Intermarriage Studies

Sometimes an author's name's familiar, but you don't know why. If you have a touch of the graphomania, you can search your own since-2004 bloggings, and you're likely to dig up something. So it went with Naomi Schaefer Riley. Anyway, here she is! She's the writer who was fired from the Chronicle of Higher Education after she declared the field of Black Studies preposterous on account of the dissertations it produces... dissertations she hadn't read, and that sounded unremarkable, certainly no worse than dissertations in other fields.

Anyway, if the retort to her last intervention into the national conversation was that her own husband is black, she's now able to use the very same husband in (preemptive?) response to criticism of her latest project: a dire warning about intermarriage in America. But it's OK, because she herself is intermarried. (Anyone who thinks marrying out means overall positive attitudes towards intermarriage, let alone towards the group into which one has married, might want to check out Drieu la Rochelle's 1939 novel Gilles. An admittedly extreme example.) Whatever the case, the important fact here is that we can safely assume Riley would approve of my dissertation topic. (French Studies with a hint of Jewish Studies.)

While I haven't yet been able to track down her book, I did read her op-ed in the NYT, presenting her findings. Which leaves me with a bunch of questions to have at the ready for the book itself:

1) Why should "secular Americans" be upset that interfaith marriages "tend to diminish the strength of religious communities, as the devout are pulled away from bonds of tradition and orthodoxy by their nonmember spouses"? I guess one could argue (does Riley?) that even the secular might be upset by the no doubt disproportionate impact this has on religious minorities, but even so. If you aren't generically pro-religion, the waning of religiosity might seem a good thing.

2) "Religious leaders I interviewed — and not only Jewish ones — were broadly worried about interfaith marriage." Is this sentence merely a reaction to the information right above it re: the higher divorce rate Riley found among intermarried Jews (but not Catholics... but what about Jews married to Catholics?)? Or is it about the common assumption that Jews are the group most angst-ridden about out-marriage?

3) Is there even a meaningful category called "interfaith marriage"? Meaning: does the marriage of a Catholic and a Protestant (both of whom could be of English ancestry, or German, etc.) much relate to marriages that also cross ethnic or socioeconomic lines - marriages in which "religion" is less about piety and more a proxy for other such factors?

4) Why are we so concerned about what happens when children are born to "people who married between ages 36 and 45"? "Those who marry in their 30s and 40s, especially educated professionals, are often at the most secular points in their lives. These couples tended to underestimate how faith can grow in importance as they got older and had children." How much older are 45-year-old women going to get before having children?

5) If the older a couple is when they marry, the more likely they are to be interfaith, and if interfaith couples are more likely to divorce, that is interesting, given that we're always hearing that if you want your marriage to last, you should wait until the five remaining minutes of your fertility to say "I do." Is it that once you get to an older cohort, there are more people who had first tried and failed to marry in, and they (or their families-of-origin) see these marriages as somehow less-than?

6) Why this project, why now? People - OK, Jews - have been issuing the very same warnings about intermarriage since intermarriage first became legal/plausible.