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In the Eye of the Beholder: Perspectives on Intermarriage Conversion in Orthodox Christian Parishes in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Amy Slagle
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Abstract

Based on ethnographic research conducted in Pittsburgh, this article examines the experiences of American-born intermarriage converts to Eastern Orthodoxy. Long characterized as a variety of Christianity fundamentally ethnic in its orientation and insular in its relationships to American religious and cultural mainstreams, Eastern Orthodoxy has attracted increasing numbers of American-born converts over the last thirty years. While the motives and perspectives of more overtly theologically driven conversions have garnered attention, intermarriage conversions are often dismissed as the natural outcomes of entering into marriage and family life. Significantly, intermarriage converts frequently stress their decisions to enter the Orthodox church as autonomously made apart from external influences.

By gauging the ways intermarriage converts are depicted in parish life as well as the motives and perspectives they themselves convey in interviews, I argue that the language and assumptions of the American spiritual marketplace profoundly influence Orthodox Christian understandings of family and religion today. Personal choice and individualism rather than the expectations of traditionally ascribed identities have come to be highly valued and valorized means of counting Orthodox identity in the United States. Yet, the prevalence of marketplace values does not diminish the emotional and social impacts of family and community for intermarriage converts. Rather, I observed a general elevation in the importance of both and a frequent substantiation of their roles as the transmitters of shared values among these individuals. Thus, this article provides a case study of how individual and familial concerns further religious choice-making.

Type
Review Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , Summer 2010 , pp. 233 - 257
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2010

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References

Notes

Some of the material in this article is from my forthcoming book on conversion and Eastern Orthodoxy, which will be published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2011.

1. All informant and field site names have been changed.

2. Pittsburgh has been a center for Orthodox Christianity in North America since the beginning of the twentieth century, when large numbers of immigrants from central, eastern, and southeastern Europe, many of whom were Eastern Orthodox, came to work in the city's steel mills and other burgeoning industries. Among American Orthodox Christians, Pittsburgh is nicknamed the “Holy Land” in recognition of the plethora of Orthodox churches found there. More generally, the Eastern Orthodox Church in the United States is composed of a number of jurisdictions, each independently governed by its own episcopate and largely divided along ethnic lines (Greek, Serbian, Ukrainian, and so forth). John H. Erickson notes that this structural disunity arose from the fact that arriving immigrants established churches according to ethnic affiliation rather than organizing into a single American church. This fracturing pertains to governing structures and, at times, ethnicity alone, for the churches share common doctrines and liturgical practices as well as full communion with one another. The Orthodox Church in America (OCA) was originally in the Russian Archdiocese and was granted autocephaly (self-rule) by the Moscow patriarchate in 1970. For more on the historical development of the Orthodox church in the United States, see John H. Erickson, Orthodox Christians in America, Religion in American Life Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. chaps. 3–5. See also Krindatch, Alexei D., “Orthodox (Eastern Christian) Churches in the United States at the Beginning of a New Millennium: Questions of Nature, Identity, and Mission,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41, no. 3 (September 2002): 533–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a current discussion of the demographic configurations of Eastern Orthodoxy in the United States today.

3. A handful of scholarly studies have been devoted to the phenomenon of recent American conversions to Eastern Orthodoxy. These studies include Whitesides, Paisios Bukowy, “Ethnics and Evangelicals: Theological Tensions within American Orthodoxy,” St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1997): 19–35 Google Scholar; Cavalcanti, H. B. and Paul Chalfant, H., “Collective Life as the Ground of Implicit Religion: The Case of American Converts to Russian Orthodoxy,” Sociology of Religion 55, no. 4 (1994): 441– 54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lucas, Philip Charles, “ Enfants Terribles: The Challenge of Sectarian Converts to Ethnic Orthodox Churches in the United States,” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 7, no. 2 (2003): 5–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See Gillquist, Peter E., Becoming Orthodox: A Journey to the Ancient Christian Faith, rev. ed. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 1992)Google Scholar, for an insider's account of evangelical Protestant conversions to Orthodoxy in the mid-1980s. Most of the above studies stress an overall bifurcation of American Orthodox church life between seeker converts and ethnic Orthodox Christians.

4. Abraham, William J., “Orthodoxy and Evangelism,” Sourozh 61, no. 3 (1995): 1 Google Scholar, quoted in Whitesides, “Ethnics and Evangelicals,” 20; Clendenin, Daniel B., Eastern Orthodox Christianity: A Western Perspective, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 166 Google Scholar.

5. See Berger, Peter L., The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 126–53Google Scholar, for an extensive discussion of these processes and reference to the fragile nature of the modern family (133). Scholars have often commented on the ways personal religious choice alters the contours of modern conversion narratives. See, for example, Viswanathan, Gauri, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Queen, Christopher, “Ambedkar, Modernity, and the Hermeneutics of Buddhist Liberation,” in Dr. Ambedkar, Buddhism, and Social Change, ed. Narain, A. K. and Ahir, D. C. (Delhi: B. R. Publishing, 1994)Google Scholar; and Brereton, Virginia Liesen, From Sin to Salvation: Stories of Women's Conversions, 1800 to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991)Google Scholar, for discussions of choice and conversion in differing modern contexts.

6. Bellah, Robert, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985)Google Scholar, 227, 221, 226; Roof, Wade Clark, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 217, 219.Google Scholar

7. Wuthnow, Robert, America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 260–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roof, , Spiritual Marketplace, 248 Google Scholar; Whitehead, Barbara Dafoe, “The Changing Pathway to Marriage: Trends in Dating, First Unions, and Marriage Among Young Adults,” in Family Transformed: Religion, Values, and Society in American Life, ed. Tipton, Steven M. and Witte, John Jr., (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2005), 176 Google Scholar.

8. Stark, Rodney and Bainbridge, William Sims, “Networks of Faith: Interpersonal Bonds and Recruitment to Cults and Sects,” American Journal of Sociology, 85, no. 6 (May 1980): 1376–95Google Scholar. See, for example, Davidman, Lynn, Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to Orthodox Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)Google Scholar, and, more recently, Chan, Carolyn, Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. See Canon LXXII of the Quinisext Council (692) for the original prohibition of intermarriage between church and nonchurch members in The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Undivided Church: Their Canons and Dogmatic Decrees, Together with the Canons of All the Local Synods Which Have Received Ecumenical Acceptance, vol. 14 of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Henry R. Percival (repr., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 397. Since, according to researchers Charles Joanides and Lewis Patsavos, anywhere between 66 and 80 percent of its members are now intermarried, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, in particular, has been keen to address issues of intermarriage in its parishes. The archdiocese has a Department of Interfaith Marriages that offers resources for couples, families, and pastors available at its website, http://www.goarch.org/archdiocese/departments/marriage/interfaith.

For other contemporary views, see Vrame, Anton C., ed., Intermarriage: Orthodox Perspectives (Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Joanides, Charles J., Ministering to Intermarried Couples: A Resource for Clergy and Lay Workers, foreword by Trakatellis, Demetrios (New York: Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, 2004)Google Scholar; and Joanides, Charles J. and Patsavos, Lewis J., “Interchurch Marriages: An Orthodox Perspective,” International Academy of Marital Spirituality Review 6 (2000): 215–23 available at http://www.goarch.org/archdiocese/departments/marriage/interfaith/journal-articles-1/documents/patsavos-joanidesarticle.pdf/view Google Scholar. The above statistics come from this article.

10. Fitzgerald, Thomas E., The Orthodox Church, Denominations in America Series, no. 7 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995), 77 Google Scholar; Erickson, , Orthodox Christians in America, 118 Google Scholar. Erickson estimates that, by the mid-1960s, approximately 15 percent of Orthodox church members were converts, most of whom had entered the church through intermarriage. The famous Orthodox author and bishop, Kallistos Ware, for example, recalls the rarity of conversions to Orthodoxy in Great Britain in the 1950s in his own conversion narrative, “Strange Yet Familiar: My Journey to the Orthodox Church,” in The Inner Kingdom, vol. 1, The Collected Works (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2000), 4.

11. Krindatch, Alexei D., “Eastern Christianity in North American Religious Landscape: Ethnic Traditionalism versus Civic Involvement and Social Transformations,” report for the project Research on Orthodox Religious Groups in the United States (Hartford Institute for Religion Research, http://hirr.hartsem.edu/research/krindatch.pdf, 5 Google Scholar; Erickson, , Orthodox Christians in America,118 Google Scholar.

12. Valliere, Paul, “Introduction to the Modern Orthodox Tradition,” in The Teachings of Modern Orthodox Christianity: On Law, Politics, and Human Nature, ed. Witte, John Jr., and Alexander, Frank S. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 1 Google Scholar; Elizabeth H. Prodromou, “Religious Pluralism in Twenty-First-Century America: Problematizing the Implications for Orthodoxy [sic] Christianity,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72, no. 3 (September 2004): 752. 13. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977), as noted in Wuthnow, Robert, “The Family as Contested Terrain,” in Family Transformed, ed. Tipton, and Witte, , 76–77 Google Scholar. See also Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe, “Who Wants to Marry a Soulmate?” in National Marriage Project (Rutgers University), The State of Our Unions 2001: The Social Health of Marriage in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: National Marriage Project, 2001), 13; Swidler, Ann, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 201–2Google Scholar; and Narayan, Uma and Bartkowiak, Julia J., “Introduction,” in Having and Raising Children: Unconventional Families, Hard Choices, and the Social Good, ed. Narayan, Uma and Barkowiak, Julia J. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 1–14 Google Scholar.

14. Wuthnow, “The Family as Contested Terrain,” 77.

15. See, for example, Buckser, Andrew, “Social Conversion and Group Definition in Jewish Copenhagen,” in The Anthropology of Conversion, ed. Buckser, Andrew and Glazier, Stephen D. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 69 Google Scholar; Kaplan, Jane, Interfaith Families: Personal Stories of Jewish-Christian Intermarriage (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004), 173–230 Google Scholar; Mayer, Egon, Love and Tradition: Marriage between Jews and Christians (New York: Plenum Press, 1985), 209–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McGinty, Anna Mansson, Becoming Muslim: Western Women's Conversions to Islam (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 115–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Nieuwkerk, Karin van, “Gender and Conversion to Islam in the West,” in Women Embracing Islam: Gender and Conversion in the West, ed. Nieuwkerk, Karin van (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 1–4 Google Scholar.