The whole "unquestioning obedience" thing is what freaks me out the most. Truly people are right when they say that religion is fundamentally about control.
I don't know about you, but for me the obvious way in which politicians and other powerful sorts have abused and perverted religious devices (and systems of control) to achieve their own ends has left a really bad taste in my mouth generally w.r.t anything "control-y' about religion.
The religious motivation behind control in monasteries is something different, though (at least when uncorrupted by politics and power).
Monasteries are, by design, very controlled environments. That's _exactly_ what they are supposed to be.
A place where you can safely get lost in ecstatic bliss, altered states of consciousness and the sometimes-difficult psychological territory of self discovery that typically follows these experiences.
The guard rails are put there by people who have travelled the road before and know what the pitfalls are.
For anyone curious about that (from a Christian monastery context):
* Cloud of Unknowing (Anonymous)
* The Dark Night of the Soul (St. John of the Cross)
* The Interior Castle (Teresa of Ávila)
Similar material exists for guiding e.g. Buddhist monks through the sort of territory that comes up when people spend a lot of time alone in contemplation (The Visuddhimagga, The Vimuttimagga in the Theravada tradition, The Tibetan Book of the Dead in the Vajrayana tradition).
Shamanic traditions likewise have very strict schedules of diet and spiritual preparation before aspirants can consume psychedelics - and ceremonies are (traditionally) performed under exquisitely controlled conditions.
Incidentally - westerners who play with meditative technologies or "psychedelic" therapies absent a regular, working relationship with a guide who know the territory do so at their own peril, IMO.
Thousands of years of contemplative and meditative practice have yielded independently arising systems in many different cultures which call for a controlled environment where a practitioner is surrounded by peers who know what to do, and more importantly what _not_ to do when things get a bit weird.
That's JUST for the individual practitioner.
Now add another layer for "things that can go wrong when trying to manage / lead a large community of people doing these things together".
Many mystical traditions (particularly eastern ones) solve this problem by having rules about how long monks and abbots can stay in one place.
Here, we see some western solutions to the common problems of community governance (at least: the sorts of problems one was likely to encounter at the time).
I've meandered really widely around the point! :)
Really I just wanted to call out that there is a valid (within the context of the goals of spiritual practice) use for a very controlled environment that should be considered separately from the common understanding of "religious control" (i.e. the powerful and political abusing religious devices to exert control over the masses).