It would be so easy, especially as a religious person –an eighth generation rabbi - to say yes, religion should be at the forefront of addressing sexism and racism. Of course religion should fight racism and sexism, after all religions, each in their own idiom, teach that every human being is an image of God, that every human being is of infinite value, unique, irreplaceable, and equal, that we are supposed to love our neighbor as our self, yet alone love the stranger – (perhaps we ought to start by loving the that which we find strange with in and about ourselves.) But before we go there, we who are religious better be honest and admit, confess, atone for, the immense racism and sexism that religious leaders and their followers have perpetrated over the centuries. For the same religions that teach love have also legitimated slavery and patriarchy as God’s way and have roused fear and hate and violence against the other. Perhaps we religious people should be a bit more humble – a good religious virtue - recognize the power of religious wisdom and practice to evoke the best in us as well as the worst and realize that what we claim God or our sacred texts teach is often simply what we in our limited and finite and distorted and clouded view of things are teaching. One good rule of thumb is that when our religious teachings are hurting people, damaging people, dismissing people, harming people, especially people we see as a class of people who make us uncomfortable, who we see as different than us, and who we do not really know, then we need to seriously rethink our religious teachings no matter how fundamental they may be.

We also need to be honest that the equality of all citizens before the law, regardless of race, sex, or creed that has roots in the Renaissance, blossomed with the Enlightenment, and continues to this day was dependent, thank God, on separating religion from the political sphere. It was the loosening of the relationship between religion and political theory that gave birth to human rights. Even liberal religion which has fought against sexism and racism was the religious tail wagged by the political liberal dog. By this I mean that liberal religious people used religious texts to affirm what they already had decided was the moral position regarding sexism and racism that had developed in the secular political culture. Rarely did liberal religion add value, yet alone lead the way, in defining the substance of these moral developments. Rather liberal religion did a sort of classic apologetics – legitimating (thankfully in these cases) what many of us had come to understand independent of or even despite our religious teachings. Yes, there were the occasional religious leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Joshua Heschel who spoke out of an authentic spiritual and religious consciousness that actually added depth and value to the fight against prejudice and helped shift our consciousness rather than simply affirm what we already believed but they were rare and stood out within religious life.

We need to understand that religion functions in two different ways. Religion both legitimates the status quo and destabilizes the status quo. It roots us and it blows us away, it conserves and it creates, it anchors and it uproots, it preserves and it challenges, it has its establishment priestly comforting role and its anti-establishment prophetic discomforting role, and religion affirms exactly who we are and it also urges us to be better than what we are. Religion, its wisdom and practices, reflects these two different psycho-spiritual impulses because they are central to our own experience of ourselves and of reality around us. So we always need to be on the lookout for how we are using religion and how religion is using us.

So yes, yes, religion should fight against racism and sexism. But we religious people should always remember that while we would like to think that there is a necessary connection between being religious /spiritual and being morally/ethically developed – that if one is religious then one will be moral and that if one is spiritually attuned one will also be ethically aligned - it turns out that it ain’t necessarily so. One can be religious and immoral, moral and irreligious, spiritual and unethical, and ethical and spiritually tone deaf. Religious wisdom and practice is simply one method/technology/way to help people know themselves a little bit more truthfully, have a little bit better sense of how they fit into this vast cosmos, be able to love and to feel loved with a bit more vulnerability, act a bit more compassionately, and live a bit more courageously and vitally. And like any technology it can be used to help us be destructive or to repair the world.

It seems to me that the issue is not whether religion should address sexism and racism, religion will do so one way or another. The more important question is at what level of moral and psychological development are the people who are using religion to address sexism and racism because that will determine how they use religion. And perhaps even more important is whether religious wisdom – its stories and narratives and philosophy and intuitions about life - when studied and spiritual practice – its rituals, customs, ceremonies and sacraments - when done, actually can help us refine the human character and develop ourselves morally, ethically, and psychologically. We religious people have a lot of work to do to make the answer to this question an obvious yes.