Like many contemporary ethical dilemmas revolving around religion, this question pitting patients’ interests against religious conviction presumes a fault line or dualism, characteristic of modernity, which has now led us into what T. S. Eliot called a wasteland. It is hard to believe that just a few hundred years ago the great philosophers, theologians and religious figures like Maimonides were also the era’s greatest doctors. And it would have been unimaginable to them that patients’ interests (to be cured) and God’s desires (to choose life) could conflict. No wonder, that well into this century, this sensibility was expressed by many like my grandparents who saw doctors as gods!

The explosive advances in medicine since the enlightenment were to a great extent dependent on the differentiation (Kant) between the knowledge spheres of science and religion, and the emergence of scientific and empirical methods to study the body. This healthy differentiation became, over the centuries, an unhealthy separation and even antagonism between medicine and religion with the unfortunate consequence of medicine seemingly always associated with pushing the limits (a good thing) and religion seemingly always being associated with holding the line (a bad thing). The fact that this question feels so pressing reflects the failure of both physicians and religious leadership to understand their respective expertise’s, roles, limits, and to ultimately see the patient as a whole human being.

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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.

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So we have now gone through another more high profile sex scandal with its obligatory mix of power (did you know there was talk Eliot Spitzer was going to be the first Jewish President) and money (Spitzer didn’t have sex with just any street hooker whose more gritty stories we get to see on HBO but with diamond or was it emerald escorts who earned more in an hour than the entire recently passed tax rebate our government spent weeks debating that our president thinks will raise our spirits and address our economic meltdown,) a Harvard Law trained beautiful wife from a small southern town who stands by her man (as if she wasn’t beautiful and did not go to college her husband’s trysts would somehow have been more understandable or even justified), three young daughters (had they been sons would we feel the same way) whose pictures we can drag through the media all the while proclaiming our genuine sympathy, and of course a lead character whose arrogance, self-righteousness, and prosecuting zeal – especially for prostitution rings - made for the perfect karmic payback and who surprising for a politician did not have one friend.

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So we have now gone through another more high-profile sex scandal with its obligatory mix of power (did you know there was talk Eliot Spitzer was going to be the first Jewish President) and money (Spitzer didn’t have sex with just any street hooker whose more gritty stories we get to see on HBO but with diamond or was it emerald escorts who earned more in an hour than the entire recently passed tax rebate our government spent weeks debating that our president thinks will raise our spirits and address our economic meltdown), a Harvard Law trained beautiful wife from a small southern town who stands by her man (as if she wasn’t beautiful and did not go to college her husband’s trysts would somehow have been more understandable or even justified), three young daughters (had they been sons would we feel the same way?) whose pictures we can drag through the media all the while proclaiming our genuine sympathy, and of course a lead character whose arrogance, self-righteousness, and prosecuting zeal – especially for prostitution rings -- made for the perfect karmic payback and who surprising for a politician did not have one friend.

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I am not big on arguing whose oppression is the most severe or who is more of a victim than whom or which prejudice and discrimination is more entrenched in America. Women, African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Jews, homosexuals, etc., are all in different and similar ways strangers in this country. With all the important and significant advances in political and human rights there is still much work to do.

As a Jew, I know personally, from stories of my family’s immediate past and of my people’s historic past, the pain, vulnerability, and humiliation of the “ism” anti-Semitism and the consequent damage, anger, and resentment it has produced in my community. I know what it is like to be made to feel like a stranger because I practice a strange/different religion from the majority. But as a white male I can only imagine what it is like to be the object of hate and discrimination simply for being of a “strange” race or of the “other” sex – identities that unlike my Jewish identity one can not conceal. The destructive effect of sexism and racism to individuals, communities, and societies (both its victims and its perpetrators) is generational and deep and addressing their worst manifestations, which we have done in America, is only the very beginning of what needs to be a thorough transformation of our political and cultural landscape as well a profound reimagining and reorienting of our inner landscape.

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Sadly, in every cultural war issue in this country religion is used by people in low level obnoxious ways to legitimate and affirm their already existing political, moral, and psychological positions.

So if we are politically liberal then not surprisingly we seem to cite precisely those religious texts, principles, and values that support our liberal views and if we are conservative then not surprisingly we seem to cite precisely those religious texts, principles, and values that support our conservative views. (And this is especially so with regard to issues of sexuality.) And what is worse is how each side believes that legitimating their already existing view with religious sources is some sort of trump card rather than seeing how it is simply using religion as bad apologetics, making religion irrelevant and insuring that religion contributes no added and desperately needed wisdom or insight to the public conversation.

Just once it would be refreshing for a religious person to say, “In wrestling with my religious tradition, which reminds me that every human being is an Image of God, my preexisting view of things has been shaken and I see a bit more clearly that I need to find and include the partial truth in the view of my fellow human beings who I have always thought were dead wrong.”

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