Religion Is Still Being Used to Control People Right Now and Here Is How to See It

 Everything we have talked about in this series, the pharaohs claiming to be gods, the Roman emperors absorbing Christianity into the imperial structure, the Crusades launched for political as well as spiritual reasons, might feel like ancient history.

It is not.

The same patterns are operating right now. The tools have been updated. The underlying mechanics are identical.

What the Pattern Looks Like

Every time a government or political movement uses religion as a tool of control it follows the same basic structure.

Step one. Attach your political agenda to God's will. Not just claim God's blessing but claim that your specific policy positions, your specific enemies, your specific version of social order, are divinely commanded. Anyone who disagrees is not just politically wrong. They are opposing God.

Step two. Use religious identity as a loyalty test. If you are a true believer you support the political agenda. If you oppose the political agenda you must not be a true believer. This makes religious identity and political identity the same thing and makes dissent feel like apostasy.

Step three. Identify an enemy who threatens both the religious and political order. The enemy might be a foreign power, a religious minority, an ethnic group, a political movement. The important thing is that opposing this enemy is framed as a religious duty.

Step four. Promise spiritual rewards for political loyalty. Those who support the cause are not just good citizens. They are soldiers in God's army. Their sacrifices serve a cosmic purpose. Their suffering is meaningful because God is watching and will reward them.

This is the structure of the pharaoh's claim to divinity. It is the structure of the medieval church's claim to political authority. It is the structure of every theocratic government that has ever existed. And it shows up in various degrees in political movements that would not call themselves theocratic.

How to Recognize It

When a political leader claims their authority comes from God rather than from the consent of the governed that is a warning sign. Democratic legitimacy comes from the people. Divine mandate is not subject to election.

When a political movement frames its policy agenda as God's will in ways that make disagreement impossible without challenging faith that is a warning sign. Legitimate religious belief and legitimate political disagreement can coexist. When they cannot that is worth examining.

When religious identity and political identity become completely fused so that leaving one means leaving the other that is a warning sign. Religion and politics are not the same thing. When they are treated as identical someone is benefiting from that fusion and it is usually not ordinary believers.

When political enemies are described in religious terms, as evil, as spiritually corrupt, as agents of darkness, rather than as people with different views that is a warning sign. Dehumanizing opponents through religious language has historically preceded some of the worst violence in human history.

What Is Worth Defending

None of this is an argument against religion itself. Human beings need meaning, community, moral frameworks, and ways of engaging with the questions that science alone cannot answer. Religion has served those needs for all of human history and continues to serve them.

What is worth defending against is the use of religious institutions and religious identity by political actors to serve their own power interests rather than the genuine spiritual needs of their followers.

The pharaoh who claimed to be God was not trying to help his people get to heaven. He was trying to make them easier to govern. Every ruler since who has wrapped their politics in the language of divine will has been doing the same thing.

Knowing that history does not make you anti-religious. It makes you a harder person to manipulate.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Crusades Were Sold as Holy War but the People Who Called for Them Had Political Reasons

 In November of 1095 Pope Urban II stood before a crowd at the Council of Clermont in France and called for a holy war.

He told the assembled nobles and clergy that Jerusalem, the holy city, was in the hands of Muslims and that it was the will of God for Christians to take it back. He promised that those who died on the campaign would have their sins forgiven and would go directly to heaven.

The crowd responded with chants of God wills it.

The First Crusade began the following year. Hundreds of thousands of people died over the following two centuries of crusading. Jerusalem was taken, held, lost, fought over, and fought over again. The human cost was staggering on all sides.

And behind the religious justification were political calculations that the pope and the kings who joined him understood very clearly.

What Urban II Actually Needed

Urban II had a problem. The church and the Holy Roman Emperor had been locked in a bitter dispute over who had the right to appoint church officials. This conflict, called the Investiture Controversy, had destabilized both political and religious authority in Europe for decades.

Urban needed something that could restore the prestige and authority of the papacy. Something that would unite the feuding nobles of Europe under the banner of the church. Something that would give the pope a role as the supreme spiritual and political leader of the Christian world.

A holy war answered all of those needs. It gave the church a mission that overrode local political disputes. It put the pope in the position of commander of a Christian army. It gave restless nobles and knights an outlet for their aggression that the church could direct. And it promised spiritual rewards that no secular ruler could offer.

The Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople had also asked for military help against Muslim incursions. Urban answered that request with something much larger than what was asked for, because a large crusade served the political needs of the western church far better than a small military alliance.

What the Nobles Got Out of It

The nobility of Europe did not join the Crusades purely out of religious devotion either. Land and wealth in Europe were concentrated among the eldest sons of noble families. Younger sons got little or nothing. The Crusade offered younger sons a chance to win land and title in the Holy Land.

The Italian city-states, Venice, Genoa, Pisa, had enormous economic interests in controlling trade routes to the east. Military campaigns that opened or protected those routes were commercially valuable. The Fourth Crusade in 1204 famously ended not in Jerusalem but in Constantinople, which the crusaders sacked and looted while it was still a Christian city, because Venetian creditors redirected the campaign to serve their own commercial interests.

The religious justification was real to many of the people who participated. People genuinely believed they were doing God's will. But the people who organized and directed those beliefs toward specific political and military objectives had interests that were not purely spiritual.

That is the pattern. The faith of ordinary people is real. The way that faith gets organized and directed by institutions with power and resources and political interests is something else.

The Crusades were a holy war. They were also a political project. Both things were true at the same time. And understanding both is the only way to understand what actually happened.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Similarities Between Ancient Gods and Modern Religion Are Not a Coincidence

 This is not an attack on any religion. It is history. And it is history that most people who practice modern religions have never been taught.

The story of a god who dies and comes back from the dead did not originate with Christianity. It is one of the oldest religious ideas in human history. And the versions that existed before Christianity share enough details with the Christian story that scholars have been studying the connections for over a century.

Osiris

Osiris was the Egyptian god of the dead, the afterlife, and resurrection. His story is one of the oldest in recorded religion going back to ancient Egyptian texts from over four thousand years ago.

Osiris was killed by his brother Set who dismembered his body and scattered the pieces. His wife Isis gathered the pieces and resurrected him. After his resurrection Osiris became the ruler of the afterlife and the judge of the dead. Those who lived righteously could enter his kingdom after death.

The parallels to later religious traditions are striking. A god who dies. A resurrection. A kingdom of the dead ruled by the resurrected god. A moral framework where righteous living determines what happens after death.

Osiris was worshipped in Egypt for thousands of years. His cult spread throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. By the time Christianity emerged, the story of a dying and resurrected god connected to the afterlife and moral judgment was deeply embedded in the religious culture of the region.

Mithras

Mithras was a god worshipped across the Roman Empire at roughly the same time Christianity was spreading. The cult of Mithras was particularly popular among Roman soldiers.

Mithraism involved a sacred meal shared by followers. Initiates went through stages of spiritual development. The religion involved moral codes and ideas about the afterlife. The central figure of Mithras was often depicted as born from a rock and associated with light and the sun.

The cult of Mithras and early Christianity competed for followers across the Roman Empire during the same centuries. They were targeting similar populations with similar kinds of spiritual offerings. The degree to which one influenced the other is debated by historians, but the similarities were noted by early Christian writers themselves, some of whom attributed them to the devil deliberately counterfeiting Christian truth in advance.

What Historians Say

Historians who study comparative religion do not argue that Christianity invented nothing new. The message of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels has its own character and its own specific historical context. The ethical teachings, the emphasis on love and forgiveness, the specific historical figure at the center of the story. These elements have their own integrity.

What historians do argue is that the religious ideas of any time and place are shaped by the religious ideas that came before them. Christianity did not emerge in a vacuum. It emerged in a world saturated with ideas about dying and rising gods, divine births, sacred meals, afterlife judgment, and the cosmic struggle between good and evil. Some of those ideas got absorbed into the new religion, whether consciously or simply because they were part of the cultural water everyone in that world was swimming in.

Understanding that does not have to undermine anyone's faith. But it does undermine the idea that any religion's ideas appeared from nowhere with no connection to what came before.

All human ideas have history. Religious ideas are no exception.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

When Rome Made Christianity Its Official Religion It Did Not Give Up Power It Took More

 For the first three centuries after the death of Jesus, Christians in the Roman Empire were persecuted.

They were a minority religious group that refused to participate in the imperial cult, the official state religion that required worship of Roman gods and emperors. That refusal was considered treason. Christians were imprisoned, executed, and thrown to animals in public arenas.

Then in 312 CE the Emperor Constantine won a pivotal battle and credited his victory to the Christian God. In 313 CE he issued the Edict of Milan granting religious tolerance throughout the empire. By the end of the fourth century Christianity had become the official state religion of Rome.

This is usually told as a story of Christianity's triumph. But look at it from the perspective of political power and it looks like something different.

What Constantine Actually Did

Constantine did not convert to Christianity and then figure out how to govern a Christian empire. He governed a crumbling empire that was held together by religious unity and found a new religious framework that could serve that function.

The old Roman religion was not working well as an instrument of political unity. It was diverse and decentralized. Local gods competed with state gods. The emperor worship system required constant maintenance and was generating conflict with growing minority populations.

Christianity offered something the old system did not. It was monotheistic, which meant everyone worshipping the same single God. It had an existing organizational structure with bishops and councils and established theology. It had a message of universal brotherhood that could potentially hold together a diverse empire. And critically, its God was a God of all humanity, not just of Rome, which made it more compatible with ruling a multi-ethnic empire.

Constantine did not surrender power to the church. He recruited the church into the project of empire. He gave bishops legal authority. He funded church construction with imperial money. He convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE to settle theological disputes, presiding over it himself as a political ruler deciding matters of religious doctrine.

By aligning the empire with Christian doctrine, Rome gave the Church both political and moral authority. In Byzantium, the Eastern Roman Empire, the emperor held supreme authority over both the state and the church, embodying the concept of Caesaropapism, a blend of secular and religious power in one figure.

The emperor and the church needed each other. The church got protection, resources, and official status. The emperor got a unified religious framework that could hold the empire together and a moral authority that claimed God was on his side.

What Got Left Out of Official Christianity

When Constantine and the councils of bishops decided what Christianity was officially going to believe and teach, they made choices about what to include and what to exclude.

There were many early Christian texts and communities with very different ideas about who Jesus was, what he taught, and what the church should look like. The councils decided which texts were authoritative and which were heretical. The texts that were excluded were suppressed. Some were destroyed.

The version of Christianity that emerged from this process was shaped not just by theological reasoning but by the political needs of an empire that needed a unified, hierarchical, obedient religious structure.

A religion that taught that the poor were blessed and the meek would inherit the earth was adopted by the most powerful empire in the western world and used to keep its subjects obedient. That is one of the more remarkable transformations in the history of religion.

The pattern it established lasted for a thousand years in Europe. Church and state working together, legitimizing each other, maintaining a social order that kept power where power already was.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.

The Pharaoh Was God and Everyone Had to Believe It or Else. Here Is How That Actually Worked.

 Think about what it means to tell a population that their ruler is not just chosen by God but is actually God.

Not a representative. Not a prophet. Not a king appointed by divine will. An actual living god walking among them in human form.

Ancient Egypt did this for roughly three thousand years. And it worked. It worked so well that the Egyptian state outlasted almost every political entity in human history.

Here is how that system actually functioned.

How the Pharaoh Became God

Research notes that divine kingship likely originated in the role of a traditional shaman who possessed special abilities to commune with the supernatural on behalf of his people. Over time, this position became more formalized and powerful, eventually transforming into institutionalized divine kingship during periods of social consolidation and territorial unification.

In Egypt the pharaoh was identified with Horus the falcon god while alive and Osiris the god of the dead after death. Every pharaoh was a new incarnation of the same divine principle. The human individual who wore the crown was mortal but the divine essence of the pharaoh was eternal and unbroken.

This meant that when a pharaoh died and a new one took the throne it was not a change of ruler. It was a continuation of the same divine being in a new body.

The temples were not just places of worship. The state's religious structure was deeply intertwined with its administration, with temples functioning as both religious and economic centers. The temple held land. The temple held grain. The temple employed thousands of people. The temple was the economic and administrative backbone of the state dressed in religious clothing.

How It Controlled People

When the ruler is God three things happen simultaneously that are extremely useful for maintaining power.

First, resistance becomes unthinkable in a way that goes beyond ordinary political calculation. Opposing the pharaoh was not just dangerous. It was cosmically wrong. It threatened the order of the universe itself. The Egyptian concept of Ma'at, the cosmic order and harmony that the pharaoh was responsible for maintaining, meant that social disruption was not just a political problem. It was a religious catastrophe.

Second, the suffering of ordinary people becomes acceptable within the system. If the current order is divinely ordained, then your poverty and hard labor and difficult life are part of a sacred arrangement. Accepting it is a virtue. Resenting it is impiety.

Third, the priests who interpret and administer the divine order become essential partners in power rather than competitors. The pharaoh needed the priesthood to perform the rituals that maintained his divine status. The priesthood needed the pharaoh to provide the resources and political protection that made the temple system work.

As Egyptian dynasties sought to raise individual cults to supremacy by granting their priesthoods special favors, they ceded power to those priesthoods as well. This balance of power between king and priest was a constant negotiation throughout Egyptian history. When it broke down, as it sometimes did, the results were dramatic.

What Akhenaten Tried to Do

The pharaoh Akhenaten, who ruled around 1350 BCE, tried to break the power of the established priesthood by declaring a new religion with a single god, the sun disk Aten, and himself as the sole intermediary between humanity and this god.

The celebrated reforms of Akhenaten, who attempted to install the sun-disk Aton as the sole god of Egypt and erected a new palace and temple complex for this purpose, may have been intended in part to break the power of the priesthood of Amun-Ra. The attempt ultimately failed, and when the centralized power of the New Kingdom gave way at the end of the Twentieth dynasty, the priests of Amun-Ra found themselves the effective rulers of southern Egypt.

Akhenaten was essentially using a religious revolution as a political power grab. He was trying to cut out the existing priesthood and replace the entire religious system with one that gave him more direct control. It did not work. After his death his reforms were reversed, his monuments were defaced, and his name was erased from the record. His successor Tutankhamun, the famous boy king, restored the old religion.

The system he tried to destroy had more staying power than he did. Religious institutions that have been running for centuries have a kind of inertia that individual rulers find very hard to overcome.

The Lesson That Lasted

Egypt lasted three thousand years as a continuous civilization. That is a record almost nothing else in human history comes close to matching.

Some of that was geography. The Nile made Egypt rich and defensible. But a lot of it was the stability of the system of divine kingship. A system where the ruler was God had a built in answer to every challenge. You cannot argue with the order of the universe.

That lesson was not lost on the rulers who came after Egypt. Rome watched Egypt and learned. Christianity took elements of the divine king concept and adapted them. The concept of the divine right of kings that persisted in Europe well into the modern era is the same idea in different clothing.

The pharaoh of Egypt is gone. The idea that rulers derive their authority from God is still very much with us.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.