Something revolutionary new in religion
When any institution gets stuck in its own dogma, style and government, and refuses to understand that change and growth are endemic to culture, it is in serious trouble. Any wider notion of evolution posits that change and growth are in themseves a fact of existence. Few successful political strategies suggest that if we only go back or concretize the status quo, all will be well. When General Electric said, “progress is our most important product,” the American people said, “Yes!”
What is true of almost everything else, is also true of religious institutions. Those here who insist that there is no such thing as a dynamic modern religious movement, and who want to believe that all religious thought must be dated sometime back, just hope for a moribund form of faith they can more easily attack.
Just last week we saw a biting example of this truth. The Vatican has just unleashed a vigorous attack on its growing progressive edge. Once the nuns got out of their black and white habits and entered the modern world, they discovered that a religious enterprise mired in the 16th century was hopelessly out of date. Up they came from the bowels of a church that never realized that the feminist movement is real, that sex is not universally evil and that a group of old celibate men did not have the last word about life.
For a long time the Vatican has been able to control creative thought through heavy-handed juridical power. What they had not countenanced, however, was the advent of women who had come into their own and were no longer subject to an outmoded patriarchy.
For decades Catholic religious women have been abandoning their orders and the rule of the church. Now within the church the revolt is in full bloom. While the Vatican may now attack the orders in hope that those they appointed as their heads will bring their groups back into proper order, it is a losing battle. Once the Genii is out of the bottle, no amount of old-time pressure can stuff it back.
Women have unleashed something vibrant in a deadly hierarchy. Here is a single contemporary example of what is happening throughout Christianity. There are two groups which are resisting the developments. One is the established religious authorities. The second is those non-theists who are threatened by anything new in religion they cannot put down. They both come out in the same unfortunate place.
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You have examples? 
--imm
