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Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States
The rate of interfaith marriage in the United States has risen so radically since the sixties that it is difficult to recall how taboo the practice once was. How is this development understood and regarded by Americans generally, and what does it tell us about the nation's religious life? Drawing on ethnographic and historical sources, Samira K. Mehta provides a fascinating analysis of wives, husbands, children, and their extended families in interfaith homes; religious leaders; and the social and cultural milieu surrounding mixed marriages among Jews, Catholics, and Protestants.
Mehta's eye-opening look at the portrayal of interfaith families across American culture since the mid-twentieth century ranges from popular TV shows, holiday cards, and humorous guides to "Chrismukkah" to children's books, young adult fiction, and religious and secular advice manuals. Mehta argues that the emergence of multiculturalism helped generate new terms by which interfaith families felt empowered to shape their lived religious practices in ways and degrees previously unknown. They began to intertwine their religious identities without compromising their social standing. This rich portrait of families living diverse religions together at home advances the understanding of how religion functions in American society today.
Mehta's eye-opening look at the portrayal of interfaith families across American culture since the mid-twentieth century ranges from popular TV shows, holiday cards, and humorous guides to "Chrismukkah" to children's books, young adult fiction, and religious and secular advice manuals. Mehta argues that the emergence of multiculturalism helped generate new terms by which interfaith families felt empowered to shape their lived religious practices in ways and degrees previously unknown. They began to intertwine their religious identities without compromising their social standing. This rich portrait of families living diverse religions together at home advances the understanding of how religion functions in American society today.
274 pages, Hardcover
Published March 26, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 8, 2023
This is a top-notch summary of a decades long academic study in the United States regarding interfaith marriage. I can understand your disappointment if you were expecting either a humorous writeup à la Dorothy Parker or a romance along the lines of the classic Brigid Loves Bernie TV show in the 1970s.
Essentially, the study discovered that by and large, interfaith and interracial families are able to sort things out and find suitable compromises that meet the needs of everyone in their family. In addition, their kids tend to turn out okay. If anything, kids with a multicultural experience turn out better than those without such experiences.
Why was such a study undertaken? In the late 1960s and early 1970s, religious leaders noticed that attendance, membership, and donations were on the decline. These leaders tended to blame this trend on the increasing number of interfaith marriages. One positive result in this was that religious leaders made it easier for interfaith couples to get married. They did this with eyes on the couple's children.
Personally, my parents were both Baptist, and they became Methodists. My wife and I were both Methodists, and we became atheists. Since then, there hasn't been much change. The fruits of our love haven't fallen far from the tree.
Essentially, the study discovered that by and large, interfaith and interracial families are able to sort things out and find suitable compromises that meet the needs of everyone in their family. In addition, their kids tend to turn out okay. If anything, kids with a multicultural experience turn out better than those without such experiences.
Why was such a study undertaken? In the late 1960s and early 1970s, religious leaders noticed that attendance, membership, and donations were on the decline. These leaders tended to blame this trend on the increasing number of interfaith marriages. One positive result in this was that religious leaders made it easier for interfaith couples to get married. They did this with eyes on the couple's children.
Personally, my parents were both Baptist, and they became Methodists. My wife and I were both Methodists, and we became atheists. Since then, there hasn't been much change. The fruits of our love haven't fallen far from the tree.
January 10, 2020
An intriguing but dry read. Very much an academic treatise.
Religious studies professor Samira Mehta followed Jewish/Christian interfaith families for ten years in order to figure out how they shape and have been shaped by American society. Focusing on the last fifty years, she posits that the interfaith movement, for lack of a better term, has moved away from assimilationist messages to multicultural messages.
Meaning that when the interfaith numbers started to skyrocket, and religious institutions were still broadly speaking out against it, there was a separate American movement to encourage these couples to cohabitate, adopt an American "Protestant" secular lifestyle, and eschew their more "ethnic" traditions. By the '90s, multiculturalism was in. Which meant it was okay to identify with a particular culture, but it was even better to blend that culture with another.
Mehta doesn't go into this in much detail, but the "Protestant"/secular thing has to do with how American culture was founded. Yes, technically Prootestantism is a religion (several strains of Christianity, in fact) and secularism implies the lack of religion. But mainline, white protestantism feeds into the idea of a quiet, individual-centric midwestern life, which is more or less the American cultural stereotype. On the opposite side of the scale, Jews (and to a lesser extent Catholics) are seen as loud, "ethnic," aka foreign, and urban, aka cosmopolitan. Mehta quickly analyzes a handful of '70s tv shows that sell the idea of an "American" interfaith marriage being a step up from neurotic Jewish or Catholic parents.
Meanwhile, of course, Jewish institutions railed against this, and largely would refuse to marry such couples, especially without a show of commitment to raising Jewish families. (Catholics, for their part, were more concerned with their people marrying Protestants than Jews--understandable because Protestantism is the dominant religion here.) Mehta quoted the numbers and had all of the academic jargon on hand, but I was reminded of how real life rarely measures up to an academic study. Or at least my real life doesn't, where my parents were married in a joint ceremony by a rabbi AND a priest in 1981.
I don't think my parents were as intensely involved as most of the "subjects" Mehta details in this book either, though I'm speaking as an adult, and they surely see their obligation to my religious/cultural education as over. I was raised in an interfaith (as in my father didn't convert) Jewish (as in one-religion) household, with two white parents. (Also, because I am Jewish by matrilineal descent, I am accepted as a Jew by all Jewish denominations. This is unlike patrilineal Jews who might walk a more difficult path with regards to community acceptance.) Mehta actually didn't spend a lot of time on families like mine.
She went into fascinating detail with more "blended" religious families, and Jewish interfaith families with an interracial component. Though she kept some analytical (sometimes almost judgmental) distance, these people and their complex realities came alive on the page. In contrast, she only cited "composite" examples of Jewish-only families where the wife converts for the husband and is then expected to raise Jewish children all on her own. The general gist of this is that the man wants the woman to convert, out of a vague sense of Jewish loyalty or cultural nostalgia. But the wife isn't culturally Jewish, she's now religiously Jewish, much moreso than the husband. Frustrations ensue. I would have preferred, perhaps, a more empathetic look at one of these individual families.
(Relatedly, I should say that, except for an anecdote here or there, Mehta focused on families that at least adhered to some Jewish custom.)
The shift from "assimilation" to "multiculturalism" means another shift as well--the shift from seeing Judaism (and indeed Christianity) as a "religion" to seeing it as a "culture." Religion, after all, has "truth claims," as Mehta put it, which in it's purest sense means you can't believe in Jewish doctrine and Christian doctrine at the same time. But if you believe in culture, you see all of this as manifestations of a homey heritage, and you can blend different pieces together (also exemplified through recent children's and YA literature that Mehta analyzes). Perhaps you can even find similar meaning in the holidays, like Christmas and Chanukah having to do with "family, tolerance, friendship, joy and unspecified wonder."
A caveat to say that most Jews with any religious affiliation would probably, at best, only vaguely associate those words with Chanukah (and would probably be more in tune with the fact that our holiday with perhaps the most vocal anti-assimilationist message has in fact become the most "Americanized" Jewish holiday.) Mehta goes back and forth, and prods her subjects to interact with the notion of, whether all of this "blending" in fact leads to a lack of nuance in whatever might be termed "Jewish life." Mehta comes to the conclusion, which seems to be backed by her specific examples, that interfaith families experience deep wells of meaning, if not in the traditional sense. What I grapple with, personally, is how religion has become transactional in modern parlance. I almost wanted to slap one of the men in this book who seethed about how his kids should receive bat mitzvahs because, to paraphrase, "he was paying for it." That's not how religion works!
In America--for interfaith families, but also, Mehta hints at, for everyone--our approach to religion has become more individual based than community based. Religion should adhere to us rather than the other way around. Personally, I'm looking for a bit of a happy medium. Or perhaps, to be more traditionally Jewish about it, I am Yisrael, I am struggling with Gd.
Mehta makes a comment or two about the limitations of her experiment--that even though she's using Jewish/Christian marriages as a "stand in" for all interfaith marriages, Jews and Christians have specific histories and customs that may or may not correlate to someone of another religion being the interfaith partner. She also pretty exclusively points to Jewish culture being Ashkenazi. But it is fair to note that most American Jews are, in fact, of the Central/Eastern European variety.
Religious studies professor Samira Mehta followed Jewish/Christian interfaith families for ten years in order to figure out how they shape and have been shaped by American society. Focusing on the last fifty years, she posits that the interfaith movement, for lack of a better term, has moved away from assimilationist messages to multicultural messages.
Meaning that when the interfaith numbers started to skyrocket, and religious institutions were still broadly speaking out against it, there was a separate American movement to encourage these couples to cohabitate, adopt an American "Protestant" secular lifestyle, and eschew their more "ethnic" traditions. By the '90s, multiculturalism was in. Which meant it was okay to identify with a particular culture, but it was even better to blend that culture with another.
Mehta doesn't go into this in much detail, but the "Protestant"/secular thing has to do with how American culture was founded. Yes, technically Prootestantism is a religion (several strains of Christianity, in fact) and secularism implies the lack of religion. But mainline, white protestantism feeds into the idea of a quiet, individual-centric midwestern life, which is more or less the American cultural stereotype. On the opposite side of the scale, Jews (and to a lesser extent Catholics) are seen as loud, "ethnic," aka foreign, and urban, aka cosmopolitan. Mehta quickly analyzes a handful of '70s tv shows that sell the idea of an "American" interfaith marriage being a step up from neurotic Jewish or Catholic parents.
Meanwhile, of course, Jewish institutions railed against this, and largely would refuse to marry such couples, especially without a show of commitment to raising Jewish families. (Catholics, for their part, were more concerned with their people marrying Protestants than Jews--understandable because Protestantism is the dominant religion here.) Mehta quoted the numbers and had all of the academic jargon on hand, but I was reminded of how real life rarely measures up to an academic study. Or at least my real life doesn't, where my parents were married in a joint ceremony by a rabbi AND a priest in 1981.
I don't think my parents were as intensely involved as most of the "subjects" Mehta details in this book either, though I'm speaking as an adult, and they surely see their obligation to my religious/cultural education as over. I was raised in an interfaith (as in my father didn't convert) Jewish (as in one-religion) household, with two white parents. (Also, because I am Jewish by matrilineal descent, I am accepted as a Jew by all Jewish denominations. This is unlike patrilineal Jews who might walk a more difficult path with regards to community acceptance.) Mehta actually didn't spend a lot of time on families like mine.
She went into fascinating detail with more "blended" religious families, and Jewish interfaith families with an interracial component. Though she kept some analytical (sometimes almost judgmental) distance, these people and their complex realities came alive on the page. In contrast, she only cited "composite" examples of Jewish-only families where the wife converts for the husband and is then expected to raise Jewish children all on her own. The general gist of this is that the man wants the woman to convert, out of a vague sense of Jewish loyalty or cultural nostalgia. But the wife isn't culturally Jewish, she's now religiously Jewish, much moreso than the husband. Frustrations ensue. I would have preferred, perhaps, a more empathetic look at one of these individual families.
(Relatedly, I should say that, except for an anecdote here or there, Mehta focused on families that at least adhered to some Jewish custom.)
The shift from "assimilation" to "multiculturalism" means another shift as well--the shift from seeing Judaism (and indeed Christianity) as a "religion" to seeing it as a "culture." Religion, after all, has "truth claims," as Mehta put it, which in it's purest sense means you can't believe in Jewish doctrine and Christian doctrine at the same time. But if you believe in culture, you see all of this as manifestations of a homey heritage, and you can blend different pieces together (also exemplified through recent children's and YA literature that Mehta analyzes). Perhaps you can even find similar meaning in the holidays, like Christmas and Chanukah having to do with "family, tolerance, friendship, joy and unspecified wonder."
A caveat to say that most Jews with any religious affiliation would probably, at best, only vaguely associate those words with Chanukah (and would probably be more in tune with the fact that our holiday with perhaps the most vocal anti-assimilationist message has in fact become the most "Americanized" Jewish holiday.) Mehta goes back and forth, and prods her subjects to interact with the notion of, whether all of this "blending" in fact leads to a lack of nuance in whatever might be termed "Jewish life." Mehta comes to the conclusion, which seems to be backed by her specific examples, that interfaith families experience deep wells of meaning, if not in the traditional sense. What I grapple with, personally, is how religion has become transactional in modern parlance. I almost wanted to slap one of the men in this book who seethed about how his kids should receive bat mitzvahs because, to paraphrase, "he was paying for it." That's not how religion works!
In America--for interfaith families, but also, Mehta hints at, for everyone--our approach to religion has become more individual based than community based. Religion should adhere to us rather than the other way around. Personally, I'm looking for a bit of a happy medium. Or perhaps, to be more traditionally Jewish about it, I am Yisrael, I am struggling with Gd.
Mehta makes a comment or two about the limitations of her experiment--that even though she's using Jewish/Christian marriages as a "stand in" for all interfaith marriages, Jews and Christians have specific histories and customs that may or may not correlate to someone of another religion being the interfaith partner. She also pretty exclusively points to Jewish culture being Ashkenazi. But it is fair to note that most American Jews are, in fact, of the Central/Eastern European variety.
October 9, 2023
best book I’ve read in interfaith families in a long time
Not a handbook or how to guide, but a really good and nuanced exploration of the history of interfaith marriage in the US, depictions in popular culture, and actual lived experiences of couples and families.
Not a handbook or how to guide, but a really good and nuanced exploration of the history of interfaith marriage in the US, depictions in popular culture, and actual lived experiences of couples and families.
March 5, 2019
I loved this compelling and interesting look inside the navigations interfaith families make in the US! My favorite section was on the Mormon-Jewish family!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews