“If there be evildoers in the Pentagon or on Wall Street or in prosecutors’ offices…that is not as morally significant as the occupation of these same and similar premises by people who have become captive and immobilized as human beings by their habitual obeisance to institutions or other principalities as idols. These are persons who have become so entrapped in tradition, or, often mere routine, who are so fascinated by institutional machinations, who are so much in bondage to the cause of preserving the principality oblivious to the consequences the costs either for other human beings or themselves that they have been thwarted in their moral development.

However many evil people hold places in the American establishment, they are far, far outnumbered, by my tally, by those bereft of conscience, so pathetically have they been dehumanized by the principalities and powers for which they are acolytes.”

– William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land

[And this is doubly true for our denominations as well.]