The Holy Land's most instructive religious institution is an administrative arrangement nobody designed and everybody now defends.
The status quo is a set of rules governing who may do what, when and where, at the shared Christian sites, above all the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. It was consolidated by Ottoman decrees in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries after repeated violent disputes between communities, and it fixes the existing distribution of rights in place: which denomination owns which chapel, which may process at which hour, which is responsible for cleaning which step. Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic and Roman Catholic custodians hold the largest shares, with Coptic, Syriac and Ethiopian communities holding smaller ones.
Because any repair to a shared space could be read as a claim to it, maintenance is difficult. A wooden ladder has stood on a ledge above the Holy Sepulchre's entrance since at least the eighteenth century because moving it would require agreement. The keys to the church have been held by two Muslim families for generations, an arrangement that persists because it removes one point of contention.
The arrangement is regularly described as absurd and is a serious piece of conflict management. It has kept a functioning shared use of the most contested Christian building in the world for two centuries, on the principle that possession is frozen and nothing is renegotiated.