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.What's the moral of the story?
In a paper published in 1993, Evelyn Lehrer, a professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found that if members of two mainline Christian denominations marry, they have a one in five chance of being divorced in five years. A Catholic and a member of an evangelical denomination have a one in three chance. And a Jew and a Christian who marry have a greater than 40 percent chance of being divorced in five years.
A Jew's view from the capital of Israel and the future site of the Third Temple, may it speedily be rebuilt.
Opposites may attract, but they don't stick well.
ReplyDeleteWhat about Jews and Agnostics? Jews and Unitarians? And are these Reform Jews? Conservative? What about an "intermarriage" between a raised-frum Jew who'd gone "off the derech" and a Renewal Jew?
ReplyDeleteReally, these intermarriage studies lack nuance to the point that they're almost useless. How many Jews who already have a strong Jewish identity marry practicing Christians, anyway?