A year ago, I began researching mixed-faith families in London. But first: hi!
I’m Dalia, a PhD student in Social Anthropology at SOAS, and I’m wrapping up my fieldwork year. I, too, was born into a mixed-faith family, so many of the stories I encounter resonate deeply.
So, what are mixed-faith families?
Also called “interfaith families”, these are households where more than one religious tradition is present through relationships, conversion, or extended family ties. I also include under this umbrella term families that mix atheist members with practising ones.
For a fuller explanation, see the toolkit I co-wrote with interfaith families author and speaker Susan Katz Miller: Interfaith Families and Interfaith Work: A Toolkit.
At the heart of my research is the idea that interfaith families offer a privileged lens through which to observe how religious boundaries interact, shift, or hold.
Media and academic literature (though not all of it!) have often portrayed them as problematic: sources of confusion, threats to religious tradition, or pathways to secularisation.
But my findings tell a different story.
My interlocutors show deep awareness and curiosity toward all the traditions present in their homes.
Living with religious diversity doesn’t push them away from religious tradition, rather it pushes them to reflect, adapt, and often develop practical tools for bridging differences.
Many of my participants feel this lived experience could deeply enrich interfaith work at large, as not only is religious difference part of their daily life, but they also develop practical tools for bridging it.
Yet, only a few of them are involved in interfaith work. And for most, our interview was the first time they’d had a space to talk about their interfaith family life.
This raised a question for me:
What do people already working in interfaith spaces think about interfaith families?
Would they agree that interfaith families can bring something valuable to the table?
To explore this, I teamed up with Sophie Mitchell from the Faith & Belief Forum (F&BF) to organise a focus group with interfaith practitioners.
We were building on the energy from F&BF’s Inter Faith Week consultation, which had opened space for creativity and renewal within the movement.
We invited “anyone involved in interfaith work” to join a Zoom call. Eight people joined.
We structured the discussion around three questions:
- What do you know about mixed-faith families?
- What might prevent them from accessing places of worship or interfaith events?
- What can you learn from informal, everyday interfaith encounters in your life?
It quickly became clear that some participants hadn’t realised how close they were to interfaith families’ dynamics in their own lives.
Several reflected on growing up with parents of different religions, denominations, or one religious parent and one atheist.
One participant spoke about their “spiritual family”, a chosen community based on shared attitudes toward spirituality rather than shared religion:
“I am a mixed-faith person myself now because I am a [X] and a [Y]. I’m also a [Z], because I feel comfortable with people who adopt this label. […]
I cannot be somebody else rather than someone that has a foot in all these camps. [My chosen family is made up of people from different religions].
We are so similar in attitudes towards everything even if we are from different faiths.”
Alongside the personal stories came questions and concerns.
Several participants noted that interfaith families are often portrayed in the media as unstable or controversial.
Attitudes towards this topic vary within religious communities depending on the level of orthodoxy, with some sects and denominations rejecting mixed-faith relationships altogether.
One participant shared that their professional work involves supporting women who face violence for marrying outside their faith.
The contested space in which mixed-faith families often sit has consequences.
One participant reflected on how difficult it had been to find families willing to appear in a past media project they directed. They suggested that privacy concerns, stigma, or fear of judgement from relatives and communities were among the reasons for this reluctance.
With reference to interfaith work, other participants noted how mixed-faith families might feel unsafe attending some interfaith spaces and events, as they are unsure whether their life choices will be respected by all attendees or scrutinised as being illegitimate by some.
Participants agreed that hearing more interfaith families’ stories could help shift perceptions and enrich interfaith work; including mixed-faith families’ experiences helps move the conversation from tolerance to true celebration of difference.
One participant, who worked with interfaith couples, further noticed:
“[interfaith families] have more broadly an understanding of what faith is, and a wider language on how to navigate it. [They] have practical experiences of dialogue, and of specific conversations.
[For example, about] how do you navigate the practicalities of a person who converted? or married out? or also [the practicalities] of setting up dialogue groups.
And [interfaith families] are just evidence against stereotypes [on religious conflict]. [They] just show positive examples through existing.”
While all attendees recognised the value of learning about interfaith families’ experiences, an anxiety also emerged:
If interfaith families become accepted, and if children are raised in multiple traditions, what happens to the neat distinctions between religions?
Do boundaries still hold? And what will become of religious institutions?
One response that stayed with me was the idea of religion as language.
A participant described how, when their mother lost the ability to speak due to illness, they could still communicate through hymns:
“[when] I went visit her, I printed out in big fonts some hymns and […] she could sing them perfectly. My mother had lost the power of intellectual conversation, but we could still communicate through the hymns.
I lost all my problems about singing the hymns because that was my mother’s language when we had no other language left to speak.
I believe very strongly that everybody’s religious expression is their particular language, for complex reasons, and that’s it.”
Viewed this way, interfaith families are not sites of confusion but spaces of learning, where members become fluent (to varying degrees) in more than one religious tradition.
This enables them to identify connections, highlight where boundaries are more permeable, and translate meanings across traditions.
These are all skills that lie at the heart of interfaith work.
“[…] As [X] I would talk about the light or the spirit but when I talk with some friends [of a different religious tradition], I would fall into using their language.
I remember talking with a bunch of [Y] and I felt perfectly comfortable using their words. It made it simpler. Using their words made [communication] simpler.”
Our focus group revealed a hunger for more nuanced conversations, not just about interfaith families, but about the boundaries between traditions more broadly.
It also echoed data from F&BF’s Inter Faith Week consultation.
This year, the D&I questionnaire offered a new “mixed/prefer to self-describe” option for religious affiliation. Thirteen percent of respondents chose it, thus describing their religious affiliation in ways beyond the pre-defined categories.
The term “mixed” was added following the toolkit that Susan Katz Miller and I published, where we advised on adding this term to surveys. The idea being to encourage people born into interfaith families to share the multiple religious affinities that are often formed in this context.
As more people live spiritually complex lives, through conversion, interfaith relationships, or chosen interfaith families, the idea of fixed religious identity may no longer be enough.
Adding “mixed” to D&I questionnaires, and creating spaces for conversation like this focus group, are then meaningful ways to start talking about religion as it is lived: nuanced, multiple, layered, and influenced by history, culture, and personal experience.
It’s a chance to rethink what religious belonging means today.
Find out more:
Have thoughts, want to share your story, or interested in exploring how to include more interfaith experiences in your work?
Feel free to get in touch with me at 686386@soas.ac.uk.
Note:
Direct quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and confidentiality.
References to religious traditions are anonymised with placeholder letters (X, Y, Z), and “they” is used throughout to protect participant identity.
Credits:
This article was first published by Faith and Belief Forum (25 July 2025).
This post was originally published on Voice of Salam.