Dogma

Jehovah’s Witnesses instruct their members not to keep company with a disfellowshipped person, “not even eating with such a man”, and tell family members not to “look for excuses to have dealings with” a disfellowshipped relative who lives elsewhere, keeping any contact to a minimum. The same treatment applies to those who leave voluntarily (Wikipedia). In 2024 the policy was softened: “disfellowshipped” became “removed from the congregation”, and members may now invite removed people to meetings and offer brief greetings — unless the person is deemed an “apostate”. In other words, the harshest shunning is kept for those who openly reject the doctrine.

In Islam, the four major Sunni schools of classical Islamic law held that apostasy in Islam — leaving Islam — is punishable by death for an adult man who refuses to repent, based on the hadith (a recorded saying of the Prophet Muhammad) “If somebody (a Muslim) discards his religion, kill him” (Sahih al-Bukhari 3017). In 2019, 22 countries had laws against apostasy, and in at least ten countries, including Afghanistan, Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, it can carry the death penalty. In a 2013 Pew survey, among Muslims who favor making sharia the official law, a median of 76% in South Asia and 56% in the Middle East and North Africa supported executing those who leave Islam. At the same time, a growing number of Muslim scholars reject this punishment, citing the Quran itself: “there is no compulsion in religion” (2:256).

The Catholic Church put Galileo on trial. In 1616 the Inquisition declared heliocentrism — the view that the Earth revolves around the Sun — “formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture”, and ordered Galileo to stop teaching or defending it. In 1633 he was tried, found “vehemently suspect of heresy”, and forced to “abjure, curse, and detest” this view. His book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was banned, and he spent the rest of his life, until his death in 1642, under house arrest. This book was removed from the Church’s list of forbidden books only in 1835, and only in 1992 did Pope John Paul II acknowledge that “the error of the theologians of the time” was to think that our understanding of the physical world “was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture.”

Doctrines of scriptural inerrancy make revision impossible in principle. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978), signed by nearly 300 evangelical scholars, declares in Article XII: “We deny that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science. We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood.”

The young-earth creationist organization “Answers in Genesis” goes further in its Statement of Faith: “No apparent, perceived, or claimed evidence in any field of study, including science, history, and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the clear teaching of Scripture obtained by historical-grammatical interpretation.” Here the conclusion is fixed in advance, and any contrary evidence is ruled invalid by definition.

Before the US Civil War, many Southern clergy defended slavery from the Bible, e.g. Leviticus 25:44–46: “of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids … they shall be your bondmen for ever”, and Ephesians 6:5: “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling”. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 partly to uphold the institution of slavery. It formally apologized for its support of slavery only in 1995 (resolution).

In 1452, Pope Nicholas V’s bull Dum Diversas authorized the King of Portugal to conquer “Saracens and pagans” and “to reduce their persons into perpetual slavery”. The Catholic Church didn’t list slavery among grave wrongs in an unmistakable way until Vatican II (Gaudium et Spes, section 27, 1965).

Abolitionists argued from the same Bible, citing “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18) and the idea that every person is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). The tradition’s own deepest principles pointed against slavery, but the literal texts and centuries of precedent were used to hold the change back.

In Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (1994), Pope John Paul II declared: “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.” So the Church says it cannot change this even if it wanted to.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s confession, the Baptist Faith and Message, states that “the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture”, and that “A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband”. In 2023 the SBC upheld the expulsion of Saddleback Church, one of the largest churches in the US, for having women pastors.

In Orthodox Judaism, only the husband can grant a divorce (a get). A woman whose husband refuses is an agunah (“chained woman”) and cannot remarry. The internal tension: many Orthodox rabbis openly acknowledge the injustice, and Jewish law has its own strong principles against causing suffering. Yet the basic structure is treated as untouchable, and solutions have been partial workarounds, such as prenuptial agreements or social pressure on the husband.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (section 2357) says that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered” and “Under no circumstances can they be approved.” The internal tension: the very next section (2358) says that homosexual persons “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity” and that “every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.” The Church’s own ethic of human dignity pulls against the fixed rule.

In 2021 the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that the Church cannot bless same-sex unions, because God “does not and cannot bless sin”. In 2023, Fiducia Supplicans allowed blessing “same-sex couples without officially validating their status or changing in any way the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage”. This is an example of disguised revision (see below): the practice changed, but it was presented as no change at all.

In the United Methodist Church, more than 7,600 US congregations — a quarter of the total — left the denomination between 2019 and 2023, largely because they saw its ban on LGBTQ clergy and same-sex weddings as scripturally fixed and objected that it was not being enforced. The remaining church lifted the ban in 2024. This shows both how strongly some believers resist revision, and that revision is sometimes possible.