The challenge of an interfaith home. . .

Vice President Harris’s mixed racial heritage also has an interreligious aspect. The daughter of a Hindu and a Christian, she was raised in the Black church, but was also taught her reverence for Hindu temples. Later, she married Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, creating an interfaith home for her new family and two stepchildren.

JD Vance has an equally diverse religious history.  Having grown up believing in God but not affiliated  with a particular faith group, he attended an evangelical Christian church off and on as a teen and then, by his own admission, entered a period of near-atheism in his twenties. When he graduated from law school in 2013, Vance wasn’t committed to a specific religious community but he was curious about them again. He ultimately chose to the Roman Catholic Church, was baptized and received into the faith as an adult after a long journey. Vance’s wife, is “not Christian.” The two met in Yale Law School and married shortly after graduation. Usha, a native Californian, was raised by Indian immigrants in a Hindu household but has said she was very supportive of Vance’s conversion to Roman Catholicism.

Almost 40 percent of people who have married since 2010 married someone of a different religious tradition bringing with it the joys and challenges of living this out.  It is the story of America in the home, according to some, with the upside being learning tolerance and acceptance while growing up.  This is the practical shape of the coexist ideal.  But is it good for religion?  The essential conflict is that if every religion is true and acceptable, none is true and worth more than either.  Of course, in an individualistic world in which truth is the possession of the individual and the individual is the artibiter of truth and reality, this is not a problem.  But what does it do for the exclusive claims of the faiths themselves?  How does Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life -- the only way to the Father and the only name under heaven by which any will be saved -- live side by side with other religions, other religious truths, other religious promises, and other religious faiths?

Yes, there is religious diversity and no one is suggesting that we dismantle this freedom of religion but it is worth asking the practical question of how this works out in the home and in the family.  What does it mean to the children when both or any faith is true and equally valid?  What does it do to the religions themselves -- can you be a Roman Catholic or a Lutheran and still honor, respect, and allow for the promises of other religions?  Honestly, it is hard enough when two Christians from diverging Christian traditions marry and try to respect each other's faith.  How is it even possible to acknowledge and be supportive of the competing religious claims of non-Christian with Christian religions in the home?  I look at how hard it is for Protestants raised without sacraments to understand Lutherans (or Roman Catholics) who believe that God acts through means to understand each other and accept the divergent ways in which God is accessible.  How is it even possible to reconcile a faith which is non-Christian with the faith that affirms Christ as the only begotten Son of God through whom salvation alone is to be found?

I was raised in a home where my parents made a choice.  My mother, raised non-Lutheran, was confirmed as an adult and become Lutheran.  She did not do so for the sake of family, although that was an important consideration, but because she had come to know through catechesis that the faith of my father was also her faith.  There was no confusion in my home.  My parents were on the same page from the get go.  How does it work, then, when that is not the case?  How can it do anything but dilute the religious integrity of each faith in the home when there is disagreement?  Sure, by all means, respect the person who is not Christian but to affirm that their faith as a non-Christian is equal to or equally true to the Christian faith tends to gut the essential claims of Christianity.  Is Jesus willing to be merely one choice in the marketplace of religious choices?  It sounds good -- tolerance, respect, etc... -- but on a practical level it is nearly impossible to live out without making both religions somewhat shallow and weak.  If you can tell me how this can be done while allowing each faith to be fully authentic to its claims, please do.  

Again, sometimes we do not have a choice in the matter.  But sometimes we do.  Unity of the heart and mind of the family rooted and planted in one faith would seem to be the best choice even while admitting that the best is not always attainable.  At the least, the Christian would need to preserve the integrity of Christ in an interfaith household.  As American as this whole idea of faith and tolerance is, it is much harder to live out than one might presume.  Unless, as is obvious, you believe that the only good religion is the one whose claims are relative, whose demands are minimal, and whose truth is malleable.