Andrew Sullivan relays complaints from three writers, Leon Wieseltier, Molly Worthen and Rod Dreher, who are uncomfortable with the DIY approaches to religion adopted by many Americans. Worthen expresses the nub of their common complaint. "An institution" such as the Catholic church
forces you to have, for at least part of your life, a respect for authority that inculcates the sense that you have something to learn, that you’re not reinventing the wheel, but that millennia have come before you.
The loss of such authority is in my view a good riddance. On the plane of dogma, it means that those who confuse their close analysis of the fantasies derived from ancient fables with actual knowledge are not fooling anyone but atavists like themselves. On an institutional level, we've learned, or should have learned, that those credited an authority alleged to derive from God are likely to abuse it.
