'As long as you're not hurting anyone' is not a high enough bar for a religion

CBC Saskatchewan is examining the role religion plays in the province.

A recent survey by CBC and the University of Saskatchewan found the number of people in Saskatchewan who consider religion an important part of their life is going down. Read that story here.

Maybe you've heard, or even said, something like this:

"It doesn't matter what you believe, as long as you're not hurting anyone."

I think we should set the bar higher. How about:

"Whatever your beliefs, do they lead you to participate in reducing suffering in the world?" 

Poverty. White supremacy. Human trafficking and displacement. Homophobia and transphobia. Violence through words, actions and systems. Environmental degradation. Greed and apathy. 

Why not ask if your beliefs are driving you to lessen the effects of these and other means of suffering, human and otherwise? 

Personal meaning, without moral obligation, is incomplete

I am keenly aware that my religious tradition has been, and continues to be, the cause of much violence, suffering and injustice. I am both saddened and animated by this hard reality. 

At the core of my tradition, I read a witness to a God who is not just loving and accepting, but is particularly attuned to the plight of those who suffer, who vindicates victim over oppressor and calls human beings into radical solidarity, not to mere politeness and piety or personal fulfillment and success. 

Personal meaning is important, but if it's not tied to moral obligation, it's incomplete and not worthy of the stories of the great faith traditions.

While many seek personal meaning and fulfillment in modern spiritual practice, not all are rooted in an awareness of human suffering. This can be problematic. When spiritual practice becomes a tool of achievement, higher efficiency and a greater pursuit of progress, it is even more so.

Rabbi Sharon Brous, leader of IKAR, an innovative Jewish Community in Los Angeles, preached her Rosh Hashanah sermon this past September.

Brous, who is well known for her TED Talk It's Time to Reclaim Religion, and who appeared on a November cover of Time Magazine, reflected that when she and some friends began IKAR more than a decade ago their guiding question was, "What Treasures are in our Jewish Tradition that we'd like to claim for ourselves?" — but that now, in 2018, their guiding question is, "What does our Jewish tradition demand of us in a time of moral crisis?"

John Stuart Mill suggested in his seminal 1859 work On Liberty that harm is not only active, but is also caused by the failure to meet moral obligation. Rabbi Joshua Abraham Heschel, who shared the stage with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at a 1963 conference in Chicago titled Religion and Race, famously wrote that "Few are guilty, but all are responsible."

Obligation and responsibility are important concepts to my understanding of my faith tradition and my understanding of many others.

Religions have not cornered the market on these ideas (just ask Chidi on the sitcom The Good Place), but rightly understood religious traditions are rooted in this and call us to embody ethics.

When belief is rooted instead in the story of progress and personal enhancement — perhaps the dominant non-religious myth at work today — or when spiritual practice is plucked from its broader story or teachings, obligation and responsibility can easily be left behind.

'We are not well'

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said that in many communities he ministers to, when one is asked "How are you?" the custom is to answer in the plural, "We are well," or, "We are not well" — the meaning being that one's individual wellness is only part of it. 

Perhaps an individual is in fine health, but a neighbour is ill: We are not well. If one has found successful employment, but recalls a family in the village in poverty: We are not well.

I would humbly suggest that we are not well, that we have common obligations and that we are all responsible to address our common lack of wellness.

Do our beliefs, whatever they may be, motivate us towards these things? 

That our inaction is not hurting someone, somewhere, is a fiction.- Cameron Fraser

This is a question worthy of the moment in which we find ourselves. I believe this is a question that both religious and non-religious people should ask of themselves and their communities.

I believe that this rings true both in my tradition and in many others, but that there are many ways to be a Christian, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Sikh, an atheist, an agnostic, a secular humanist and so on. Some of these ways lead to action, others to apathy.

'Your inaction becomes the mortar'

Within the Christian tradition we express devotion to the way of Jesus of Nazareth, himself an outcast — living in poverty under military occupation, seeking asylum in a foreign land, arrested, tortured and executed by the lawful rulers of his land — whose ministry was one of exposing the true violence and exploitation within the systems of his day. 

To be devoted to such a way means both to awaken to an awareness of obvious suffering and to be confronted by the hidden, systemic, often lawfully sanctioned causes of suffering. It also often requires detangling that way from centuries of dogma and replacing it in the soil of its foundational stories.

This is not to say that you should go to church this weekend, although I'll be there and would welcome your company, as would friends in temple, synagogue, ceremony, etc.

This is to say that statement, "As long as you're not hurting someone," just isn't good enough in a world where many suffer and struggle, often at the expense of we who have the privilege of moral, spiritual and religious neutrality. 

That our inaction is not hurting someone, somewhere, is a fiction. On some level, much to our chagrin, we know this to be true.

As Rabbi Sharon told her congregation on Rosh Hashanah, "Either you work to dismantle oppressive systems, or your inaction becomes the mortar that sustains them."

This column is part of CBC's Opinion section. For more information about this section, please read this editor's blog and our FAQ.