Time & Perspective Quote by Mary Douglas

Douglas is doing something sly here: taking the grand, marble self-image of the Roman Catholic Church and describing it in the language of plumbing. "Constant leakage" punctures any romance about seamless tradition; it makes schism feel less like heroic rebellion and more like a recurring structural condition. The Church isn’t portrayed as a fortress under occasional siege. It’s a system that inevitably sheds people at the seams.

Her choice of "breakaway cults" is the sharper knife. It refuses the comforting neutrality of "sects" or "movements" and collapses the distance between respectable religion and the stigmatized fringe. That’s classic Mary Douglas: an anthropologist of purity, danger, and classification reminding readers that labels are weapons. What counts as "Church" versus "cult" often depends less on theology than on who gets to control boundaries, rituals, and legitimacy.

The second jab is temporal: these breakaways "go on splitting". Douglas isn’t just recounting Reformation-era drama; she’s pointing to fission as a social technology. Once a group defines itself against a central authority, it inherits the very boundary-making impulse it resists, reproducing smaller orthodoxies and fresh heresies. The subtext is almost ecological: institutions generate the conditions for their own offshoots.

Contextually, Douglas wrote in a period when social scientists were dismantling triumphalist narratives about modernity dissolving religion. Her line argues the opposite: religious life persists, but it does so through ongoing differentiation. Unity, for Douglas, is never a stable fact; it’s an administrative achievement with a permanent leak.