We can understand what a religious community offers its members by considering Prayer, Fasting, Chastity, and Charity. The first refers to individual and communal practice and ritual. The second refers to restrictions on the consumption of food and drink. The third refers to restrictions on the exercise of the sexual function, and the last refers to restrictions on the use of money. A religious community with a rule of Prayer, Fasting, Chastity and Charity constructs a transpersonal order, and each person models a particular form of the community. The community creates a system of collective discipline, whereby each person sacrifices, suffers, and is transformed through this process of discipline. The end result is a community with a high level of social cohesion and interpersonal trust. As I have suggested before, the mystery of human relationship is found not in mutual distrust and suspicion, but mutual trust, which is fundamentally irrational. Why would you trust someone simply because you were both involved in a collective system of personal sacrifice?
None the less, a group organized along the principles I have suggested will begin to experience a high level of trust in the company of each other, and this sense of trust can be a very positive experience, particularly in a society as fragmented and alienating as the present. We can also understand why religious groups, especially intense or fanatical religious groups, are so prone to scandals. If you are a member of a group with a high level of interpersonal trust, then it is very easy to abuse that trust. In fact, we should be surprised that there are not more scandals, given the level of opportunity presented. In addition, we can understand the collective pressure to cover-up instances of abuse of trust. The group is predicated on the experience of trust, and a scandal coming to light will undermine the collective sense of the group. Perhaps better, in the eyes of some, to suppress the scandal and not damage the group cohesiveness.
I think we can understand certain features of the modern world. Living in a world with strangers in which one has very low levels of trust in one's fellow men and women, one would likely find a group manifesting a high level of trust quite appealing, if one could adapt oneself to the discipline required. Second of all, the group commitment to the discipline would likely inspire an individual to push themselves beyond what they thought possible, and allow for self-transformation in a way which might not otherwise be imaginable. Third, to the extent that group discipline was watered down or eliminated, although the group might offer "community" it would not be capable of producing comparable levels of interpersonal trust or self-transformation. Thus, we can see why modernizing and liberalizing religious groups invariably destroys loyalty to the group.
We can also say that scandals, such as the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, do not per se discredit Catholicism: such scandals would not take place unless the community had a high level of interpersonal trust. The scandal is a consequence of that trust, and it is not necessarily the case that the world would be a better place if people did not trust each other, even if that would reduce the number of scandals. Moreover, we can get a sense of what someone who is not affiliated with a strict religious community is missing out on: a strong sense of belonging to a group with high levels of trust. The more rootless and disconnected people feel, and the greater their sense of alienation, the greater the appeal of more strict religious orientation. Anomie breeds fundamentalism one might say.
I suspect that the best path lies in the mean, between rootlessness and unquestioning fanaticism. I think a group in which an individual can maintain an differentiated identity, and thus enough distance to report and to suppress abuse is desirable. At the same time, being capable of submitting to a system of discipline, and developing a sense of belonging and trust is not ultimately a bad endeavor. But others will likely differ in one direction or the other.
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