Protestants are not significantly different, for they are within the same faith, but different denomination. For Jews, conversely, there was a much higher intolerance parameter with respect to Catholics than vice versa.  Because of these differing rates of tolerance, a child in a heterogamous family not only does not have a well‐defined reference to be socialized to, but as a consequence must pick a trait by matching in the population with a cultural parent who socializes the child to the parent’s own religious trait. From this study, the main variable is the type of religion at play. Every religion is unique and has its own characteristics, and such characteristics can have racial and/or cultural undertones. Given that Judaism is widely known as an ethnoreligious faith (though such a fact can be contested further), it would be no surprise if non-ethnoreligious faiths like Christianity encountered problems with Jewish people, for naturally, American people favor outward similarity, like race, skin color, just as much as inward similarities, like religious and political beliefs.

Analysis and Conclusion

Scholarship on interfaith families within the United States is quite limited because most studies attempt to understand interfaith families through the relationship between interfaith couples. Furthermore, information about the communicative aspects between the child and parent remains unclear or if not too general and unspecific because there is a dearth in scholarship that focuses on the thoughts of children of from interfaith families. Specifically, the thoughts of interfaith children could be examined further by finding out whether nor not the spiritual development of interfaith children is different from children in a monogamous family. Do interfaith children have a choice over what religion they wish to follow? If so, can that choice be debilitating to a child’s cognitive development due to the vast amount of beliefs and ideals before them? Can it annihilate simplicity, a very important factor needed for the development of a child? Or, does complexity at a young age aid the child’s cognitive development?

These aforementioned questions are only general hypotheses, but perhaps they invoke a bigger picture about choice, its definition, its role and its effects on the spiritual development of interfaith children.

Given that choice, by its definition, further empowers the idea of romanticized individualism that many interfaith couples associate themselves with, couples justify that their interfaith bond is a living example of religious freedom bestowed by the United States constitution. Therefore, interfaith parents can involuntarily inflict decision making upon their children from a very young age in order to further maintain the values of freedom and liberty that choice delivers and to sustain a more subjective, non-absolute familial household that does not compel, but provokes many beliefs and ideas the children can consider. On the surface, this infliction seems benign and common-sense, but when looked further in-depth, this infliction can be seen as a political statement expressed on behalf of the interfaith parents. If ample amounts of studies regarding parents giving choice-making abilities to children are found, then we are able to deduce consequences it might have on interfaith children.

One possible consequence choice can have on interfaith children is excessive amounts of information from a young age. Social scientist Barry Schwartz deems this as the major paradox of choice. To put it within the context of interfaith children, the children can feel too much pressure to a point where choice-making gradually causes difficulty for them to perform cost-benefit analyses to make the out right choice. This confusion roots from the fact that the parents have differing beliefs. Having two different beliefs constitutes of too much information to choose from. Excessive points of view has a direct relationship with excessive information, in that the more information there is, the more perspectives and differences that need to be examined, and the more perspectives there are the more trouble children may have in making up their minds. Should an child ever chose which faith to follow and what information to examine and process, the child may gain the facts and knowledge, but may feel less satisfied with the results of the faith he or she has chosen because of regretting how he or she could have chosen a better, more attractive faith. Here, it is shown that with high volume of information to begin with, the child is completely responsible for his initial decision and must bear the consequences of missing out on another medium that would have provided more valuable information.

Sophia Chawala