For both authoritarian leaders and authoritarian followers, religion is a wonderful convenience. It allows them to lord it over other people since they alone know the “truth”. It allows them to punish people guilt-free, since that punishment is on a god’s orders. It allows them to deny reason by dubbing irrationality “faith.” It gives them extra ways to bully people, especially women and other scapegoats, who are regarded as inferior, dirty, and second-class. It is everything an authoritarian could wish for.
Many authoritarians who do not believe in the gods they profess to worship still love the cover of religion. They know that to associate with a religion is to associate with like-minded authoritarians. Trump is one contemporary example. To take a classic example, the atheistic, anti-clerical Mussolini, the fascist leader of World War II Italy, in order to get into bed with the Vatican, married in church, had his children baptized, and in his first parliamentary speech in 1921 announced that “the only universal values that radiate from Rome are those of the Vatican.” Mussolini knew where he would find his fascistic friends and allies: in church.
To take another example from that same time period, when the fascist-leaning, anti-clerical Futurist artist Marinetti, who had once said of the Catholic Church that “throughout its history, the Vatican has defecated on Italy,” saw the value of aligning himself and the Futurist movement with “the sacred,” he created a “Manifesto of Futurist Sacred Art” and participated in the Vatican’s International Exhibition of Sacred Art. Neither writers, painters, doctors, lawyers, butchers, bakers or anyone else are above such shenanigans—no authoritarian is above such shenanigans.
Religions castigate the other and designate the other as deserving of punishment; they demand strict obedience; they reduce nuanced discourse to the size of slogans; and they assert that they are the chosen ones, the anointed ones, and owners of the future. Therefore, they align beautifully with individual authoritarian agendas. An individual authoritarian spouting the sanctimonious homilies of some religion is a marriage made in Heaven.
Indeed, fascism, that authoritarian extreme, has been dubbed a “political religion” because of the ways that it mimics orthodox religion. Popularized by Emilio Gentile, the term “political religion” refers to any movement that sacralizes itself and adopts the trappings of religion, including religion’s emphasis on the never-ending battle between good and evil. These trappings can be found in every sort of group and institution, from corporations to fraternal clubs to professional organizations … and of course, in families.
As to the ways in which religious trappings are employed by family authoritarians, I invite you to take a look at my book Helping Survivors of Authoritarian Parents, Siblings and Partners. To learn more about kirism, an anti-authoritarian philosophy of life, please visit Lighting the Way, where kirism is introduced. We each share the responsibility of pointing out unholy marriages like the one between religion and fascism. If we do, the authoritarians that we very much ought to fear will have at least that much less cover.
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