All institutions end up connected in some way, because all humans are connected in some way. The church became a form of governance. They where the power behind the thrones. They snapped their fingers and tens-of thousands of men, women and children where butchered for the love of Christ. Look how well religious leadership worked, much like countries run by Muslim clerics today, they are Third World, suppress women and promote ignorance to the highest degree.
I think Christianity started as a movement of free of association, a way for the oppressed to see their lives as tolerable in light of the eventual pay-off at the end. It was not an esoteric teaching as in Buddhism, but it was not so different in that, it tried to break from the straight-jacket of Jewish orthodoxy and promote the individual over the religious hierarchy. It empowered people who had no power to believe the individual needed no other human on their spiritual quest, no Pharisee, no priest, no Elder, etc.
Today of course Christianity is even more straight-jacketed than Jewish orthodoxy in the age of Christ. It's no longer a religion about the collective action of individuals, it's about compliance to the religious elite. It makes dozens of millionaires every year out of conmen and women. It produces societies of the preaching class who are ordinary people pretending their asses off. Christianity has morphed into the polar opposite of its true self.
If you read the Jehovah Witness spiel, they have taken this to the extreme, their only source of knowledge comes by way of a governing body that digests all Biblical understanding and feeds it back piecemeal to the followers to accept without question. The individuals that Christ uplifted has been replaced by the mindless, simpering follower.
