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Notes -
Is the State a "Civic Church" in terms of jurisdictional power, or am I overreading this?
Guys, I'm new here, so I'm not sure if this fits, but I've been wrestling with the relationship between the State and religion, and I want to run a thought by you.
We all know this Western ideal: separation of church and state. But after years of living it, watching the news and trying to understand the friction, it seems to me that you don’t get constant, systemic conflict unless two powers are fighting over the exact same piece of "real estate." And that "real estate" is moral authority.
Here is the nuance I want to add, because I know the counter-argument: "The State doesn't care what you believe in your heart; it only cares about public compliance." I grant that completely.
But here is where the jurisdictional land-grab happens: The State doesn't just say, "We have a separate rule for public conduct." It says, "Your religious rule is invalid inside your own institutions, and you must comply with our civic moral code—even when operating your own schools, charities, and hospitals." That isn't two sovereigns coexisting; that is the State asserting ultimate supremacy over religious bodies.
Now, I agree that politicians and judges likely aren't malicious. They genuinely believe they are defending "progress," "equality," or "women's rights." They see themselves as liberators from "archaic dogma."
But functionally, aren't they establishing a new civic orthodoxy? The medieval Church defined orthodoxy and punished heterodoxy. The modern State does the same—except the "sin" isn't heresy; it's "discrimination," and the "punishment" is fines, loss of tax-exempt status, or closure.
Let me give a concrete example, carefully: In Europe, it is generally legal to teach your child at home, in private, that homosexuality is a sin according to your faith. However, if you run a state-funded religious school, the State will intervene to compel the curriculum to reflect civic values over religious ones. The State is not policing belief, but it is policing the public expression and institutional enforcement of that belief.
To me, that sounds less like "neutral arbitration" and more like a rival institutional power asserting its dominance over the moral code. I've read that conflict over legal jurisdiction is the academic gold standard for proving institutional rivalry.
So my ultimate question isn't "Is the State a religion?"—because clearly, it lacks the supernatural elements. Rather, my questions are:
"If the State claims ultimate jurisdiction over moral conduct even within religious institutions, does that make it functionally equivalent to an established 'civic church' in terms of political sovereignty? If so, how can religious groups negotiate this without capitulating entirely?
And isn't the State constantly changing its beliefs? By doing so, isn't it effectively admitting that it was wrong before—and that it will likely be wrong again? That makes me doubt whether it even cares about being objectively right at all, or whether it is just running social experiments on us. And if it is just experimenting, then isn't it essentially messing with society however it wants, without caring enough about the long-term consequences—even if its leaders have 'good intentions'? I mean, the society is pretty polrized in many things.
This is overly-wordy ("concrete example, carefully") for a simple topic that has been discussed to death in the Culture War Threads. Here is some additional reading for you, in case you are new to these parts:
There are probably others too, but these are the first that came to mind.
I read both pages.
The first one gives too much credit to gay ideology. It may be destroyed by its own lack of children. Unless people have become more stupid, this can't become a new establishment for long before it gets replaced. That ideology is unsustainable. I do get that this seems to be part of a cycle—countercultural movements take over the state, and elites weaponize new ideologies to control the masses. But the demographic angle is the fatal flaw Alexander ignores.
The second one is quite smart, even if I don't like how religion is portrayed. The author argues that the category of "religion" is a harmful meme that distracts us from real threats. Still, to me it makes more sense to expand the definition of "religion"—recognize that any comprehensive moral order is a religion, whether it has gods or not.
I would support many of Yarvin's ideas, but the problem is that if the elite have no defined morals, they may rule like an oligarchy. We should at least add Porter's Shared Value as a guiding principle—so the state serves society, not just itself.
"Gay ideology" isn't the best name for it, since Feminist values are also anti-natal. Yours is a standard reply, that wokeness will fail because it is low fertility. It isn't so. It doesn't need to breed adherents, it can just convert them. This is trivial if you control education and state. Even if wokeness manages to marginalize high-fertility sub-groups (Amish, Mormons, etc.), they can still import infinite migrants.
Whether you expand the definition of "religion" or discard the word altogether for the more neutral-sounding "ideology" is inconsequential. The "harmful meme" is the distinction, that isolated demand that treats paranormal entities differently than run-of-the-mill moral instruction.
Your "problem" with Yarvin doesn't make sense to me. Are you saying if the elite do have defined morals, then they won't rule like an oligarchy? what does it mean to "rule like an oligarchy?" Your distinction between state and society also doesn't make sense to me -- can you clarify more?
In any case, the rest of Yarvin's ideas (Formalism) are not relevant. That "Belief in Religion" post is more of a companion essay to his longer stuff, just focusing on the theocratic aspects of wokeness under a different name -- we call it something different 20 years ago.
I know "gay ideology" is too narrow, but "anti-natalist" isn't complete either. They're just one strain of a broader selfish ideology.
The more you force an ideology, the more you create resistance. And conversion has limits. If it didn't, the ideology would be even more suicidal. If it changed int something else and rename itself, then it failed.
Churches are empty, but people aren't becoming woke either—they're becoming apathetic or hostile. Also, immigrants from traditional cultures often bring more conservative values than the native population. That strategy can backfire.
They are just one of many selfish ideologiesm and the more you force an ideology, the more you create resistance. The conversion strategy also has limits. If it didn't, it would be even more suicidal. Churches are empty but people aren't becoming woke either. They're becoming apathetic or hostile. Also, immigrants from traditional cultures often bring more conservative values than the native population. The "infinite migrants" strategy can backfire.
I meant that if elites have no fixed moral principles, they rule in their own interest, not the public's. That's essentially an oligarchy. LKY and Xiaoping followed utilitarian principles. Mandela used Ubuntu. Seretse Khama was guided by a strict opposition to corruption. You should already know that today's society believes in money and success as goals—while the happiest people in multiple studies are shown to be the ones who have the best relationships.
Childfree and antinatalist movements are two distinct things with very different vibes.
Childfree are proudly selfish folks, while antinatalists are self sacrificing Boddhisatvas, staying in this hellworld of pain and misery in order to preach their message and prevent future sentient being to be born and suffer.
One is mega consumerist lifestyle pushed Up To Eleven, problematic not only due to maximal carbon footprint while the other is rather more disturbing - well, would be if it was less cringe.
Anyway, the pro natalist movement one upped and overcame anti natalists in cringiness long ago.
Typical natalist discourse now looks like this:
ANTINATALIST: Life is pain and suffering, the best fate is to be never born, but only one out of million could get so lucky. Sad!
PRONATALIST: Yea, life is suffering and this gives it meaning, suffering is awesome! Think about thousands of generations of your ancestors who suffered horribly, so you could be born and suffer too! Be thankful for the gift of suffering and pass it to future generations, you do not want your ancestor's sacrifice be in vain!
edit: links uplinked
Ok, sure, I didn't know some weird people had already claimed the names, but it's not like they are the only ideologies or religions that think similarly. And any society should be in favor or babies or they would go extinct.
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And we already have examples of this that are also very clearly religions- Confucianism and Buddhism. Western thought, as always, tends to be colored by "[everything we hate about/a strawman of/how wrong about everything is] Chrstianity", and then the reactionaries respond with [everything they love about/how right about everything is their version of] Christianity.
So they end up talking past each other.
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It's not that the state is a church. It's that the class of people who staff the bureaucracy have a deracinated protestant heresy which they have entrenched in the university system which serves as the great filter for the middle and upper classes. They (in a very complicated and messy and unorganized manner over several generations) then declared the traditional concept of meritocracy against the Constitution and replaced it with what X might call "gay race communism", the true religion of the capitalist managerial class. Forever decrying the system they are parasitized on, and the populations they rule. It is only by this "eternal revolution" that they can maintain the class solidarity needed to rule the empire. Everything old must be destroyed forever so that each generation can in turn be divided and ruled along lines of class or race or religion or sexuality. Hilariously, the religion essentially exists as a critique of itself. It calls for the constant abolition of the economy that sustains it, the nationalism that empowers it and the social order that submits to their bureaucratic will.
Just as in the old days, this church controls the official Science, all official education, its monasteries and charitable organizations serve as conduits for political power and influence. And just as with any state religion, the personal and class interests of the adherents inevitably influence some amount of their doctrines. The amorphous nature of the ideology is sort of the point, it can change on a dime when political winds change. You can always revolt against the revolutionaries from twenty years ago.
But waiting for an ideology to exhaust itself is passive—and it may costs generations. Maybe we at least need an institution to identify contradictions. I also just noticed that we need more independent media, while "scientists" keep saying that AI will replace media jobs. Not to mention stuff like alternative schools and education.
I'm just describing it. The ideology will not exhaust itself, but find ever weirder and more unpalatable things to force the country to deal with. It's part of the religion. Find or invent some tiny minority of badly-behaved people, sacralize them and accuse the mass population of conspiring against them. Then unleash this group on the population and accuse anyone who complains of deep and unjustified hatred of anyone who isn't straight white men. This will continue to happen for the rest of our lives, and probably our children's children's lives. It will potentially end in the civil wars of empire that destroy the last vestiges of "Democracy"(oligarchy) and with it the unelected bureaucracy hiding inside it. Whether the future emperor keeps the religion (and the class) or replaces it is in his hands, not mine.
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Okay, the root of this is that the State and Church have long been intertwined. Since we're talking about Western society here, we're talking about Christianity. And for a long time, the values of the state and society were Christian values, so there was no or not much dissonance. The ruler, be he king or emperor or whomever, expects to exercise some degree of authority over the church but that's as much or more about politics and governance rather than religious doctrine. The king wants to be able to appoint his own bishops or cardinals because those are important and powerful positions that involve wealth and influence in the secular sphere, not because he wants a particular view on the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin to be taught as doctrine. The Church has a parallel system of canon law which it insists applies to the clergy so secular courts have no authority over them, and there are tussles over that.
Come on up to the Reformation and the Wars of Religion, and in the exhausted peace after that, we have a division between the generally Protestant of some stripe states, where the State exercises authority over the Church (see Henry VIII taking the title of Supreme Head of the English Church) or the Catholic states where the church is independent but still subject in some fashion to the authority of the king or emperor.
But broadly speaking, the values of society are still Christian values, and this holds even during the Enlightenment, post-Enlightenment, and into the 19th century. However, society is becoming more secular. People are breaking away from established religion (the Dissenters, etc. and the American state of continuing splits of denominations into their own denominations) or leaving religion altogether (the Free Thinkers etc.) This is more marked where there isn't one established State Church, as with the Anglican Church, but it's happening all over. Jews, Catholics, and others disadvantaged by a Protestant State Church want equal rights within civil society and to have public offices open to them without the confessional requirements.
And in countries with State Churches, where the civil Parliament or similar authority did have the final say on matters, that increasing secularisation meant "okay you can decide on your own private beliefs but when it comes to wider society and civic law, we get to say what happens". Similarly, in Catholic countries, the power of the Church was challenged over the years and much the same kind of views were taken (we're still fighting today in Ireland over the Church's involvement with schools).
So, increasingly as more states become multi-cultural, with a mix of Protestant (state or majority denomination), culturally but never darken the door of a church Protestant, Protestant but not the state church version, not Protestant, not Christian, not religious at all, there are no longer common shared assumptions because common shared values and so we get to "there has to be one rule for everybody, and that is the state and secular values" and "we're not going to tell you what to believe, but if you're taking state money then the state has the last say".
Thanks for the historical context—that actually helps frame how we got here. But I think you answered 'how did the State become supreme?' whereas I was asking 'now that it is supreme, doesn't it functionally act like an established church over moral conduct? How far will it actually end up replacing parts of faith like moral understanding?
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My model of religion and governance (laws, welfare, etc.) overlap but are ultimately different.
Abstractly, both religion and governance are a set of opinions (and speculations, and manners, and practices, etc.) that adherents follow. The difference is that religion is stricter but voluntary, while governance is more flexible but mandatory. Church is between government and individual: both impose their opinions for the individual's own good and that of others around them, but government's opinions are less tailored and more imposed (by consequences and physical force).
In simpler words: Church tells you how to live your life in detail, but there are multiple Churches and you choose one, then can ignore it without much consequence. Government tells you less (broadly-applicable rules, education, etc.) but you only have one, and better listen.
When I imagine government, I imagine things like laws/enforcement against murder and theft, welfare to provide bare-minimum necessities, education that is facts and widely-held opinions (like "don't murder or steal")...things that are widely-agreed-upon or can be justified by widely-agreed-upon axioms. When I imagine religion, I imagine more specific rules ("no sex before marriage"), specific prayers, specific celebrations (Christmas dinner), specific customs (crosses)...that aren't widely-agreed-upon or justified by widely-agreed-upon axioms (instead axioms like "divine beings said so"). Both are important: the lowest-common-denominator provided by government is necessary to prevent anarchy, but not sufficient for human flourishing, because most people need more tailored guidance, and a bit of coercion, than they can provide to themselves.
Everything described before is simultaneously managed by culture (even enforcement, informally). Religion is a culture given structure, while government is the intersection of many cultures, or a large culture, given structure.
Sure, there exist (or have existed) religions with minimal beliefs and Churches that carry out laws up to executing people; and laws that are personal and controversial and governments with minimal enforcement. There are (or were) places where Church is more of a government than the official government. There are Church-government hybrids. This is just how I define Church and government and imagine how they work, based on my perception of them in modern Western nations and how other define them.
When Church and government opinions overlap, the government's take priority. This is obviously true in practice, but also according to this model, because the government's opinions should be strictly more permissive; if Church is right and government is wrong, the government should be more flexible so it permits the Church.
Thanks for your answer—it made me realize something scary, though. You see the State as a neutral floor that permits religion to exist above it. But I actually see it as a moving ceiling. Because the State doesn't just stay at 'don't murder or steal'—it actively redefines what counts as acceptable public morality.
Today it says 'teach our civic values in your schools.' Tomorrow it says 'stop hiring based on your doctrines.' The day after, it says 'publicly stating your doctrine is hate speech.' Over time, that moving ceiling pushes religion out of the public square entirely, without passing an outright ban yet. Doesn't that become a slow jurisdictional takeover? Someday religion may be banned for limiting the State.
ChatGPT (or whatever LLM)'s metaphor is wrong. We both see the state as a floor, your concern is when the floor rises above the Church (and what's reasonable), i.e. the state's morality isn't flexible enough to permit Church doctrine.
When we talk about "state" we may refer to two separate things: the theoretical state with laws as they're written (which for most real nations isn't even coherent), or the physical state with laws as they're enforced. As previously said, religion is a set of opinions. The state can (theoretically) ban opinions from being practiced and discussed, but not the opinions themselves, and it's (physical) enforcement is limited.
Sure, in a 1984-esque state with total control and invasion of privacy, a religion will be physically destroyed (although the non-physical set of opinions will always exist, so it may be revived, maybe that's unlikely). Or perhaps a Brave New World-esque state may voluntarily convince the masses to abandon the religion, leaving it all-but-destroyed physically. But otherwise, in today's states (states without total control or persuasion, even Iran), a conflicting religion may at least survive by teaching its opinions (secretly, publicly covertly, publicly if allowed), even if they never get to be practiced; and they may be secretly practiced, moreso whenever the state becomes weaker, and eventually may influence the state so they become legal. Even the Aztec blood religion (although fortunately, a state today may be powerful enough to prevent them from actually carrying out any blood sacrifices).
I don't see a point in this reply unless you're just showing off. Congrats on repeating that I use AI for comments. I'm not too motivated on using wording that can be misundertood and I have had people that felt offended with my straight words, just like I also feel ofended. You spent a lot of words agreeing while pretending to correct me.
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It's actually worse than that.
Aztec blood sacrifice is a legitimate religion. How should freedom of religion operate for people who wish to adhere to that religion? The answer, speaking plainly, is that it doesn't and can't, right here and now, not in some hypothetical "someday" far in the future. If we have a significant population that wants to seize outsiders and rip their hearts out, there's no way we're going to be able to coexist with that population long-term. Nor is there any principled distinction between their claim to toleration of religious practice or mine; there is, in fact, no objective definition of "harm", and yet there is no way to maintain society without enforcement against those inflicting harm; this enforcement will be both necessarily subjective and entirely indispensable.
The logic of the First Amendment assumes that the range of religions is much narrower than the observable range of religions, just as it assumes that the range of ideologies and of values is much narrower than the observable range of ideologies and values. When you get out past the borders of the range it was built for, the logic it runs on simply stops working. The fact is that you cannot actually run even a minimally-cohesive society if your population is too values-diverse to cooperate.
The comment above yours is still filtered.
I think your point is the most valuable in several good posts in this subthread. The more pluralist a society becomes, the less classical liberalism works for it. But America of all places is kind of in a bind on that front. A change in immigration policy might help us stop digging the hole we're in, but even that much is outside the Overton window.
That's one of the fundamental questions on the American right at present: Does classical liberalism necessarily produce a level of pluralism it cannot survive?
Fixed.
Speaking for myself, straightforwardly, obviously, unavoidably, yes.
Classical liberalism as it is commonly understood and described is built on axiomatic assumptions about the possible range of human values, and those assumptions are observably wrong because the observable range of human values is significantly wider. You can track the obvious cross-sectional ways in which those assumptions have decayed by degrees across our entire society over time, and how our institutions and social structures have decayed with them.
Classical Liberalism increases tolerance. Increased tolerance creates values-diversity, and then values-incoherence. Values incoherence creates conflict, which reduces tolerance. Perhaps this cycle can be retarded or bypassed in some ways or in some circumstances, but certainly classical liberalism cannot do it because it cannot even begin to adequately frame the problem. It believes tolerance is a moral precept, axiomatically, but Tolerance Is Not A Moral Precept.
Absolutely. Classical liberalism doesn't account for evil, which is understandable since it's the little-autistic-kid-asking-why-not of political ideologies[0] (and why people who aren't autistic little kids, at least at heart, tend to run into trouble with it). The whole 'life/liberty/pursuit of happiness' thing is a pretty clear example of this; for evil women, pursuit of happiness involves oppressing men, vice versa, and etc. for any combination of ingroup and outgroup you like.
In other words, it's an ideology for/by Abel, and as such doesn't put much effort into protecting itself from Cain (or at least denies his ability to do wrong... and really, if Cain should murder him, what Abel has done is generally pleasing to God; what horrible afterlife consequences should he fear? Would it not be a sin for Abel to devote resources to self-defense against his brethren rather than his normal business?).
This cycle is usually retarded/bypassed by having so many resources that the limiting factor on their exploitation is manpower.
Or "$", for short.
You'll note that the pattern of classical liberalism within Western Great Powers tends to come with a new frontier and new technology to exploit it. This means that the population of those countries can get out of PvP mode (zero-sum) and go into PvE (positive-sum) mode, and once that happens, the people spec'd into PvP- the existing power structures- get pushed out because it's harder to rent-seek under these conditions. The US, for most of its history, has spent most of its time in PvE mode, and it shows- all of its cultural memes (including classical liberalism itself) are predicated on the PvE worldviews.
In a PvE environment, you actually can say "just build your own" and it not be in bad faith (and when PvPers say it today, they can't say it decoupled from the concept of PvE being the ideal- more proper snobs, stereotypically the Brits, have a different response to this; Americans will interpret this response as "no, because you're a nigger", because that's what it means). Values-incoherence is not something that can really be stopped if the ruling elements of a population wanted to[1], because if they did they'd be outcompeted by their enemies (internal or external) that did allow it.
Economic contractions, however, push the population towards PvP. Institutions become more powerful, rent-seeking becomes more important as a way to maintain personal wealth [which is where purity spirals come from, and in extremes, will cause the population to sell itself into more and more intense forms of slavery just to get a meal]. Values are mediated by those that still have resources, or can amass them, and those people would really hate if some other system that proved their values were wrong emerged (or allowed anyone the means or motivation to get around their resource monopolies)- hence why they wage holy war on them.
[0] As opposed to paternalist politics; these can be either mother-privileging (progressive) or father-privileging (progressive boogeyman/traditional). This is also what I'm generally trying to get at when I say "trads and progs are the same just with a different gender valence" and point out that liberalism and progressivism are very different things. One might even notice that paternalist politics are obsessed with fighting deontological evils (as a means to assert values-coherence); liberals only really have the consequential one (and as such can't assert values-coherence; "correct" is not a political identity).
[1] The one major exception to this is China, who declined to send colony ships anywhere specifically for this reason. What developed in the New World would fundamentally not be China any more, and unlike Europe they could afford to do this- they had everything they wanted at home. Which would remain true right up until they got curb-stomped by the English, and that was evidently only temporary.
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I agree, I think the First Amendment was made considering the West. Religions outside it (including native ones) wouldn't fit.
The problem is that new ideologies may also not fit, and you would need to limit Freedom of Religion instead, just like the Woke ideology is doing.
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I think what we're seeing here is modern woke secularism is a religion that has adapted to American law around the separation of church and state, such that it is able to infest the perquisites of religion without being expunged by the court's religious protection pesticides. Wokeness is a religion in the sense of acknowledging an ultimate reality and seeking to answer metaphysical questions about life, the universe, and everything; but it avoids the legal American definition of religion and thus can seek to be enforced by laws and taught in schools and discussed directly in the workplace. It satisfies the need for religion without being a religion.
The separation of church and state fundamentally, but silently, assumed that we all had a church we were leaving behind when interacting with the state. The Founders assumed that each man had religious beliefs, likely a formal denomination, which answered questions about life, the universe, and everything and that we would all lay those disputes aside when interacting within government structures. The assumption was that our public schools would be secular, but that was ok because nobody in the room fully believed in what was being taught in that school, we were all setting aside and sacrificing some separate religious belief and finding common ground in the secular.
Wokies have in essence hacked the system, where Hindus and Jews and Christians and Buddhists and Muslims and prots and Catholics and Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons* all need to set aside their identity at the door and learn to accept secular stuff they don't actually believe, Wokies seek to impose their metaphysical understandings within the classroom and the office as orthodoxy. "Just being a decent person." Yeah, we're all trying to do that, and we all have different definitions.
This will ultimately require reworking the concept of freedom of religion.
*the Overton window of religious acceptability varied with the Founder in question and the era of the American Republic, Jefferson certainly in his writings at least fantasized about including hindoos and Mohamedans in the range of religions accepted in the land, but Missouri only rescinded the Mormon Extermination Order 50 years ago.
I've always liked James Buckley's thoughts on this matter.
Wokeness is absolutely a (pseudo)religion in that it gives its believers a sense of being among the "elect" and "right" in the metaphysical sense. Where it falls woefully short, of course, is in its role as a cohesive and consistent worldview and moral compass. How do wokies deal with the very common idea of "You don't like thing x, but you have to do thing x as part of your job / role / responsibility?" They don't, the cry out "oppression!"
I wager most of them just get on and do it. We could also turn that around of course. Christians sometimes refuse to do their jobs and cry oppression (Kim Davis and gay marriage?), and often complain about being persecuted for their beliefs. So it goes. It's nothing to do with being a religion pseudo or otherwise, just that people who believe things strongly enough understandably may not want to violate their beliefs. And if forced to will often complain about it.
Nothing special about wokeness in that regard.
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Reminds me of my old post on adversarial establishment of religion https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/i2r8qo/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_august_03_2020/
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Thanks, this was helpful for me to understand the problem better.
It seems that I didn't approach the subject in the right way. I should reformulate it after reading you.
We have religions and ideologies (like Wokeness) that are rival worldviews/moral orders.
Since the Church and State are separate, ideologies can use the state to enforce their worldview but religions cannot. Religions are disarmed by the law but ideologies are not because they can successfully rebrand moral demands as "anti-discrimination" and "public health."
Most people don't understand that these ideologies have morals and even metaphysics, and actually work like a religion, except that they use taboos and loyalty tests. But taboos enforced by the State work differently than theology, because theology can be debated; a State taboo just gets you fired.
So the Separation of Church and State is a lie, it doesn't separate worldviews from the State. It only separates supernatural religion from the State. Ideologies can take over the State and force morals from childhood (schools). It seems new worldviews have an advantage, since they haven't been framed as religion yet.
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I think this is an under-appreciated insight and it reminds me of @BarnabyCajones' old post on tolerance vs denial of sin. He argued that there was a qualitative difference between acknowledging the existence of a sin and choosing to tolerate it and denying the existence of a sin entirely even if the policy outcomes were ultimately the same.
I think that a fundamental limitation of secular/materialist ideologies is that they don't really allow for anything resembling traditional western notions of "right", "virtue" or "sin". See the famous Terry Pratchett bit from Hogfather about grinding down the universe to find a single particle of "mercy". Justice is a metaphysical construct, liberty is a metaphysical construct, rights (inalienable or otherwise) are metaphysical constructs and there is no place for the metaphysical in a strictly secular worldview.
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Separation of Church and State just biases in favour of the first group to come along and convince that their moral values are secular. Ideally you'd seperate that too, in practice nowhere does.
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I agree, states and religions could just be the same kind of thing fundamentally.
The Arabic empire and Islam were at one point one and the same, before splitting apart. The USSR and communism were, at one point, virtually the same. Most communists took their opinions and marching orders from Moscow.
Only ideologies and religions as we know them don't have that territorial dimension of a state, they're not quite so powerful most of the time.
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The key word in your example is "state-funded". That isn't rival institutional power, that is basic capital command-flow. Very few taxpayers are happy with carte-blanche funding of anything, and few legislators would risk their reputation in such a way. There are some basic parameters of public-interest (I understand that such a term can be twisted, but it remains there in a functional system) that require enforcement (very disrespectful to my imagined Fraud-punk religion where committing fraud is cool).
Much of the contention that morphs the state into a civic church is the morphing of the word "public-interest" to become anything you can imagine, so long as it is dressed in anti-discrimination language (see below for why).
Neoreactionaries have identified the modern civic-religion in the US as having been conceived with the Civil Rights Act which goes far-beyond state-funded entities:
State-sanctioned Racial-districting, private businesses can't freely associate if that includes turning away members of a specific race from their business, neighborhoods cannot limit who purchases homes in an area.
Basically it's the point at which the constitution morphs away from being a limiter on state-power. Now the state can enter and enforce its religion anywhere where a civil-rights grievance can be claimed.
In Europe, the encroachment is a bit more baked-in: For instance, Germany simply outlaws home-schooling outright. This is fairly insane from the perspective of an American: nobody is free to educate their child outside of the state.
Arguably the ability to educate your children away from state-propaganda is a God-given right.
In fact there is the case of a German homeschooling family (The Romeike family) obtaining deferred-status to stay in the US due to state-persecution in Germany. They were initially granted Asylum and then revoked by the Obama administration (An administration emblematic of upholding civic-religion).
The contrast between the traditional limited-government american legal view to grant asylum to such a family vs the civic-religion upholding Obama administration clarifies much: From the traditional american perspective, A victim of state-persecution is offered a lifeline by the US. From the perspective of the Obama administration, offering this family asylum validates apostasy from the German civic-religion which is disrespectful, being a fellow civic-religion.
Thanks, I hadn't seen the mechanics clearly. I think I understand from what you are saying that the State doesn't need to claim moral authority directly. It just attaches moral conditions to money. That's how the State enforces its orthodoxy without ever saying "this is a religion." The anti-discrimination framework is a legal chassis that the ideology rides on.
The Romeike family example may show that Obama's civic religion could not tolerate validating someone who rejected the German civic religion—it would set a precedent that civic religions are optional. This looks more like a totalitarian impulse hiding inside "neutral" secularism.
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FYI, Pangram says this is 100% AI-generated.
Personally: if you're a human who had a human idea and used AI to put it into writing, please write in your own words. Maybe it can be intimidating when people write long-winded essays in perfect prose, but it really isn't necessary to contribute to this site. I wouldn't care even if you wrote broken (human) English.
Why AI writing is bad (even logic/philosophy writing like this) is complex and debatable enough that it would be a great top-level discussion. But at least, don't do it because it's borderline against the rules (yeah, a random comment you had no expectation of knowing being new here, it should really be in the sidebar).
English is not my main language. Even if I undersand it well, I can't guarantee that I'll write something and people will understand is completely. I use AI to change the wording mostly, not the ideas. If you want to throw away any post from people who have problems writting, just do it. But I don't see a point in someone asking stuff to understand it better making a comment with AI only to waste people's time. But that seems logical to you. You don't have to answer me if you don't want to. I read all answers.
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Hmm. I checked my own comment and that got the 100% human imprimatur, then I checked the original post and it says AI generated.
But it's basing that on two things:
(1) Use of triad "schools, charities and hospitals" (2) Use of em-dash
That's a bit thin, to my view, to declare this is completely AI-written. I would have said "schools, charities and hospitals" as examples of institutions often founded and run by churches, and I'm not AI.
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Is that a vibes-based "100%" or does the figure reflect some real confidence estimate? Because the typo+awkward grammar in the very last sentence, if nothing else, seems very organically human to me.
Yeah, I could understand someone whose native language isn't English running it through AI for a check-up and polish, and that giving the same result.
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FWIW, I also instantly clocked it as at least partially AI writing. Though I agree that it looks mostly like someone using AI as a helper as opposed to full AI, which is fine by me.
As an example this sentence and the follow-up: "So my ultimate question isn't "Is the State a religion?"—because clearly, it lacks the supernatural elements. Rather, my questions are: ..." This sounds exactly like what Chatgpt would write when I ask it to give me counterarguments to some random idea I had.
I have always had problems ordering my thoughts. But that's not ChatGPT, it's Deepseek. I don't want to waste people's time on something AI can answer, so I actually talk a lot with Deepseek first and it helps me order the comment I'll write. The whole point of the post was to ask people on things I was missing, that I didn't think about. What's the point on me writting stuff to waste people's time? I would waste my time too then. That is pointless.
AI is quite good at saying what you're right at (even when it lies). I want to know what I'm missing.
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I don't mind if someone uses AI, even to produce a full draft of their comment; as long as what they publish is hand-written, or somewhat if they gave the AI a unique-enough prompt that nobody notices.
A big problem with AI is sameness. Echoed by this short blogpost, where someone looks up "100,000 whys" books on Amazon, and all the covers are indistinguishable. 1 of the covers would be interesting and acceptable, 100 are boring and the flaws stand out. Besides desensitization, sameness also leads to model collapse and its cultural equivalent: AI and humans need to experience diverse writing (including bad writing) in order to write better.
This is also why I don't really mind if AI is unnoticeable. Because, if my thesis is true that AI output has inhuman similarities no matter how it's prompted, eventually humans would begin to notice. I say "really mind" because the realization may happen too late, when subliminal desensitization and model collapse have already caused serious problems. But it's an improvement, because right now I see serious problems from AI output that is obvious at least to me.
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I passively clocked it as AI which is why I asked Pangram. Em-dash, "it's not X, it's Y", "here's the XYZ", very short paragraphs; if it had a couple of these tropes I wouldn't guess, but it's full of them.
It also has the high-level AI trope of being overly wordy. My understanding is that the main message is "Separation of church and state isn't fully possible, and the state is effectively its own church, because both church and state advocate and enforce their own morality, and sometimes these moralities conflict". That's one sentence, does the full 32-sentence comment add much else?
If you don't want "overly wordy" posts or comments, boy are you on the wrong site! 😁
Something can wordy without being overly so. LLMs use lots of filler expressions. “But here is where the jurisdictional land-grab happens” - a very LLM-esque sentence, what does it mean?
It means "this is the place where the courts decided to make law rather than just rule on it".
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I don't have a position on the general question, but "jurisdictional land-grab" is a pretty common expression in discussions of law. See here for a 2015 example on pages 2 and 4; here for 2014. I think the Waters of the United States rule popularized it as a more literal term-of-art than its historical use, but the only thing I can say, and with weak confidence, is that it was coined sometime after Kelo v. New London because otherwise the libertarians would have used it everywhere.
It's heavily focused on connotation, as normal "land grabs" in the resource extraction business world usually meant large-scale destruction of natural environment and/or displacement of peoples, but the applicability here isn't that much of a stretch. The state commanding internal behavior of religious, moral, and ethical institutions is something that was both initially disclaimed and completely replaces whatever moral codes those institutions were able to field on this particular matter.
((Conversely, this is probably the stronger argument for it being bad AI-gen: a remotely questioning approach with a 23B LLM and maybe a 7B one can give concrete examples of this process: CLS v. Martinez, Rotary Club of Duarte, Bob Jones University, these are not new cases.))
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Those are what stood out to me, too. If I had to bet, I would easily bet that either this comment was AI generated, had significant AI generation with minimal human editing, or was intentionally human-written to appear AI generated, almost purely based on multiple paragraphs starting with:
There are so many "AI experts" here, but none seem capable of asking me directly, when I'm the one who made the post. So what, is even this answer AI generated?
The only criteria I use when calling out AI is Pangram, which has a low false positive rate.
I don't mean to offend you, so I'll stop calling out your posts.
(Also, most of your posts haven't been visible for the last 1-2 days out of order, because you're in the new user filter. Once you get enough upvotes, your posts will appear to everyone else immediately).
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This will be some an half-formed nonsense blatted out 5 minutes before going to bed but I think that one of the major innovations of western civilization, and a major driver of it's success was the development of a bright line distinction between the moral/religious world and the material. IE "Render unto Caesar that which is Ceasar's, and Render unto God that which is God's". It also seems to me that much of [current year] moral and political philosophy is organized around the of undoing this innovation as post-modernism is itself a reaction against the success of Western Civilization.
When discussing modern liberalism the state is best understood as a substitute for religion. Whether any given act is moral or immoral is entirely determined by politics not principle.
This is the kind of answer I needed. I don't like how you frame things, but it actually makes me angry that I was never taught this. Even if you call it nonsense, I just didn't know about Post-modernism's implications. I thought it was just an ideology, not that the West followed it blindly. I didn't know modern liberalism treats the State as a substitute for religion, or that politics determines what's good and evil.
So if the State has become the only church we have left, does that mean we've just gone back to the pre-Christian pagan model—where the State was the Church and there was no separation? I don't really see "progress" in that.
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