Interfaith Marriages... Would Pat Buchanan Approve?

Interfaith Marriages... Would Pat Buchanan Approve?
by Radley Balko and Josh London

"Sirs:

A few friends of mine are thinking about getting married. She comes from a very Catholic family. He is what I would call a temporarily lapsed Orthodox Jew.

Should they tie the knot?

--No Soup for You"
(via TAP's discussion boards)

Josh

Absolutely not. Catholics and Jews, if they are at all serious about their religion, should only marry people who are similarly inclined about the SAME religion.

Consider the problems they'll face raising children:

Should we raise them Catholic? Should we raise them Jewish? Should we try both and simply downplay the potentially explosive, antagonistic and mutually exclusive differences? Should the kid be baptized? Should the kid, if a boy, have a bris (religious/ceremonial circumcision)? What about a bar mitzvah? What do we do about Easter? Yom Kippur?

Forget it. It isn't worth the potential hassles and it wouldn't be fair to the children.

Before the hate mail pours in, let me say for the record that I'm sure there are couples out there who have exactly this Catholic/Jewish mix and who feel that they have a healthy loving relationship.

Yes? I doubt it.

Doctrinally, she would be a bad Catholic and he would be a very bad Jew. They would both be, to use the Catholic phrase, living in sin. Jews should only marry Jews, and Catholics should only…well, that's not really my department.

Radley

Hmmm. "A few" friends of yours are getting married? If "few" still means more than two, dueling faiths are the least of your friends' worries (though I'd love to party with them at New Year's).

This is the stuff of a Woody Allen movie-the husband/father trudges off to the butcher after sundown on shabbat to buy a kosher bird for tomorrow's Easter dinner. The kids are snug in bed, preparing to celebrate the resurrection of a minor prophet and/or Messiah who may have, might, or may never have shown up in the first place.

Makes for good comedy but, I'm guessing, an awful marriage.

It also makes a mockery of either faith. The prevalence of interfaith marriages today I think indicates both a watering-down of religious doctrine and an increased willingness of folks to pick and chose only those particulars of dogma that appeal to the lifestyle they've chosen.

So surprised though you may be, Josh, I'm going to agree with you--but with a significant caveat:

The writer mentions that the man is "lapsing" in his Orthodox faith. Without daring to tread into questions of validity regarding one faith or the other, and without knowing anything about the guy, I'd suggest that his lapsing may be in part due to him considering conversion.

Bear with me, here.

It's difficult to conceive of two people at the point of marriage with such different world views as those offered by Catholicism and Judaism. Indeed, it's difficult to conceive of any substantial romantic love of one person for another, without each accepting the whole of the other. The faith of someone "very Catholic" would presumably infiltrate nearly all or all facets of her life. I'm not sure a man could be at the point of marriage with a woman and still be at odds with such a significant part of her person.

I would submit that the very notion of his marrying a devout Catholic, coupled with his "lapsing" in Judaism, suggests that he has already partially converted to Catholicism or, at the very least, that he is drawn enough to it to be pulled from Judaism.

I say either they are in love, in which case he needs to seriously re-examine his faith (and convert) before they marry, or they aren't, in which case they obviously shouldn't be married at all.

"Sirs:

What's your opinion on Pat Buchanan? Many people (including myself) think he's a bigoted, arrogant, intolerant -- well, I can't write anymore, as this is a family-oriented site. But I was surprised to see that he has some support among Orthodox Jews. I would never vote for him, but I wouldn't vote for most people, except perhaps, myself.

--M.T."

Josh

I mostly agree with you. Buchanan does seem arrogant, intolerant and bigoted, though, now that I think about it, those three epithets have been invoked to describe me on several occasions. But then, I've never asked anyone to vote for me.

He claims to be an American Nationalist--wishing to have narrowly defined national interests at the root of our economic and foreign policies. Unfortunately, Buchanan has confused healthy nationalism with robust isolationism and protectionism.

He wants to close our borders to immigrants. He wants us to abandon or give up on free trade and he wants our armed forces to stay at home and not engage themselves abroad.

On all three issues he is terribly mistaken.

The anti-Semitic, anti-Asian, etc., stuff is mostly lightly done--just enough to communicate with the faithful and ruffle the feathers of the overly sensitive targeted group, but not enough to be black and white. Consequently, I think we are much safer in disliking Mr. Buchanan for his policies rather than for his rhetoric.

It is not clear to me that he is bigoted--I like to think of him as a cynical manipulator of the belligerent, befuddled, addled, daft, white lumpen-proletariat. Though I think it safe to place him in the ranks of the high-foreheaded, knuckle-dragging, rhetorical slatterns and political louts.

He is not what I would refer to as a good thing.

There are, as you pointed out, some Orthodox Jews who have endorsed Mr. Buchanan in the past. I do not know why they would do this; though I suspect that there were some hidden motives and agendas involved. I also would not rule out insanity.

Suffice it to say that the high profile (as if even one out of three hundred randomly selected people would have any clue who they are) Orthodox Jews who have supported him are not thought of highly by the rest of the Jewish community, including among those politically conservative.

Radley

Wouldn't it be great if these two questions could be combined? What if Pat Buchanan's (who is Roman Catholic) daughter brought home an Orthodox Jew to marry? What I wouldn't give to be a fly on the mashed potatoes at that Sunday dinner.

I think the primary reason not to vote for Mr. Buchanan is that he isn't a conservative at all. He's a statist--a New Deal liberal with all the trimmings. I once took a political science seminar that traced the evolution of liberalism. My professor was visibly shaken--and unable to provide a rejoinder--when a student in our class pointed out that the liberal labor icons of the mid-century we'd been studying (and whom he'd been glorifying) had more in common with Pat Buchanan than Tom Hayden.

Buchanan is a protectionist, he espouses a bustling, populous message, he would have a near-perfect voting record with the AFL-CIO and his rhetoric is blistered with xenophobic tirades against immigrants who don't quite look like he does.

He is, in effect, Larry Lunch Bucket, circa 1938, with the added attributes of a decent education, articulateness, and the ability to inspire the occasional aneurysm in Michael Kinsley (and for that, who wouldn't love him?).

Buchanan appeals to the basest prejudices of his supporters, and he calls them to action with thinly veiled buzzwords and ethnic stereotypes. He's never called on his rhetorical bile the way other candidates would be because he has ingratiated himself to his media cronies over the years with an affable nature and grandfatherly demeanor.

In short, he's great entertainment…but I wouldn't wear his varsity jacket.

And I'm troubled by the number of Republicans who tolerate him.

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