The Real Problem: Can Religious and Spiritual Leaders Help?

[I wrote this blog in October 2020. It shows my hope for what religion and spirituality can accomplish.] 

As I virtually attended High Holiday services, I often found myself thinking that the religious community, especially religious leaders, is the biggest hope for helping our nation fix the horrific and devastating divide we are facing. We need help learning to listen, understand, and have compassion for each other. We must stop thinking that compromising equates to losing. We must find solutions that bring peace to an overwhelming majority of us. 

Like most people I know, I continue to be horrified by how President Trump expresses racism, sexism, xenophobia, ableism, and a lack of civility. We are saddened watching hard-fought laws, roles, and responsibilities being overturned. We are petrified imagining what he may do if he has another term, and we are working diligently to see that the Biden-Harris team wins the election. However, I fear that we are ignoring the real problem. 

Throughout the last four years, I believe that the President has been opening our eyes and seeing how unhappy people are with their lives and U.S. policies. Polls show that regardless of what he says or does, about 40% of the populace still supports him. While this may not be a majority, it is a significant number of people. Why are people so unhappy? Why do so many people support him, and why are almost all Republican legislators in Congress backing him? Throughout his administration, we focused so much on our dislike of the President’s character, rhetoric, and harmful policies, that we ignored the real problem. 

Laws are valuable and necessary to protect people’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Roles and responsibilities can help us be safe, guard our civil rights, ensure that all children get a good education, set accessibility standards, provide adequate and affordable health-care-for-all, etc. Laws cannot change attitudes. Until a super-majority of people agree to a  set of principles or at least ones we can comfortably live with, we will continue to experience the U.S’s terrible and disruptive bipartisanship. We cannot develop these principles by ourselves. Politicians have shown their inability to help us. Can we seek religious and spiritual communities’ assistance?  

I look to my Jewish community, clergy,  family, and friends from all religions and spiritual beliefs for moral guidance and support. I appreciate how ancestral religious leaders passed along stories and moral views that enabled their followers to live good lives in an ever-changing society. Now we need leaders from many religions and spiritual groups, including the most conservatives to the extreme progressives, and everything in-between, to collaborate on a set of principles that doesn’t violate their groups’ beliefs while enabling us to live harmoniously.  

Please let me know what you think about this idea. How can we start the process?