Strengths and Strategies in Interfaith Marriages

Abstract

Despite the rising number of interfaith relationships, few empirical studies have explored the strengths of interfaith couples living in the United States who are striving to integrate separate religious beliefs. This study examined the strengths of interfaith marriages by conducting a qualitative analysis of 32 religiously diverse interfaith couples’ (N = 63 participants) reports of strengths that resulted from their relationships. We found five core themes that couples identified as strengths of being in an interfaith relationship: (a) increased acceptance and tolerance, (b) opportunities for exploration, learning, and discovery, (c) an increased ability to find and build upon similarities, (d) more traditions and practices, and (e) strengthened personal faith. The authors promote a balanced awareness of both strengths and vulnerabilities that recur in interfaith families.

Keywords:

• family relationships
• interfaith
• marriage
• parenting
• religion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the coding and analysis efforts of Julianna Herbst, Madisyn Groberg, Zachary Johnson, Elisabeth Kirchner Kimball, William Stanford, Jessica Willis, Mishonne Marks, and Emily McCrary, as well as the help of Anthony Hoff, Raetchel Hanselmann, and Kat Smith in the transcription of the interviews.

Notes

1 This survey looked only at couples’ current religious identities, and thus does not capture couples that began as interfaith and converted or interfaith couples that subsequently divorced. Thus, this 28–42% may be slightly conservative (Pew Research Center, 2015).

2 This growing movement is what Miller refers to as more couples emphasizing two religions in their interfaith home (Miller, 2013).

3 The preferred name for most within this group is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but Lehrer includes a number of “RLDS” (now Community of Christ) participants under the “Mormon” heading as well.

4 This list is available from the authors upon request.

5 The sample composition included 22% from the Mountain West (Utah and Arizona), 16% from the Southern Crossroads (Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas), 19% from the Pacific (California and Nevada), 16% from the Mid-Atlantic (Washington, D.C. and New York), 13% from the Midwest (Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana), 9% from the South (South Carolina and Florida), and 3% from the Northwest (Oregon). The sample was 76% White and 24% racial and ethnic minorities (6% Hispanic, 6% Black, 5% Asian, 3% African, 2% Filipino, and 2% Middle Eastern). Additionally, seven of the couples were in cross-cultural or cross-racial relationships.

6 The reason for oversampling Latter-day Saints was the particularly high instability (i.e., divorce rates) in interfaith marriages involving this group (Dollahite et al., 2017; Lehrer, 2009), and that Latter-day Saint parents perhaps place greater importance on their children marrying within the faith than almost any other religion (Riley, 2013).

7 This is likely a function of purposively selecting strong marriages who creatively navigated this obstacle, or who even found ways to transform a typical obstacle into a strength. This tendency is not generalizable to all or even most interfaith marriages, but the possibility of outcomes that do not involve conflict is promising.

8 https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript?language=en.