The Jacobin Supreme Being cult was the first root of the modern lay State.

Evidence

The only way in which this differed from the Middle Ages was the fact that religion was openly conceived of and analysed as an instrumentum regni . It is from this point of view that the Jacobin attempt to institute a cult of the ‘Supreme Being’ should be studied. This appears to be an attempt to create an identity between State and civil society; to unify in a dictatorial way the constitutive elements of the State (in the organic, wider sense of the State proper + civil society), in a desperate endeavour to keep a hold on all of popular and national life. But it appears too as the first root of the modern lay State, independent of the Church, which seeks and finds in itself, in its own complex life, all the elements of its historical personality. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2187

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the nation-as-imagined-community and secular-religious transference themes in later Islamophobia readings; also echoes the ADDENDUM ‘immodesty’ moral-panic material about how regimes invent civic cults.