Another chunk of Cupitt

"In dogmatic religion of the ecclesiastical kind, religious language undergoes a steady decline. It slowly turns into a series of stock slogans that are used as passwords in order to demonstrate one's own loyal membership of the group and to check other people's credentials. Eventually these slogans become so meaningless and irritating as to be quite unusuable by anyone who cares about language ... the hideous old obsession with using Christian vocabulary to police the frontiers of the community, to divide us from them, and to confirm hierarchies of spiritual power."

From "Theology's Strange Return."