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.