Diversity, Trust and Organized Religion

I was scanning through the Calgary Sun this morning and stumbled across Janet L. Jackson's latest column. In it, she is busily going on about some wondrous prayer day that is being organized - okay, fine - whatever. It was the paragraph at the very end of the column that caught my attention:

It has been my observation over the years that the more a church evolves away from reliance on the Bible, the more the Church's pews empty over time. Change begins within each of us and what many seeking tolerance rather than absolutes don't realize is, "Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty." (II Cor. 3:17)

I thought about this for a few minutes, and it occurred to me that unwittingly Ms. Jackson has hit upon the very problem that organized religion presents for many people - myself among them.

While many individual churches and pastors are truly lovely people, and no doubt work very hard to contribute to their communities in meaningful ways, history gives us many reasons to be skeptical of the church hierarchy.

Most religions start out as small movements, often addressing legitimate social ills in their society. Sooner or later, they seem to organize themselves into quasi-coherent bodies. In a localized sense, the individual churches can - and do - serve a very real purpose. They have provided a social structure for people to organize themselves around, refuge for people in need and a host of other services.

However, sooner or later, it seems that those purposes morph, and the Church becomes about politics and power. The more people that are "under your sway", the more influence one can exert on the government. Ideally, the Church manages to make itself so indispensible that the highest levels of the government that leaders have Church advisors at their sides.

Usually around this time, the teachings of the now formalized Church begin to take on the trappings of power and politics. The interpretation of the Church beliefs (whether that is scripture, or reading the entrails of a chicken) form themselves around the political and power ambitions of the senior clerics.

Consider - in ancient Rome, one of the Augurs was responsible for taking the "auspices" (reading the entrails of a freshly killed chicken) before a meeting of the College of Pontifexes (priests). The Augur would often interpret the auspices based on whether the meeting was in their political interests. (Of course, the religious leaders and the government's leadership were deeply entwined at the time, so political power was important to the priesthood)

The history of the Christian faith is hardly inspiring in this regard - especially if one looks at the Medieval and Renaissance era church.

- Witch hunts were sanctioned by the Church. Having read the Malleus Maleficarum, I can only conclude that those were more about the acquisition of wealth and power than about saving people's souls.

- The "Crusades" were driven by several popes, and constituted little more than a bloody attempt to not only invade and control the Middle East, but also to impose a religion upon the occupied.

- Where the Church could have acted to preserve the broad literacy of the Romanized peoples during and after the collapse of the empire, it instead seized opportunity to hoard literacy within its walls. Insisting instead that only the priests could commune with God, and "ordinary people" couldn't possibly understand scripture. For nearly a thousand years, the Church managed to keep control over people's spiritual existence by keeping the scripture in Latin, a language that was effectively moribund outside of the church itself.

- Of course, faith, being a human condition turns out to be impractical to actually control. As versions of the bible start to be translated from Latin into the common languages of the day. The Church fought this tooth and nail - with the Roman Catholic Church keeping the Mass strictly in Latin until the 1960's - long after other Christian faiths had switched their services to local languages.

- New knowledge and discoveries become threats to the faith (or - more correctly - to the power of the Church. The most famous example of this is Galileo, although writers such as Copernicus, Bacon and Kepler were astonishingly careful to write in such a way as to apologize to the Church for those areas of their discovery that might bring into question the dogma of the day.

With many churches today standing on interpretations of scripture that ignore modern knowledge and understanding of the world around us, the churches render themselves irrelevant in the social and political discussions of the land. One cannot talk of morality appropriately without accounting for new knowledge and understanding. Just as the Roman Catholic Church was ultimately provably wrong in its insistence on a geocentric universe in Galileo's day, there is much in today's discussions where the Church continues to bury its head in the sand of dogma, rather than examining the broader realities. (AIDS in Africa for one...)

There is an old adage about past behaviour being the best predictor of future behaviour. With the history of blind rigidity that organized religions often demonstrate (it's not just Christian religion, but others as well), it should come as little surprise that Churches are no longer seen by many as inclusive places.

In a country like Canada, where literacy is common, and many people are intellectually engaged in life beyond the day to day struggle to make a living, many people are finding their own paths to spiritual meaning. Whether that is through individual bible study, or contemplating the universe while sitting beside a mountain lake.

For many, the "spirit of the Lord" doesn't reside in a Church any more.