A purely theological movement had reactionary social effects in practice.

Evidence

Boulainvilliers traces the whole history of how the nobility was educated by showing that the reason the church placed such emphasis on the afterlife, which it described as the sole reason for being in this world, was basically that it wanted to convince the well-educated that nothing that happened in this world was of any importance, and that their true destiny lay in the next world. And so it was that the Germans, who had been so eager to possess and to dominate, the great blond warriors who had been so attached to the present, were gradually transformed into archetypal knights and archetypal crusaders who took no interest in what was going on on their own lands and in their own country, and who found themselves dispossessed of their fortune and their power. The Crusades—those great pilgrimages into the beyond—were, in Boulainvilliers’s view, an expression or manifestation of what happened when this nobility’s attention was fully concentrated on the next world. What was happening in this world, or in other words, on their lands, while they were in Jerusalem? The king, the church, and the old Gaulish aristocracy were manipulating the Latin laws that would dispossess them of their lands and their rights. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 170 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Religious otherworldliness can function as a mechanism of political dispossession. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 170; Positing a unitary ‘human’ as a starting point is a theological residue

Related

• Religious otherworldliness can function as a mechanism of political dispossession. (similarity 0.91)

Broader Connections

• Religious otherworldliness can function as a mechanism of political dispossession. #expands (0.82) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 170
• Positing a unitary ‘human’ as a starting point is a theological residue #complicates (0.72)