i think it is fair to say that institutionalized or 'established' religion is destructive of spiritual truth or living in contact with god, if any, in particular with regard to its own priestly hierarchy. you're likely not there for god. you're there to rise in prestige and power and wealth, or to be regarded as in contact with god so you can lord it over people. that's what kierkegaard is saying in attack upon christendom.
this is even more true with regard to philosophy. that's precisely why we still tend to tell the story with a giant leap between the ancients and the 17th century: not that there's no philosophy in between, but it's polluted by the enforcement of dogma. in circumstances where you pay a terrible price for dissent - your works repressed, your person extruded or immolated - it is not even possible to tell whether the claims are sincere. likewise where the rewards of conformity are potentially great - rising in the hierarchy, social prestige, power over other people. the relation to truth which must be at the heart of philosophy is fundamentally compromised.
i say that is the position of philosophy in academia now: quite like medieval philosophy in relation to the catholic church. the reasons people assert what they do: they want tenure; they want status; they need to find a prestige group and conform to their dogmas. to some extent there are multiple dogmas or churches, but you have to find one that can carry you along in the hierarchy. but in the matter of politics, the dogma is pure and total: you must agree or pay the hideous price that heretics pay.
that is anathema to the quest for truth; it is incompatible with philosophy. academic philosophy today is not philosophy, and if there is a future of philosophy, the people building it will skim over this period as offering almost nothing, as polluted fundamentally by power relations and social slavishness.
not that there have never been good philosophers who were professors. but the dogmatism of the institutions and the hierarchy, the mood of desperate conformity and resolution to rise to professional respect of this moment are extreme. try to imagine your tenured professors - today's little priesthood - or the endowed chairs in their bishoprics, paying the sort of price for speaking their truth that socrates paid, or spinoza, or nietzsche. people think they can do both. i don't think they are, though, and i think many have lost track of the fact even that they are not seeking the truth. that condition is fatal to a thinker, and there can be no resurrection from it; it is soul-annihilating, as ole sk might put it, or emerson.
you might think about what happened to platonism, to confucianism, to christianity when they were institutionalized. they became boring, repetitive, immune to truth. any moment of innovation or originality emerged at a moment of institutional crisis. hold on to your smugness and mediocrity while you can. clutch hard onto such prestige as you have achieved. actually, i think you'll be fine, for i don't see any crisis looming. hold on long enough, and you can really be safe, and put this philosophy thing to rest forever.
