Friedrich Nietzsche announced "God is dead"—was he right?
Despite the optimistic (or gloomy, depending on your perspective) expectations of secularists like Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, religion in the 21st century remains a substantial force in the world. Not merely as a bunch of belief systems giving rise to private worship, but also as value systems capable of being repurposed by public officials.
This phenomenon is made possible by religion's inherent fluidity. Religions have never been static entities—they've both shaped, and been shaped by, the times in which they exist. This explains both the incentives for state actors to adopt them (religions embed values a regime may find politically useful) and the availability of religions to be adopted in the first place (they are broad enough to accommodate being repurposed by politicians).
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