The Radical Resurgence

Ensuring Conformity

Churches are possessed of instruments of destruction as well as habits of appropriation. Conformity can be imposed by means of excommuni­cation and interdict, in their varying degrees. It is a mistake to imagine that those devices are obsolete…. The function of excommunications and the interdict is to cut off a person or a community from the professional services of the clergy; they are sacerdotal strikes.

The Roman Catholic Church maintains a blacklist as well. The blacklist applies to books and ideas. The ideas are studied by the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition and, according to their judgment, condemned or proscribed. Books are condemned by the Sacred Congregation of the Index and public notice is given that they are placed in the Index Expurgatorius. Then, without very special permission, no faithful Catholic may read them….

All churches that attain a fixed and infallible revelation, a set of sacred scriptures whose meaning is in the custody of a specially ordained priesthood trained for the purpose and organized in an ecclesiastical hierarchy, require considerable material equipment not only to win greater power but to keep from losing ground. A customary section of this equipment is the machinery of suppressing variations, exterminating differences, keeping the revelation secure from the menace of rivalry …. Churches, as we have seen, are founded on professional priests. They rest upon the establishment of a vested interest in the art of manipulating the supernatural. The products of this art constitute a commodity that churches sell and that they seek, each in its own way, to monopolize ….

How Clergy Developed

The story of the elaboration of the arts and crafts of manipulating the supernatural is like the story of any other enterprise of man that has come down the years as an institution. You begin with a technique in which the house-mother or the house-father or the tribal headman is especially skilled. The technique is a patterned action, involving the formal use of various objects such as we have already observed to be constantly recurrent in the practice of religion. The action is accompanied by incantations, by liturgical formulas, also patterned and highly stylized….