Suspicious of ALL Institutions

Suspicious of ALL Institutions

Michael Baggot writes at First Things:

Nones succeed in avoiding a full buffer against the divine at the vertical level, they often succumb to an atomized approach to religion, which buffers them from a believing community at the horizontal level. They tend to regard their neighbor as an obstacle to their private experience of the divine. They are suspicious of traditional ritual, skeptical that what has proven formative for generations can be assimilated authentically. Relations with a higher power or purpose, they think, should be more fluid.

As a None, I don’t quite understand (of course) where Baggot’s coming from with the line: “They are suspicious of traditional ritual, skeptical that what has proven formative for generations can be assimilated authentically.”

I would rephrase it as suspicion and skepticism toward traditional “bureaucracy” or traditional “institutions”–whether governmental, educational, religious, media-based, or corporate or non-profit.

Many (but not all) Nones are exhausted with the rituals of institutions and the draconian rules and practices and procedures and predicaments of bureaucracies because we have no experience of the word “ritual” meaning anything but going through the motions to keep up the appearances for the sake of sustaining said institution/bureaucracy, whether secular or transcendental.