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Your history is off. You may be basically Madison's and Jefferson's views and the policies of Virginia, but you are not describing the early republic as a whole. Individual states were allowed to have official state churches, Massachusetts had Congregationalism as established and taxpayer supported up until the 1830s. Religious tests for office (requiring office holders to sometimes be Christian, other times Protestant) lasted into the 20th century. School teachers could actively teach religion in class up until at least the middle of the 20th century. The original idea behind the First Amendment was simply as a truce between the religious sects that were dominant in various states, the states could intertwine religion and government but the federal government as a whole would not choose sides and enforce one particular sect upon the entire country.
But by the late 1800s state constitutions banning "sectarian support" was starting to be used as anti-Catholic cudgel. State support of protestantism was ok, because protestant was not sectarian, according to this logic, but Catholicism was sectarian so could not be taught in a local public school.
By the 1950s and 1960s the First Amendment became a cudgel to use against mixing of any Christianity with government at any level. The novel "incorporation doctrine" was used to apply the First Amendment down to even a local public school of a town of a 1,000 people. The federal government was being used to quash the religious choices of a local community which was the exact opposite the original intent. At the same time, the hegemonic ideology of the United States shed its last connections to Christianity, and thus mutated to make itself immune to First Amendment charges. This hegemonic ideology -- an ideology that has no name, and defies all attempts to be labeled, any time a name is placed on it it tries to shed its name -- gained tremendous state support not only financially but in law (Civil Rights law has morfed into becoming a speech code and ideological test for high-status employment).
This isn't new to "Wokism" -- I wrote a school paper 20 years ago about how "Civic Americanism" basically had almost all the properties of what we normally call religion. Moldbug wrote the same back in 2008 in his "How Dawkins Got Pwned Series" -- https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-1/ I'm sure other people noticed the phenomena before.
Who is "we"? The powers that be quite like being able to suppress the ideologies that traditionally code as religion, while being able to turbo-charge their own ideology with funding and legal support. They don't want a level playing field.
Fundamentally, I think the idea that religion could ever be separated from politics was an error. Politics at the end of the day depends on raw military power, and raw military power depends on people willing to risk their life for their God and their Sovereign. Politics also is all about making sure various groups and people get along, thus needs to teach a common morality, or at least a meta-morality. Politics is about forming durable group alliances -- which is what much of what religious ritual and sacrifice is about. "Religion" can only be separated from politics if you basically water down religion to just meaning a random grab-bag of stuffy old superstitions. Historically, and even in many contemporary societies, there isn't really an equivalent of our concept of "religion" that was separable from just life itself (in the same way American schools that teach "values" don't separate this value system as a separate category from just life itself.
My best take at defining religion that cuts reality at joints (and doesn't arbitrary distinguish between adhering to a "deity" versus "universal principles") is that a "religion is the binding agent of a non-kin or super-kin tribe." Things like creeds, stories, beliefs about ultimate meaning, rituals, sacrifice, are all components that help bind the group together and enable it to take collective action. I am unsure whether I would call "American hegemonic ideology" or "wokism" a religion, or a cancerous and metastatic mutant form of a religion, that is out-competing and strangling real religion.
I think the problem with this definition is that it defines garden variety civic nationalism as a religion. In theory, I could agree with that, but if we define my actions as a citizen (voting, jury duty, taxes to pay for social and defense spending) as a binding agent with my fellow Americans -- which I unironically believe, then the entire idea of separation of church and state is nonsensical to members of the Church of American Democracy.
Honestly I do somewhat agree with you, but I think it doesn't resolve the ambiguity of where "church" ends and "state" begins. I certainly don't see an obvious line of delineation despite wanting one to better define policy.
With excellent timing, a federal judge struck down Florida's anti-woke law while approvingly calling woke college professors "Priests of Democracy"
So I think you're probably right that no distinction between religion and ideology is possible.
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Yes. I believe that the "no establishment" clause has failed and no longer makes any sense. If it ever made sense, it was only in a historical context coming out of the post-reformation wars of religion, where a general truce between sects was desired. It made sense in an era where Christian or at least Abrahamic belief was assumed, the federal government had little role in education or ideology, and thus the First Amendment was merely the government not taking sides among Abrahamic sects. Ever since the rise of communism, fascism, liberalism, American civic liberalism, etc, and the main faultlines and fighting lines were among things that no longer coded as "religions" the First Amendment no longer makes sense.
Back in 2007 Moldbug bit the bullet and said that to really make a delineation that makes sense, you would need complete separation of state (ie, the organization with monopoly on force) and information -- https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/06/separation-of-information-and-security/ He later changed his mind in the opposite direction and basically accepted that control of information/ideology/religion is simply a fundamental property of sovereignty and cannot be split off. I have made the same intellectual journey myself and come to the same conclusion.
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This is a bullet that I bit a long time ago. The “religion vs. ideology” distinction is fake, and is a result of Enlightenment thinkers who believed, incorrectly, that humanity could rise above religion and replace it with something fundamentally different that would act as a coordination mechanism for society. I think that on a primal evolutionary level, anything that can function as a large-scale non-physically-coercive coordination mechanism for non-kin individuals is indistinguishable from a religion. Whether or not one decides to deploy discussion of transcendent/supernatural elements as a rhetorical device is irrelevant to the underlying structure of the coordination mechanism.
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