This page is part of “Problems with Religions and Spiritual Traditions”.
Reverence for lineage can harden into rigidity, treating “the way it’s always been done” as sacrosanct. This resists development even when change is genuinely needed.
Whereas dogma freezes beliefs — what must be held true — rigid adherence to the past freezes forms: language, calendar, music, technology, and the ways things are done. Age itself becomes the justification, and the question “why?” is answered with “because it has always been done this way”.
When the form outlives the reason
A practice often begins for a good, practical reason. Over generations, the reason is forgotten, but the practice remains — and is then defended as sacred in itself.
Example: The Russian Old Believers
In the 1650s, Patriarch Nikon of Moscow reformed Russian Orthodox rituals to align them with Greek practice. The changes were small details: crossing oneself with three fingers instead of two, spelling the name of Jesus “Iisus” instead of “Isus”, and singing “Alleluia” three times instead of twice. Those who refused the changes became known as the Old Believers. In 1666–1667 a church council anathematized the old rite and its followers, and they were persecuted for generations. In the generation after 1667, perhaps 20,000 Old Believers died by self-immolation, sometimes thousands at a time, rather than accept the new rituals. Both sides treated the number of fingers used in a gesture as worth dividing a church over.
A parable: The guru’s cat
The Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello tells this story in his book The Song of the Bird (1982): When the guru sat down to worship each evening, the ashram cat would get in the way and distract the worshippers. So he ordered that the cat be tied up during evening worship. After the guru died, the cat continued to be tied during worship. When the cat died, another cat was brought to the ashram so that it could be duly tied up. Centuries later, learned treatises were written by the guru’s scholarly disciples on the liturgical significance of tying up a cat while worship is performed.
Freezing time: calendars
Example: The Old Calendarists
The Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar, is slightly too long, and so it slowly drifts relative to the solar year. It is now 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar used by most of the world, and the gap keeps growing. In 1924, the Church of Greece adopted a corrected (“Revised Julian”) calendar. Groups that refused to accept it broke away and became the Old Calendarists, who today number probably over a million people, mostly in Romania and Greece. The Russian Orthodox Church and several other Orthodox churches also still use the Julian calendar for religious purposes, which is why they celebrate Christmas on January 7.
Freezing language and liturgy
Example: The Latin Mass
For centuries, the Catholic Mass was said in Latin, a language most worshippers did not understand. The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) allowed Mass in local languages, and a new Mass was introduced in 1969. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre opposed these reforms and founded the traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X in 1970. In 1988 he consecrated four bishops without papal permission, and the Vatican declared this “a schismatic act” and excommunicated all participants (the excommunications were lifted in 2009). The dispute continues: in 2007 Pope Benedict XVI made the old Latin Mass freely available again, and in 2021 Pope Francis reversed this with Traditionis Custodes, restricting it once more.
Resisting innovation as such
Some traditions go beyond defending specific old forms, and treat novelty itself as suspect.
Example: “The new is forbidden by the Torah”
The Mishnah (Orlah 3:9) states that “chadash (new grain) is forbidden by the Torah” — a law about not eating the new year’s grain before a certain offering in the Temple. In the early 19th century, Rabbi Moses Sofer (the “Chatam Sofer”, 1762–1839), a leading opponent of the emerging Reform movement, gave this phrase a new meaning: “chadash asur min haTorah” — “the new is forbidden by the Torah”. That is, any change in the commandments and customs of Israel is forbidden, solely because it is a novelty, even if it does not contradict the Talmud and later legal authorities. The slogan became a guiding principle of what later became Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Judaism.
Example: Musical instruments in worship
In 1810, the Jewish reformer Israel Jacobson installed an organ in his new synagogue in Seesen, Germany — the first synagogue to use one regularly in services. Berlin followed in 1815, and the Reform Hamburg Temple in 1818. Orthodox rabbis across Europe fiercely condemned the Hamburg Temple’s innovations, including in a collection of rabbinic letters published in 1819, Eleh Divrei HaBrit (“These are the words of the covenant”) (Wikipedia). To this day, Orthodox synagogues do not use instruments on the Sabbath.
A similar principle exists in Christianity: the Churches of Christ sing without instruments (a cappella) in worship, because there is no historical evidence that the early church used instruments, and the New Testament contains no verses authorizing them.
Some distinctions
At the same time, fairness requires some distinctions.
Continuity has real value
Shared forms connect generations, and give people a sense of being a link in a chain. The problem is not keeping old forms, but when their age becomes the only justification for them, and change becomes impossible even when it is genuinely needed.
Chesterton’s fence
The writer G. K. Chesterton proposed a principle for reformers (in The Thing, 1929): if you find a fence across a road and don’t see the use of it, you should not clear it away. “Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” Old practices often encode forgotten wisdom, so it is worth understanding why they exist before removing them. But the principle cuts both ways: before keeping a practice, we should also be able to say what it is for.
Deliberate choice is not rigidity
The Amish are often seen as the epitome of clinging to the past. But they do not reject technology automatically. Each community decides together which technologies to allow, weighing how each might affect family and community life, and what is acceptable in one community may be unacceptable in another. Whatever one thinks of their conclusions, this is a conscious, reasoned choice — the opposite of keeping a practice only because it is old.
A better approach
Rather than preserving a tradition’s forms for their own sake, we can ask what human need a practice was meant to serve — and keep the need, while letting the form evolve.