Shma;An Online Journal of Jewish Responsibility

Growing Up Religious: Christians and Jews and Their Journey of Faith (Robert Wuthnow, Beacon Press, 1999, xl+249 pp., $27.50)

Based on in-depth interviews with 200 American men and women of many religious denominations, this book addresses how being raised in a religious home affects subsequent religious development. Inexplicably, the book shares neither the protocols of the interviews nor the language of the questions. This is unfortunate, because interview responses are influenced by the wording of questions. We can infer that the interviewers were interested in recollections of the subjects' home experiences, specifically in terms of the spiritual atmosphere. Also of interest was how the respondents evolved from the religion of their childhood and how they came to terms with the religious diversity that is so characteristic of the contemporary religious scene in America.

Should there have been any doubt, this project confirms that upbringing has an enormous role on people's religious development. The sounds and smells of festivals celebrated, the music in synagogues and churches, parents reading the Bible and praying, the taste of food at Christmas dinner and the Passover seder remain imbedded in recollection and constitute a background against which later religious experiences are understood. Hal Meyerson, a Jewish subject, comments: "My mother would first of all prepare the house scrupulously clean. I remember Friday night [probably Friday during the day -- M.W.] she'd wash the floors and put newspapers down so we didn't get the floor dirty before my dad got home ..."

While most of the childhood memories Wuthnow records are positive and a source of strength in later life, this is not true of all memories. Some children are raised in abusive homes, where abuse takes on a religious coloring. This is particularly true of corporal punishment brutally administered and religiously justified. In some fundamentalist circles, corporal punishment is a religious obligation because it is directed at Satan even if transmitted through the buttock of the child. For some religiously abused children, a positive relationship with God, it seems, is precluded for the rest of their lives. Madeleine Dunn, on the other hand, "started realizing that she might never be able to earn her father's complete approval but that God's love was unconditional."

What is the relation between a strong religious upbringing and a respect for religious diversity? Superficially, it would seem those with the weakest or no religious upbringing would be the most tolerant, because they have little basis for considering any particular religion superior to another. But a respect for religious diversity means little if it is not accompanied by a deep respect for religion, and that in turn requires firm roots in a particular tradition. Raman Wilkins, an African-American, remarks: "There is an ethnic connectiveness to black people's religion, because I can go to Detroit and somebody can just drop me in the church, and it'd be no different if I was in Pittsburgh or I was in Newark, because the black thing comes out, all of their culture." He adds: "I think it was the basis of strength for the black community. I sometimes think that if it wasn't for the black church, black people wouldn't have any cohesiveness. I think the black church is the essence of black people."

Respect for religious diversity must therefore not exclude the kind of loyalty and rootedness in a particular tradition that Mr. Wilkin's comments reflect. The good news of this spiritually sensitive book is that most Americans with active religious lives are deeply respectful and open to other religious traditions. More and more, religious people are learning that what unites them is more important than what divides them.

Dr. Michael Wyschogrod, a Sh'ma Contributing Editor, is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Houston.

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