Belief boosted community. Black churches, unified by a belief in the intrinsic value of humanity, got people to vote, to march, and to change. Whites, Asians, and others, unified by a common core belief pushed against the violence and racism of their day to improve the lots of their fellow man. At the forefront was not a scientist, not a technocrat, but a preacher, surrounded by preachers.
At its zenith, as with all things lofty, religion started to fade. In its setting the government rose. It took up the mantle of diety. It became father. We live in its world now. We are poorer for it.
Government takes power from the people and apportions it to its acolytes. Organization for its own sake is the status quo. To streamline government is to unemploye millions. Our calf requires total subservience with little benefit.
Perhaps we’ll find a way to control our new leviathan. Maybe we can yoke it to till the soil of communal need. We could even do that by trying to preserve the dignity of man. To do that we might have to abandon our new truth that life is an accident. That man has no more importance than a rock. This might be a noble lie. We need something for we have only straw to grasp now handed to us by our new religion postmodernism.
There are quite a few countries with much lower rates of religious affiliation than the US, and decent societal values. NZ, Aus, Nordics, Swiss, Germany etc. And even if they have non-trivial rates of religious belief, its not the kind of fundamentalist and extractive religion that grips the US. If anything, the decoupling of religion from official institutions in the US has given it free reign to accumulate ever more soft power and wealth.
Those countries usually have "stronger" Governments too, with stronger social safety nets, and healthcare systems that don't try to shaft you for $40k when giving birth.
More to the point, someone should visualise the relationship between rates of religiosity and quality of public transportation, across a range of geographic areas. I can imagine the general trend, though there may be some outliers like Poland and Italy.
Content aside, this text sounds like a street-preacher in Battlestar Galactica or The Expanse.
Do you have any more writing on this subject? I have been working on an essay discussing the lack of this philosophical backbone in our ideologies we build up - the new religion of the intellectual liberals of today (traditional dictionary definition of liberal, of course). I can feel a similar emotion in your writing.
