Tolstoy ... believed that property claims were based on robbery and maintained by violence. More radical than second-century radical Christians and t… - H. Richard Niebuhr

The Christian .. cannot dismiss the philosophy and science of his society as though they were external to him; they are in him. ... He cannot rid himself of political beliefs and economic customs by rejecting the more or less external institutions; these customs and beliefs have taken up residence in his mind.

Tolstoy ... can center his attack on the conscious beliefs, the tangible institutions, and the specious customs of society. He is not content simply to withdraw from these himself and lead a semimonastic life; he becomes a crusader against culture under the banner of the law of Christ.

Denominations, churches, sects, are sociological groups whose principle of differentiation is to be sought in their conformity to the order of social classes and castes. It would not be true to affirm that the denominations are not religious groups with religious purposes, but it is true that they represent the accommodation of religion to the caste system. They are emblems, therefore, of the victory of the world over the church, of the secularization of Christianity, of the church's sanction of that divisiveness which the church's gospel condemns.