by Susan Jacoby
From these strictures, it could not be clearer that the process of obtaining permission for a mixed marriage from the Catholic Church was humiliating for both the Catholic and non-Catholic partners. That is one reason why any statistics about mixed marriages between, say, 1900 and 1940 seem to me inherently unreliable. Who knows how many independent-minded mixed couples never bothered to go through the rigmarole and simply took themselves off to a justice of the peace? It may be assumed that parish priests dealt with these instructions in varying ways, depending on their temperament and talent for diplomacy. My grandmother Minnie Broderick (née Rothenhoefer), despite her complete willingness to convert from Lutheranism before she married my grandfather in 1919, remembered a particularly unpleasant parish priest who asked bluntly if she was “in the family way.” Gran recalled, “I was shocked, because I would never let Jim do more than kiss me.” My grandfather, who was not shocked, told the priest, “She’s as innocent as the Virgin Mary, no thanks to me.” Gramps was so angry at the priest that my grandmother had to persuade him, in deference to his mother’s feelings, not to run off and get married by a judge. Some couples must have done exactly that, and they would not necessarily appear in parish records from which demographic statistics might be gleaned. Many of these couples, given the strong social pressure to display some religious affiliation during the first half of the twentieth century, probably went to some church—especially after they became parents. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that mixed marriages during, and for at least two decades after, the massive immigration of 1880 to 1924 were responsible for a considerable number of unrecorded “conversions of convenience” in the United States.
The church was concerned enough by 1932 to issue a special letter listing the ecclesiastical punishments for the Catholic spouse if prenuptial promises to raise children as Catholics were violated. Among these were religious annulment of the marriage, denial of the sacraments, and even public excommunication (if the partner in a mixed marriage was prominent enough to be seen as giving “public scandal”). “Perhaps the best indication of the continuing failure of the Catholic system to check what it has considered to be the undesirable results of religious intermarriage,” the sociologist Milton L. Barron wrote in 1946, “is the fact that a large percentage of ‘invalid’ religious intermarriages have been noted in recent Catholic surveys. The term ‘invalid mixed marriage’ is defined by Catholics as marriage by a Catholic and a non-Catholic before a non-Catholic minister or civil official.”6
Protestant authorities in America also disapproved of intermarriage, and their position stiffened considerably after the Catholics took a stronger stance in 1932. Soon after the Catholic declaration of penalties for violations of prenuptial agreements, the Committee on Marriage and Home of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ described the requirement of a promise to bring up children as Catholics as an “intolerable condition” that should be used by ministers to advise the Protestant partner against entering any such marriage. The committee also suggested that those of different Protestant denominations reach a prenuptial agreement to attend one church together—or to pick a third church agreeable to both. Exactly how this was to be accomplished was not specified. In the old days, when churches were listed in the Yellow Pages, there was no listing under “Third Churches” for, say, a Baptist and an Episcopalian looking for a religious compromise to avoid marital strife.
Intermarriage with Jews was a bridge much further for both Protestants and Catholics. Moreover, Jewish leaders in America were, for the most part, as opposed to intermarriage as the snide priest who asked my grandmother, in 1919, if she and my grandfather had to get married. Conservative and Orthodox rabbis had always refused to preside over marriage ceremonies unless the non-Jewish partner converted according to Jewish law (and according to whatever interpretation of the law was accepted by the particular rabbi). The stance of Reform rabbis was not as uniform, but there is considerable evidence that Reform Judaism in America grew more conservative on this issue as the number of mixed marriages increased in the first three decades of the twentieth century. As early as 1883, though, the prominent Reform leader Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise delivered a public lecture with as negative a view of intermarriage as that promulgated in any Vatican declaration. Wise’s remarks were specifically directed at those who believed it appropriate for Reform rabbis to officiate at mixed-marriage ceremonies in which both parties were relatively detached from religious belief and observance.
It might be urged that there are thousands and tens of thousands of individuals in this country who profess no religion at all; hence they are free….Why should any rabbi refuse to solemnize in behalf of Judaism the marriages of such irreligious parties whose parents happened to be Jewish on one side and Christian on the other, if no existing law restrains him?…To this might be replied: Because the parties are irreligious; or because such solemnization would be a mere mockery to persons who profess no religion…and no rabbi will abuse the authority vested in him to perform the task of a lower magistrate; no rabbi has the right to act the part of an ordinary stage actor—to go through a performance and pronounce formulas and benedictions to parties who believe in neither, and cannot consider themselves benefited by either, as the next justice of the peace can declare them man and wife without any performance or benediction.7
This position is certainly understandable, notwithstanding the possibility that the desire of the putative secular couple for a Jewish ceremony might indicate some degree of attachment to Jewish culture and a Jewish family. To a Catholic or Protestant clergyman, the loss of one of their faithful (and of potential children) to a mixed marriage might be regrettable and sinful, but the institutional faith would go on. For a long-embattled Jewish minority, the entry of one of its members into a mixed marriage (with or without actual conversion) meant a loss to a people as well as a faith.
In the twentieth century, especially as Hitler’s threat began to loom in the 1930s, opposition to intermarriage grew stronger among American Reform rabbis. A survey in 1937 showed that more than 75 percent of Reform rabbis in the United States either refused to officiate at any mixed marriages or would perform the ceremony only if the non-Jewish partner had signed an agreement to raise the children as Jews.8 Such an agreement was as unenforceable in a civil court as the prenuptial promises demanded by the Catholic Church.
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And yet the rate of religious intermarriage continued to rise, first in the “greatest generation” and then, more dramatically, among the post–World War II baby boomers who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. In the Catholic and Jewish communities whose authorities had opposed intermarriage most strongly, rabbis and priests had to cope with religious defection at a time when American public religiosity was at its zenith, in the 1950s. Indeed, the obligatory religiosity of American middle-class life—in contrast to the more comfortable secularism of Europeans in mixed marriages—may have produced more conversions here among intermarried couples. When the first question you are asked upon arriving in a new town is “What church do you go to?,” it is natural to pick a church to go to.
The connection between the vast immigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the growing number of religious and ethnic intermarriages after the Second World War is more easily understood if social change is measured by the standard of generations rather than years. A considerable number of the American soldiers who fought what is remembered as the nation’s “last good war” were the children of immigrants. A teenager who immigrated to America with his family in, say, 1915—before the quota system—would have been exactly the right age to marry and produce a son who would have served in the U.S. Army during the Second World War. And that son—unlike his parents from a Russian shtetl or an impoverished Sicilian hill town—would have a chance to go to college on the GI Bill. The immediate impact of the GI Bill is apparent in the numerical difference between the 160,000-member college graduating class of 1940 and the 500,000-member graduati
ng class of 1950. Eventually, 2.2 million veterans would attend colleges (with another 3.5 million entering vocational institutions).9
The entry of so many more Americans into four-year colleges was the most important factor in the postwar rise in mixed marriages and conversions. Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather, followed by the 1972 blockbuster movie, offers a cameo of what was happening in families more ordinary than the Corleones. Michael, the youngest son of Don Vito Corleone (an immigrant from Sicily), is a war hero who attends an Ivy League school, where he falls in love with the New England Protestant Kay Adams. (Michael’s father would presumably have been able to pay his tuition without the GI Bill.) When Michael and Kay finally marry, she is the one who converts—as one might expect when a nice girl from New England marries into a Mafia family. The movie doesn’t make much of Kay’s conversion, but Puzo uses it to set up the ending of the novel, when Michael has already engineered numerous murders and taken control of his father’s Mafia empire. In the final scene: “As she had been taught to do, Kay struck her breast lightly with her clenched hand, the stroke of repentance….She emptied her mind of all thought of herself, of her children, of all anger, of all rebellion, of all questions. Then with a profound and deeply willed desire to believe, to be heard…she said the necessary prayers for the soul of Michael Corleone.”10
This kind of conversion story played out, on a less operatic scale, in ordinary families whose children had gone to college and met people from backgrounds unknown to their immigrant parents in insular communities. As the level of education rises, so has the incidence of religious intermarriage in every developed country in the modern era. Today, however, the proportion of interreligious couples is increasing at every educational level in the United States—a significant change since the middle of the twentieth century. The impact of higher education on religious intermarriage may have been more powerful in the past because less educated Americans, especially women, had fewer opportunities than they do today to meet anyone outside their immediate family and social group. Today, young women and men of different religions, ethnic groups, and races meet in the workplace—regardless of whether they are graduates of high schools, two-year community colleges, or the nation’s most elite universities. They also communicate with one another on the Internet. The era when the social choices of teenagers and young adults could be circumscribed and controlled by family, neighborhood, and church is long gone. And, as can be seen from the lamentations about mixed marriages from priests, ministers, and rabbis in the 1930s, the breakdown of traditional mechanisms of social control had begun long before technology and expanded higher education accelerated the process.
The nuns of my childhood were not wrong in their conviction that many American conversions of the twentieth century would never have occurred without the impetus of mixed marriage. My father certainly would not have converted to Catholicism had he married a girl from a similar nonobservant Jewish background instead of my Catholic mother. That fact does not make his conversion insincere, but it does mean that he was more interested in family harmony—and in distancing himself from his Jewish origins—than in Catholic doctrine. In mid-century America, religion—especially when intertwined with tribal ethnic loyalties—was important enough to Americans that a marriage to a person of another faith was still considered somewhat inconvenient. Conversion, for many Americans of my father’s generation, was a way to ameliorate the strain, rather than a profoundly felt spiritual or intellectual choice. These kinds of conversions would continue, in increasing numbers, in the next generation of baby boomers. The political scientists Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, in American Grace, put together some of the best available studies and concluded that the rate of what they call “religious switching” rose steadily throughout the twentieth century, along with the rate of religious intermarriage.11 There are, as I have already indicated, immense problems with all statistics about both conversion and intermarriage rates, because no one was keeping track of them in any systematic way before the Second World War. Astonishingly, the Gallup Poll began asking Americans about their attitude toward mixed marriages only in 1968, when nearly 60 percent of Americans already said they approved of marriages between Catholics and Protestants and Jews and non-Jews. By 1982, the approval figure had risen to 80 percent.12
If many American “conversions of convenience” were determined as much by social opportunism and intermarriage as by spiritual needs, and if they lacked an overwhelming intellectual or ideological component, that is not such a bad thing when one considers absolutist alternatives—both secular and traditionally religious. Conversions of convenience may have been the American norm for those who changed faiths from the 1920s to the 1950s, but the same decades of the twentieth century, on both sides of the Atlantic, saw ideologically driven conversions, especially by intellectuals, based entirely on an intense desire for certainty. Some converts embraced the faith of Stalinist Communism; others found solace in the most anti-modernist forms of traditional religion. Such conversions were never the norm, but because some involved famous literary intellectuals and scholars, they have exerted an outsize influence (especially in the United States and England) on our image of what it means to replace one faith with another. The normative American conversion experience undoubtedly had less to do with religious absolutism than with conventional social yearnings like those of my father. The pragmatic nature of so many American conversions from the 1920s to the 1950s presented a sharp contrast to the exemplars of absolutist conversions of intellectuals, on the left and right, clothed in traditional spiritual or modernist garb. Perhaps that very contrast accounts for both the romanticization and demonization that still surround the politically charged, impassioned conversions that took place at a time in the twentieth century when the world was locked in an epic battle between good and evil—whether those terms are defined in a secular or a religious sense.
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*1 Stories on the subject by the Catholic News Service, The Jewish Week, and The New York Times all referred to Gustav Gumpel as a “rabbi,” but the Bridgeport congregation of which he was a member has no record of his having served as a rabbi there in any official capacity. This, perhaps, was more of a family legend or a wish, since being a butcher did not confer high status among Prussian Jews.
*2 All of the men in the Jacoby family married and had children relatively late in life, which explains why there were only two generations born in the United States between 1849 and 1945.
*3 The provisions of the new immigration law went into effect in 1968.
*4 The amendments were named after Maine Representative James G. Blaine, who in 1875 had introduced a constitutional amendment that would have banned taxpayer support for religious instruction nationwide. That amendment failed to obtain the necessary two-thirds majority in the Senate by just two votes. Had it passed and been ratified by the states at the time, tax vouchers for religious schools today would be clearly unconstitutional.
INTERREGNUM
ABSOLUTISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
19
TRUE BELIEVERS
From the psychologist’s point of view, there is little difference between a revolutionary and a traditionalist faith. All true faith is uncompromising, radical, purist; hence the true traditionalist is always a revolutionary zealot in conflict with pharisaian society, with the lukewarm corrupters of the creed.
—ARTHUR KOESTLER, THE GOD THAT FAILED
IF I WERE TO BE GRANTED ONE WISH, in fairy-godmother fashion, it would be that Arthur Koestler’s analogy between secular and traditional faith-based absolutism, made at the midpoint of the twentieth century, remained true today only in a personal and psychological sense. To put it another way, I wish that absolutist religion and absolutist conversion no longer possessed any public or political power anywhere in the world. As I have indicated in the introduction to this book, I do not consider any form of secular thought a religion unless the secular ideology possesses a civil enforcement mechanism (a
critical qualification, to be sure). Nor do I believe that conversions to a traditional religion pose anything but individual concerns as long as they do not attempt to impose cultural hegemony (also a critical qualification). However, the new religio-political horrors that have marked the opening decades of the twenty-first century, and their relationship to the undead phenomena of absolute truth claims and forced conversion, have ensured the continuing relevance of Koestler’s observation.
There have always been eras when it was particularly problematic to separate individual conscience from the social causes and consequences of religious choice. One of those periods extended from the beginning of the First World War until the end of the Second World War, when the clash between totalitarian and democratic values eventually engulfed most of the earth and its inhabitants. That organized secular totalitarianism was characterized by the same imperviousness to evidence as absolutist traditional religion was recognized by only a small minority of congenital skeptics.
Conversions by both American and European intellectuals to Stalinist Communism in the 1920s and 1930s were produced by a crisis of confidence in social institutions battered by a brutal war and then by a worldwide economic depression. But the same period also saw an extraordinary number of conversions by atheist intellectuals to Christianity—and the political implications of these contemporaneous leaps of faith have often been overlooked. Sometimes the converts to Communism were the same people who eventually turned to conservative forms of Christianity, and nowhere was this more true than in England and the United States.
It is one of the peculiarities of history and national character that some of the most famous absolutist conversions took place in two nations where absolutist politics never gained the upper hand at a dangerous time. For precisely that reason, certain Anglo-American conversions stand out as exemplary demonstrations of the intellectual and moral dangers of religious absolutism and of their persistent social influence in ways that sometimes outlast the original religious impulse. Whittaker Chambers (1901–61), known primarily in American history for his role as the accuser in the notorious Alger Hiss trial, comes to mind. So does his near contemporary C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), the English medieval and Renaissance scholar and author of the beloved Chronicles of Narnia, and the English journalist and critic G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), whose Father Brown mystery series is one of the staple British imports that keep America’s Public Broadcasting Service going year after year. There may be something to offend everyone in a comparison of the conversions of such seemingly disparate intellectual figures, but the common element is that they all, at one point or another, embodied the absolutist passions of their era. Chesterton (though he was of an older, Victorian-bred generation) converted to Roman Catholicism in the same decade when Chambers converted to Communism and Lewis converted from atheism to High Anglicanism. After leaving the faith of the Communist Party, Chambers and Koestler (1905–83), not surprisingly, came to know each other as anticommunist intellectuals.