Religious communities endure through organized repetition of apologetics and intellectual hierarchy

Evidence

Religion, or a particular church, maintains its community of faithful (within the limits imposed by the necessities of general historical development) in so far as it nourishes its faith permanently and in an organised fashion, indefatigably repeating its apologetics, struggling at all times and always with the same kind of arguments, and maintaining a hierarchy of intellectuals who give to the faith, in appearance at least, the dignity of thought. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1222

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lays out the mechanism by which a worldview sustains its followers.
• XREF: The ‘hierarchy of intellectuals giving faith the dignity of thought’ maps directly onto Gramsci’s organic intellectuals and onto how Islamophobia discourse keeps its ideological apparatus running. — connects to: Mass entertainment sustains religious habits of thought even after belief in God fades — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 694