April 5 1999

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Growing Up Religious: Christians and Jews and Their Journeys of Faith
by Robert Wuthnow
Beacon Press; 400 pp.; $27.50

T he Bible is frustratingly silent on the question of how to raise religious children. The Gospels largely skip the childhood of Jesus, telling us only that Jesus' parents lost him for a few days when he was 12 and were surprised to learn he was at the temple. Mary and Joseph, this vignette suggests, did not have a complete handle on how to cope with the religious needs of their son.

The Old Testament is full of people who are failures as parents: Adam and Eve raise a son who commits fratricide, and Jacob raises a whole bevy of sons who try to commit fratricide. Moses, proving the truism that great leaders are rarely ideal family men, rears sons who are unfit to succeed him as leader of the Israelites. In Deuteronomy, parents of a stubborn and rebellious son are instructed to stone their child to death. (Not to worry: the Talmud, clearly troubled by this dictate, took on the question of what constitutes "stubborn and rebellious" and offered a list of requisite nasty traits and acts so lengthy that no one ever qualified.)

The most oft-quoted bit of biblical wisdom on the topic of rearing children comes from Proverbs: "Train children in the right way, and when old, they will not stray" (22:6, nrsv). But how, exactly, does one go about training one's son or daughter in the right way?

In Growing Up Religious: Christians and Jews and Their Journeys of Faith, Robert Wuthnow suggests that theologians have proved singularly unhelpful in addressing this question. He challenges the reader to come up with one denomination that "has a helpful understanding of childhood."

If theologians have ignored childhood, scholars and ...