I've mentioned it before, and I'm sure I will again, but, as much as there's a reason why I reject Christianity, there were also a lot of good things. Churches have governing bodies (with varying degrees of democratic representation) that guide the ministry (preaching and actions) as well as managing logistics (building maintenance, accounting, etc). This provides opportunities for self-governed collective action.

Quakers are the most radical in terms of this, and are basically anarchists. Quaker circles often meet at people's houses and can be as small as 3 people. There is often no leadership. A Quaker service could easily just be everyone sitting in a circle and someone talking at one point.

I grew up in a Presbyterian church, and one of my first jobs (at 11 or 12) was landscaping there. Within the church there were a lot of different trades, which meant that you could volunteer time and learn basically any kind of maintenance. Basically everything that needed to be done was done in-house. This also meant that if you needed a plumber, an electrician, etc, that you could pick one from within the church.

I remember painting the church, learning how to paint, with a bunch of other members of the congregation at a work party. I also remember being volunteered for child care during choir. There were a few rooms around that were used for different things, such as music practice. But these rooms could be made available for any type of community activity. This can actually include community organizing. In fact, Seattle GDC was offered an occasional space for organizing in a church (we didn't take it, but appreciated the offer), and that same church hosted a lot of other community events. I actually went to a queer relationships skills class once hosted in a church, which was great.

What I'm saying is that churches often act as a kind of parallel society up-to-and-including acting as dual power structures....

This becomes especially interesting when you understand the history of the church as a quasi-revolutionary organization. One could describe early church history as a mostly-successful attempt to overthrow the Roman empire. I say mostly successful because, in the end, the Roman state mutated the church for it's own ends and basically pulled a Lenin.

The early church was a religion of women and slaves that set up alternative institutions. See, the Roman economic system basically ran through the temples. Temples were basically the banks of their day (thus money changers in the temples and all that). So when the church set up their own institutions, they were actually attacking the economic system of the Roman empire. *That* is why the empire tried to destroy them. The Romans didn't really care about the gods. They would just mutate their beliefs to pull other pagans in. No, it wasn't about the gods. The Christian were fucking with the money.

The whole church as an institution was about dual power, and Paul (one of the early founders of the church) was central to organizing this into a political machine that could actually threaten the dominant order. One could argue that he saw the potential of the church, and used it to solidify his own power.

It all basically worked, right up until Constantine figured out how to flip the whole thing against the most radical elements. He had his people collect up different books of the Bible and modify them in such a way that it favored Rome. The trick here was to highlight the existing antisemitic threads of early church, and destroy the anti-Roman ones. Anti-authoritarian sects were killed as heretics, and centralized sects became aligned under the church.

This strategy of controlling internal dissent probably feels quite familiar. It's basically how the US works.

But this whole time, during the whole lead up to this, Christianity was illegal and it was continuing to grow as a system of dual power. When Romanism merged with Christianity, it created the most authoritarian institution in human history that brutally destroyed all opposition. Even still, several hundred years later it's power broke.

Today Liberalism has separated banking and the church, and has created the illusion of separation of church and state. But the same dual power strategy that allowed the first church to gain enough power to merge with the Roman power structure have now allowed Christian Nationalism to fully merge with Americanism into the Christian Fascism we see today...

Why this is all relevant to the OP is that there is actually nothing preventing us from exploiting these same vulnerabilities (and doing so far more effectively). The (illusion of The) Satanic Temple has already given us some vision of what that could look like. We can imagine a religious institution that actually challenges power in the way TST claims to do. We could imagine an institution that is more radical. We could imagine an institution so dangerous it actually forces the state to choose between it's own survival and alienating liberals by (more) visibly clamping down on freedom of religion.

One could imagine an anarchist or solar punk religion that intentionally builds an alternative society within the shell of the old, one that recognizes the validity of other religious sects (like, for example, Quakers) who are doing similar things.

While there is a very interesting spiritual element to #CultPunk. I think there's also a very interesting set of radical opportunities that we have long since ignored....

Collectively owning property is difficult because the law is not set up for that, but a church provides a clear legal framework to do so. Prisoners can be cut off from political literature, but the first amendment protects religious literature (which is why Nazis started a church to get Nazi shit inside of prisons... but that's a whole other story). While these legal protections are definitely not guaranteed (we all know how many fucks the state gives about the law), it is both easy to hide in the noise (there are a *lot* of churches) and to hide in other ways. After all, the ichthys (Jesus fish) was an appropriated pagan symbol.

And there is also still value in peeling off other religious groups by showing them that they are also in danger. "When your enemy is strong, divide them," after all.

There are also a bunch of other interesting things. The Seattle Grand Jury Resisters were kept in solitary confinement (for several months) under the pretext that this would compel them to testify. Belonging to a church together could have made such compulsion (more visibly) illegal. While I don't actually believe that the US government would follow the law, not then and especially not now, being able to talk about this as religious persecution could be enough to make other religious groups that align with Trump become more skittish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_grand_jury_resisters

There are all sorts of complex practices and laws around churches, because "religious freedom" is really a minefield. It's not that the state cares about the law, but that the narrative of the US is deeply intertwined with the narrative of "religious freedom" and "escaping religious persecution." (I probably don't need to tell anyone that the people "escaping religious persecution" were some of the absolute worst humans on the planet who were not being persecuted but wanted to be free to persecute others... but I digress.)

It is not aligning with the law that matters, nor any other sort of legal justification for their authority. Authority comes from a complex memetic fabric of woven ideas. This fabric can be attacked, these threads can be pulled out, and eventually the fabric unravels and the authority collapses.

When central authority collapses, dual power institutions pick up the pieces. They replace the faltering authority. Today, as the US government is frantically burning itself down, corporations and churches are the two most developed institutions prepared to fill that void,

If anyone is interested in continuing to explore this thread, a legal church takes 3 people to start (in the US):

https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/churches-religious-organizations/definition-of-church

(no one can stop you from starting an illegal one.)

This gets especially interesting when you realize how there are several whole societies that are largely invisible to mainstream society. There's a whole bunch of law around monasteries which allow them to essentially operate almost entirely outside of the state. Similarly, Amish/Mennonite communities basically don't interoperate with the outside world most of the time. I lived on a religious commune for a bit (it was an Isis cult, which I wasn't really part of but that's a whole other story. And I'm not going to get in to the abuse elements of a lot of these because that critique is separate.)

A lot of these places can only exist because they don't have to pay taxes or comply with a number of laws. They often also can get government grants. There's a whole world of things that are built specifically to benefit Christian churches that can be subverted towards actually radical ends.

@MamaLake my main issue with drug churches is that they tend to leverage law that indigenous people fought for to secure their own rights to their own practices. I do agree that the first amendment gives people the right to use drugs, but anyone who isn't indigenous should be working to expand the protections on indigenous practices through other legal pathways rather than threatening the work they've done to protect themselves.

But yeah, on all other points absolutely agree. It's also worth watching Wild Wild Country and realizing how close the Rajneeshees came to turning Oregon into their Utah.

The US is uniquely vulnerable to this threat, as demonstrated by the multiple times it's been exploited successfully (generally by the worst people) without anything being done to fix it.

@Hex that is a Very Very good point, #landback needs to happen and we can support that. Mormons committed genocide to eradicate indigenous peoples to build up *the kingdom of god* and to continue their practice of pedophilia, they did face their own extermination order from the president at the time adding to the story that they were the persecuted rather than the persecutors.

I guess that what I'm saying is that creating a religion has allowed some of the worst people to do some of the worst things, all in the name of God. Now the US is minting a terrible coin of Trump enshrined with In God We Trust. The cult of Trump is based in Christianity. So do we pop off a new religion to protect *unalienable* rights? Do two wrongs make a right?

@MamaLake I think the key here, which was mentioned in the original article, is that religion is a social technology. Technology can (and will) be used by whomever has power for whatever purposes.

But that same technology has also been used to resist oppression. Standing Rock was, first and foremost, a spiritual movement rooted in indigenous beliefs and prophecy. Religion used by colonists for colonization is bad, but religion (or at least "spirituality") is not inherently genocidal or colonial.