Eat, Sing, Love: How Interfaith Families Model Interfaith Engagement

Abstract

Eat, Sing, Love: How Interfaith Families Model Interfaith Engagement Susan Katz Miller I lift my eyes up, unto the mountains, from where, from where can my help be found? (Psalm 121) Dancing a grapevine step, while singing Psalm 121 set to a minor melody, I was conscious of a pleasant harmonic buzz created by engaging more than one of my senses simultaneously. The circle connected dozens of members of the Interfaith Families Project of Greater Washington DC (IFFP), a community of Jews and Christians celebrating both Judaism and Christianity together. When we reached the line “My help comes from the one, maker of heaven and earth” I looked into the eyes of the random person across from me in the circle, and thought about that person as my source of help. I felt deeply moved by the intensity of this direct gaze, and the pleasure of moving in sync with a chain of people who embodied interfaith life. In that moment, claiming an exclusive label or theology for myself as a Jew or Christian felt entirely beside the point. A growing number of Americans are rebelling against the traditional narrative of lifelong allegiance to a specific religious denomination, movement, community, dogma, or creed. Free to move about the country, free to love across boundaries, they are forming interfaith families, and participating in multiple religious practices as “lived religion.” Rather than attempting to resolve the cognitive dissonance of “competing” religious truth claims, they are content to immerse themselves in the rich sensory experiences of the entire extended family: the sounds, smells, tastes, and imagery. Resisting the false binaries of religion versus culture, belief versus cynicism, intellectual versus corporeal, these families may access spirituality, and even transcendence, through performance of ancestral and contemporary rituals. And increasingly, they resist internalizing the idea that they are transgressors, gate‐crashers, or dabblers. At the same time, they may resist the idea that their hybridity is a disrespectful form of cultural appropriation, because they are growing up in families with historical connections to more than one religious culture. They take pleasure and pride from eating, singing, dancing, and loving in the new liminal spaces they are creating together. Today, at least one quarter of married people in the U.S. say they have a spouse with a different religious (or nonreligious) identity, according to the Pew Research Center. And one in every five people in the U.S. now grows up in an interfaith family. While traditional religious institutions have often warned against forming such families, Pew finds that “Nearly three‐quarters of those raised by parents from different religious backgrounds say their parents disagreed little, if at all, about religion.” In this essay, I explore what I believe is one of the secrets to that harmony: an emphasis on embodiment rather than exposition and explication. In much of the literature on interfaith families, religious institutions (and those scholars they fund) have tended to studiously ignore multiple religious practitioners, at best, and discourage their existence at worst. In part as a result, and because the study of religious complexity in families with multiple religious heritage is relatively new, the terminology remains fluid and contested. In the Jewish world, academics and community leaders still refer to “intermarriage” or possibly “interfaith marriage,” while referring to multiple religious practitioners as “partly Jewish.” The term multiple religious belonging (MRB) came out of Catholic academic theology, with the writings of Catherine Cornille and Peter Phan, and continuing through the work of Paul Knitter. The Protestant world has begun to take an interest more recently, often adopting the terms multiple religious practitioners (MRPs) or multiple religious participation as more appropriate since belonging may be moderated by institutional gatekeepers. In recent years, sociologists, anthropologists, and scholars of religion have explored the reclaiming or creation of other terms including complex religious identity, religious syncretism, bricolage, and hybridity. And in his essential new book When One Religion Isn't Enough: The Lives of Spiritually Fluid People, Christian minister and Buddhist practitioner Duane Bidwell uses the terms religious multiplicity, or spiritual fluidity. Meanwhile, in many societies it is entirely normal and unremarkable to practice more than one religion—as in the intertwined practice of Buddhism and...