Note on Christianity and politics (within and/or beyond its horizon)
Protestantism is an ethos dominant in some modern societies that upholds the absolute power of the state (that is, of all official authority), though without ever having established this proposition, which is never questioned; and which, in consequence, directs all social criticism at individuals, presumed liable to act wrongly, though with all ethical notions identified with this principle upholding established authority. Historically, this attitude was facilitated by an interpretation of the Christian religion, which was superficially Hebraizing, but that elevated faith as absolute over the moral value of action. Thus, it favors a rightness of attitude, which, unsurprisingly, reduces ultimately to contentment with things as they are.
Protestants divide into types according to their attitudes towards "oppression" or systemic injustice. The dominant group believes that it may be real but as such only matters as a private experience, and since all that really matters is what you do, it doesn't really matter. People who think this might say: "Of course our institutions are oppressive! Life is hard." They represent what might seem wrong because oppressive as a general feature of the difficulties of life. Thus, the injustice in society is no differently treated from misfortunes due to nature.
A second type is constantly complaining about injustice. It just happens that the only affect of this is on how they treat other people. This surely helps explain why in America the (politically) radical Protestant groups in Europe became apolitical. For instance, most American Baptists are right-wing, especially on "cultural" issues having to do with sexuality or obedience to authority generally. They have never heard of the German Peasants' War of Thomas Münzer and the Anabaptists.
(If they are black, they are usually left-wing on social issues affecting their group, but otherwise are effectively on the right, even if this is not usually said of them or believed by them; they vote liberal but are deeply authoritarian in their interpersonal practices, especially when institutional authority is involved; provided they are included in its exercise, they almost always uphold this without question or hesitation, none being permitted.). That's one possibility among others, politically all problematic. (And it is today political issues that are rightly recognized as the greatest problems, at least when broadly conceived. The black church is heir to a dialectical relationship to the white slave church, which was all about obedience to authority.)
The Protestant groups in Great Britain that played a role in the English Revolution have lost all political sense in their American afterlife. They have no politics to speak of, or they do but it is an ideological emphasis that politically is but a remnant; basically, they just believe in their morality. Their politically salient beliefs are ideological ones that tie them to political traditions that are normal in this country, and generally quite conservative, though allowing for rebellion in the interests of their values and perceived self-interest; hence, the Jan. 6 protest, and for that matter, the American black-hating Klan itself, which is historically a militant white Protestantism (they dislike both Jews and Catholics).
A counter-movement within Protestantism historically did allow and even encourage opposition to injustices at the level of institutions or something like them (for instance, social practices or ideologies). Though in practice the facility with moral outrage ultimately reduced to a criticism of individuals.
All peculiarities of individual persons -- anything that can be noticed -- are culpable in this scheme. "Protestantism" in the above described sense was perhaps not necessary to make possible the barbarism of the last century, but it certainly could prove quite useful in its support.
The most curious claim of the Protestants is surely that their "faith" in established authority (and the consideration of its importance which allowed sometimes for opposition) was that it was a form of Christianity. One only needs to look at American "evangelical" Protestant Christians to see how peculiar this is. Loving your neighbor as yourself never seemed to have much purchase on people's thinking when compared to the obsessions with propriety and putatively universal or otherwise absolute rules of social order. In general, of Christianity, one must say, historically anyway, what Ghandi said of Western civilization: it might have been a terrific idea.
The New Age spiritualities in American cultural life and institutions (for instance, Buddhism is now semi-officially authorized as part of American "mental health" practices) must be considered a form and variant of American Protestantism, perhaps one that takes it further into paganism, given all of the enchanted fantasies with magical notions that prevail in it.
The examples that Protestantism as an intellectual and cultural force is independent of properly Christian motifs -- though it may allow for them, or for "Jewish" ones, or others. It really is constructed around the state and politics, and a faith or covenantal commitment, that goes far indeed towards affirming the ethos of a business society with an authoritarian, undemocratic, state. This is not incompatible at all with an "interior" liberty of the Protestant kind, as in Kant, for whom this ultimately Stoical notion (also made much of in contemporary "therapies") of inward freedom in the face of outward oppression. For such people, the divine is just an event in their minds; society and the world can be damned and go to hell, which increasingly, of course, seems a real possibility.
"Spirituality" must be debunked. It doesn't mean the presence of God. Originally, "spirit" meant breath; hence, Hindu and Buddhist meditation, which is anti-intellectual but based on the primacy of one's own consciousness. The term came to mean "mind" in modern European languages other than English (as it still does in French and German, and in philosophy in those languages). Minding your own business, literally what spirituality becomes in a business society, could be minding it with an ethos that is either highly concerned with social justice and love of other people, or quite exclusive of these things, in fact. There certainly can be and is, for example, a fascist, even a Nazi spirituality. Consider this before running to get more helpings of it.
The Catholic church historically faced a similar problem. Christianity from its outset had a curiously ambivalent attitude towards the state, and its rapid transformation into a universal religion for gentiles destined it to assimilate Jewish and imperial Roman law and government and regard them both ambivalently. It was, like Islam after it, a religion of empire, and a religion of faith partly for that reason: its spread was a effectively kind of conquest (Islam did this literally through a series of wars of conquest); it surely was destined to challenge the Roman empire's state religion, which was already much more of a governmental apparatus than its Greek parallel. Christianity sees God as a father and its original rendering interior and psychological of the then-contemporary Jewish opposition to the empire may have destined it to a comfortable accommodation with it as official religion. The Protestant Reformation was the ultimate outcome of a long set of struggles involving the Roman church's claim to secular authority and its competition with the secular authorities.
The problem with Christianity was not its assimilation of pagan influences so much as its ambivalent relationship to, and thus dependence on, worldly political authority. Logically, the complex relationship that was supposedly resolved at an ideological level in the complex relationship of the trinity that included both father and son, meant that there could be a Christianity of filial rebellion or paternal domination or both. And in many ways Christianity was and is both: consecrating the father-son relationship with an internal antagonism that involves in some interpretations the actual enduring of the death of the divinity, it became the ultimate Oedipal religion. God is a father in Christianity in a way that it cannot be in Judaism or the similarly purer monotheism of Islam. Christianity was not only patriarchal, it modeled forms of anti-patriarchy, and that is why even contemporary "feminist" themes are part of its legacy.
What feminism overlooks is that young women may rebel in much the same ways as young men; that a matriarchy is not patriarchy's alternative but its complement, as the long history and great success of Mariolatry (worship of a divine Mother, whose putative virginity is surely, in light of Protestantism and modern attitudes towards sexuality, a revisable detail) suggests; and that the figure of triumphant revolt is inevitably a return of the father, or if you prefer, of a divine "family" whose dominion over its imperial subjects has the governmentality of a familial and thus intimate authority.
Thus the problem with Christianity in all its forms is the state. It is not a paganism if that means one that involves forms of mythological figures of identification dividing up divine powers in a less than ethically robust manner as in monotheism, let alone forms of magic rather than their scientific variant as technology, which is magic rendered more credible because of science's claim to both governmentality and truth. But Christianity does remain pagan in a deeper sense that is also a legacy of the Roman empire. For what made it endure was its often cynical yet singularly devoted commitment to the ultimate value of the authority of the state.
This has everything to do with the fact that Christianity lacked the internal resources to effectively overcome its greatest internal historical challenge, which was the threat of Gnosticism and Manichaeanism. If only to maintain its secular political authority, the church had to combat these as heresies, as it certainly did. But aspects of both tendencies are intrinsic to it, and much more than they are to Jewish Kabbalistic mysticism, though it certainly fed on Gnosticism and neo-Platonism, which shared some of its traits. In fact, it seems monotheism as such is persistently most threatened by the problem of evil, the finding that it is inevitable, the fear that it is fundamental, and the need to chart some means of its complete overcoming; it is tempting to think that the idea of evil itself is the problem, perhaps as a form of the nihilism (and the possibility of its rejection) that has been traced in Western philosophical thought as far back as Parmenides. For the idea of evil says: at the heart of Being is something negative, bad, that may very well threaten it. If Manichaeanism is simply moral dualism, then the Biblical prophets are as responsible for articulating it as any use of the psychology of Melanie Klein might attribute to a psychological archaism located in a universal infancy. It is far from clear that any psychology is first philosophy, especially when it is recognized how dependent it always is on philosophical motifs and the ethical meaning of its metaphors, articulated as cosmological principles or otherwise. Anyone looking for an alternative to dominant Western models and their dependence on a certain thinking of war might well be better off to look to Chinese thought or to search out "primitive cultures" and perhaps the more pacific among them. In Western traditions, whatever ails us seems also to be the source from which we find any possible cure.
If there were a real alternative, it would be some form of anarchism, perhaps. Though the way in which that possibility is understood in Jewish and Christianity redemptive political traditions is perhaps less than fully reassuring, either for our ability to escape its logic, or the salutary character of implementing it, implementation being a profoundly governmental figure. Is the "communism" of some of the early Christians (for instance, as described in the Acts of the Apostles) and the antinomianism that may go with it the, or an, alternative? I don't know anyone who appreciates the benefits of modern culture, including its massively universal opportunities connected via technology to forms of literacy, who wants to live on a collective farm, even if democratically governed. Not even the founders of this country, such as the Federalists, wanted that.