Interfaith Divorce

A strange court decision underscores the apostolic advice against being unequally yoked.

Jerold Simms and Dorothy Boeke got a divorce. Boeke is now remarried and is continuing to raise their children, two girls, ages five and seven. Tragic, yes. Unusual, no.

But there was one unique feature of the Simms-Boeke story that caught the attention of the national news media just after Christmas. For the first time in U.S. history, a court had intervened in a family to declare in what religion the children ought to be raised. The judge in a Colorado family court gave Mrs. Boeke, who is Catholic, “physical custody” of the children, while she gave Mr. Simms, who is Jewish, “religious custody.”

A bit of background: Dorothy Boeke was raised in a Christian home, but when she married Jerold Simms, she converted to Judaism.

The Simms home was not actually “a home full of Judaism,” Dorothy Boeke told ABC-TV’s Morton Dean on “Nightline.” “The children were only two and four years old at the time of the separation,” she continued. “So they had had, in fact, no religious training at that time.… We only went to synagogue like two times a year. We were not practicing Jews at all. We had a very nonreligious home.”

After several years of marriage—and marital problems—Dorothy Boeke wanted to return to her Christian upbringing. After reconverting to Catholicism, she began to attend Mass daily and to bring young Rachel and Lauren with her. When her estranged husband learned of it, he asked the court to enforce his “religious custody” and to forbid the mother from taking his daughters to church except on Easter and Christmas. This the court did, creating as much confusion as it did clarification.

In addition to raising the obvious religious liberty question, the ruling also indicated an extraordinarily naive understanding of religion on the part of the court, as if it were something that happens only in church or synagogue on Sunday or Saturday. The girls’ stepfather knows better. “I don’t know if I am permitted by court law to say grace or worship God the way that I know God in my own home,” protested David Boeke.

Fortunately, experts suggest that the conflict raised by this decision will probably warn other courts away from similar decisions.

Dividable Property?

A deeper and more troubling matter remains, however. What is a family’s religion in the court’s—and society’s—eyes? ABC-TV’s Brian Rooney posed the issue this way: “Whether the courts can treat religion as dividable property, almost like the house, the car, and the family record collection.” And the courts are often a reflection of our commonly held sentiments.

Our society now talks about “religious preference” as if religion were something one shopped for like a new automobile or a college. In our noble efforts at tolerance and pluralism, we treat religion as a matter of taste or style. Yet we have forgotten that we do not choose a religion so much as a religion chooses us.

Religions choose people in a variety of ways. Some find themselves chosen by the religion into which they were born. Their culture and ethnicity determines their religious identity.

Others are chosen by a religion as the Spirit of God finds them in their need and pulls them into a helping and healing community of faith. “I once was lost, but now am found” is their refrain.

“Was blind, but now I see” would be the confession of still others, who are inescapably gripped by the intellectual soundness of a particular theology. They, too, have been chosen as much as they have done the choosing.

This independent and uncontrollable quality of religious faith can be a wild card in a marriage. It is difficult enough for a man and a woman of similar religious upbringing to forge a common spiritual vision that will allow them to devote their mutual energies to the kingdom of God. Because marriage is often a subtle contest of wills, and because religion is for Protestants a last refuge of personal decision, husbands and wives can manipulate each other through religious differences, often in ways too subtle for them to recognize.

Visible Differences

Once you introduce the more visible differences of an interfaith marriage—whether Jewish-Christian, Catholic-Protestant, mainline-sectarian, or even humanist-supernaturalist—the situation gets both easier and more difficult.

It is easier because religious differences are more visible before marriage than many of the other differences couples have to cope with. We can see our different religious heritages and practices more easily than we can see differences in money management, personal tidiness, or ways to sort laundry. Apparently, couples from differing faith backgrounds take the time to discuss this potential source of conflict before marriage and as a result find it easier to transcend those differences in the early years of marriage. One study of couples in their first year of marriage compared couples in interfaith marriages with those who had married spouses of the same religion. Their finding: “Newlyweds in interfaith marriages were 10 percent more likely to report that marriage was easier than they had expected it to be” (Arond and Pauker, 1987).

That said, interfaith marriage is also more difficult because, for those to whom faith is not a “preference,” for those who feel “chosen,” the stakes are higher. There is a lot of pain believing that your spouse and your children, the people you love most, will not see the kingdom of heaven.

And for many, the bond to children is stronger than the bond to spouse. Couples who have been able to work out the peaceful coexistence of two religions in a marriage often find themselves starting from scratch when children arrive. The ties of blood are deep and mysterious, but their strength continues to surprise us. The primal human sense that in our progeny we live on is part of this. We feel that if our children do not carry on our faith, we have lost something. But above that shadowy emotion rides the bright prospect of building the kingdom of God both here and hereafter through the blessedness of family life. “Happy is the man whose quiver is full of them.” Miserable are they who are forced to submerge and surrender their religious convictions as their children are being led by another vision.

The televised pain of David and Dorothy Boeke and Jerold Simms serves to remind the church, both Catholic and Protestant, that it once took with utter seriousness the apostolic injunction against being “unequally yoked” (2 Cor. 6:14). In our rush to accommodate the niceties of modern culture, we have failed to repair the hedges around Christian marriage and to steer young adults away from unequal yoking. It is time not only to recall the rules of yesteryear, but to articulate clearly a theology of Christian marriage that places united service to the kingdom of God once again at its center.

By David Neff.

Just when you thought your relief dollars made little difference in the lives of the world’s starving, Ethiopia gives us reason to hope.

That’s right, Ethiopia—a country the State Department pessimistically classifies as a “permanent disaster.”

It seems as though a second famine, which many believed would be far greater than the first, has been averted. For how long is unknown. But for the time being, there will be no heart-rending scenes of mass starvation from that part of the world. No spectral images.

Journalistically speaking, says Robert Seiple of World Vision, “it is fair to say that Ethiopia is the largest ‘nonstory’ of the year.”

It is, in fact, an astounding success story in which the church played, and continues to play, a critical part. It is the sort of good news that few will sing about, but which offers hope and encouragement both to the men and women who give to those who receive.

It was estimated that 1.3 to 1.6 million metric tons of food would be needed to sustain the population of Ethiopia in 1988, or on average, over 100,000 metric tons of food a month. In August of 1986, the largest month of distribution during the 1984–86 famine, 83,000 metric tons of food were distributed. Thus, every month could be worse than the worst month of the last disaster. And yet, throughout 1988, the pipeline of food was filled, maintained, and ultimately distributed in such a way that the prophecies of holocaust remained unfulfilled.

Moreover, Christian relief groups such as World Vision and World Relief continued to oversee development projects geared to meet not only immediate needs, but offer hope for the future. For example, World Vision, with the help of a group of volunteers from some Minnesota churches and the indigenous population, began to dig wells, cap springs, and plant trees in the Ansokia Valley north of Addis Ababa. Hillsides were terraced. Children were immunized. Better farming techniques were introduced. Roads were made passable.

Today, Ansokia, a famine camp in the last disaster, exists as an oasis. And it can be replicated throughout Ethiopia. “But,” warns Seiple, “the need is for perseverance.”

“A commitment to relief need only last as long as the immediate problem exists,” he says. “A commitment to development needs to be maintained over years, even decades. In the process, we must transcend ideologies that are not our own, governments that are not always to our liking, difficult environments that are uncomfortable.”

In short, the church has brought hope, but it can ill afford to rest. Instead, it must continue to be the hands and feet of Christ, and continue to bring his healing touch to those who can hope in nothing else.

“Compassion fatigue” is not an option.

By Harorld Smith

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