Within the Abrahamic tradition men create religions, and women develop and sustain them within ritual settings. Religion stands on doctrine and ritual alike. Belief (myth and memory), canon (morality and ethics), hierarchy (priesthood and authority) were structured by men; but they could not sustain themselves amorphously. They needed daily repetition and cycles of initiation, and those repetitions and initiations were done at home, from within and out of the body of the family, and the body of the family was female. The standing of religion is therefore measured not by what men may believe but by what women are willing to practice.
We cannot, then, see the loss of religion as merely women deciding that ritual is no longer a possibility. We must ask how and why doctrine reached a place where it could cease to be followed by ritual at all, because before women leave praxis a shift in conditions, in the pre-emancipatory stage, must already have voided doctrine of its claim on praxis. Callum Brown showed that British Christianity did not fade since the Enlightenment but collapsed abruptly in the 1960s when women abandoned the domestic Christianity they carried; but the seventeenth to nineteenth century theorists must explain Brown, and Brown must explain why the ritual setting collapsed on its own.
The collapse of the ritual setting occurred when theologians allowed their religion to be infused into nationalistic politics without even identifying the inversion they themselves allowed to occur systematically in the Lockean, Rousseauian and Hegelian moments, later leading to competing economic and national frameworks.
When they lost the exclusivity of their doctrine in the realm of spirit and enabled it to speak in the language of the earthly Caesar (Especially after Hegel), they subjected women to a societal ritualistic reality that their own doctrine being inverted was now incompatible with.
Thus, the whole structure came to rest on a doctrine which loss theoretical exclusivity not in the moment of reformation, or church and state separation, but in the moment of enabling the infusion of it into a new national synthesis which occurred after the French revolution.
As a reaction to it. This new ritualistic framework was more pernicious from a religious perspective then the worshiping of the goddess of reason, for at least with the goddess of reason, it could still stand in opposition, and not ask for incorporation.
Once incorporation occurs, compromise deeper than different theological perspectives occurs, but a compromise with Caesar himself.
Once doctrine compromises with Caesar via incorporation as occured in Germany, and later in the United States, England, and throughout the fascist world, whatever the economic relations are, they are already critiqued from a materialistic political perspective, that only has a residue of any doctrine, and no ritualistic value of itself outside the national.
Thus, the women themselves, are pivoted into their political economic whims and away from the ritual.
This could have only occurred sue to a failure to create a language of religion and logic, as science, industry, and economics did.
Thus hurling religion into the only other realm of non-sacred discourse in which their concepts and words might still resonate. Politics, arts, and literature.
The moment doctrine loses control over ritual — that is, the moment the structures of religion and its deduced morality are shaken, are when religious ritual cannot be deduced any longer from a robust doctrine.
And women no longer devoted to ritual to preserve the structure of religion, but for their own sake, topple prevailing religion.
So it is not the liberation of woman but the loss of doctrine into national and imperial politics which collapsed the ritualistic moment, after which the release of sexuality and egalitarianism naturally ensues.
Secularization does not begin with men giving power to themselves rather than to the ritual-centred Church post Reformation.
Protestant secularization in fact begins at a different, decisive moment: when women are socially emancipated from the national or social commitment.
Until then there remained spaces under male control, the church, the state, science, the economy — the men who replaced the Church with their politics already retreated religion into modern doctrine, transferring sanctity from one institution to another that they headed. But those spaces were not fully secularized until the woman herself entered them with her mom ritualistic mindset, stemming from the man, who with the fall of nationalism, could no longer offer her any spiritual or collective doctrine-backed ritual at all.
Within liberal politics, once turned past the Mill and Priestley, moment, there is, by definition, no hierarchical justification.
Furthermore, once the national doctrinal and ritualistic moment had passed, the continued exclusion of women could no longer be justified by any civil ordinance.
This is the root where confessions part.
There are two secularized theologies: one as a national structure and one as a philosophical effort, and they fall differently on different ritual economies.
In the female ritual structures of Catholicism and Orthodoxy there is less need for a male doctrinal structure; ritual carries memory on its own.
The secularization attributed to Protestantism is precisely the pulling of the lines back toward doctrine and away from ritual, a religion that made itself doctrine-heavy and ritual-poor, so that when doctrine went political it had removed its only pillar.
The Catholic Church took the other path, and failed differently. It refused the nation in doctrine: the Syllabus of Errors and ultramontanism kept its claim to exclusivity, and it never became a state church. In practice it made deals with Caesar through the Lateran Treaty with Mussolini, the Reichskonkordat with Hitler, and the alliances with Franco and Salazar. Along the way its ideas were taken from it: corporatism became the economics of fascism, and Catholic social teaching became the program of Christian Democracy, both stripped of the theology that had grounded them. Toward science it did not merely do nothing; it shut the door. Aeterni Patris gave it a system of its own, neo-Thomism, but a deductive fortress rather than a scientific reading, and Pius X's anti-modernist oath crushed those who tried to build a bridge, from Loisy to the silencing of Teilhard de Chardin. The Church had the scientists, Mendel the monk who founded genetics and Lemaître the priest who proposed the Big Bang, yet it never turned their work into theology; it had science within its walls and no language for it. Both confessions thus failed at the same root, the absence of a language joining logic and ethics, but on top of it the Protestant failure was incorporation and the Catholic failure was the fortress. A doctrine that could defend itself but not create kept its ritual longer, while its ideas left through the windows as the door stayed locked. That is why the Catholic collapse comes later, in Ireland, Quebec and Poland, but comes all the same.
Russia is the test case, not the exception: Orthodox theology had spoken Caesar's language since Peter the Great, and religion survived anyway, because ritual density carried it without doctrine, and because under Soviet conditions there was no market substitute to draw the energy of ritual elsewhere, belonging without the option to consume.
From the same split come two economies: the Catholic ritual-collective produced collectivism, corporatism, Christian democracy, and anticlerical socialism as its inverted mirror, while the Protestant doctrinal-individual produced industrial liberal capitalism.
(These two streams of theology turned into nation / ideology , will collapse, and with them the theological residue will go through a watershed moment of being exposed to a non ritualistic home-space, which will than create either a return out of sentimentality and nostalgia, or exiting into new ritualistic praxis )
Each was a response to the moment before it, the hijacking of the religious by the political via the philosophical in the 1830s.
Indeed protestantism could have been infused into an economic structure only after a full national English realization, and also socialism could only occur in the Catholic countries, once nationalism was spread - paradoxically - by French nationalism. Thus weberiasniam , and Catholic -socialist critique, could only make sense via a national medium, which can contain a setting for the replacement from the theological to the economical.
Secularization of the mind entered the home through the theologically reduced doctrine of the nation long before the home, the woman, ever received a vote.
The mother instils in her domestic rituals a memory; this is religious education, the mother transmitting the text through praxis into ethics and meaning in memory, and that is what the state took when it imposed national schooling.
The same state the priests bowed to, took the children away from God in a more subtle way than the USSR, but from a ritualistic perspective, to the same result.
The British Education Act of 1870, the Ferry laws in France, Fichte's Prussian education are only examples.
Women left with rite and nothing to transmit beyond the reduced religious into the national, while losing normatively and legally the monopoly on memory.
Into that ritual moment, hurled into a formalized, centralizing duality of nation and God, the market offers a third option: consumption as a ritual that could expand beyond the home and affirm itself without checking against shifting hierarchical doctrines.
Those who saw the danger, Veblen and the moralists before him, could offer nothing in its place, because memory was no longer theirs — it was national designed by industry hurled by capital redeemed by consumption.
It was the woman who took the substitute and internalized it, and not by chance: Colin Campbell showed that modern consumerism grew out of emotional Protestant piety itself, from Pietism through Romanticism to the consumer's daydream. Female piety did not disappear; it changed object. The religious longing remained, the text was reshaped, the memory reframed, and the Protestant home, which had less ritual to offer than any other, let the commodity inherit the energy of ritual — though it could never inherit its bio-symbolic meaning.
The fall in church attendance across the West from the 1950s is the end of a journey from memory breeding to consumption in the realm of ritual, as much as it is the end of a journey in the realm of politics from collective idealism to individual materialism.
Why?
Once the national moment, doctrinal and ritual alike, had fallen, nothing remained to justify the woman's exclusion. In this sense Hitler is the consummator of secularization: what Hegel began as a philosophical movement, Hitler finished as a political one. The movement Hegel began was one that drove religion into politics with philosophical violence. That infusion was then absorbed into the national moment instead of the religious one, and out of it came the mad blood of class socialism and racial socialism (Nazism), as transmutations of an earlier theology. The clergy did not stop this; they let theology seep into nationalism, and when it came to collect via socialism, the clergy already sold it all to the national moment that either collapsed is a binding ideology in the West, or was put under a secular cloak in the east.
They had already sold their soul in the nineteenth century, choosing to go along with nationalism so long as it was not socialism, and with that their doctrine was ruined and no ritual was left to seep down into the home.
They did it because they had no foothold in science. They had nothing else to wager on; it was the only horse in the stable.
So when nationalism too was shattered by Hitler, after Hegel had violated it philosophically and the age of the great ideologies had penetrated it politically, culminating in Hitlerism, no binding doctrine remained.
Nothing contained a theology that could seep into the nation once more and exist as something the woman could be devoted to in the domestic space.
In this sense it was Hitler, and the liberal reaction to him via egalitarianism that chooses post doctorinial association, not feminism, who liberated the woman: not by intent, but by destroying the last structure that could still hold her in any collective ritualistic framework that can be infused to home and memory.
The last straw was that nothing was left to feed the woman that was not a function of shape or labour, consumable outside the home, let alone once she could work for it herself. Thus woman goes from producing life, to producing her own conditions, to consuming the world; and that is secularization: worship without substance to give the family to ritualize.
Women do not secularize. They are capable of producing different dimensions of ritual to fit male structures and of adapting their own functions to them, and within those spaces they can receive representation, but not necessarily power.
The moment they seek power of representation beyond ritual or beyond myth reproduction— that is, loss of control from the man's hands than sexual scarcity may become shaken. This shakiness is responded by a lack of man's will to sacrifice, and the woman's will to sacrifice herself contracts as well.
Thus we move from a Christian idea of love rooted in vertical (God) and horizontal (communal) frameworks, as Carol Quigley noticed, to an individualistic one driven by a greater pursuit of the romantic in order to recapture the sacred ritual now gone, but that falls short facing egalitarian economism so Central to post national Liberal capitalism and the post Soviet East alike.
Sacrifice between the sexes is the first model of all sacrifice: the man learned to sacrifice for what is under his control, the woman for what controls her, and from both was learned a mutual sacrifice for a higher order that can be reproduced.. And so, when the chain of doctrine and ritual between the sexes contracts, the meaning of sacrifice for God's sake loses its proportion too, and what remains is a religion unable to re-embody relations of money, power, control, order, fate and meaning between sexes.
Here the pincer closes. From above, a theology that refused to enter science gave up the link between logic and ethics, compromised with the political and surrendered to logic — in Locke as secularized theology, in Hegel as dialectic — and thereby handed the state enormous power with no ability to react soundly by exploring working relations with science.
The moment this became visible can be dated to the 1830s and 1840s: Heine's recognition that money had become the god of the age and Rothschild its prophet — money, prophecy and power in one house — in the same decade that Feuerbach and Hegel reached the European salons and Emerson brought forth transcendentalism. From below, that economic power changed the point of relation between men and women, and the changed relation returned as a secularizing force from the home only 100 years later after Hitler killed the spirit of nationalism as a viable ritual.
Between the two stood nationalism, and what it did was not reconciliation but normalization of secularized theology: it hijacked mythological memory, filled itself with female representations — apparently in order to postpone the inevitable that came with mechanization and the obsolescence of woman's essential role in the economic unit — and demanded no piety of women. Woman as nation, as homeland, as a class: ritual in place of the role that was lost. And when the woman returned home from industrialization she returned to a different space, one in which theology is political and not sacred; and the man, occupied with the political, no longer commands in his home, because the home, like her, is forfeit to the nation. As long as she was under the man's control the situation was given; once control was lost, representation did not save the structure, because representation without control is ritual without sacrifice. And whoever understands this today and seeks to rebel has no tools: he lives in a Catholic or Orthodox fantasy, in a play of symbols inside a field that is wholly secularized theology, and on the day the nation dies, when the fragments of the theology it carried are buried, all that will remain is ruins.
Attempts on the right to rebuild monarchy, elitism, or a Schmittian critical moment will not succeed until the right takes upon itself the real work: a critique of the moments of loss themselves — the part where the theological gave up on the scientific and went to the political. This is the moment at which Christianity itself could no longer defend itself, after the French Revolution and perhaps even before, and whose outcome became visible in the 1840s. That is the moment to be studied; attempts to reconstruct past structures without understanding their collapse will not help. Imposing the earlier structures that collapsed produces a language that lives in reaction and in struggle, not a language of creation, as the scientific and the religious languages were. Newton's inspiration came from Scripture, and Einstein saw in Spinoza's God a synoptic explanation. Bergson's experiment was perhaps the last to speak of morality from within an evolutionary field, and it too has been forgotten. The materialist-determinist language that national and socialist ideology absorbs into itself is what allows the religious spirit to be collapsed into political categories — and it is an absorption no church can stop as long as it is unable to contribute anything to science, and as long as consumption from outside is able to fill the reproductive and religious void; or, as Barak Hess said to me in response to these words, "when capital is channelled toward a state of abundance instead of a state of growth."
The single subject, which in Spinoza became the basic component of conatus and of the soul, moves through these same voids too: until it reaches the Lockean self, closes back after Freud into a sealed ego-sexual entity, and then opens again to a more critical thought in the cognitive currents of psychology that arrived after the fall of mechanistic behaviourism. Religion thus seeps into the paths of psychology, where it seeks to save us from the economic alienation that sustains it, into spaces of meaning; but it too, like the entire existential project, becomes a footnote, collapsing before the political and the economic, which have already drawn the sting from the theological.
The worship of matter has turned the soul into a broken vessel whose defining feature is that it is sick, as a system. Today, if you have a soul, it needs a psychologist.
