4 - Religious Dissent

Summary

Historically speaking, monotheisms have tended to be very harsh on the notion of dissent, treating almost any opposition to their authority as heretical and therefore all but demanding extreme punishment to be dealt out (as with the Inquisition, for example) to deter others from following suit. Uncritical belief is what religious leaders seek to maintain at all times and that allows little, if any, scope for alternative interpretations of the relevant doctrines and sacred works which go to make up their theology: conformity is always the monotheistic goal, to be pursued as vigorously as one's culture permits. Once up and running, intolerance is the house style in such cases, with tradition becoming the arbiter of what can be said or done doctrinally. Militant authoritarianism tends to create resentment of those in power, however, and that is where dissent comes into play. Protestantism is a prime example of that process, constituting a dissenting movement against what it took to be the abuse of power and authority within Catholicism, a division which led to war and conflict throughout Christian Europe for several generations (and still does in places like Northern Ireland). Protestantism itself soon broke down into a range of competing positions, each claiming to be the definitive reading of Christian doctrine, resulting in yet more conflict. An interesting case study of how this operated can be found in the development of Nonconformism within the Anglican Church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a movement that came to be known as Dissent and its followers collectively as Dissenters. It provides a classic example of the clash between authority and dissent, particularly of the intransigence of authority when faced with any concerted challenge to its power base and the belief system that it has established. A classic example, too, of how dissent tends to turn against opposition to its own power once it attains authority and autonomy itself. Large-scale organisations are rarely well disposed towards dissent, generally treating it as a nuisance to be quashed as quickly as possible; power is jealously guarded by those at the top in any such set-up, whether religious or corporate.