Friday, December 6, 2002

A story published today by the USA Today reports that the American Religious Identification Survey 2001 (ARIS) finds that of all U.S. adults who have had children with someone of another faith, 10% are divorced, compared with 3% for parents of the same faith.

The finding emerged as demographers looked in depth at the survey's findings on the religious and spiritual choices of 50,000 people. Researchers from the Graduate Center at City University of New York were the first to ask people not only their own religious identity but also the faith of their current or former partner -- and to ask how parents of differing religions were raising their children.

Few were surprised to add up 28.4 million Americans living in mixed-faith households, says Ariela Keysar, one of three co-authors of the survey.

The survey found each interfaith household may cost religious denominations three to six future adherents when parents choose one faith, or none, for their children. Catholic parents in interfaith marriages are among those most likely to say their kids are being raised in their faith (66%). But retention rates drop to half for Lutherans (54%) and Methodists (51%) and less than one in three for Episcopalians (31%).

Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, says Muslim men, who are permitted in their religion to marry outside the faith, have trouble in custody disputes in U.S. courts. They are responsible for raising Muslim children, he says, but ''we find the father's faith and ethnicity are used against him.''

Often two distinct faiths can only work together if parents ignore theological gaps between divergent beliefs about the nature of God, the value and role of scripture and the path to salvation.

So far, mental health experts have seen no lasting psychic misery inflicted by growing up with parents who take opposite stands, says Los Angeles attorney Marshall Zolla, a family law specialist.

Ed Johnsrud, whose grandparents came from a tiny Scandinavian fundamentalist Christian sect, married Patti Oblath, a Jew, and promising to raise children as Jews.

When the Los Angeles couple divorced, he kept the agreement for their daughter but insisted on custody at Christmas, even though for him it's a cultural event, not a religious one.

Santa Monica Rabbi Jeffrey Marx says religion is an issue in 95% of interfaith marriages and divorces, but only 20% of the time is it a thorny theological point.

More often, he says, former partners club each other with the visitation schedule or try to appease in-laws.

But contested divorces where one parent claims God for his or her side can get ugly. A frequently cited legal case illustrates a triad of troubles: different theology, different degrees of commitment and an insistence that only one faith, one parent, can be right.