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.