Monday Morning Greetings 2026 #26 – The Banality of Evil and Religious Institutions

I hope most of you read my last post “My Association with the Gambino Crime Family”.[1] When I grew up in Brooklyn, my brother’s best friend until they were ten years old was Dominick Montiglio whom we recently found grew up to be a hitman for the Gambino crime family. We were shocked that such an apparently normal child became so corrupted. The post tried to briefly explain the reasons why. In this post I wish to expound on one of those reasons that I didn’t have time to elaborately discuss the last time, and I will call it “the banality of evil.” I will then discuss its practical application to some of the behavioral problems that plague religious institutions. The term “the banality of evil” was first coined by Hannah Arendt in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). She was a political philosopher who was hired by New Yorker magazine to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi bureaucrat heavily involved in organizing the deportation of Jews…