Faith and accounting
Public argument about religion usually offers two caricatures: pure spirituality above earthly interests, or an outright business under a sacred sign. Faith belongs to private life, and organised religion inevitably becomes a public institution as well.
A temple needs a building, electricity, repairs and people who give it their working hours. Donations, property, posts and management appear. This does not prove that religion was created solely for money. It means that even a conversation about eternity acquires a current account fairly quickly.
A religious organisation can give a person:
- a community;
- ritual;
- a moral language;
- support;
- education;
- help in a crisis;
- a link to the family’s history.
The same organisation can demand obedience, interfere in private life, trade in guilt and pass off the leadership’s interest as the will of a higher power.
It helps to separate faith from the institution, and the institution from the people currently running it.
A person has the right to believe, to doubt, to change his convictions and not to discuss them. He is not obliged to prove his own morality by membership in an organisation.
The organisation itself deserves the same questions as any other:
- where the money comes from;
- what it is spent on;
- who makes the decisions;
- whether questions may be asked;
- what happens to those who disagree;
- whether the leadership is accountable;
- what help the members receive;
- what rights the organisation claims over their lives.
Financial activity does not make faith false. Opacity and lack of accountability make an organisation dangerous however holy the sign.
If a person claims to speak on behalf of God, it helps at least to check who pays for the microphone.
Alongside the structure of the institution, it matters to distinguish the kinds of belief themselves: a testable claim, a moral principle, a symbol, a hope and a tradition.
Rituals reduce uncertainty. Faith ties separate events into a single order. A religious community can supply a moral language, support, tradition and a sense of belonging.
It can also produce fear, submission and the right of some people to speak for an observer no one can reach. A tool does not guarantee how it will be used.
Not every belief is rational in the scientific sense. But human life does not consist exclusively of testable hypotheses. Love, dignity, beauty, duty and meaning cannot be fully reduced to a lab protocol either.
It is worth knowing what kind of belief we are dealing with:
- an empirical claim;
- a moral principle;
- a symbol;
- a hope;
- a metaphor;
- a tradition;
- personal experience.
The problem arises when a symbol demands to be treated as a physical fact, and a private faith as a binding law for someone else.
If a person believes, his ethics should not rest solely on the expectation of a reward or the fear of punishment. A good deed done purely for the sake of cosmic accounting is still useful, but there is little moral autonomy in it.
Nobody holds an obvious power of attorney to govern others on God’s behalf. Any such claim deserves the same scrutiny as any other demand for power:
- where the authority comes from;
- who benefits from it;
- whether it can be contested;
- who bears responsibility for the consequences.
Checking the arrangement is not hard: any organisation that collects money keeps records somewhere. A parish that posts the estimate for the roof repair and a report on where the donations went is, in this respect, no different from an allotment association. The difference is that in the association the question about the estimate is considered normal, and in the parish awkward, and that awkwardness guards the cash box better than any lock. The response to a request to see the report is informative in itself: it is given either within five minutes or never.
The awkwardness is the mechanism. Where a question about money is taken as a test of faith, audit is replaced by piety, and the leadership gets a set of books that nobody inspects out of moral scruple.