A social studies cliche continually referenced throughout elementary and middle school is the analogy that America is a "melting pot" or a "salad". Ethnically, we are taught that America is more of a melting pot: we all exist as Americans but mostly retain our distinct cultural identities.
Religiously, America is increasingly resembling a "melting pot". Religious service attendance among young Americans is the lowest it's been among "any other living generation", as is identification as religious. Organized religion is quickly losing the faith and loyalty of young Americans; it is no longer a framework through which people live their lives, the way it once was as Weber cited in "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism". Religion is becoming less inherited and more of an active choice: choose if you want to believe in the first place, what you want to believe in, what rituals and rules you follow, etc.
Many youth are struggling with organized religion in particular: just because they don't identify with any particular religion doesn't mean they aren't spiritual. Few would go as far to describe themselves as atheists or agnostics, though atheism has become intellectually fashionable in recent years.
The many caveats, rules, and ostensible closed-mindedness of organized religion is, in general, why many young Americans are drifting away from organized religious institutions. One is that issue of interfaith marriage. Two major world religions, Judaism and Islam, have been approaching this issue differently; and it has been turning away members from both religions. Interfaith marriage is an especially interesting issue for Islam because many studies and analyses have suggested that Islam will be the world's largest religion by 2070.
Judaism is older than its related Abrahamic religions Christianity and Islam; as a result, it has gone through more stages. In existence now are many movements of Judaism: reformed, conservative, and Orthodox. Christianity has splintered into different sects as well. Islam, the newest of the three, has yet to do this: there is no such movement as "reformed Islam:; I am arguing that there should be if Islam hopes to retain members in an increasingly globalized world.
Since the 1970s, the Jewish conservative movement has banned rabbis from "…officiating or even attending wedding ceremonies between Jews and non-Jews". This is contrary to reform Jewish movements, which leave the question of intermarriage up to the rabbis to decide on a case by case basis (this usually means interfaith marriage is theologically permissible in these movements). The conservative movement has taken steps to join the reform movement in this concession to modern life and global interconnectedness.
Islam has no reformist counterpart. There is a reformist Quran in circulation, but its existence is not well known and the prospect of starting a reformist movement comes with risk of backlash from Islamic scholars with a vehement following, established precedent, and even global extremist groups.
Dissent from the traditional banning of interfaith marriage in conservative Judaism has grown much louder in the past two years. Rabbis at B'nai Jeshurun, a Manhattan synagogue with very high membership, have begun officiating interfaith marriage ceremonies; another well respected Manhattan rabbi, Amichai Lau-Lavie, "released a 58-page study detailing why he had decided to start marrying interfaith couples at his "artist-driven, everybody-friendly, God-optional, pop-up, experimental" congregation, Lab/Shul". Rabbis have begun to hold the fear that rejecting interfaith marriages would drive the Jewish spouse even further away from the faith, which is obviously counterproductive.
Interfaith marriage holds the same ultimate existential threat to both Judaism and Islam: that intermarriage will cause the religion to die out; that further generations resulting from these marriages will create kin that are not loyal to the religion and its practices. This was a legitimate concern when Islam was newly created in early Arabia and Judaism was under attack by the Roman empire, but not in the modern day: the situation is no longer as dire. Another fundamental difference is that Islam seeks to proselytize while Judaism is not: this is another reason why interfaith marriage should be seen as more acceptable in Islam.
Numbers of intermarried Jews have risen steadily since the 1970s; this rise has not yet been seen in Islam but is irrefutably expected to happen as more Muslims move out of Muslim majority countries.
