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Sorry... did you end that with a critique of secularism as if that's the problem?
I have troubles expriming qualified opinions in English, which is not my mother tongue, sorry.
Of course secularism is not the problem, that was not what I intended to say, sorry again. But still, secularism has this secondary effect to weaken rational and open forms of religion while strengthening reactionary forms of religion.
Must have been a whole lot of secularism going on in the dark ages when Christianity was very much into torture and murder.
I'll back you on this one. I believe the nation-state (or any empire) has a vested interest in 1) pinning historical injustice on the Church, absolving worldly government of its responsibility for those injustices, and 2) capturing religion as a banner for tribalism.
I'll give you the oft repeated, but rarely challenged adage "religion starts wars". You could more accurately state that governments start wars, but I don't see many people taking anarchistic positions.
I'd be curious to hear your hypothesis on why governments like and support reactionary forge of tl religion.
BTW I believe most American expressions of religion are more nationalistic than Christian.
Wars are caused by power, and people searching it. Religious, political, economical, symbolic, … when there's power, there could be war.
Religion is a way to give sense to a world which seems very chaotic. Governments need legitimacy. Mix the two, and the sense given to the world by a religion can be justifying the legitimacy of a government. If it's the case, this legitimacy can be very strongly rooted in people's mind, making any decision of this government a part of the sense of the world (even if for an individual, this decision may look nonsensical). The more nonsensical a political movement is, the more religion will be useful to it, but ut's a very strong temptation for any government, and that's why the religions and the State should be separated.
Now, religion is a very complicated thing. I was reading yesterday an article in the last issue of the socialist American magazine Jacobin which says : “there is not, and has never been, a single identifiable thing that we can call ‘Christianity’ except with excruciating generality.” And I think it's true for Christianity, but also for any religion. For our subject, we could discern to kinds of movement within every religion:
Of the two kinds, which one will be more useful for a government? Of course, the second one. That's why we see, all around the world, alliances between oligarchic political movements (which have less legitimacy than more popular political movements) and with reactionary forms of religion. Trump with evangelicals, Putin with super-Z orthodoxs, and so on.
Interesting. I've been wondering about that pattern. I think what you're referring to as 'closed religions' I've been labeling 'fearful' and 'legalistic' because I've noticed a pattern. They seem to have a great and suspicious view of the world, and prescribe a set of strict laws to keep us all "safe". Ironically, not what I believe Christianity was intended to be, but there have certainly been forces shaping it that way.