A dear old lady, after reading my piece yesterday on “Using the whip inside the temple,” wrote to me and said, “Bob, do you think our religious institutions would ever need such a cleansing?”

I wrote back, “Ma’am, if Jesus walked into some of our places of worship today, he’d need not just a whip, but possibly a bulldozer!”

But then, let me not get too carried away. Let me explain what I call the “arms, legs and body” theory—no, it’s not an aerobics expression—but it might just be the diagnosis our spiritual institutions need today.

You see, when a religious organisation starts small, it’s usually driven by a passionate core—the body, if you will. This core is rooted in the original spiritual mission: love, truth, humility. But as the organisation grows, it starts sprouting departments—arms and legs—education wings, cultural cells, social outreach units, legal committees, art and theatre groups, and so on.

Now, that’s not a bad thing—until the limbs start growing longer than the torso.

These arms and legs start developing muscles of their own, and one fine day they forget they’re part of a body. They start marching to their own beat, sometimes even kicking the very values the core body once stood for.

And sadly, instead of reining them in, the head—the guru, the swami, the pastor, the priest,—start either looking the other way or getting cozy with the ones making the most noise. After all, these departments bring in visibility, power, and sometimes… funds.

Take, for example, this play, the one I saw on Monday where a religious message was supposedly being showcased—but all I could see were that the arms and legs had taken over the stage, while the body was tied to a chair backstage!

In India, we’ve seen this with organisations like the RSS. The core talks about a spiritual, unified India—but then smaller groups go around breaking churches and beating up pastors. And the body remains silent.

This dissonance—where the voice of love is drowned by the din of limbs gone rogue—must be corrected. We need a spiritual chiropractor or even maybe a clever orthopedic surgeon, someone who aligns the limbs back with the body, someone not afraid to say, “That arm isn’t healing—it’s hitting! That leg isn’t walking in love—it’s trampling!”

And sometimes, just sometimes, like Jesus, we need to walk in with a whip—not to punish—but to clean. To remind these arms and legs they are not the body.

Because when the body forgets its heart, it becomes just another machine. And machines don’t save souls.

They just make noise, which is exactly what we hear now….!

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