Over the past few decades, the number of Americans who identify as religiously unaffiliated—often referred to as “nones”—has grown rapidly. In the 1970s, only about 5% of Americans fell into this category. Today, that number exceeds 25%. Scholars have debated whether this change simply reflects a general decline in belief, or whether it signals something more complex. The research team wanted to explore the deeper forces at play: Why are people leaving institutional religion? What are they replacing it with? And how are their personal values shaping that process?
Not at first, but the people in the organization who want that will rise to the top due to ruthlessness.
Especially because the already established religions in the area will try to crush the new one, and that persecution makes that concentration of power a necessity to fight back. Which is a reason even dominant religions still claim they’re being persecuted.
It’s not just a religious issue, it’s just sociology in general. Humans evolved for groups of like 250 people, so all our gut instincts are shit when scaled up to millions of people. To compensate we fall back to labels and generalizations, and nuance goes out the window.
Exploiting all that makes it easy to move up in any power structure, so on a long enough timeline the majority of people in charge are going to be willing to do anything to increase their organization’s power, because that increases their personal power.