Source: www.washingtonpost.com
UNITED STATES, June 6, 2010: In some ways, more interfaith marriage is good for civic life. Such unions bring extended families from diverse backgrounds into close contact. There is nothing like marriage between different groups to make society more integrated and more tolerant. As recent research by Harvard Professor Robert Putnam has shown, the more Americans get to know people of other faiths, the more they seem to like those people.
But the effects on the marriages themselves can be tragic — it is an open secret among academics that tsk-tsking grandmothers may be right. According to calculations based on the American Religious Identification Survey of 2001, people who had been in mixed-religion marriages were three times more likely to be divorced or separated than those who were in same-religion marriages.
When Joseph Reyes and Rebecca Shapiro got married in 2004 they had a Jewish wedding ceremony. He was Catholic but converted to Judaism after they married, and they agreed to raise any children in the Jewish faith. However, after their daughter Ela was born, Reyes began to worry about the fact that she had not been baptized. “If, God forbid, something happened to her, she wouldn’t be in heaven,” he told me. Today, two years after the Illinois couple’s bitter divorce battle began the fight over Ela’s religious upbringing involves criminal charges.
The Reyes-Shapiro divorce is about as ugly as the end of a marriage can get. But the fight over Ela’s religion illustrates the particular hardships and poor track record of interfaith marriages: They fail at higher rates than same-faith marriages. But couples don’t want to hear that, and no one really wants to tell them.