What I’m talking about here is my synthesis of 17 years of my personal experience put through the filter of what I now know about a social science dynamic. If someone were to study this “scientifically” they would do so by asking people about their personal experiences and then synthesizing the data in much the same way that I did.

I was not talking about one brand of religion. I talked about the Catholic Church in particular because it is such a clear example of how very hierarchical institutions have a lot of issues, but this is what I actually said, “Churches are some of the most hierarchical organizations still in existence; and the more fundamentalist, the more this is the case.”