State religion as a tool: 1,600 years of altar and throne

Series: How minds are moved · Belief and power · 3 of 3

On 27 February 380, three Roman emperors issued an edict that told every people under their rule which Christianity to profess. Those who disagreed were “foolish madmen”, liable to punishment by God and by the emperors. Sixteen centuries later, on 27 March 2024, a council chaired by the Patriarch of Moscow called a war a “Holy War”. Between those two dates, almost every faith and almost every kind of state, including atheist ones, has used religion as a tool of government. In the Soviet Union the number of open Orthodox churches fell from 28,560 churches in 1928 to 1,744 churches in 1939, and then, in the middle of a war, the same state allowed the Church to elect a patriarch.

This post closes the family on belief and power. It draws on Part 14 of my book Religions, Cults and Power, “Religion and politics”, and it sets cases side by side from several faiths, eras and political directions. None of them is the “bad” one. The mechanism is the point.

Contents · 8 sections

TL;DR #

• States use religion in three ways: to make rule legitimate, to make a people feel like one people, and to mobilise for war.
• They also do the reverse: license, register, merge, split or abolish religious bodies that they cannot use.
• Documented cases cover Rome, the Reformation, the French Revolution, the Soviet Union, communist Romania, Franco’s Spain, Cold War America, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China and today’s Russia.
• Forced belief has a poor record. Seventy years of Soviet atheism did not end belief, and state support can even weaken religious practice.
• The sign to watch: when disagreeing with a policy is treated as betraying a faith, or when a faith is treated as disloyalty to the state.

Three uses, and their mirror image #

The book’s Part 14 runs from sacral kingship to present-day geopolitics. Reading it end to end, I see the same three uses again and again.

Legitimacy: the ruler or the regime is blessed, chosen or required by God. The first post in this family covered the ancient form.

Unity: one people, one faith. A shared religion marks who belongs and who is foreign, and it makes the nation feel older and holier than any government.

Mobilisation: war becomes a defence of the sacred. Soldiers fight harder for a holy land than for a border.

The mirror image is control. A state that cannot use a religion tries to tame it: it registers clergy, licenses buildings, appoints or approves leaders, merges one church into another, or bans a faith outright.

Documented cases #

Rome, 380. The Edict of Thessalonica, issued by Theodosius with Gratian and Valentinian II, made Nicene Christianity the state religion. My book calls it the first legal definition of orthodoxy; it went into the Theodosian Code.

The Reformation, 1534 to 1648. In England, Henry VIII’s Acts of Supremacy made the king head of the Church of England. On the Continent, the Peace of Augsburg (1555) established the principle later summed up as cuius regio, eius religio: the ruler decides the religion of his territory. As my book summarises the reference shelf, once the papal check was removed, Protestant and Catholic kings alike became answerable only to God, and the national churches became instruments of the crown. Anna Grzymała-Busse, in Sacred Foundations, argues that Westphalia completed a long subordination of the Church rather than inventing the secular state.

The French Revolution, 1790 to 1801. A revolution against throne and altar did not abolish the sacred. It moved from state control of the clergy (1790) to the Cult of Reason (1793) and the Cult of the Supreme Being (1794). Napoleon’s Concordat of 1801 then brought back a state-paid Church because he found it useful. France separated church and state fully only in 1905.

The Soviet Union, 1929 to 1964. The book quotes Gregory Freeze in the Encyclopedia of Russian History: in 1929 the regime “declared open war on the church”, and “by 1939 all but 1,744 churches (of the 28,560 in 1928) were closed”. In September 1943, with the German army in Russia, Stalin received three metropolitans in the Kremlin, and within days a council of bishops elected a patriarch. A church that had been nearly destroyed was suddenly needed for patriotism. Under Khrushchev the pressure returned: churches were cut from 13,414 in 1958 to 7,773 in 1964.

Communist Romania, 1948. This one is my own country. On 1 December 1948 the regime abolished the Greek Catholic Church, with about 1.5 million faithful, and handed its property to the Orthodox Church. Only 430 of its 1,800 priests signed the act of union. Patriarch Justinian Marina, called the “Red Patriarch”, wrote that “socialism is an integral part of Christianity”. The book records these facts from the reference shelf and from Richard Wurmbrand, who describes the line between the underground church and the official one.

Franco’s Spain, 1939 to 1975. The regime that won the Civil War called its doctrine nacionalcatolicismo, national Catholicism. Coins struck from the early 1950s named Franco “Caudillo of Spain by the grace of God”. The Concordat signed with the Vatican on 27 August 1953 confirmed Catholicism as the only religion with legal status, made Catholic instruction compulsory even in state schools, had the state pay priests’ salaries, and gave Franco the right to name bishops.

Cold War America, 1954 to 1956. In a state with no established church, Congress added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 and made “In God We Trust” the national motto in 1956, during the contest with an officially atheist Soviet Union. The sociologist Robert Bellah later (1967) named this “civil religion”: a national faith with its own creed, holidays and sacred texts, separate from any church.

Iran, 1953 and 1979. The book records the CIA and MI6 role in overthrowing Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953, including money to clerics; the CIA acknowledged the operation in documents released in 2013. Twenty-six years later the revolution built a state on velayat-e faqih, the guardianship of the Islamic jurist, so that a senior cleric holds supreme authority over elected bodies.

Saudi Arabia, 1744 to 1980. The 1744 pact between Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and the House of Saud joined a religious doctrine to a dynasty. In the book, Kim Ghattas traces how the state exported that doctrine after 1979: the funding of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth rose from $250,000 in 1962 to $13 million in 1980. Religion became an instrument of foreign policy as well as of domestic rule.

China, from 1999 and 2015. The reference shelf describes the campaign against Falun Gong since 1999 and Xi Jinping’s policy of the “sinicisation” of religion from 2015: faiths may operate if they adapt to the state’s priorities and accept its oversight. This is the control mirror in its clearest form.

Russia, 2012 to 2024. Patriarch Kirill called Vladimir Putin’s rule a “miracle of God” in 2012. In March 2024 the World Russian People’s Council, which the Patriarch chairs, adopted a document calling the war in Ukraine, in its words, “a Holy War” in defence of “Holy Russia”. The World Council of Churches said it could not reconcile that statement with what it had heard from the Patriarch. Meanwhile the Orthodox world split: in October 2018 Moscow broke communion with Constantinople when it moved to recognise an independent Ukrainian church, and the tomos of autocephaly followed in January 2019.

What it feels like from the inside #

When state and faith fuse, two loyalties become one, and that is the whole technique. If your church blesses the war, doubting the war feels like doubting God. If your state defines the nation by its faith, leaving the faith feels like leaving the nation. If your state defines itself against religion, practising your faith feels like disloyalty.

You will rarely be told “the state is using your religion”. You will be told that your people, your ancestors and your God expect something of you. The feeling is real. The question is who benefits from attaching it to this particular policy.

What it can and cannot do #

The record shows real power, and real limits.

• It can mobilise. Holy war language has filled armies and kept soldiers fighting for centuries.
• It can silence. When dissent is heresy or treason, few people speak.
• It cannot easily make people believe. The Soviet Union closed most churches for decades, and religion revived openly after 1991. Albania declared itself an atheist state in 1967 and nationalised 2,169 religious buildings; religious life came back when the regime fell.
• It can weaken the faith it supports. My book cites research reported by Ted Jelen that state support for churches may depress religious practice. A church that the state pays for can lose the people who pay attention to it.
• It invites the opposite reaction. In Iran and in parts of Europe alike, a faith tied to an unpopular state shares its unpopularity.

The pattern that repeats is that states can enforce behaviour, attendance and silence far better than they can enforce belief.

How to notice it #

• A political decision is announced in religious language: holy, sacred, blessed, God-given, or, in secular states, its civic equivalents.
• Clergy appear in state ceremonies and officials appear in religious ones, more often than tradition alone explains.
• Religious leaders are appointed, approved or paid by the state, or need its licence to preach.
• A minority faith is described as foreign, an agent of another power, or a danger to national unity.
• Criticising the war or the government is described as an attack on the faith, or practising the faith is described as an attack on the state.
• The same act is praised when your side does it and condemned when the other side does. Apply the same test to all of them.

Frequently asked questions #

What is a state religion? #

A religion that the state officially recognises, supports or requires, often with legal privileges, public funding or a role in state ceremonies. Some states have one by law; others have an unofficial civil religion, and some have imposed state atheism.

What does cuius regio, eius religio mean? #

“Whose realm, his religion”. It summarises the principle of the Peace of Augsburg (1555): the ruler of a territory chose its religion, and subjects who disagreed could emigrate. It made faith a matter of political geography.

Did the Soviet Union ban religion? #

It did not ban belief in law, but it campaigned against religion with closures, arrests and propaganda. According to Gregory Freeze, only 1,744 of 28,560 Orthodox churches were still open in 1939. During the Second World War Stalin eased the pressure and allowed a patriarch to be elected in 1943.

Is civil religion the same as state religion? #

No. Civil religion, Robert Bellah’s term, is a shared national faith of symbols, rituals and phrases such as “In God We Trust”, without an established church. A state religion is an official institution.

Does state support make a religion stronger? #

Not necessarily. Some research reported in my book suggests that state support can depress religious practice, and decades of state atheism did not end belief in Russia or Albania.

The lesson #

Every faith in this post has been used by a state, and every kind of state has used one, including those that claimed to have no use for religion at all. The tool works best for behaviour and worst for belief. So when a government tells you what God wants, or when it tells you that what you believe about God makes you a threat, the useful question is the same in Rome, Madrid, Bucharest, Washington, Tehran, Riyadh, Beijing and Moscow: what is being asked of me, and who gains if I agree?