Apostasy and schism

 I notice that practically every religious organization in the world that has preached negatively about a lot of normal human sexual behavior is now suffering schisms and arguments as they try to become more compassionate and real.

Yes. There’s a striking pattern there, although I’d phrase the underlying process a little more broadly: religions that built a large part of their social identity around regulating sexual behavior are having difficulty changing those rules without destabilizing the authority structure that created them.

Sexual morality is unusually troublesome for religious institutions because it isn't an abstract doctrine. It reaches directly into marriage, family, reproduction, gender roles, personal identity, and everyday behavior. So when a church says, in effect, “We were too harsh about this; we need to treat people with greater compassion,” it isn't merely changing its tone. It can raise the uncomfortable question: If the old prohibition was wrong, why should we trust the institution's other prohibitions?

And there are really two constituencies pulling in opposite directions. People who have always found the sexual rules cruel or unrealistic tend to regard reform as overdue. But people who accepted those rules precisely because they believed they represented divine, unchanging truth can reasonably see the reform as evidence that the institution is abandoning that truth. Both sides have a coherent argument within the institution's own premises.

There is also an interesting generational effect. A religious organization can survive for quite a while with an unpopular teaching if its members have inherited it as part of the package. But once a substantial proportion of younger members simply don't regard the behavior in question as morally problematic, enforcing the old rule becomes increasingly difficult. Eventually the institution has to choose between retaining doctrinal consistency and retaining people.

And "becoming more compassionate and real" is an especially apt description because many of these institutions are discovering that there is a difference between saying “this behavior is sinful, but we love the sinner” and actually treating the people involved as ordinary members of the human community. The latter inevitably puts pressure on the former.

The really interesting question, I think, is whether these schisms are merely the painful transition to a more humane equilibrium, or whether they represent something deeper: religious organizations gradually losing their ability to prescribe private morality at all. The latter would be a much bigger historical change.

The efforts to change lead to schisms where phobic people depart, not change leads to dropping of majorities.

Yes — that's an important correction. I had the direction somewhat backwards.

In many cases, the reform isn't primarily driven by a fear that the institution will lose its liberal members. It's driven by the institution becoming more humane, and that reform then causes the people who regard the old sexual prohibitions as essential to leave.

That produces a rather interesting dynamic:

The institution says, “We have been unnecessarily harsh about this, and these people are part of us.”

A faction replies, “Then you are abandoning God's law/the tradition/the faith,” and departs or forms a schism.

Meanwhile, the people who wanted the change generally don't have to leave, because the change has made the institution more congenial to them. So the membership loss is disproportionately on the conservative side.

That can make the apparent "crisis" somewhat misleading. From the outside, one sees a religious organization fighting bitterly over sexuality and thinks, “They're tearing themselves apart because they're becoming more liberal.” But internally the process can be more like institutional evolution through conservative secession.

And there is a delicious historical irony in it: the people who leave often regard themselves as the ones preserving the authentic religion, while the institution that remains may eventually become the much larger and more ordinary version of it. The schism preserves the purity of the old position, while the parent organization preserves the continuity of the institution.

That pattern isn't universal, of course, but I think your formulation captures something my previous answer missed.

Conservatives leave and eventually dissolve in internal disputation, liberals leave in spite of or maybe because of their success leaving the body without authority.

Yes — and that makes the pattern considerably more interesting than simply "liberals win, conservatives lose."

There can be two quite different kinds of institutional failure.

The conservative secession often produces a group that has preserved its principles but lost the broad social environment that made those principles workable. Once separated, it has to decide exactly how strict to be, who is sufficiently orthodox, which old rules are essential, and so forth. That can generate the familiar phenomenon of schism producing further schism. Having established that doctrinal purity matters, there is no obvious stopping point.

The liberal side has the opposite problem. If it succeeds in making the institution more accepting, it may remove the very thing that gave the institution much of its moral authority over private life. People who can now marry whom they want, have the relationships they want, and generally regard their own conscience as sufficient may quite reasonably ask, "What exactly do I need the institution for?"

So success can be self-undermining.

There is a particularly interesting asymmetry here:

Conservatism can preserve authority at the cost of membership; liberalization can preserve membership at the cost of authority.

And if the institution's traditional authority rested substantially on telling ordinary people how they ought to live, then becoming compassionate and permissive may be a kind of Pyrrhic victory. It wins the argument about how people should be treated while weakening the reason people once needed the institution to tell them how to behave.

That might help explain why some religious bodies end up with a curious residue: the most doctrinally committed people are on the conservative fringe, while the largest and most socially acceptable body has progressively less influence over what its nominal members actually do.

In other words, the schisms may be symptoms of a long transition from religion as an authority over conduct to religion as an identity, community, or cultural institution. That's a much more consequential transformation than merely changing one's position on sex.

All people, from Cardinals in Rome to members of the JW Governing Body, have egos.

Oh, absolutely. And that may be one of the least appreciated variables in all of this.

A Cardinal, a member of the Jehovah's Witnesses Governing Body, a bishop, or an ordinary local pastor may sincerely believe that he is defending divine truth—and also have the perfectly ordinary human desire not to admit that he was wrong. Those aren't mutually exclusive.

In fact, institutional religious authority can make the ego problem worse. If your position is merely your opinion, changing your mind is unremarkable. If you have spent years telling other people that your position is God's will, admitting error becomes a much more formidable psychological and social act. You aren't just saying, "I got that wrong." You may be saying, "I confidently instructed thousands of people that God required something He apparently didn't require."

And there is another ego involved: the people who have suffered because they obeyed the old rule. They may understandably feel that if the institution now says, "We should have been more compassionate," somebody ought to be accountable for the decades of misery.

So institutional change isn't just a contest between theology and sociology. It's a room full of human beings with reputations, careers, friendships, loyalties, memories, and considerable investments in having been right.

Which makes your earlier observation about schism particularly interesting. Sometimes the theological argument may be partly the respectable vocabulary in which very ordinary human conflicts over status, authority, pride, and belonging are conducted.

God may be invoked in the argument, but God isn't necessarily the only person in the room.