Especially When It Comes To Religion

There are many strategies companies choose from when deciding to market a vacation: DIY, package deal, and all-inclusive are a few that come to mind. In the end it comes down to how much of your decision making power you want to delegate. For some people, making one decision and then being done with it is appealing. For others, flexibility is the priority.

I’ve always been leery of package deals. I prefer to be in control of how I spend my time, so I don’t care if I might be missing out on 1/2 off the excursion to the tourist attraction.

I’ve never been interested in All-Inclusive deals, even though in theory I’d have my every whim catered to. Unlimited food and drink anytime I wanted it. Access to the finest facilities money can buy. Room service… The list is endless, but it doesn’t matter. My time is more valuable. There’s something to be said for spontaneity, and I would be miffed if an opportunity came up in the moment and then I couldn’t go because my whole calendar was locked in.

So DIY is my model. Not spontaneous to the point of not booking hotels ahead of time, but flexible enough to leave room in the schedule for whatever happens to float my boat that day. I only book the 100% gotta do items ahead of time.

The dilemma isn’t confined to destination vacations. It comes into play when you choose a political party, a cable TV company, a Costco item or a religion. I’ve been an Independent since 1990. Before that I was a Democrat. But the idea of belonging to an organization that sets a platform I don’t agree with entirely never sat well with me. I didn’t want to be in the position of wearing the Democratic label and having people assume I agree with everything they put in their platform. While I’m politically to the left of AOC, I preferred a model where they’d have to guess. My political affiliation doesn’t give anything away about me.

Where DIY or All-Inclusive really hits home is religion, but it’s more complicated than it may look on the surface. As it turns out, with religion, packaging matters too. Religious denominations offer various types of packaging with their membership offerings. Some, like Unitarian Universalism, offer the DIY version. Join in the community when you want, how you want, and form your own interpretation of the doctrine in concert with your conscience. They aren’t particularly in your business during the week. You’re a part of an organization, but the rest of your life remains largely unaffected if you want.

Others, like Catholicism and Presbyterianism, offer more of a package deal. With membership, you’re a part of the club and with that comes certain responsibilities. You’re signing up for doctrinal beliefs passed down by the hierarchy. Most people don’t let doctrinal disagreements become a deal-breaker, they just go along with it and keep their differences to themselves. Membership also comes with a bit more social activity, but nominally these are optional. Nobody is going to hassle you if church functions aren’t your jam.

I know several families who identify as Catholics who send their children to private Catholic Schools, but have serious disagreements with church doctrine (pro-choice, pro-LGBTQ rights, practice premarital sex, pro-birth-control). So they belong to the club, but don’t agree with some of the tenets the club stands for. To be sure, the local Catholic high schools do an excellent job of preparing kids for college. The success rates are extremely high. I’ve concluded that this group of people has decided that the ends justify the means. To get my kid the advantages they need, I am willing to bargain away my true beliefs for as long as it takes to get my kids a good college education. And honestly, I get it.

Then we have the All-Inclusive churches that provide everything — the Free Methodists and the Mormons. Membership comes with publicly testifying church doctrine, Church attendance, bible studies, Sunday evening functions, and a host of other extra curricular activities that fill up your calendar to the point where your life revolves pretty much around the church. But it doesn’t stop at the calendar. An all-inclusive faith tends to have an opinion on most of your life — what you wear, what you drink, how you allocate your finances, who you date and how, and where the bar is for worthiness.

It’s a good model if you’re comfortable with your entire social circle being your church friends, your calendar being filled up with church activities, and you don’t have very many decisions to make. Everything is taken care of for one price, and it works for a lot of people.

I want to be careful here, because it’s easy to make this sound all bad, and to the people inside it, it isn’t. To millions it’s a blessing. Membership gets you a moral framework, a shape for your week, a built-in set of friends, a rhythm to the year, an answer for suffering and death, and the ultimate prize, eternity in heaven. That is an enormous amount of life, solved — extremely convenient. The honest truth is that doctrine is maybe five percent of the deal. Most people in the pews next to me weren’t losing sleep over the fine print. These were their people. They’d joined the club and gotten busy with livin’, and I often wondered why I couldn’t just get with the program.

You’d think people might walk out of the all-inclusive over concerns about control over every aspect of their lives — or that one rule that finally chafes, the sermon that goes too far, the doubt that won’t get away, but mostly they don’t because the cost is too high. To leave, you have to replace all of it yourself, at once — the moral framework, the structure, the rhythm, the answers for the hard questions that keep you up at night. And the people. The emotional toll of losing your entire friends network would be too much to bear. If you leave the package-deal church you lose a Sunday. Leave the all-inclusive and you lose everything on the same afternoon — and in the strictest of them you lose your family too, because leaving, or sometimes even having enough doubt, gets you kicked out of the club.

I’m not here to talk anyone out of their all-inclusive choice. Some people genuinely love it, and they’re not wrong to. I just think it’s worth raising awareness of how we got to where we are.