CHAPTER 3.

THE USE OF RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION - A WAY OF

SAYING "NO"?

The quintessential American suburbs, with their gracious single-family

homes, large green lawns, and leaf-shaded streets, reflected not only residents’
dreams but nightmares, not only hopes but fears: fear of others, of racial
minorities and low income groups, fear of themselves, fear of the market, and,
above all, fear of change. These fears, and the restrictive covenants that embodied
them, are the subject of Robert M. Fogelson’s fascinating new book.[i]

The religious right and the progressive left are both protests against the
mainstream economy, and while the reasons for that protest look very different, at
root they are similar: they have to do with being left out of the mainstream
economy, the merry-go-round I described earlier. As people feel economic threat
they look for whom to align with for security. In much of the country religious
institutions and frameworks of faith are ready at hand, and even include “faith in
science” or “faith in the market place.” Insecurity tends to make fundamentalists
(“This is rock solid true.”) out of most people. Having a meaning tinged world
view is of course not just a reaction to economic and violence prone insecurity, but
it may be that its centrality in the political realm is triggered by fear, or disquiet
about the perceived trends in overall social meaning.
Is the use of religion in the public and political space a way of saying "no" to
the mainstream trends? The standard view is that the country is split between those
who want change, the progressives or liberals, and those who want to standstill or
go backwards, often identified with the religious right. But the model of change
that we are offered by the leadership of both parties, often called neo- liberal
economics, has become what Bush means by "democracy and markets." Bush has
deeply weakened the positive side of these terms because what he really means is
governance by a combination of large corporations, large government budgets, and
a business owned press. Basically if you sign up for what both parties' leaderships
mean by "change" you are signing up for a corporate agenda.
 The confusions on the conservative side are even stronger because in many
ways those who vote Republican in the weaker states and communities really do
want change. They want change away from the corporate agenda, which they see
as weakening their local economies, and they want change towards a more hopeful
expectation for a healthy economy, education, and family. It is their mobilization
around fear of bureaucracy and abstract authority that keeps them organized
around what in fact is a large business system and its needs.
We have a further confusion because the Democrats are working hard to
conserve a mixture of policies from Roosevelt to Clinton, and for a decade it is the
Republicans who have been changing things. That is, the Democrats are acting as
the conservatives in the simple sense of wanting to preserve some of the New Deal
spirit rather than change. I say “spirit” because the Democrats have become the
party of the professional class more than the party of the poor. “Increase breaks for
the middle class” is hardly a full spectrum politics.

Current politics can best be understood as a complex reaction to change.

Because GardenWorld is a change strategy, we need to be aware of how it will be
understood and by whom. In a recent interview we have

Proposition 13, the tax revolt -- by that time I was collaborating with a
professor at UCLA, David Sears -- we've done a lot of work together, and our work
essentially began with a theoretical question: how much is personal self-interest the
motivation of one's political attitudes, as opposed to broader attitudes such as
ideology, patriotism, racism. We were doing work along those lines already, and
then the tax revolt occurred and [we] had an opportunity to look at that. My own
take on that was the tax revolt was, in some sense, another act of mass defiance of
established elites, because Proposition 13 was opposed by every elite actor in the
State of California, both major political parties, the business [establishment], the
educational establishment, the labor establishment, and yet it passed
overwhelmingly. It should never have happened. The way in which property tax
revolt developed was, in some sense, a failure on the part of state political leaders
to react to an obvious problem. My take on the tax revolt [was] that it was a
manifestation of the loss of trust, or the lack of trust, that I'd been studying
earlier.[ii]
 Change is not new. Deciding what to do about it characterizes all societies
because of the human dependence on circumstances which never remain fixed. In
fact to do today what we did tomorrow is not the same thing – it has become a
repetition which yesterday’s activity was not and repetition is itself threatening
when changing circumstances require new responses – or reinvigorated old ones.
John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930 .

We are suffering, not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the
growing-pains of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment
between one economic period and another. The increase of technical efficiency has
been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption;
the improvement in the standard of life has been a little too quick; the banking and
monetary system of the world has been preventing the rate of interest from falling
as fast as equilibrium requires. And even so, the waste and confusion which ensue
relate to not more than 7½ per cent of the national income; we are muddling away
one and sixpence in the £, and have only 18s. 6d., when we might, if we were more
sensible, have £1 ; yet, nevertheless, the 18s. 6d. mounts up to as much as the £1
would have been five or six years ago. We forget that in 1929 the physical output
of the industry of Great Britain was greater than ever before, and that the net
surplus of our foreign balance available for new foreign investment, after paying
for all our imports, was greater last year than that of any other country, being
indeed 50 per cent greater than the corresponding surplus of the United States. Or
again-if it is to be a matter of comparisons-suppose that we were to reduce our
wages by a half, repudiate four fifths of the national debt, and hoard our surplus
wealth in barren gold instead of lending it at 6 per cent or more, we should
resemble the now much-envied France. But would it be an improvement?[iii]

In ancient Egypt it was believed that the social and architectural structure of
the capital metropolis was a reflection of the laws of the cosmos and hence any
change to the municipal structure was seen as upsetting to the cosmos itself. This
of course was an anti revolutionary belief system. Another approach to change has
been the deeply held religious belief that the only real drama in life is the fate of
the soul. For those who hold this belief politics is trivial and should be left to
others. Another widely held view believes there should not be separation of church
and state but that a broadly acceptable religion must also play a political role
supporting the establishment.
Change always has winners and losers. There is no change without losers.
The problems occur when the losers are not dealt with compassionately, which
means some kind of indemnification. If we can pay farmers to not grow crops we
can find a way to cushion loss of jobs from technologically induced shifts in the
nature of the economy.
The history of the US is filled with rapid change. From the signing of the
Constitution to the Civil War is about sixty years. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803,
was not just Louisiana, but west to Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas,
Nebraska, Minnesota south of Mississippi River, much of North Dakota, nearly all
of South Dakota, northeastern New Mexico, northern Texas, the portions of
Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the Continental Divide. The railroads,
the rise of oil, the coming of industrialization, major recessions about every
decade. Looked at large or small, change bordered on chaos. The U.S. was on the
way to becoming an empire, as Hamilton, wanting empire defeating Jefferson, who
wanted rural democracy without business. “Great” Britain was for Hamilton the to
be surpassed target. The civil war with its extended bureaucracy and reliance on
manufactured goods, and then the two world wars works to enhance America’s
dominant position. Since then we probably have been weakening ourselves by
trying to protect the “military industrial complex” by engaging in strategically
weak wars - the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the two Iraq wars, and all the
Grenadas and Banana Republic / United Fruit wars in between. Each of us has our
own history through these major events, and it is good to be reminded of this
history and its impact on the American economy, our political structure, our
position as a nation and its powerful effect on our own culture and its blindness.
The rise of the Religious Right is considered by many commentators to be
the major political event in the US since the Second World War. Its roots are deep.
The first few generations that came from Europe to the new Colonies came for
explicitly religious reasons. The generations that came to the United States from
the early 1700s came for economic reasons and advance. It was the second group
that wrote the constitution. The first room continued their migration westward and
set the tone for local culture as religious opposed to the new ideas of the
enlightenment. The two groups have always remain somewhat estranged from each
other but later politics, seeking leverage in the sound bite world stereotyped those
with religious beliefs as seeing all politics from their religious perspective. The
result is that we are made to appear more different to each other and we really are.
While this view by the mainstream of the religious right is partially correct
but those who hold it ignore that the most likely future is a continuation of an elite
running both parties, and that support technology investment to which both parties’
supporters are in various degrees of rebellion. I want to look especially at the
rebellion from the right, a rebellion that supports the Bush administration, but is
fundamentally at odds with it. I believe we misinterpret the religious right by
considering its basic motive to be religious and cultural rather than economic.
I put this to myself as a question: On the right, is the reemergence of religion
into the public space in large part a reaction to modern and post modern trends,
technical, economic and cultural, to which normal politics – the Republican and
Democratic parties – provide no real alternative?[iv] In reality the republicans and
democrats support a growing economy, a powerful military, a growing
bureaucracy. Ever since politicians started wearing American flag lapel pins and
red ties and square shouldered suits, they look increasingly like old style photos of
the Soviet Politburo leadership: stolid, self righteous, unimaginative, and with
hidden personal agendas. Signs of an increasingly corrupt leadership that aligns
itself with the power and it does not believe that it does not believe in.
The reemergence of religion[v] into the public space in politics and its
interpretations has been a cultural shock to many. And I would include myself. We
thought we lived in an increasingly science based secular world, and that the
enlightenment was still bringing reason to the few remaining shadows of old myth,
verbal rituals of gods and devils, blood- consciousness, and spiritual exploitation
by priests and shamans, and old style despair. To the extent we were religions we
thought it was private or based in our church community. Yet we moderns were
also bothered by the misuse of “rational” in the irrational trend of replacing
rational goals of the good life with “rational” means reflecting the tightening
connections of capital with technology and power.
The overwhelming movement of the West[vi]since the Middle Ages is
probably the confluence among technology, power, capital and status. The ruling
class, loosely defined by ownership, political connections, and education, has been
able to keep control, more or less, of this ensemble for its own benefit[vii]. Kings,
and later Parliaments, ran their nations as businesses, at first inconspicuously and
later explicitly, as trade, money, and war became central concerns. The industrial
phase required, until recently, a larger middle class of well paid managers to keep
this ensemble and its emerging complexity flowing and efficiently productive. The
digital world, with its technology and the consequences, seems to imply that we
need fewer managers, because coordination technology allows lower level workers
or the machines themselves to cross coordinate.[viii]
After WW2 the Republican leadership, after being out of power since 1932,
sought an easy victory in Dewey’s candidacy, and the unexpected loss to Truman
led to the choice of Eisenhower as a non ideological candidate in order to win back
power for the Wall Street Republicans. Eisenhower was successful at creating a
more acceptable image of Republicans, less rapaciously business oriented, but was
attacked by the democrats for being soft on national defense by not keeping up
with the real but still hyped Soviet progress in missiles. Note that the “out” party
usually tries the defense issue as a leverage point to regain power. Kennedy during
his campaign against Nixon had accused Eisenhower of allowing a missile gap to
develop with the Soviets. Eisenhower shocked the national leaderships of both
parties – shocked into silence - when he ended his presidency with the famous
phrase of the Farewell Address, warning us all, “beware of the military industrial
complex” (which we now know was also to include “government” which was
nixed by advisors). We are all beginning to see that there is an inexorable flow to
the techno-economic and its connection to the control of markets and resources and
wars, which is now sensed by almost everyone. Capital congregates around a few
major cities, and globalization is the extension of the exploitation of resource, but
not of real economic power, to more and more of the world. Elites in new countries
are paid off for delivering their populations to the megamachine. Law and
regulation support the movement of capital and ownership into ever more skewed
distributions.[ix] While we are creating some new middle class, the cost to the
environment and the rest of the population has been very high in most countries.
But disenchantment or outright resistance has had a hard time focusing itself
because of the distractions of war. We could start with the rise of Napoleon, his
attacks forcing the militarization of first Germany, then Japan, and the increasing
bureaucratization of empire, and the resulting 1st and 2nd World Wars, the Cold
War, and Iraq.[x] There are those who want to keep our attention focused on the
external things they encourage us to fear, rather than to fear the direction of the
economic technical system, with its concentration of money and power. This
prevents politically powerful criticism of the technical-financial axis, with its
negative impact for most of the population on family, community and the
environment, while we are seduced toward still producing children beyond
sustainability. Not only does this keep us distracted, but also the ensuing tensions
among increasing populations are good for markets: energy, weapons, and drugs.
I am inclined to look at Iraq, Bolton, the Social Security debate, and all the
minor provocations forwarded by Bush, as distractions, keeping the Center-right
and center- left fragmented in not so important pit bull fights on minor issues.
Meanwhile the distribution of real power narrows to elites within all countries.
The tendency of "the system" to turn into a well coordinated machine owned
by a few is making everyone nervous.[xi] The progressive professional class wants
peace and reason, but while still supporting expensive careers and the professionals
would like new technologies that can be assimilated by society at a non-destructive
pace, but that actually are financed and used by the military to prevent peace. . The
tendency of that group has been to see the others, the fundamentalists, the Bush
supporters, as mere primitives. But there is good evidence that the "right" in the US
have maintained a resistance to modernization that goes back to the puritans and
the Counter Reformation.
America in the 1700's was a refuge from Europe, to avoid the powers of
change and hold on to ancient ways. Jefferson's Notes on Virginia and the earlier
History and the Current state of Virginia by Beverly both portray an asylum from
emerging European culture and its trends of modernity. What Jefferson saw as
potentially free from European oppression was a widely shared vision of the
American future. Many in America then and now believed, "Just leave us alone
and let us be on our own land." This is not new, but deep in the American
experience, and taught by school teachers for two centuries.[xii].
What is striking is the degree to which Bush has been able to keep the
support of the resistant traditional part of the population while playing around in a
support the rich guy policy. The Democrats have failed to offer an alternative
except what is perceived as professionalization and bureaucratization that is
insensitive to local and traditional values. The “value proposition” of the
Democrats (though not its current leadership) – concern for peace, poverty,
environment, quality of life, better education – is lost. The Democrats are much
more likely to be at home with Silicon Valley than with unions or the bottom half
of the population.
 The progressives, seen and self-identifying as left, are against what the right
seems to want, but have no real alternative beyond a kind of center right posture
that is even divided on the Iraq incursion, but hardly asking for justice for the
bottom half of the population. In fact, no one seems to have an answer to the larger
issues of designing a quality of life with the good use of technology, the
environment, with education for all, reasonable rewards for high performance, the
use of capital and governance responsive to real issues. In the absence of
something to say “yes” to, “No” emerges with increasing power.
So I am proposing that there is a deep continuity between seeking alignment
with traditional, even fundamentalist systems of belief and a reaction against an
alienating economy that threatens local business, jobs, and identity. Most people
are deeply concerned about the directions of modern society, postmodern culture,
and either discouraged, cynical, or scared. Grabbing at local means to protest, to
say no, to put on the breaks, they will use any means at hand - and in many
communities, the local churches and their networks are the only available tools to
embrace an alternative.
The inexorable, but maybe not inevitable, tendency for concentration and
coordination to make a single world of secular non-humanistic technocratic
realism[xiii] married to market fundamentalism and Lockian[xiv] private property
fundamentalism, will eventually lead more and more people (the numbers already
might be quite high), to use whatever means they can to say “NO” to the official
future and hope for some emerging alternative. The uni-bomber and the Oklahoma
bombing are hints we should not neglect, and the similarity of critiques of what is
not working is similar across a wide spectrum of belief systems and orientations.

Michael Powell, just as he was finishing his term as head of the FCC, said,

"I'm incredibly optimistic, bullish and excited. There's another player in the
room and it's called technology. It's not a person, it doesn't have a soul, and it
doesn't care that it's ripping up the way we've done it. And there's nothing to stop
it. The laws of physics keep tearing things apart, and I don't think that [regulatory]
change is dependent on lawyers. We do need some [regulatory reform] but even if
we did nothing the world is going to change anyway. -- It’s an innovator's paradise.
You can either catch the wave, or get run over by it." [xv]
 This kind of sadistic identification with destruction by the winners will
increasingly be seen as excessive and unfeeling. It has some truth, as changing is
both interesting and necessary but not that much. Insensitivity is worse than lack of
irony. The culture will react back against the excessive identification with change
and its destructive force (Schumpeter's "creative destruction.") as inhumane, and
off center. Will that reaction itself be more humane, or, by undermining
governance, lead to a descent to Rwanda like entropic soup?
In the context of resistance to change, motivated by increasing relationship
fragmentation, alienation from meaning, and loss of a relationship to those with
power, we might see – even if we did not expect - some surprising changes in the
political landscape. Rereading American History reminds us that the passions of
American politics have been deep and always mixed with religious thinking. Issues
like slavery, the gold standard, silver parity, paper money, westward expansion, and
the wars (all of them) have always had traditional values against “the money
interests.”
So we should not be so surprised by the reemergence of religion as a
powerful public force when general dissatisfaction is increasing. The reaction of
the world to the death of the Pope hinted at this. The Pope, in his humanism, which
in many aspects was real[xvi], has come to stand for an alternative to the mega-
machine[xvii] tendencies of the techno-capital axis. The archbishop of Canterbury
said in 2005 "Religion is the counter culture, the opposition to the way of the
world. The church of God is a community of people called to live at a cost, called
to live at times to stand against what seems to be the received wisdom, what seems
to be the obvious way of living in the world around, called to lead a transfigured
life, a life that is visibly different in its quality of love, faithfulness and hope, never
mind what the price is." [xviii]
The emotionality in reaction to Pope John Paul’s death I think was hinted at
earlier by the death of Princess Diana and the deep feelings for her based on her
anti-bomb crusade and other good works. The death of the younger John Kennedy
struck a similar chord of worldwide sympathy looking for belief in goodness. The
role of television and the Internet in creating these reactions is obvious, new, and
powerful. It hints at a worldwide socialization to prefer peace and softness to war
and authoritarian bullishness.
The promise of science as a force for good has long been lost as it has
shifted from a beneficial addition to humanity to being a driver of wealth, creating
effects that work against people and the environment, leading increasingly to the
suspicion that the economy is doing well but the people are doing badly. I recently
read a biography of William Law Olmsted, designer of Central Park, the entrance
to Yosemite, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the Boston Fens, and many others. What
is clear in his life is the sense that whatever good is created will be quickly spoiled
by small-minded opportunists. Thinking about the whole is a very rare human
quality.
That a secular humanism, skeptical, compassionate, and environmentally
sensitive, could lose out to a religious view of the world was almost unthinkable a
few years ago. What we failed to consider was that the secular humanist world was
really a cover story for the technocratic corporate world. The alternatives, we
thought, were between science and religion. But the real choice for many came
down to either supporting a technocratic societal tendency run by elites, or religion
as the only alternative mobilizeable social force to put the breaks on.[xix]
To the extent that religion does emerge as a new public center of power and
persuasion, the dangers of demagoguery are probably even worse than for the
bureaucratizing capitalism of modern society. This is because religion tends to the
authoritarian and rhetorical, and willing to choose blood, rather than the reasoned
and parliamentary, as a style of persuasion. People in churches are fairly benign,
though exclusionary. People led by religious leaders outside church tend toward
crusades and demand blood in the name of belief.
But the reality is our secular leaders or those room wearing a religion as a
mask, have, in the name of security lead us into larger and more “rational” wars.
Those who are more sensitive to the humanization issues, compassion, justice,
environment, must face up to the act that the technology and science that was
meant to benefit mankind got stolen by careers and money and lost much of its
human centered values. Since Francis Bacon tried to persuade the King of the
value of science and the Royal Society to the value of empire, there has always
been a mixed story we could have learned from, if we had looked. [xx]
The two choices we thought we had: modernization vs. fundamentalism,
turn out to be three: technocratic centralism, humanizing reform, and religious
zeal. A compromise might be a revaluing humanity through religious influence,
Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist.[xxi] with the better use of technology to
support people and the environment, and an effective business sector that was
aimed - by values and regulations, to make a better world and rein in the game of
 private profiteering. I say “compromise” because it is clear that the victory of one,
or even two of the tendencies over the third would probably lead to a new kind of
totalitarianism, brutal, harsh, and control oriented.
To create that compromise we need a view of the future that allows for good
lives in the present and works toward

1. Providing reasonable security through world cooperation

2. A vigorous economy that creates jobs and is yet less exploitative of the
environment and with much better distribution of product and profit.
3. The integration of civilization into the landscape.
4. Increasing decentralization as the new peripheries become stable and
responsible.
5. Capital as raw power, as financial instruments, up to and including interest, are
de-legitimated, and we have better public accounting (one trillion unaccounted for
in the Pentagon)
6. Bringing corporations back under meaningful state charters.
7. Taking children and their parents very seriously as the major method of
producing the core of society: the next generation.
8. An over-arching vision that is simple.

If you think of your own most cherished values, something like this list will
probably emerge. And since we have no political party or well known public
spokespersons for this humanizing civilizing goal, people look for old language to
express their discontents.
The issues are deep and personal

As a new parent, I’ve been painfully aware of how little real community
there is around us. This is a market success. Our parents are too far, our friends are
too shy, the mothering old ladies are nowhere to be found. So who teaches my wife
to breast feed? The “lactation consultant.” Yes – there is such a thing! And who
watches the baby when we have to take a shower or get to work? Not a family
member or friend down the hall, but a professional babysitter, daycare center or
nanny. The diminishment of community is what fuels these new markets.[xxii]
 Yet old language contains clues to better living, and we will now look at the
Garden of Eden, not as in the past, but in the realizable future now, GardenWorld.
In times of trouble the urge to say “no” can destabilize a government.

During the crisis years of the inter-war period mainstream parties were no
longer capable of providing political solutions for these people. Fascism offered
them an authoritarian alternative which shifted social frustrations onto the symbols
of national decline and renewal, offering individuals who felt powerless a sense of
superiority through militant nationalism and violence, initially against the labour
movement, but later against all groups considered a threat to the ‘community of
destiny’.

‘In the atmosphere brought to white heat by war, defeat, reparations,

inflation, occupation of the Ruhr, crisis, need, and despair, the petty bourgeoisie
rose up against all the old parties that had bamboozled it,’ wrote Trotsky in the
most urgent and compelling of all analyses of fascism. ‘The sharp grievances of
small proprietors never out of bankruptcy, of their university sons without posts
and clients, of their daughters without dowries and suitors, demanded order and an
iron hand’[xxiii]

The danger is ever present, and we need to be careful. Mass mobilization can
lead to mass mobs bet on destruction and violence, and in turn empowering their
leaders.

What set fascism apart from other forms of conservatism or authoritarianism

was its ability to mobilize on the streets. Fascism had to prove itself in practice, not
just as an alternative to political opponents, but also to the state. The hierarchical
structure of fascist organizations fuelled a desire to dominate while reconciling
members to their personal insignificance before a higher power, summed up in
Hitler’s maxim, ‘Responsibility towards above, authority towards below.’ Fascist
ideology was geared towards building an independent mass movement and relates,
as Geoff Eley has underlined, not just to the party’s ideas or formal aims, but to ‘its
style of activism, modes of organization and forms of public display’.
 ‘Fascism’, argued the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, ‘is a movement
which the bourgeoisie thought should be a simple “instrument” of reaction in its
hands, but once called up and unleashed is worse than the devil, no longer allowing
itself to be controlled’.4

The parallel with the Bush administration, ever more withdrawn from its
own base and hoarding power, should be a warning. GardenWorld is an
opportunity to keep people together in a more life loving project of voluntary
participation with many roles and relationships.
The problem is general: people will use what they have available to align
themselves around perceived economic survival (“advantage” is weaker but
similar).
Hitler and fascism show that, using electoral politics, a small number can
gain control of the whole by the use of violence and intimidation. We, given the
American experience of moving into a war that was unjustified should have more
sympathy for the many in Germany who “went along.” The killing civilians in Iraq
from the start of Awe and thunder should have awakened everyone without
exception of the horror. What is at stake here is Escape from Freedom[xxiv] and
what not escaping from it could look like. “We shall avoid another century of
conflict only if we understand the forces that caused the last one — the dark forces
that conjure up ethnic conflict and imperial rivalry out of economic crisis, and in
doing so negate our common humanity. They are forces that stir within us still.”

The weakening of nationalism leaves people feeling unaligned with

institutions that give security. Religious identification is the alternative, given its
deep cultural roots and ubiquitous presence. To show the historical depth of the
issues raised here, Adam Smith (see Smith quotes throughout this book to get a
balanced view) writes

In every civilized society, in every society where the distinction of ranks has
once been completely established, there have been always two different schemes or
systems of morality current at the same time; of which the one may be called the
strict or austere; the other the liberal, or, if you will, the loose system. The former
is generally admired and revered by the common people: the latter is commonly
more esteemed and adopted by what are called people of fashion. The degree of
disapprobation with which we ought to mark the vices of levity, the vices which
are apt to arise from great prosperity, and from the excess of gaiety and good
humour, seems to constitute the principal distinction between those two opposite
schemes or systems. In the liberal or loose system, luxury, wanton and even
disorderly mirth, the pursuit of pleasure to some degree of intemperance, the
breach of chastity, at least in one of the two sexes, etc., provided they are not
accompanied with gross indecency, and do not lead to falsehood or injustice, are
generally treated with a good deal of indulgence, and are easily either excused or
pardoned altogether. In the austere system, on the contrary, those excesses are
regarded with the utmost abhorrence and detestation. The vices of levity are always
ruinous to the common people, and a single week's thoughtlessness and dissipation
is often sufficient to undo a poor workman for ever, and to drive him through
despair upon committing the most enormous crimes.[xxv]

And this is a misuse of religion, the integrating culture of belief, whose

normal function draws us toward the better, Each person has a right for an
environment that draws them toward their better self. If “All men are created
equal” is combined with “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” our combined
task is to work toward creating an environment with the possibility of rewarding
family life, and beyond, to some form of “religion”, some form of science, art and
surroundings that say “it is good, good, to be alive.”
All religions inculcate values that are opposed to hurting others. In the US
we have to consider that when a society turns toward dollar wealth as its definition
of success, those with a strong religious upbringing are at a great “disadvantage”
socially, and I am sure we have all met extremely loving non-narcissistic and
deeply religious people who carry the scars of marginalization because of their
humanity.
But we still need to recognize that the disaffected can be a base for political
gain – not theirs. Nikolas Lehman writes in the New Yorker

Rove never pushed for a policy unless he saw a group of big funders or a
significant electoral constituency which it might bring to the Republican Party.
Social Security privatization was supposed to attract middle-class people whose
pensions had been invested in the stock market; immigration reform to attract
Latinos and small-business owners; the No Child Left Behind law public-school
parents; and so on. Conversely, Rove was always looking for neglected
constituencies—the most important by far being frequent churchgoers—and trying
to figure out what mix of government goodies and organizing techniques would
bring them into the Republican fold. (He was never a real conservative, except in
the liberal-hating sense, because the idea that everybody who participates in
politics expects something from government was at the heart of his
thinking.).[xxvi].

I’ll write more about the positive integrating function of religion in chapter
13, On Belief.