Can religion cure the world’s biggest social problems?! Who are we kidding? The major
challenge to religion, in this next period of human history, at least at this moment, is not whether religion can cure the world’s biggest social problems but whether it will make things incredibly worse and I say this as a religious person (an observant Jew) with a disciplined spiritual practice. After the past three hundred years of modernity in which, for good reason, religion was minimized, privatized, and dismissed, religion has reemerged as a central force. This is not surprising, for at the same time that modernity radically questioned religion’s truth claims and thankfully liberated human reason from the superstition, literalness, and overextending of religion, which led to miraculous and revolutionary achievements in our ability to master the material world, e.g., the cure of diseases and the amazing increase in life span, it also resulted in a world disenchanted and disqualified - a wasteland (in T.S. Eliot’s apt description) that left human beings bereft of a sense of meaning, depth, and wholeness – precisely the purview of religion and spirituality and so we have a reawakening. But it sure does seem that in this initial period of the reincarnation of religion, that religion world wide has done more damage than good – whether by inspiring suicide bombers, leading and inflaming culture wars, stopping scientific advances, or promulgating nasty moral judgments about fellow citizens especially in the area of sexuality.
The determining question as to whether religion will contribute to enhance our capacity to evolve and our ability to address our many challenges or whether religion will take us back to the fourteenth century is this:
Will we religious leadership and religious people simply revert back to a pre-modern arrogance and overreaching and assume that because the limits of modernity have been realized we/religion have the truth about every aspect of life or have we learned and internalized the legitimate limits and humility imposed upon religion by the modern developments in other fields of knowledge - science, psychology, medicine, physics, anthropology, etc. and by the post-modern realization that truth, at least as human beings are capable of attaining truth, is contextual, constructed, and plural. If religion can not include the partial truths of modern and post-modern disciplines while transcending their excesses then not only will religion not help cure the world’s biggest social problems but will dangerously exacerbate them.
For religion to be a substantive force in helping to cure the world’s biggest social problems, its adherents will need to worry far more about their own souls and other peoples bodies than their own bodies and other peoples souls. Religious communities will need to spend more time engaged in moral self-critique than in casting moral blame. They will need to model and witness their truths rather than proselytize, evangelize, dismiss or coerce others. Religious leaders will need to stop using religion to simply affirm their already held political positions and ideologies (whether on the right or the left as if God is so small as to be a conservative or a liberal) and recover the deeper religious truth that points to the infinite and therefore recognizes the finitude and the partial truth of every position and challenges the sufficiency of any political position (especially one’s own) until the world is healed of all injustice. Religion will need to know its limits It is a wisdom and practice - a science, a technology - of our inner psycho-spiritual lives and not as an explanation – a science - of the material world. It will need to privilege acts of compassion over pieties, meaning over moralizing, justice over judgmentalism, caring over creed, healing over dogma, and humility over self-righteousness. Religion will need to remember and embody that the most genuine spirituality and religious life is not making a leap into some mystical oneness but making a leap of empathy and solidarity with other human beings, especially the stranger – the person who really is different, who is other from us, but who like us is an Image of God.
To put it simply, religion clearly is one of the most powerful and combustible forces in human life. It can inspire death cults and Kingdom of Nights and it can evoke sacrificial love and life-affirming compassion. And contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no necessary connection between being a religious or spiritual person and being a moral or compassionate person. So perhaps, as religion again emerges in the public arena, it is time for each of us, especially those of us who consider ourselves religious or spiritual and who are members of religious communities, to continuously be asking ourselves (rather than others) whether our religious wisdom and practices are indeed working. Are they actually helping us to know more clearly the truth about who we really are and our place in the world and are they actually making us ever more compassionate to others - the very purpose, according to the greatest Jewish philosopher Maimonides, of every piece of religious wisdom and practice. When religious people can answer yes to this every day then religious believers will indeed help, along with all sorts of other believers and non-believers, to cure the world’s biggest social problems.
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