Single-Faith Home May Be Beneficial

Sun., Oct. 26, 1997

Ann Landers Creators Syndicate

Dear Ann Landers: I’m a 21-year-old Harvard University junior who is writing to respectfully disagree with your advice. You said parents of different religious faiths should bring up their children in one faith or the other instead of raising them in both faiths and letting them decide which faith to follow when they are older.

I am very grateful that my parents took the other route. They raised me in both faiths and frequently bragged that when we were younger, my brother and I did not know which of them was Catholic and which was Jewish. I admit that I have not chosen one or the other because I have seen no need to make a choice.

I grew up seeing firsthand that good people can believe in different faiths. I have attended Presbyterian and Episcopalian services and studied Hinduism. I have a Christian friend who attended the Passover seder I hosted at school, and he told me later that it had completely changed the way he thought about the Jewish religion.

Good people can emerge from multireligious upbringings, with a firm belief in tolerance and a strong sense of morality. Saying that children must be raised in one faith or the other seems to suggest that you can be truly religious only if you have been brainwashed into accepting a specific denomination.

This premise I reject absolutely. Certainly, single-faith backgrounds produce good people, especially when parents encourage their children to take an active, questioning role. But it is not the only way. Religion should be a search for spiritual answers, not a commitment to dogma. - Grateful to My Parents

Dear Grateful: Thanks for a thoughtful letter. Keep reading for another point of view:

Dear Ann Landers: Your advice to the interfaith couple about choosing a religion for their unborn child was absolutely correct and sound. You said they should study one another’s religions and then select one or the other.

In a recent 20-year study of 300 interfaith couples involving 500 children, the results indicated that children raised in either a no-religion or a two-religion home made the decision to choose no religion for themselves. They did not want to offend either parent by choosing to follow the religion of the other, so they chose neither and remained agnostic.

Only those children raised in a home where a single religion was practiced remained dedicated to their religious conviction. Thank you for your clear and sensible advice. - Joseph N. Feinstein, universal rabbi, Sherman Oaks, Calif.

Dear Rabbi Feinstein: I appreciate your letter of support. I had only my gut feelings to go on, but you came through with statistics - and convincing ones, at that. It was good of you to write.

Dear Ann Landers: Will you please tell me why two people plan for months to have a perfect wedding, spend a fortune for a gown and tuxedo, order magnificent flowers, provide lovely music and then spoil it all by smashing cake into one another’s faces, ruining their clothes and destroying the beauty of the moment?

I’ve asked several people about this, and they don’t know the answer. Who started this craziness? - Cleveland

Dear Cleveland: I don’t know who started the craziness, but I wish they would stop it. The custom of smearing one another’s faces with cake is, in my opinion, coarse, vulgar and appalling. I have always felt that underneath the hilarity must be some deep-seated hostility.

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