Monty Python's Cheese Shop and the Church

Andy Dufresne’s fellow inmates in Shawshank Prison (in Frank Darabont’s Shawshank Redemption) could not escape the prison institution even when they were outside. The same can be said for institutionalised Christians whose institutions have come to resemble the Monty Python “Cheese Shop.”

Institutional religion vs. Christ’s intention

How did things come to this point where people who call themselves Christian are in flagrant contradiction of what Christ said (see previous post)? Is it perhaps that we have come to love and rely upon the institution (organised religion, the church of the Establishment) and the people who run it so much that we have forgotten about the person of Jesus Christ himself?

Like newly released prisoner Brooks Hatlen in Shawshank Redemption, people don’t know how to function outside of the institution. The Church has not equipped them for life in the real world; they relapse into their original fallen state as soon as they walk out the doors. Their religion is dead bones, a club to which they can claim membership. Luckily for institutionalised Christians, they come back to the institution every Sunday so as to feel part of the organisation, or they can join the “Sisters” - those who relish their institutionalisation - and spend all their time there, lording it over their inmates as part of the clergy or Church Board, working their way up through the human hierarchy, fulfilling their own ambition and agenda. According to Robert Shea, in the online article "Empire of the rising scum", "The better an organization is at fulfilling its purpose, the more it attracts people who see the organization as an opportunity to advance themselves."

Jesus said that where we saw the vultures, there the corpses would be. Shea talks about organisations and how they foster the type of person who functions best in these organisations: the apparatchiks. "The more an organization succeeds and prospers, the more it is likely to be diverted from its original ideals, principles and purposes," according to Shea, through the wheelings and dealings of these apparatchiks. What Jesus meant by these corpses was dead religion, fed upon by those who stand to gain materially and politically from it. During the Renaissance the Medici, or “God’s bankers” made a fortune from their connections with the Roman Catholic church, collecting 10% of the population’s earnings for the Church – the alternative was excommunication and the fires of hell. The Pope had a massive overdraft with them. They had the power to orchestrate new appointments to higher office depending on what the appointees’ standing with the bank was.  These “vultures” are not restricted to financiers of the 15th Century, but we see them alive and well today as part of church organisations where they flourish through lording it over the flock, collecting a salary and other perks but with no real intention of helping lift the burdens of hurting people – in fact, making things worse by offering super-spiritual “solutions” as seen in Johnson and Van Vonderen’s case studies, instead of real compassion.

Throughout history churches and movements have sprung up that were wonderful when they started, but they were doomed to become institutions, and as soon as an idea becomes an institution, the spirit behind it dies. Robert Shea: "Apparatchiks do to organizations what cancer viruses do to cells; they promote purposeless growth. Whatever the original aim of the organization, to publish books, to heal the sick, to share information about computers, once it has been taken over by apparatchiks, it will acquire a new aim - to get bigger." This started with the Emperor Constantine who reportedly was given the sign of the Cross by which to conquer and so made Christianity the state religion – note, a religion which supported the state and was supported by the state by making “conversions” – bringing people to Christianity at the point of a sword. The Roman Catholic Church was thus born and became the model for all institutionalised churches afterwards and would always be referred to as The Church, a monstrosity which existed to be served instead of serving its people, the body of Christ. Jimmy Carter, past President of the United States, indirectly indicts this period in church history in an article in Women’s Press for subverting the role of women in the church: "It wasn’t until the fourth century that dominant Christian leaders, all men, twisted and distorted Holy Scriptures to perpetuate their ascendant positions within the religious hierarchy." This gives an idea of the kind of worldly ambition that drove the early leaders of this “church,” instead of displaying “justice, mercy and faithfulness” as Christ requires. Ian Farr in the blog post "Seeking the Kingdom or building an empire" sees this kind of hierarchical church structure going even further back to the time of the Apostles.

Institutionalised churches would persecute every new movement, every revival of the true Christian spirit, that came after them. Shea again: "The apparatchiks not only want their own organization to get bigger; they also want it to swallow up or defeat and destroy all other organizations."  As seen in the quote from Bennett in the previous post, this is exactly what happened in church history: Episcopalians, Calvinists, Lutherans and just about every church organisation frothed at the mouth at the idea that there might be someone with a nicer religion than theirs with prettier robes of office, more hip reverential titles for members of the clergy and more impressive buildings - just like the Catholic Church and just like the religious order of Christ’s day.

Like the Monty Python cheese shop which was “very clean” and “certainly uncontaminated by cheese”, institutionalised churches have become very efficient in their hierarchy and administration but are only faintly (if at all) “contaminated” by the spirit of Christ. Johnson and Van Vonderen in The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse refer to Jesus’ description of the religious leaders as a “brood of vipers,” describing how the real vipers lay in wait in cool, sheltered places where weary travellers sought refuge – metaphorically, the church. The relief of the new Christian at finally finding rest turns to dismay when the performance-based religious views of their apparent rescuers demand more than the members of an exhausted flock can give. They are bitten and the viper latches on until the victim dies. The cheese shop had no cheese to offer after all, even though the sign outside said “Cheese Shop.”

Please note that not all traditional churches are like this – there is a vast number of congregations, in fact, where the spirit of God is still present, where people care for the needy and visit those in real and metaphorical prisons, do good not for show but out of commitment to God’s command to love one another unconditionally. How long though, before these churches are in danger of becoming totally secularised, when denominations are fighting on the world stage about issues such as same-sex marriage and the ordination of women to the clergy?

The issue here is not about gay or women’s rights, but about Government telling the churches what they can and cannot do. Perhaps the Church has given Government a foothold in its affairs precisely by certain Christians kicking up a sanctimonious noise about the morality of same-sex marriage, turning it into a civil rights issue instead of demonstrating God's love towards all people. But perhaps it is because of worldly principles sneaking into the church through the legal rights of married couples (married by legally ordained ministers of the denomination) which have now blurred the lines here between Church and State and, State following the vox populi, it has to decree illegal any refusal by Church to marry homosexual couples.

Will government one day have a say in what church ministers may and may not preach? It looks almost as if that day has come for the Church of England, if we were to go by an article that tells of David Cameron feeding "fears of persecution" and wholesale secularisation of the institution.

Whatever the outcome of the marriage equality debate and other issues, it seems doubtful that the cheese shop of organised Churchianity will stock cheese: the Spirit of Christ has long departed the portals of many of these marvels of architecture and slick organisation, no matter whether they believe in infant or adult baptism, geriatric immolation or marriage between straights, Mormons, males or Martians. The freedom that Christ won for us on the cross cannot be bound by earthly machinations and ambitions. The corpses are only food for the vultures, the apparatchiks who promote these loveless structures.

A "guerrilla" approach to Christianity does away with all the baggage of maintaining the crumbling facade of tradition and ritual that has become part of mainstream, popular Christianity. It puts the priesthood squarely on the shoulders of the ordinary citizen who wants Big Brother to think for him and is really to blame for shirking his responsibility in his salvation: "For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus," (1 Timothy 2:4-6) - not the guy in the fancy suit in his pulpit which is that little bit closer to Heaven than you and me. It's up to us to be Jesus, fountains of living water, compassionate friends, colleagues and participants in whichever facet of life God has placed us so that the world will taste and see that the Lord is good.