Faith & Spirit Quote by Robert Shea

Organized religion, in Shea's hands, isn’t the special case believers insist it is; it’s the prototype. The line works because it refuses the comforting boundary between sacred institutions and ordinary bureaucracy. By putting "the state" and "the village garden club" on the same slide, Shea collapses the moral prestige that often shields churches from the kinds of scrutiny we readily apply to civic life. The joke is scale: the garden club is deliberately petty, a comic downshift that makes the mechanism of control feel ubiquitous rather than exceptional.

His intent is less to dunk on faith than to spotlight organization itself as a technology with predictable costs. "Provides a model" frames religion as a training ground, where people learn the habits that later make other hierarchies feel natural: deference, orthodoxy, the quiet self-censorship that keeps you in good standing. The subtext is that conformity isn’t an accident or a bug; it’s a membership fee. The phrase "end a price" (likely meaning "entail a price") turns belonging into a transaction, and the currency is interior life: freedom of thought and action, not just public behavior.

Context matters: Shea is best known for The Illuminatus! Trilogy, a countercultural satire steeped in skepticism toward institutions, propaganda, and groupthink. Read from that angle, the quote isn’t a theology lesson. It’s a warning about how communities, even well-meaning ones, harden into systems that reward compliance and punish deviation - and how easily we mistake that trade-off for virtue.