Lee University, the Roman Catholic Church, and other places SHOULD change their policies, and telling people to suck it up or go somewhere else won't solve the institutional problems.
As someone who was kicked out of his lifelong religious institution after challenging its orthodoxy at age 23, I sympathize with your frustrations and sadness around what feels like retrograde stances in our modern era. But I'm surprised that you are going with a "reform the institutions" approach rather than a "leave them behind and start your life in this big, diverse world" one. Even Don Quixote would have seen the folly of tilting at windmills like those.
Although now banned from burning dissenters at the stake, the reason we even have that option to go our own way and live by our own standards is that modern Western Enlightentment championed it several hundred years, under the a priori that "forcing other people to change their ways and do what you want to fit your idealogy" will always endanger a civil society. This is why we now condemn totalitarianism and fascism as totally unacceptable political systems.
But it goes both ways. We can't in turn demand that those religious institutions change to fit our ideologies because we would be destroying the intellectual premise of our own escapes. The price of keeping your integrity is loss, sometimes terrible loss. All my friends and family shunned me when I left the church so I paid a high price, but at least I had that option. Western Enlightenment's win also meant they couldn't stone me to death or burn me at the stake for my choice to leave. Even Christ said that his followers would pay a high price to follow him, including losing parents and children and status. But the compensation is struggling and winning the right to be who you are and a place to become who you are going to become, outside the old world.
We can lament the harm that those institutions may do, but they are not ours to reform We *left*. Our best efforts should be help those who want out to transition to their new lives, as you and I both did.
As someone who was kicked out of his lifelong religious institution after challenging its orthodoxy at age 23, I sympathize with your frustrations and sadness around what feels like retrograde stances in our modern era. But I'm surprised that you are going with a "reform the institutions" approach rather than a "leave them behind and start your life in this big, diverse world" one. Even Don Quixote would have seen the folly of tilting at windmills like those.
Although now banned from burning dissenters at the stake, the reason we even have that option to go our own way and live by our own standards is that modern Western Enlightentment championed it several hundred years, under the a priori that "forcing other people to change their ways and do what you want to fit your idealogy" will always endanger a civil society. This is why we now condemn totalitarianism and fascism as totally unacceptable political systems.
But it goes both ways. We can't in turn demand that those religious institutions change to fit our ideologies because we would be destroying the intellectual premise of our own escapes. The price of keeping your integrity is loss, sometimes terrible loss. All my friends and family shunned me when I left the church so I paid a high price, but at least I had that option. Western Enlightenment's win also meant they couldn't stone me to death or burn me at the stake for my choice to leave. Even Christ said that his followers would pay a high price to follow him, including losing parents and children and status. But the compensation is struggling and winning the right to be who you are and a place to become who you are going to become, outside the old world.
We can lament the harm that those institutions may do, but they are not ours to reform We *left*. Our best efforts should be help those who want out to transition to their new lives, as you and I both did.