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Faith & Franchise: God Doesn’t Want Your Money. Religion Does.

Every night before I fall asleep, I pray. I don’t need a cathedral, a gilded Bible, or a priest telling me how. Just me, a quiet room, and the Lord’s Prayer. My faith is personal. It’s simple. And to me, that’s exactly how it should be.

But faith and religion? Not the same thing.

Faith is personal — that whisper in the night, the moral compass, the comfort that you’re not alone. Religion, on the other hand, is an institution. It has buildings, hierarchies, bank accounts, and, more often than not, a very sharp eye for fundraising. God doesn’t need money. People do. And history shows that when people wrap themselves in divine authority, the donation baskets tend to get a lot heavier.


The Pattern That Never Goes Out of Style

Pick almost any major religion, ancient or modern, and the same double helix appears:

  • Faith — private devotion, prayer, philosophy, meditation, mystical experience.
  • Franchise — temples, churches, mosques, monasteries, endowments, tithes, and in some cases, empires.

From the pyramids of Egypt to the mega-churches of America, the story repeats: personal belief blossoms, then someone builds a system around it. Systems attract wealth. Wealth attracts power. Power attracts politics. And suddenly, what began as a vision in the desert is running like a multinational corporation.


A Quick Tour of the Religions

  • The Egyptians built temples that doubled as granaries, banks, and employers. Priests didn’t just pray; they ran the economy.
  • The Greeks and Romans filled their temples with offerings and, in some cases, state treasuries. At Delphi, you went to hear Apollo’s oracle but also to deposit your gold. The imperial cult later made emperor-worship a civic duty.
  • The Norse sacrificed at places like Uppsala — sacred feasting that doubled as political theatre. Kings cemented power by presiding over rituals.
  • The Jews followed a covenant-based faith that revolved around Torah, prophets, and the centrality of the Temple in Jerusalem. Personal devotion included prayer and observance of law, while the Temple system also involved sacrifices, priestly classes, and tithes. After the Temple’s destruction, Judaism re-centered on the synagogue and rabbinic teaching — less about massive buildings, more about community study and law. Yet the line between faith and system still held: deep personal devotion on one hand, and structured institutions of authority on the other.
  • Hindu traditions developed temples that were spiritual sanctuaries and economic engines, supported by royal endowments and land holdings.
  • Buddhist monasteries began with alms bowls but soon became landowners, funded by kings like Aśoka who carved his dhamma into stone pillars across India.
  • Christianity started with fishermen and persecuted followers. Then Constantine picked it up, the canon slowly crystallised (despite popular myths, not at Nicaea), and by the Middle Ages the Church was taxing peasants and selling indulgences.
  • Islam enshrined charity (zakāt) as a pillar, but also built vast networks of waqf endowments, funding schools, hospitals, and mosques for centuries.

Different deities, different rituals — but the pattern rhymes.


What About the Women?

Here’s where things get even more obvious. In nearly every tradition, the earliest voices of women are present, sometimes even central.

  • Deborah judged Israel and led armies, but later Jewish law narrowed women’s roles.
  • Mary Magdalene was the first witness to the resurrection, but later tradition recast her as a repentant prostitute.
  • Junia, once named an apostle by Paul, got quietly edited into “Junias” — a man.
  • Priscilla taught theology to a male preacher; later writers downplayed her role.
  • Buddhism preserved the Therīgāthā, the poetry of enlightened nuns, but also saddled them with the infamous “Eight Rules” to keep them subordinate.
  • Hindu texts remember Gargi and Maitreyi debating philosophy with sages, but later orthodoxy restricted women’s roles.
  • Islam began with Khadīja the merchant, Aisha the scholar, and early female saints like Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya, yet later clerics confined women to the background.

The pattern is unmistakable: women were there at the beginning, but as religion scaled into a franchise, their influence was trimmed, footnoted, or erased.


Faith, Without the Franchise

This isn’t to say religion has only been cynical. Many hospitals, schools, orphanages, and justice movements were born from sincere belief channeled through institutions. But it’s worth being clear-eyed: institutions seek wealth and order; faith seeks meaning and connection.

For me, that means separating the two. I can believe in God without needing a paywall between us. I can pray without funding a pulpit. And I can admire the wisdom in Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and yes, even Dudeism — while still recognising that every “church” has a budget and every “priesthood” has payroll.


The Big Picture

History shows us the pattern again and again. Faith is a flame — fragile, personal, illuminating. Religion is the lantern — it carries the flame, sometimes protects it, sometimes smothers it, and often charges admission to see it.

The trick, I think, is not to confuse the two.


👉 What do you think? Does religion amplify faith, or does it commercialise it? Or is it both at once?

Published inPhilosophy

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