Atomizing Religiosity

 THE SOUTHERN BAPTIST LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE, white people's division, currently conventioning, is experiencing dissension, par for the human race/course. What group isn't? As is often the case, the lines are drawn between hard line conservative versus somewhat less conservative divisions, the division having to do with doctrinal matters, the role of women within the church, among many other more minor matters. Maybe they'll split into separate churches. American Baptism was born to be divided, as were all human associations of more than one person. In the eighteen forties Baptism north and south divided over the issue of slavery. The southern congregants favored the peculiar institution, the northerners did not, and the twain tore asunder,  for ever more. The slave themselves, involuntarily imported Africans, were not consulted, and eventually founded their own branch, the first Baptist Church of the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Matters Everyone invents his own religion". This, of course, assuming  that Christ did not and does not intend for his followers to segregate themselves into Catholic, Protestant, and then further, into Methodist, Christian Scientist, southern Baptist, conservative southern Baptist, less conservative southern Baptist and a multiplicity more, unto the ultimate conclusion: a fully atomized, fragmented kingdom of Christ, each unto his or her own, one person per church.  People do the fragmenting, Christ does not. The complete Goethe quote is: "When I realized that everyone invents his own religion, I decided to invent my own". And so we do, like it or not, deny it or not. In the United States today, there are about fifteen hundred organized religions, many of them some denomination of Christianity, all making the same claim: the unique, exclusive possession of the truth. If only Jesus, in his apparent haste to get on about the business of being tortured to temporary death, had not ignored Pilate's crucial question. Perhaps the doomed rabbi thought the answer too obvious to dignify with a response. Suppose he had simply said: "Truth is God and God is truth." This would have solved nothing, nor changed Christian history of division and violent internecine conflict, ameliorating not at all future fragmentation. The universe is layered in its meaning; Pilate probably would have have pressed on with: "What is God?", and, as we like to say, here we go again.