Religions stay strong by preventing a split between intellectuals and lay faithful

Evidence

The strength of religions, and of the Catholic church in particular, has lain, and still lies, in the fact that they feel very strongly the need for the doctrinal unity of the whole mass of the faithful and strive to ensure that the higher intellectual stratum does not get separated from the lower. The Roman church has always been the most vigorous in the struggle to prevent the “official” formation of two religions, one for the “intellectuals” and the other for the “simple souls”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1186

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The intellectual/simple distinction becomes the basis for Gramsci’s organic vs traditional intellectuals — carried forward into how Islamophobia fields see clerical elites vs mass publics.

Related

• Religion can bind intellectuals and masses only when it originates from the people (similarity 0.86)
• Religious communities endure through organized repetition of apologetics and intellectual hierarchy (similarity 0.85)
• Any single religion contains multiple contradictory class-specific versions (similarity 0.82)
• A national-popular bloc requires religious and intellectual cohesion between elite and masses (similarity 0.82)
• Politics mediates between elite and popular philosophy without eliminating hierarchy. (similarity 0.81)
• Revolutionary theory raises the masses culturally while the Church maintains only mechanical unity (similarity 0.81)
• The Catholic church maintained ideological unity by keeping intellectuals and masses doctrinally joined (similarity 0.80)
• Violently interrupting the institutional repetition of a worldview can destroy it (similarity 0.80)
• Marxism allied with foreign doctrines to fight religious residue among the masses (similarity 0.80)
• Secularization predictions have failed; religion remains politically potent (similarity 0.79)
• Prosocial religious cohesion inherently requires excluding nonbelievers from trust (similarity 0.79)
• Religion and common sense cannot form intellectual orders without coercion (similarity 0.79)
• Ideologies do not spread spontaneously but require organized struggle and politics. (similarity 0.79)
• Religion must be decomposed into parts before asking which cause conflict (similarity 0.78)
• Many political and ideological acts serve organizational coherence needs (similarity 0.78)