All states have a state religion:
If your state religion is controlled by a hostile state, you are toast. That is spiritual insecurity. The official state religion of most states is progressivism, and their progressivism is controlled by the NGOs, which are controlled by the US State Department, which is controlled by Harvard in pretty much the same way the US supreme court is controlled by Harvard. (Sometimes the president makes minor, and usually ineffectual and unsuccessful, efforts to influence the US State Department. If he gets too stubborn about it, the media demonize him.)
Back in the 1400 and 1500s the Pope was in the pocket of the Holy Roman Emperor and/or the King of Spain, and a lot of states were at war or near war or cold war with the Holy Roman Emperor and/or the King of Spain. These states found that the Pope was getting up their noses. They found Martin Luther handy to protect themselves from papism, which eventually led to the bloody holy wars of the Protestant Reformation west of the Hajnal line. Being Roman Catholic was spiritual insecurity – you were apt wind up incorporated in the almost universal empire of the triple crown.
More recently Jomo Kenyatta complained during the twentieth century: “When the Missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the Missionaries had the Bible. They taught how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.” That is spiritual insecurity.
China has a big problem with progressivism and assorted Christian sects, many of which smell suspiciously like the State Department, discovering in the New Testament that gay sex is sacred, and husbands should obey their wives. The obvious solution is state sponsored Confucianism Manchesterized, or state sponsored Manchesterism Confucianized, but they are hesitant and confused. What exactly is their state religion? Supposedly it is Maoism, but Maoism is just not that credible these days, and they don’t particularly wish it was credible. They are half decided to go with Confucianism, but what sort of Confucianism? They are not sure. In the recent confrontation in Hong Kong, the police backed the protestors against the government, siding with the US state department against Peking. Such is the power of faith. Hong Kong suffers severely from spiritual insecurity. The authorities in Peking need to decide on something that is credible, persuasive, and sane, and go with that, for right now China is spiritually insecure. The state department plots a “democratic” takeover of China. If what happened in Hong Kong had happened in Peking, China would be ruled by the State Department and looted by Wall Street the way Russia was after the fall of communism.
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There are no large scale hierarchical organized Christian religions in the west that seriously dissent from the State Department line that all religions, rightly understood, are the same religion, and that religion is progressivism.
A masterpiece of overstatement, and loftily uninterested in considering apparent counterexamples to the supposedly necessary and sufficient condition, and incidentally not obviously consistent with the Jim-ish thesis that policies of the Stuarts were the key to the English takeoff through the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions
Toast? Switzerland was pretty stable and reasonably successful for a long time. Was it spiritually secure in this sense? England was turbulent in various ways before nationalizing its religion, but not toast, indeed not even obviously less successful than its rivals that had a greater ability to influence the Church. Then the USA largely outperformed both of them, and especially before WWI is pretty hard to describe as running a top-down state religion, and enjoying 2 centuries of success is not ‘toast’. I don’t know enough about Japan, Germany, and the Dutch to be sure where they fall, and the other Asian tigers haven’t necessarily settled into any equilibrium yet, but the thesis looks like a pretty poor fit to national successes since the Industrial Revolution.
From my admittedly sketchy knowledge of the history of areas on the continent which are more Germanic than the Dutch, their history might not be inconsistent with the thesis that state religion-or-something is helpful, yay. But that does not seem to be enough to support ‘toast’.
It *is* easy to find historical examples of states which successfully propped up their internal stability by imposing state religions that they could control or at least influence. Also by not tolerating the spread of printing presses, not translating foreign books, not allowing traditional business interests to be displaced by modern competition, etc. Since the Industrial Revolution, though, that kind of repression has been hard to maintain without falling dangerously behind external rivals.
Even pointing to a favorite example of England as a success for spiritual security looks dubious to me, similar to agenda-driven morons pointing to Japan to demonstrate that trade restrictions are key to success (when Japan was indeed not a free trade exemplar — except perhaps in contrast to many (most?) of their many unsuccessful rivals, with India the biggest example but plenty of third-world basket cases lined up behind it). England did have a state religion, and did actively suppress Catholicism in particular during much of its early success, but it is unclear to me that it promoted state religion as vigorously as did rivals that declined sharply in relative importance in modern history (like Italy and Spain and France and Russia and various small fry), and it is awkward for the thesis that Britain promoted state religion more vigorously than its mostly-more-successful rival across the pond.
Admittedly it is not hard to find cases where religion broadly defined (so as to include things like Marxism) from outside seems to have been particularly destabilizing. (Weasel words like “seems to have been” seem especially appropriate for messy situations like the decline of the Roman empire, when so many things were changing over so many generations that teasing out one key factor is tricky.) But in most of the cases that particularly impress me, the society doing the influence needed to be perceived as enviable in order to have so much influence. Then, once you admit enviability as (another) necessary condition for strong foreign influence, it is not obvious that enviability is not the primary necessary condition, with religion merely a decoration on what’s fundamentally going on.
I remember how even with Japan merely catching up with the USA in the 1980s, Americans in the 1980s were pretty credulous about any arguments that we should imitate them. (And as best I recall, such arguments didn’t tend to resemble religion much at all, not even in the ways that Communism and environmentalism resemble religion.) I expect that if Japan had advanced well past the performance of the USA so that today they had, say, double our per capita GDP, double our visibly prestigious research output (Nobel prizes, surprisingly innovative commercial gadgets…), and some scarily effective military tech, the urge to imitate them today would be considerably stronger than the 1980s urge was. And considering how strong the 1980s urge was in historical fact, I expect the urge in the ahistorical hypothetical would be very strong indeed.
You cannot make this stuff up. NGOs controlled by the State Department. Only one deeply unfamiliar with either could make this claim. In truth the relationship is closer to the other way around. Far, far more credit given to the State Department here than is their due. Silliness.
If they are pushing the same thing it doesn’t matter who is “in control” if that even means anything in the context of massive bureaucracies.