‘Groupthink’ and religion

Sir, – I was surprised and a little shocked by how negative Archbishop Eamon Martin was in his opinion piece "Organised religion provides balance to uncritical acceptance of facile 'groupthink'", April 4th ).

Archbishop Martin reduces anything short of his “hallmarks of organised religion” as disparate voices, individuals’ feelings and “a vague sense of being ‘spiritual’”.

He employs the notion of groupthink to these people but fails to understand that it is precisely because Catholicism (and other religions too), down the centuries, so often operated out of a groupthink and tribal mentality that it lost so many people, particularly in recent decades. And the emerging, amorphous search for authentic spirituality is anything but “groupthink”. In fact, to the contrary, it can be criticised for being all over the place in its diversity of ideas and expressions.

The archbishop appears to not really understand nor address the more critical issues underlying the decline of mainline religion today.

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For much of our civilised age, the past 3,000 years particularly, religion dominated our cultural landscape, not because it embodies an indisputable “revelation” but because it created a culture of “groupthink”, thus reinforcing the wider patriarchal consciousness to exert control over people’s bodies and minds.

In our postmodern world, that desire for uniform control, or domination, simply does not work any more, except of course in more fundamentalist strains of religion. On a more positive note, people trust diversity, and wisdom from the ground up, which is what people are trying to articulate under the rubric of modern spirituality which he so readily rejects as “vague”.

As American theologian Ilia Delio has written: “The train of human evolution has left the station, and institutional religion is not on it.”

People don’t want a small God anymore, they want to find meaning in a mysterious universe and currently they are getting it not from organised religion but from the “ground up” with people like Vicky Phelan, from on top of Croke Patrick with Charlie Bird, or from inside a command bunker in Ukraine with President Zelenskiy. These people are not known for groupthink and there’s certainly nothing vague about them. – Yours, etc,

GARRY O’SULLIVAN,

Publisher,

Columba Books,

Dublin 18.