I will be probably burnt at the stake for this but any way here goes. All of us who have been thinking a lot about the trend of 2.0 - enterprise, media, education, the military etc are clear. Top down - one to many ways of doing things are not working well.
Most organizations got the top down - one to many ideal from how religions are organized - our first institutions. I have been wondering how organized, institutional top down one to many religion has been doing in our modern context.
Well Pew points the trend out today in the NYT:
The fastest growing "religion" "Unaffiliated" - The Top Down Model is losing its flock.
I don't think that this means that people are losing their spiritual life. I think that it is more likely that just as they don't want people in other parts of their life treating them like sheep - they don't want to be sheep in their spiritual life either.
It's ironic. Martin Luther's big message, amplified by the advent of the press and hence "blogging" in medieval terms, was that you could speak to God directly. You did not need an institution to stand between you and God.
Is this process of spiritual freedom coming back?
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