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I think the problem with this definition is that it defines garden variety civic nationalism as a religion. In theory, I could agree with that, but if we define my actions as a citizen (voting, jury duty, taxes to pay for social and defense spending) as a binding agent with my fellow Americans -- which I unironically believe, then the entire idea of separation of church and state is nonsensical to members of the Church of American Democracy.
Honestly I do somewhat agree with you, but I think it doesn't resolve the ambiguity of where "church" ends and "state" begins. I certainly don't see an obvious line of delineation despite wanting one to better define policy.
With excellent timing, a federal judge struck down Florida's anti-woke law while approvingly calling woke college professors "Priests of Democracy"
So I think you're probably right that no distinction between religion and ideology is possible.
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Yes. I believe that the "no establishment" clause has failed and no longer makes any sense. If it ever made sense, it was only in a historical context coming out of the post-reformation wars of religion, where a general truce between sects was desired. It made sense in an era where Christian or at least Abrahamic belief was assumed, the federal government had little role in education or ideology, and thus the First Amendment was merely the government not taking sides among Abrahamic sects. Ever since the rise of communism, fascism, liberalism, American civic liberalism, etc, and the main faultlines and fighting lines were among things that no longer coded as "religions" the First Amendment no longer makes sense.
Back in 2007 Moldbug bit the bullet and said that to really make a delineation that makes sense, you would need complete separation of state (ie, the organization with monopoly on force) and information -- https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/06/separation-of-information-and-security/ He later changed his mind in the opposite direction and basically accepted that control of information/ideology/religion is simply a fundamental property of sovereignty and cannot be split off. I have made the same intellectual journey myself and come to the same conclusion.
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This is a bullet that I bit a long time ago. The “religion vs. ideology” distinction is fake, and is a result of Enlightenment thinkers who believed, incorrectly, that humanity could rise above religion and replace it with something fundamentally different that would act as a coordination mechanism for society. I think that on a primal evolutionary level, anything that can function as a large-scale non-physically-coercive coordination mechanism for non-kin individuals is indistinguishable from a religion. Whether or not one decides to deploy discussion of transcendent/supernatural elements as a rhetorical device is irrelevant to the underlying structure of the coordination mechanism.
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