With Putin talking about the orthodox church being holy and using to justify some conservative bullshit, all I can remember was the bolsheviks going around the country proudly declaring that cities were now "officially godless" and redistributing the church's gold amongst the people and using it to pay for electrification projects.
Liberalization was a catastrophe that caused mass death and suffering, and churches provided the same sort of community support and mutual aid that they do in the US, helping people survive. It makes perfect sense why in the sudden absence of the social support and secular community building that the USSR provided people would end up dependent on newly rebuilt religious institutions and become indoctrinated as a result (and the study on excess mortality resulting from liberalization specifically called out areas where religious institutions provided support networks as experiencing less excess death, demonstrating that such communities were an effective social defense mechanism that helped people survive hardship).
I've seen the same basic process happen firsthand in the US: my family was always secular and my grandparents were explicitly atheists and socialists, but decades ago my mother started attending a church with a friend of hers out of a vague need for community and mutual aid and became thoroughly indoctrinated for a few years before breaking with them for reasons I never learned (and more recently she completely cut ties with that friend after I came out and that person was apparently a transphobic piece of shit about it).
People have a desperate need for community and support, and religious institutions prey upon that need very successfully. I can 100% believe that 75% of the population was atheist-by-default until everything collapsed around them and their only lifeline was accepting religious indoctrination. This is also why leftist mutual-aid operations are so specifically targeted for violence and suppression by capitalist police: providing people with material support and community is an extremely effective means of winning people over to your side, and so only far-right institutions are allowed to provide them on any large scale by the capitalist state.
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Yeah, atheism was just the default for me, apart from some vague pagan animist stuff from my father, while Christians were always a hostile Other who were basically outside tormentors and attackers. I can absolutely understand why atheists become misanthropic and reactionary in the face of that sort of hostility, and went through a phase of that myself when I was a teen (in addition to the absolute incoherence of swinging wildly from edgy libertarian shitheel to earnest totalitarian quasi-trot/ultra when I was in high school, progressing to edgy chauvinist succdem libertine in college).
Ironically, going from a position of relative privilege (believing myself to be a cishet guy) to an active target of religious hatred and persecution (trans woman) has mellowed me out considerably, despite making the conflict all the more personal. Maybe it's just a broadening understanding of what the opposing side really is: the chauvinism, racism, and classism that all exist independent of religious institutions. That is to say that the religion is a tool for reinforcing and spreading these problems, rather than the actual root of them, and that what must be defeated are chauvinist and reactionary tendencies as well as the material conditions of precarity, alienation, and desperation that drive people into the arms of theocratic institutions; by educating away bigotry and chauvinism, you remove the most toxic effect of religious institutions; by providing a cure for alienation and precarity through secular social support and mutual aid institutions you remove the material factors that entrench religious institutions as systems of control.
If those goals are accomplished, then personal religiosity stops mattering for the most part, and people should ideally be allowed to follow whatever belief system they want so long as they don't propagate reactionary and chauvinist ideals.
I don't believe that there's a functional difference after long enough: while obedience is enforced through holding social support hostage, even a cynical and performative expression of belief becomes genuine over time as a function of how memories and belief work (so, simply expressing belief in something or stating it as a fact will eventually lead to it becoming ingrained if one doesn't actively denounce it in one's mind). As you go on to say, the emotional experiences people have in churches with group song and other rituals serve to reinforce and build belief.
Yeah. That reminds me of a different, related topic that I've talked about on here before, about how back then the "western left" as it were included a bunch of chauvinist libertines who were only there because fundamentalism was an active threat to their own personal hedonism, and when clear lines were drawn with Gamergate and its related culture war shit all the chauvinist libertine types went full fash because it promised them freedom not only from the rules of theocrats but also from the restriction of women saying "no" to them or the McDonalds cashier asking them to please stop screaming slurs. It's quite scary to think that I probably would have gone down that same path if not for the fact that I realized I was trans right when all that shit was kicking off, suffered what can only be described as the complete razing of my ideology and worldview as I dismantled all the lies and values that built up my repression, then rebuilt my worldview from the ground up in a world that was suddenly actively hostile to my very existence. It's also kind of disheartening to think that deprograming all the chauvinist shit I'd absorbed from pop-culture or synthesized on my own from own alienation took something as drastic as a deep and personal need to dismantle it for my own benefit, and how hard it was to overcome all the toxic barriers it left sitting around just to learn to be a better person. Teaching people to be better is not a simple matter of providing accurate information and education, but requires something that makes them receptive somehow.
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It is scary. It can be used positively, and it's a common facet of self-help snake oil (as well as outright occult theory stuff) where just vocally declaring what you want to be true can alter your perspective to an extent if it's repeated for long enough. It can also be used to make certain lies automatic like an alias or fake backstory (some old friends of mine used to do this shit, making up aliases and backstories for themselves and one another and just telling these lies to random strangers as small talk), or just used to make yourself believe a lie enough that you can tell it convincingly. I think method acting may work on a similar principle, where you just kind of trick your brain into giving you a different headspace and set of information to draw on.
But it also has much darker uses when it comes to indoctrination, where if someone is made to repeat something enough it does start to sink in, whether that's religious or secular (like the ritual of pledging allegiance to the american flag that many millions of children are made to do every single day, although the abject misery of school probably detracts from the power of that particular ritual by associating it with being uncomfortable and miserable). It's not mind control by any means, and I don't want to give the impression that that's what I'm claiming, but it can ingrain itself over time if it's not challenged and corrected. I don't believe it's enough in and of itself to make someone coerced into performative rituals and declarations of belief start to believe them, since the coercion aspect implies an active resistance, but when paired with the other emotional effects of ritual it leaves people with a lot of sort of default lines with strong positive emotional attachment that their memory will bring up and so they will consider these to be beliefs just as a basic function of what they feel like when remembered.
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Yeah, I remember it mostly not being taken seriously in high school, and I just ignored it apart from my last semester there, when there was the unfortunate combination of it happening during a class that I actually enjoyed and was interested in (and which I'd probably say was the single positive experience I had in high school) and the teacher making a big deal of it, so I stood to avoid antagonizing someone I otherwise liked and respected.
That's wild, the only thing I ever heard from ROTC kids in high school was that they wanted to be officers or get some enlistment privileges related to having taken ROTC.
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