Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino’s Pizza, is planning to start a town which will be governed according to traditional Catholic principles.
A FORMER US marine who was raised by nuns and made a fortune selling Domino’s pizza has embarked on a €337m plan to build America’s first town to be run according to strict Catholic principles.
Abortions, pornography and contraceptives will be banned in the new Florida town of Ave Maria, which has begun to take shape on former vegetable farms 90 miles northwest of Miami.
I’ve been reading Rodney Stark’s book, For the Glory of God, and I’m working my way through the accounts of various reform movements and persecutions in history of the Catholic church. Throughout history, Stark sees a tension between people who are fairly lax in their faith and people who are looking for a more intense religious experience. Because of this tension, religious culture tended to move between laxity and drives toward purity. As a result, history is marked by the formation of sects, where people who were interested in a more intense religious experience could congregate, and reform movements aimed at cleansing a corrupt church of its impure elements. In response, when sects and reform movements became too threatening, the mainstream church tended to bring to bear whatever power it had to suppress it.
I suspect a society with a monopoly religion is inherently unstable over generations.
We’ve had any number of experimental communities established in this country, including religious communities, communes, and even a community based on B.F. Skinneer’s book, Walden Two. Very few last beyond the first generation, and virtually none have worked as well as their founders had hoped.
One reason the second generation is always a problem is “regression to the mean”. The founders of a community can self-select. Generally, they will all be of like mind and temperment, and they’ll share a number of unspoken rules in common. As a result of these unspoken rules, they’ll function quite well as a community. Then along comes the second generation, which is not selected in this fashion. They’ll be far more like a collection of people chosen at random from the world at large. In addition, kids are always testing the rules, and unspoken rules get tested more severely than others.
Even if this town passes muster with the ACLU, I have a feeling it will lose its distinctiveness in a generation or two.
A fair amount of commentary can be found at World Magazine’s blog.
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