Children of the Religious Enlightenment: The Question of Interfaith Marriage in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

The biblical story of Ruth, Moabite woman who marries the Israelite Boaz and adopts his religion, is remarkable account of intermarriage in an ancient Jewish community overwhelmingly proscribed such practice. The union of Ruth and Boaz is all the more anomalous given the specific Mosaic ban on intermarriage with Moabites for period of ten generations. Yet to many readers in the predominately Christian context of American religious history, Ruth's story was less about intermarriage itself than about the results of her union-that she became the great-grandmother of David, and therefore, according to the Gospel of Matthew, member of the direct lineage running from Abraham to Jesus Christ. The eighteenth-century New England theologian Jonathan Edwards viewed the story in this light, referring to that marriage of Boaz with Ruth, whence sprang the Savior of the world. Equally important, Ruth became, in Edwards' estimation, a type of the Gentile church, and also of every sincere convert: one who forsook all previous attachments in order to follow Christ.' The nature of Ruth's prior faith commitments and the demands of her Moabite gods scarcely concerned Edwards or most other American interpreters, for whom Ruth became model of willing religious conversion and successful assimilation. In Beloved Strangers: Interfaith Families in Nineteenth-Century America, Anne C. Rose recovers the theme of intermarriage in all its social complexity, focusing on couples who retained separate religious identities through an often difficult process of day-to-day negotiation. Rose's sample of twenty-six families includes many elite figures who are well-known for other contributions to American history but whose interfaith marriages typically garner little more than footnote, if that, in standard biographical reference works. She thus brings to light an important but heretofore neglected dimension of American religious pluralism in the nineteenth century. Intermarriage in the