Religious otherworldliness can function as a mechanism of political dispossession.

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

Categorization

• XREF: Reads almost like a prototype of ideology critique — otherworldliness as mystification serving material expropriation — echoes Marx’s ‘illusory forms’ and the reader’s Gramsci/hegemony toolkit. — connects to: A purely theological movement had reactionary social effects in practice.; Religion can override political rights and material gains when believers hold it inviolable; Politicizing religion functions as assimilation as well as exclusion (+4 more)
• CANDY: The Crusades as engineered distraction from land-grabbing is a punchy, argument-starting line for casual conversation.

Related

• A purely theological movement had reactionary social effects in practice. (similarity 0.91)

Broader Connections

• Religion can override political rights and material gains when believers hold it inviolable #expands (0.78)
• Political movements must engage the religious terrain where religion is the dominant ideological domain. #exemplifies (0.75)
• Religious cues harness situational power where secular institutions are absent #corroborates (0.75)
• Politicizing religion functions as assimilation as well as exclusion #qualifies (0.72)