Religion should be understood through the lenses of dogma and crusader idealogy. It should be seen as a mechanistic thing, encompassing society, culture, economics, and politics, *before* faith. The motto should be, for anyone serious about faith *all within the faith, nothing and no-one outside it. As it is in heaven, so be it on earth.* Fanatacism creates soldiers, both of the social variety (necessary for 'housekeeping', aka ostracism of the unfit, and soldiers in the sense that people fear to attack the faith.) Without which, faith is suppressed. The far future, assuming humanity doesn't war itself back into the stone age, will either be a completely atheistic bureaucracy, or an utterly theocratic aristocracy. These are the only two models (totalitarianism of the stalinist, or papist variety) that have been shown to work over the span of 1500-2000 years for sustaining empires. And there can be no doubt that if globalism is imperialism, that they must resort to either oppressive atheism, or suffocating fatwa-like rulership. Republics and democracies do not scale to billions of people.