Steve and Cokie Roberts Preach Religious Tolerance in "Our Haggadah"

Cokie and Steve Roberts, both respected journalists and writers who now commentate for various news outlets like ABC and NPR, have been married for a long time. Which sounds great, except that when Imus asked Steve exactly how many years they’d been hitched, Steve began, “We’ve been married for…” and Cokie cut him off with, “Ever.”
 
In truth, the two have been married 45 years, a fact evidenced in the loving way they speak both of and to each other. Beautiful as it is, Cokie and Steve were not visiting Imus today to pat themselves on the back for sticking it out longer than the average American couple. Instead, they discussed their book Our Haggadah: Uniting Traditions for Interfaith Families, something they learned how to do on their own.
 
Cokie, a Catholic, and Steve, a Jew, met at Harvard at a time when it was more difficult than it is today to bring home a significant other of a different faith, according to Steve.
 
“Particularly for my family—they were the minority, they were the ones who felt threatened by this,” Steve said. “They sent me out to the wider world, they were so proud of me.” What they didn’t bargain for, Steve added, was “this Jewish kid from New Jersey bringing home this Catholic from New Orleans.”
 
But the Northern Jew and Southern Catholic were meant to be. “At one point my father said, ‘It would be so much easier to oppose this marriage if it wasn’t so obvious she’s the perfect girl for you,’” Steve recalled.
 
Over time, his parents came to love Cokie very deeply, much to Imus’s dismay. “If I can stir up trouble, 45 years later,” he said. “I’d like to.”
 
Vowing to never make each other change—religiously or otherwise—Steve and Cokie instead focused on embracing Catholicism and Judaism, which is where they got the title of their book: the Haggadah is the Jewish prayer book used at Passover.  
 
“Marrying a Catholic made me a better Jew, because she is a woman of faith, and she returned me in many ways to those rituals that were not part of my growing up,” Steve said. “The first Passover Seder my mother ever went to was at her Catholic daughter-in-law’s house.”
 
For more than 40 years, Steve and Cokie have hosted Passover dinner, and contained in Our Haggadah is not only an explanation of the story of Passover and its meaning, but also recipes; instructions for setting the table; and notes on how certain Christian rituals are echoed in Passover prayers. “It makes it comfortable, and recognizable,” Cokie noted.  
 
Steve has also embraced Catholicism, he said, by “deeply” devoting himself to Christmas and Easter. But the most telling moment of the religion for him came—where else?—in Vatican City.
 
During Cokie’s mom’s tenure as ambassador to the Vatican, the couple visited Rome and was invited to mass with the Pope. Steve recalled being ushered into a sunlit chapel in a palace north of the city, walking into tiny room, and witnessing the Holy Father at prayer.
 
“It was a moment of such pure spiritual power that transcends liturgy, it transcends doctrine,” Steve said. “It symbolized to me, at its best, as Cokie says, this yearning, this ambition you have towards a common spiritual center.”
 
And with two-thirds of the marriages announced in The New York Times every Sunday being interfaith couplings, it’s a commonality more and more couples are facing, and working to accept.
 
“People are going to marry the people they meet and fall in love with, whether they’re the same faith or the same race—they don’t care,” Cokie said. “What we’re trying to do is make it easier, once that’s happened, for them to continue to get along, and have an easy time of it.”
 
Besides, Steve was quick to note, “All marriages are mixed marriages. Start with a marriage between a man and a women—the whole notion that gender is less divisive than religion is ridiculous!”
 
Can I get an Amen?
 
-Julie Kanfer