"People create institutions for a variety of reasons: to nurture life and serve the common good, to advance their own self-interested goals, sometimes to accomplish both. People create institutions to promote agendas that may either help or harm human beings or the earth. They invest their energy and resources...serve them, become loyal to them, and promote and defend them...When an institution invested with authority assumes this degree of importance in people's lives, the survival and growth of the institution itself may become paramount...
"What many people do not realize is that institutions are not simply groups of individuals working together. Invested by humans with authority, institutions tend to take on a life of their own, to develop their own personality, goals, ethos, culture, milieu. As an institution becomes larger, wealthier, and more powerful, individual human beings within the institution have relatively less control over what it does...
"In other words, an institution is more than the sum of the human beings who make it up. It is an actor, a protagonist, an agent, interacting for better or for worse with human beings, with other institutions, and with the nonhuman parts of creation. It is a Power. In a very real sense, through the people who make it up, it takes on a life of its own.
"In theological terms, one could say that the Powers are primarily concerned with their own survival and growth, even at the expense of mortal human beings. An institution demands loyalty from those who identify themselves as part of the institution and have an interest in furthering its goals...When this happens, people end up serving the institution, instead of the institution serving life..."
--from Shaking the Gates of Hell: Faith-Led Resistance to Corporate Globalization by Sharon Delgado
if this is so--and I submit it is at least partly so--then theargument can be used in at least 2 ways: to further the legal argument that corporations become citizens, with rights and responsibilties, because they act in society's interest (or against it); and to argue that opposition to corporations and institutions is a holy act that religiously-inclined individuals are obligated to be a part of, even if it conflicts with their role as part of the institution.
The same process applies to schools and churches. Why is the UCC spending so much $ on the new video? Because it is losing members. Does the video serve the purpose of life or the purpose of institutional survival? Those who created it claim it is for survival. I then wonder why UCC is so concerned for its institutional survival. If the UCC were doing the work of Jesus, it would give its all to this work -- and accept the future form it will take.
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