Secularization reifies in-group division more stubbornly than religion did

Evidence

Freud’s error in political prognosis, his blaming the ‘socialists’ for what their German arch-enemies did, is as striking as his prophecy of fascist destructiveness, the drive to eliminate the out-group. As a matter of fact, neutralization of religion seems to have led to just the opposite of what the enlightener Freud anticipated: the division between the believers and the non-believers has been maintained and reified. However, it has become a structure in itself, independent of any ideational content, and is even more stubbornly defended since it lost its inner conviction. At the same time, the mitigating impact of the religious doctrine of love vanished. This is the essence of the ‘sheep and goat’ device employed by all fascist demagogues. Since they do not recognize any spiritual criterion in regard to who is chosen and who is rejected, they substitute a pseudo-natural criterion such as the race, which seems to be inescapable and can therefore be applied even more mercilessly than was the concept of heresy during the Middle Ages. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 196

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely dense claim: the loss of religious ideational content does not dissolve group boundaries but hardens them into structure — with the religion of love’s mitigating force removed, the exclusion becomes even more merciless. This resists easy summary and sits as a top-tier analytical notion.
• XREF: Links to the reader’s ‘sheep and goat’ test case: modern identity politics and culture-war sorting can be run through this mechanism of reified, content-independent in/out division. — connects to: Debate over secularism strengthens, rather than divides, ethnic boundaries — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 321