Sorry, Killing Religion Won't Save Anyone
Kill the church and something else moves into the building
There’s a certain kind of person online who’s convinced they’ve found the root of every problem, and it’s Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Scroll the replies under any post about war or bigotry or bad policy and you’ll find them, persuaded that if religion would just die already, the fever would break and we’d all wake up reasonable. Religion is the disease, atheism is the cure, case closed.
While I'll give the Church its due as a builder of Western civilization, I've still spent years writing about how the texts got stitched together, who edited them, and how much of what gets preached on Sunday would startle the men who wrote the New Testament. So I'm not here to defend the faith but to point out that these people are charging at windmills.
The problem was never religion specifically but its exploitation and nationalism or ideology can easily replace religion.
So we’re ending the week with an opinion piece where I’ll talk about a historical event that shows what can happen when you try to kill the influence of religion, but we’ll be back to facts next week. Don’t just read this piece in the inbox. Like it, drop a comment, pick it apart, don’t leave me talking into the void.
Enjoy.
What Religion Does for the People Who Hold It
A religion gives its believers a few things that have nothing to do with whether any of it’s true. It tells them who they are and who they’re not. It hands them a story where they’re on the right side, a community that’ll notice if they disappear, and a reason to get up in the morning that’s bigger than their own small life.
Those needs don’t evaporate when you talk someone out of the resurrection. They stand there, fully intact, looking for the next thing to fill them, and plenty of things are happy to volunteer. Nationalism does the same work. So does a political movement with a flag and an enemy. So does a conspiracy that explains why you’re losing and who to blame. The architecture is identical, and only the paint changes.
When the Ottomans Swapped Faith for Nation
If you want to see how this plays out at the scale of a whole country, look at the late Ottoman Empire. For centuries it ran on a religious organizing principle. The millet system sorted people by faith, and a Christian Armenian, a Greek, a Jew, and a Muslim Turk all lived under an order that defined them first by their religion. It wasn’t tolerant in any modern sense, but there was no assimilation policy, no push for a single Ottoman identity. Everyone followed the basic secular laws, and on top of those they kept the laws their own religion demanded. Mosques, churches, and synagogues stood next to each other. Still, the Muslims were the majority, the binding glue was Islam and the Sultan’s role as caliph rather than blood or ethnicity, and Muslims held first-class citizenship, leaving second-class citizenship to the rest.
Then the empire started losing, badly, for a hundred years. A big part of the reason was the reactionaries who controlled the talking points and stood against any technology or school of thought that came out of Christian Europe. They were so influential that even the Sultan couldn’t overrule them. So a new generation of officers and intellectuals decided the old religious identity was the thing holding them back. The Young Turks who took control by 1913 were modernizers and secular nationalists who wanted to trade the crumbling religious empire for a tight, modern nation built on Turkish identity. The sacred thing stopped being the faith and became the nation. To their credit, that Turkishness was a matter of accepting you were Turkish. The aim was assimilation, not bloodline.
That swap is what turned Armenians from a tolerated religious community into a population the new nation couldn’t place. When some Armenian groups tried to found an independent country on Ottoman land, it became clear they wouldn’t fit into an all-Turkish nation.
Any country would send its army if a group tried to carve an independent state out of its soil. So the problem isn’t that the Ottomans took military action. The problem is how they handled it. They decided the area where an independent Armenia was meant to rise had to be emptied of its Armenian population.
Under the cover of the First World War, the Committee of Union and Progress organized the deportation of the empire’s Armenians, with a death toll that Bloxham, Suny, and most historians outside Turkey put close to a million, many of them marched into the Syrian desert to die.
The line they drew wasn’t ethnic. The Kurds weren’t Turks either, but they were Muslim, and the CUP assumed they’d melt into the Turkish nation through their faith, even using them as instruments in the deportations. Christianity was the disqualifier, and not for theological reasons. In a different universe, if Armenians had been the front-line backers of the nationalist movement, the ultranationalists might have embraced them, hoping it set a precedent for the other Christian minorities. The trouble was Christianity as an identity and the assumption that assimilating Armenians into Turkishness would be hard, maybe impossible.
Scholars like Donald Bloxham and Ronald Suny have traced how a population that had lived there for millennia became disposable once belonging in the new nation got measured by religion rather than the old order that had protected them as a community. The Turkish state still disputes both the scale and the intent, calling the deaths wartime casualties rather than an organized campaign. The documentary record the historians work from says otherwise.
By Turkey's account the high numbers are manufactured, though it admits Armenians died, and it adds that the war killed Muslims in huge numbers too.
On Turkish soil, disputing the state’s account is a criminal matter, prosecutable as insulting Turkishness. The irony is that Turkey’s standing abroad takes its real hit from the prosecutions themselves, not from anything the dissenters say.
That said, the speech runs both ways. In Switzerland, taking Turkey's side is treated as a punishable offense, so policing what gets said about 1915 isn't something only Turkey does.
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The Same People Get Exploited Either Way
The trait that makes someone an easy mark for a charismatic preacher is the same trait that makes him an easy mark for a demagogue, a cult leader, a get-rich-quick pitch, or a movement that needs a scapegoat. It’s the willingness to hand your judgment to a story that flatters you and a leader who promises certainty.
Take away the church and that willingness goes shopping. Sometimes it lands somewhere harmless and often it doesn’t. The anti-vaccine influencer, the strongman politician, the financial guru with a course to sell, they’re all fishing in the same pond, and a freshly deconverted believer is a fat target swimming in it.
If you want fewer people captured by bad ideas, the fight isn’t against any particular belief. It’s for the habits that make capture hard, like checking sources, living with uncertainty, and noticing when a story exists mainly to make you feel righteous. Those habits are rare, hard to teach, and they don’t fit on a protest sign, which is exactly why the loudest voices skip them and swing at the easy target instead.
Teaching people to think is slow, unglamorous work with no enemy to rally against, which is why almost nobody signs up for it. Killing a religion would only leave the same people standing there, just as ready to follow the next voice that sounds sure of itself.
Disclamer: This is an opinion essay, not a legal or definitive historical determination. The events of 1915 to 1916 remain the subject of genuine scholarly and political dispute. I've tried to represent the Turkish state's position as well as the conclusions of historians who disagree with it, and readers are encouraged to do their own research and reach their own judgment. Nothing here is intended to insult any nation, people, or faith.
The problem as I see it is rather different. People don't have a religion-shaped hole in them, they struggle differentiating fantasy from reality.
Christian scriptures are heavily redacted and so can our screeds, consider y adaption of your opening paragraph "A religion gives its believers a few imaginary things that have nothing to do with whether any of it’s true. It tells them who they might be and who they might not be. It hands them a imaginary story where they’re on the right side, a community that’ll notice if they disappear and disappear them if they get out of line (There is no hate like Christian love.) and an imaginary reason to get up in the morning that’s bigger than their own small life."
If this is an argument for theocracy, it really doesn't land for me. Who is your audience?
Religion exists to oblige social conformance and create order. In return it offers a form of community and reinforces patriarchy-- which you explicitly called out.
Faith is an entirely different matter.