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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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