Unity, Liberty, and the Architecture of Religious Authority: A Comparative Study of Leadership Models in Christianity and Islam

Presented by Claude for Zia H Shah MD

Abstract

Every large religious tradition must eventually answer a structural question that is logically prior to any specific doctrine: who, if anyone, has the authority to settle disputed questions of belief and practice, and how binding is that authority? Christianity answered this question one way at Rome and another way at Wittenberg and Geneva; Islam answered it one way among the majority who came to be called Sunni, and in several related but distinct ways among the branches that trace legitimate leadership through the Prophet’s family. This article maps these leadership architectures side by side — the Roman Catholic magisterium and papal infallibility; the fragmented, congregational, “priesthood of all believers” model of Protestantism; the scholarly, decentralized, consensus-based authority of Sunni Islam; the doctrine of the infallible or protected Imam across the various Shia communities (Twelver, Ismaili, Zaidi, and others); and the singular case of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, a Sunni-rooted movement that nonetheless organizes itself around a centralized, continuously reigning Khilafat. It examines the historical consequences of each model — including the Catholic Church’s long resistance to independent inquiry and its delaying effect on the Scientific Revolution, and the fissiparous energy but intellectual freedom unleashed by the Reformation. It then asks three constructive questions: Is there a “happy medium” that captures the unifying strength of centralized authority without its historical costs to reason and inquiry? What would each tradition’s own best-informed reformers suggest to improve their model on its own terms? And which architecture of religious authority is best suited to fostering pluralism and a sense of universal human brotherhood in the century ahead? The aim throughout is descriptive and constructive rather than polemical: each tradition is presented in the terms its own scholars use to justify it, with due respect for the sincerity and sophistication of those justifications, before turning to comparative evaluation.

1. Two Axes of Religious Authority

Before comparing traditions, it helps to name the two axes on which any leadership model can be plotted.

Axis one: centralization versus dispersion. Does final interpretive authority rest in a single office (a pope, an Imam, a Khalifa), in a body of scholars operating by consensus, or in each believer’s own conscience and reading of scripture?

Axis two: the epistemic status claimed for the leader. Is the leader merely a respected teacher whose views can in principle be wrong and revised, or is some form of protection from error — full infallibility, restricted infallibility, or a lesser “divine support” — claimed for the office?

Nearly every model discussed below can be located on this two-dimensional grid, and much of what looks like a bewildering variety of institutional forms across two of the world’s largest religions turns out to be a small number of underlying choices, made independently, on these two axes.

2. The Catholic Model: Unity Through a Single Protected Office

The Roman Catholic Church places final doctrinal authority in the papacy, operating within the College of Bishops and, since the First Vatican Council (1870), under the formal doctrine of papal infallibility: when the pope speaks ex cathedra on a matter of faith or morals, Catholic theology holds that the Holy Spirit preserves him from error. In practice this narrow, rarely-invoked power sits atop a much broader everyday authority — the Magisterium — exercised through encyclicals, catechisms, and canon law, all understood to unfold within a single, unbroken apostolic succession traced to Peter.

The case for it, in Catholic terms. Catholic apologetics roots the model in Matthew 16:18–19 (“You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church… I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven”) and in the practical need, felt acutely in the early centuries as heresies multiplied, for a final court of doctrinal appeal. Unity of teaching across a billion adherents in every culture on earth is offered as living proof of the model’s coherence-generating power; so is the Church’s historical role as a transnational institution capable of preserving learning through the collapse of Rome, negotiating with (and outlasting) empires, and exercising moral and political influence disproportionate to any single nation-state.

The historical cost. The same structure that produced unity also produced, for long stretches, a low tolerance for independent inquiry that contradicted settled teaching. The condemnation of Galileo in 1633, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (in force from 1559 to 1966), and the general posture of suspicion toward hypotheses that appeared to threaten a literal reading of scripture or established Aristotelian-Scholastic cosmology are the most cited examples. Historians of science today generally reject the crude “Church versus science” narrative — the Church funded astronomy, the Jesuits produced genuine scientists, and much of the conflict was jurisdictional and personal as much as doctrinal — but it remains true that a single office with the power to declare a scientific proposition heretical, and to back that declaration with real coercive consequences, created a chilling effect on inquiry that had no equivalent in traditions without such an office. A model built for doctrinal unity structurally discourages the very “loyal opposition” that scientific and philosophical progress depends on: if the office is protected from error, dissent is not just wrong but a category of disobedience.

3. The Protestant Model: Liberty Through Dispersion

The Reformation (from 1517) rejected centralized, protected authority in favor of sola scriptura (scripture alone as final authority) and the “priesthood of all believers” — the principle that every Christian, not only ordained clergy, has direct access to God and to the interpretation of scripture. Institutionally this produced not one alternative church but thousands: Lutheran, Reformed/Calvinist, Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, and on to an estimated 45,000-plus denominations worldwide today.

The case for it. Protestant theology argues that no human office can legitimately claim the infallibility that belongs to God and to scripture alone; placing interpretive authority in a single office is, on this view, itself a theological error and an invitation to abuse. Historically, the model is credited with unleashing enormous intellectual energy: literacy campaigns tied to vernacular Bible reading, the rise of Protestant-majority universities, and a scientific culture in England, the Netherlands, and Protestant Germany that many historians (following Robert Merton’s classic thesis) link to a religious ethos more comfortable with individual inquiry and less able to enforce uniform condemnation of new ideas. Newton, Boyle, and much of the early Royal Society operated in exactly this environment.

The cost. The same dispersion that enabled liberty also enabled fragmentation, doctrinal drift into idiosyncrasy or heterodoxy with no check, repeated and sometimes violent schism (the Thirty Years’ War being the starkest case), and a chronic difficulty presenting a unified political or moral voice on the world stage. Congregational authority, taken to its logical extreme, can also produce authoritarian micro-leaders — a charismatic pastor unaccountable to any wider body — trading one kind of unchecked authority for another, only smaller and less visible.

4. Sunni Islam: The Protestant Parallel, at Far Larger Scale

Sunni Islam — roughly 85–90% of the world’s approximately two billion Muslims — has no ordained clergy, no single office analogous to the papacy, and no doctrine of an infallible living leader. Religious authority rests instead in the collective, historically accumulated scholarship of the ulama (religious scholars), organized loosely around four classical schools of jurisprudence (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali), operating through ijma (scholarly consensus) and qiyas (analogical reasoning), with the Quran and the verified Sunnah (prophetic practice) as the ultimate textual anchors. Within this frame there is enormous diversity — Deobandi and Barelvi movements in South Asia, Salafi and Wahhabi reform currents, Sufi orders (tariqas) with their own chains of spiritual authority, national fatwa councils, and independent scholars whose authority rests entirely on peer recognition rather than office.

The case for it, in Sunni terms. The classical argument is that the Prophet Muhammad was the final prophet and that no individual after him can claim protected, error-free authority; the community (ummah) as a whole, guided by scholarly consensus, is the safeguard against error, expressed in a hadith frequently cited in this context: “My community will never agree upon an error.” Diversity of legal school and scholarly opinion (ikhtilaf) is treated not as a scandal to be eliminated but as a recognized, even celebrated, feature of a healthy juristic tradition — closely paralleling the Protestant instinct that dispersed authority is a safeguard rather than a defect.

The cost. As with Protestantism, dispersion of authority makes it structurally difficult for Sunni Islam to speak with one voice — whether on doctrinal disputes, political crises, or responses to extremist appropriations of Islamic vocabulary, since no scholar or institution (not al-Azhar, not any national grand mufti) can bind the whole community. It also leaves an opening that self-styled authorities with no traditional scholarly grounding can exploit, since “consensus” is a slow, retrospective, and often contested judgment rather than a live adjudicating mechanism.

5. The Shia Communities: The Catholic Parallel, in Several Registers

The various branches that trace legitimate post-prophetic leadership through Ali ibn Abi Talib and the Prophet’s family (roughly 10–15% of Muslims) converge on a structural principle that has no equivalent in Sunni Islam: the doctrine of the Imamate, in which the Imam possesses a degree of protection from error and sin (‘ismah) and a special, divinely sanctioned capacity to interpret revelation. The precise intensity of this claim varies considerably across the Shia spectrum, which is itself far from monolithic.

Twelver Shia (the large majority of Shia Muslims, dominant in Iran and Iraq) hold that twelve Imams in unbroken succession from Ali possessed ‘ismah — full protection from error and sin — and that the Twelfth Imam is in occultation, to return as the Mahdi. In the interim, the modern institution of marja’ al-taqlid (source of emulation) and, in Iran specifically, the post-1979 doctrine of wilayat al-faqih (guardianship of the jurist) extend a derivative, non-prophetic but still weighty authority to senior clerics — the closest thing in the Muslim world to an ongoing magisterium, though explicitly understood as fallible relative to the Imams themselves.
Ismaili Shia (including the Nizari Ismaili community led by the Aga Khan) hold the most Catholic-like position on this spectrum in one specific respect: they maintain a living, present Imam in every generation, understood to possess special spiritual authority and interpretive insight into the “inner” (batini) meaning of revelation — structurally the closest Islamic parallel to a continuously reigning, doctrinally authoritative single office.
Zaidi Shia (concentrated in Yemen) hold a considerably more moderate doctrine of Imamate — closer in spirit to Sunni scholarly leadership, with the Imam understood as a qualified, pious scholar-leader rather than a metaphysically protected figure — making Zaidism something of a middle case on the spectrum between Sunni dispersion and Twelver/Ismaili centralization.

The case for it, in Shia terms. The theological argument is that revelation requires a living, qualified interpreter in every age precisely because textual and communal consensus alone are held to be insufficient safeguards against error and political manipulation — the same instinct that motivates Catholic magisterial authority, arrived at independently. The Imamate is presented as a mercy: a guarantee that the community is never left interpretively rudderless.

The cost. The parallels with Catholic history are notable. Concentrating protected authority in a person or narrow lineage raises acute succession questions (the Sunni-Shia split itself originates in a leadership dispute), can fuse religious and political authority in ways that constrain independent political and scholarly reasoning (the wilayat al-faqih system in Iran is the most-debated contemporary example, criticized by many Shia scholars themselves, including several senior Iraqi and Iranian clerics who reject it as a departure from classical Twelver quietism), and can make reform difficult when protected doctrine and lived social conditions diverge.

6. The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community: A Sunni-Rooted Movement with a Catholic-Style Unifying Office

The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in 1889 in Qadian, India, is doctrinally rooted in Sunni Islam but is organizationally distinctive among Sunni-derived movements in exactly the respect this article is concerned with: it is organized under a continuously reigning Khilafat (Caliphate), currently in its fifth incumbent, functioning as a single global executive and interpretive authority over a worldwide community with a unified administrative structure (the Nizam-e-Jama’at) reaching into virtually every country with an Ahmadi population.

Where it sits on the grid. Ahmadiyya theology does not claim that the Khalifa is infallible in the strong sense claimed for the pope or for the Twelver/Ismaili Imams — there is no formal doctrine of protection from doctrinal or moral error analogous to ‘ismah or ex cathedra infallibility. What is claimed is a doctrine of divine support and confirmation (ta’yid) for the institution of Khilafat itself, understood as a continuation of prophetic guidance in a non-legislative, non-prophetic mode, combined with a structural expectation of bay’ah (oath of allegiance) that produces a degree of practical, felt unity closer to the Catholic experience than to the loosely federated Sunni world from which the movement emerged. In this sense Ahmadiyya occupies an unusual position: high on the centralization axis, but deliberately restrained on the infallibility axis — a “semi-infallible” office, in the terms of this article’s own framing, closer to a strong, spiritually authoritative constitutional monarchy than to either an absolute papacy or a loose scholarly federation.

The case for it, in Ahmadi terms. Ahmadi writers argue that this structure delivers precisely the unifying benefits Sunni Islam otherwise lacks — a single voice on doctrine, a single administrative and missionary strategy, insulation from the fragmentation that has produced thousands of independent and sometimes mutually hostile Sunni sub-groups — while avoiding the theological overreach of claiming actual error-proof status for a living human being. The Khalifa is elected (by an electoral college) rather than dynastically inherited, which the community presents as a further safeguard against the concentration-of-power failure modes associated with hereditary or purely self-perpetuating religious offices.

The cost, and the caveat. Because the community operates under significant persecution in several Muslim-majority states (most severely in Pakistan, where Ahmadis are constitutionally declared non-Muslim and legally barred from various forms of religious self-identification), its internal cohesion has developed partly as a survival mechanism, which makes it harder to assess how the model would function absent external pressure. Critics — including critics internal to the broader Muslim world — raise the same structural question raised of any centralized office: how are correction and reform possible when so much communal identity and cohesion is invested in deference to a single office, however non-infallible in formal doctrine?

7. The Deep History: Why These Patterns Recur

Two long historical arcs are worth holding side by side.

Christianity’s arc runs from a genuinely diverse, geographically dispersed early Church (with real doctrinal authority distributed across Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem) toward centralization in the West — accelerating after the Great Schism of 1054 separated Rome from Eastern Orthodoxy, and reaching its most codified form in the First Vatican Council of 1870 — and then, in a countervailing arc beginning in 1517, toward radical dispersion. It is a genuine historical irony that papal infallibility was formally defined only nineteen years before Darwin’s Origin of Species had reshaped the intellectual landscape the doctrine would then have to negotiate — the centralizing and the modern-scientific arcs collided almost immediately.

Islam’s arc runs the opposite direction in its opening chapters: an early, brief period of centralized political-religious leadership under the Rashidun Caliphs collapses into the founding trauma of the Sunni-Shia split — the succession dispute after the Prophet’s death in 632, and its violent climax at Karbala in 680 — after which Sunni Islam evolves toward the dispersed, scholarly-consensus model described above, while the Shia communities preserve and elaborate the principle of a protected, lineage-based Imamate that the majority tradition had rejected as the basis of communal authority. The Ahmadiyya movement, arising in the specific conditions of colonial South Asia in the late nineteenth century, represents a much later and independent re-invention of a centralizing solution to the same underlying problem — arrived at from within Sunni theology rather than through the Shia doctrine of Imamate, which is part of what makes it such a useful comparative case.

Seen this way, the recurring pattern across two unrelated traditions, separated by centuries and continents, suggests the tension is not an accident of any one religion’s history but a structural feature of any large interpretive community: centralization buys unity and a fast, authoritative response to disputed questions, at the price of concentrated fallibility risk and reduced tolerance for productive dissent; dispersion buys resilience against corruption of any single office and space for intellectual and scientific inquiry, at the price of fragmentation and a chronic inability to speak, or act, as one.

8. Is There a Happy Medium?

Several traditions have, in fact, experimented with intermediate models, and it is worth asking what a synthesis drawing on the best-documented successes might look like.

Conciliar rather than monarchical authority. The Second Vatican Council (1962–65) itself moved the Catholic Church toward collegiality — bishops sharing authority with the pope rather than merely receiving it from him — without abolishing the papacy. Sunni Islam’s own classical ijma is, in effect, a conciliar mechanism, just a slow and informal one. A genuinely intermediate model would formalize ijma-like or synodal mechanisms with real, time-bound deliberative power, rather than leaving consensus either purely retrospective (as in classical Sunni theory) or purely concentrated in one office (as in the strongest Catholic and Twelver/Ismaili formulations).

Narrow, procedurally bounded infallibility rather than broad, discretionary infallibility. The Catholic doctrine itself is instructive here: ex cathedra infallibility has been formally invoked only twice since 1870 (1854 and 1950, on Marian doctrines, the first predating the formal 1870 definition but retroactively treated as an instance of the same charism), precisely because the Church itself has treated the power as an emergency brake rather than a routine instrument. A model that keeps a very narrowly scoped, rarely-invoked mechanism for resolving true impasses — while leaving the vast majority of doctrinal and practical questions to distributed scholarly or conciliar reasoning — captures unity-when-it-matters without inviting the chronic suppression of inquiry that broad, everyday magisterial authority can produce.

Elected rather than hereditary or self-perpetuating leadership, with real term or review mechanisms. The Ahmadiyya Khilafat’s electoral college and the Catholic conclave both already embed an element of this; a fuller synthesis would add fixed-term reviews or clearer mechanisms for course correction between elections — closer to the Twelver Shia system of scholarly peer-recognition of a marja‘, which allows some believers to shift allegiance to a different living scholar without schism, than to a single lifetime office with no internal check.

Protected doctrinal core, open interpretive periphery. Perhaps the most promising synthesis, visible in embryonic form across several of these traditions, distinguishes a small set of foundational commitments (the reality of God, the finality/centrality of the founding revelation, core ethical commitments) that a community treats as settled and unifying, from a much larger domain of legal, scientific, and interpretive questions left explicitly open to ongoing, revisable inquiry — precisely the distinction Sunni jurisprudence draws between usul (settled foundations) and furu’ (derivative, debatable rulings), and one Catholic theology gestures toward in the distinction between doctrines de fide and matters of legitimate theological opinion. A tradition that is disciplined about keeping this boundary narrow, rather than letting the “settled core” creep outward to cover scientific or social questions it was never meant to adjudicate, gets unity without paying the Galileo-era price.

In short: the happy medium is not a single office or total dispersion, but a layered structure — a small, rarely-invoked unifying mechanism for true impasses; a standing conciliar or consensus body for ordinary governance; elected rather than dynastic leadership with real accountability; and a disciplined, narrow definition of what counts as doctrinally “settled” at all.

9. Suggestions for Each Tradition, on Its Own Terms

For the Roman Catholic Church. Continue and deepen the synodal, collegial direction begun at Vatican II and pursued institutionally under the recent Synod on Synodality; consider formally narrowing, in explicit doctrinal language rather than mere practice, the domains in which magisterial authority claims competence, explicitly excluding empirical scientific questions as a category (building on, and going beyond, the 1992 rehabilitation of Galileo); expand local and regional episcopal conferences’ genuine decision authority on matters of pastoral practice, reserving Rome’s role for the small set of truly foundational questions.

For Protestant Christianity. Invest in stronger voluntary ecumenical and coordinating bodies (in the spirit of the World Council of Churches and the National Association of Evangelicals, but with more binding practical cooperation) that can represent shared positions on humanitarian, ethical, and political questions without requiring doctrinal uniformity; develop clearer accountability structures for independent congregations and their leaders, precisely to guard against the small-scale authoritarianism that unchecked congregational autonomy can produce; treat denominational plurality as a strength to be coordinated rather than merely tolerated.

For Sunni Islam. Strengthen existing transnational scholarly bodies (such as al-Azhar’s international councils, or the Amman Message consensus of 2004-05) into standing, faster-acting deliberative mechanisms capable of a more timely collective voice — especially against extremist misappropriation of Islamic vocabulary — while preserving the classical commitment to ikhtilaf (legitimate scholarly disagreement) in matters of law; invest in mechanisms that make scholarly ijma more visible and citable in real time rather than only recognizable long after the fact.

For the Shia communities. For Twelver Shia, continue the internal scholarly debate — already active among senior clerics, including prominent voices within Iraq’s Najaf seminary tradition — over the proper scope of wilayat al-faqih, distinguishing the spiritual authority of the marja’ from direct political governance; for Ismaili communities, continue developing the substantial existing network of independent educational and civil institutions (the Aga Khan Development Network is already a notable model here) that channel the Imam’s authority into pluralistic, non-coercive humanitarian and educational work rather than doctrinal enforcement; for Zaidi communities, their comparatively moderate Imamate doctrine is itself a useful bridge model worth wider study by both Sunni and Twelver scholars.

For the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. Continue to invest in the community’s existing consultative bodies (majlis-e-shura at national and international levels) as genuine deliberative input to the Khilafat rather than symbolic consultation, and continue to make the non-infallible, non-legislative character of the Khalifa’s authority as doctrinally explicit and well-known as possible, both internally and to outside observers, since this distinction is precisely what differentiates the model from stronger infallibility claims elsewhere and is easily lost in outside characterization; continued investment in interfaith and inter-Muslim scholarly engagement, despite the real constraints imposed by persecution, would help test and refine the model’s claims in open exchange with critics rather than primarily within the community itself.

10. Which Model Best Serves Pluralism and Universal Brotherhood?

If the goal is not merely internal coherence for one tradition but a healthier relationship among traditions — genuine pluralism and a lived sense of universal human brotherhood — a few conclusions follow from the analysis above.

Neither pure centralization nor pure dispersion, alone, reliably produces pluralism. A strongly centralized model can produce impressive internal unity while historically making external pluralism harder, since a protected office is under structural pressure to treat rival claims to truth (inside or outside the tradition) as threats requiring suppression rather than partners in inquiry — the historical pattern behind both the Inquisition and, in various Muslim-majority contexts, state enforcement of a single school’s rulings. A purely dispersed model avoids that specific failure mode but can produce a different one: so little collective identity or capacity for authoritative self-correction that the tradition cannot restrain its own extremist fringes, which then become the public face of the whole in the eyes of outsiders — a live problem for both fragmented Protestant sectarianism historically and for the Sunni world’s difficulty disowning groups that invoke Islamic vocabulary for violence today.

The layered model sketched in Section 8 is also the model best suited to pluralism, for a specific reason: a tradition that has clearly and narrowly defined what is doctrinally non-negotiable for itself is, somewhat counter-intuitively, better positioned to be generous and curious about other traditions’ full claims, because it is not defending an unbounded territory. Traditions whose “settled core” has crept outward to cover history, science, or the legitimacy of other faith communities have far less room to engage those communities as genuine interlocutors rather than as errors to be corrected. Ahmadiyya theology’s own explicit, centuries-old emphasis on the doctrine that God has sent guidance to every nation (drawing on Quran 35:24, “There is no nation to which a warner was not sent”) is one existing example, from within this comparative set, of a tradition using a relatively centralized structure to justify pluralism theologically rather than to restrain it — worth noting precisely because it shows centralization and pluralism are not automatically at odds, provided the center’s own doctrine points outward.

Universal brotherhood, in the end, looks less like theological convergence and more like a shared commitment to a common procedural ethic: every tradition examined here already possesses, in its own vocabulary, the resources for (a) a narrow protected core, (b) broad participatory deliberation beneath it, (c) real mechanisms of internal accountability and course-correction, and (d) an explicit outward-facing theology of respect for other communities’ sincerity. A “model for pluralism” is therefore not a single new institution to be invented from scratch, still less a call for doctrinal merger, but a set of internal reforms — available in each tradition’s own theological idiom, as sketched in Section 9 — that would let every one of these communities be more fully and more safely itself, while becoming structurally more capable of recognizing the same achievement in its neighbors.

Thematic Epilogue: The Architecture of Trust

Underneath the institutional detail, every model surveyed here is finally an answer to one very old and very human problem: how do you organize trust across millions of people who will never meet, across centuries none of them will live to see the end of, without either crushing the individual conscience or losing all capacity to act, correct, and cohere as one body? Rome answered with an office it believed God himself would guard from error. Wittenberg and Geneva answered by handing that guardianship back to scripture and to every believer’s own reading of it. The scholars of Sunni Islam answered with the slow, patient accumulation of consensus across generations, trusting the whole community more than any single voice within it. The Shia communities answered by insisting that revelation is not safely left to consensus or text alone, but needs a living, protected interpreter in every age. And the Ahmadiyya movement answered with something genuinely its own: a single reigning office, elected rather than inherited, that claims not error-proof status but the humbler promise of ongoing divine support — unity purchased without the strongest form of the infallibility claim that unity elsewhere has often required.

None of these answers is naive, and none is without cost; that is precisely why they have all endured, in one form or another, for centuries. The deepest lesson of setting them side by side is not that one is simply right and the others simply wrong, but that they cluster, again and again, around the same two dials — how much authority to concentrate, and how much protection from error to claim for it — because every large community that outlives its founders must eventually turn those two dials one way or another. The traditions that have adapted best over the long run are not the ones that found a perfect, permanent setting, but the ones that kept the capacity to turn the dials again: Vatican II’s turn toward collegiality eight centuries after Vatican I’s predecessor councils centralized authority; the ongoing internal Twelver debate over wilayat al-faqih; the Sunni world’s repeated, unfinished efforts to rebuild transnational scholarly consensus for a globalized age; the Ahmadiyya movement’s own explicit doctrinal insistence that its Khalifa is guided, not infallible. Universal brotherhood, on this reading, will not be won by any tradition abandoning its own architecture of trust for another’s, but by every tradition keeping its own architecture humble, correctable, and — in the oldest and best sense of the word — reasonable enough to recognize the same humility, the same capacity for self-correction, and the same underlying dignity, wherever it appears in a neighbor’s house of faith.