Too many people do not understand that government, organizations, hierarchies and religion are all very different things. The confusion is easy to explain, because they all grew up together and look like they are elements of each other. But European history has clarified the relations among those concepts. First is the confusion of organizations and religion.
Religion itself seems to be a natural human inquiry. Certain things are powerful and demand awe, but cannot be explained in any precise terms. If someone wants to speak of those things to other people, then the concepts require the use of metaphor. Anything more specific than that fails to communicate the essence of the "awesome" things. These are things which are known to exist, yet cannot be more precisely explained to another human being. If a word is a label that points at something which it represents, then religion is the study of things known to exist but which cannot be consistently labeled in a way that allows people to talk about them.
The urge to find religion may well be an outcome of the human ability to use elaborate language and develop narratives to explain things to each other. These narratives require an understanding of cause and effect. The narratives can be linked to each other, so the result of one cause and effect chain can lead to the cause of another cause and effect. There are two especially interesting things in this. First, these cause and effect chains are communicated between people in the form of stories, something normal human children learn to do between the ages of about 2 and 4. Second, the narrative chains themselves sometimes have gaps in the chain, leading to efforts to fill an understanding of those gaps. Such gaps clearly include the question of how humans got here in the first place, and what happens after a person dies. Every known religion attempts to answer these questions and others using myth and metaphor when more precise explanations are not possible.
Communicating these forms of understanding is a group activity. It has to be done in language and requires more than one person. Some people get better than others at such understanding. Groups of people facing these issues tend to organize.
This urge to organize is, like language, narrative and storytelling, a natural human action. The fact is that people seem to be genetically programmed to form into teams (A Brief History of the Mind - William H. Calvin p. 112.) This was enough for hunter-gatherers, but as Jared Diamond pointed out in his "Guns, Germs and Steel", when humans abandoned life as hunter-gatherers and started living as groups in towns, the new social arrangements required that hierarchy and a distinction between the aristocracy and everyone else be adopted.
Since people already formed groups outside the family to try to understand the religious impulse, then that same impulse could be used to justify hierarchies and status inequality in the newer groups we call towns. Religion provided a way of justifying the difference in status so that administrators were expected to take part of the crops of the farmers in order to live. Religion thus became conflated with the new social requirements of government. The frequent efforts by Kings to adopt the trappings of Gods demonstrated this conflation of government and religious organizations.
But just because religion can be used to justify hierarchies, aristocracies and social differences does not make its trappings (rituals, myths and sacred items) any more true in a religious sense than simply sitting next to a stream in the mountains and meditating as you listen to the water flow. Religion still was not government. They were two different functions which complemented each other, but they were not the same thing.
Towns also required the development of writing, and this new development was quickly adopted by the religious organizations. Writing is social memory, and much more consistent and permanent than stories, tales and narratives told by parents to children. Learning to write down the myths and metaphors that the organized religion was based on did not, however, especially sanctify the myths, sacred items or rituals. It merely made their social memory more permanent. Such written compilations of religious thought make up the oldest books known to man. Their age and the difficulty of learning to read and write was eased by making the written documents objects of obsession. An object of obsession can also be described a being sacred or holy.
Flags are often described as sacred for the same reason. They are at the very center of an organization and originally were critical to its continued existence.
The development of organized religion and its offshoot, government leads to attempts to turn religious metaphors into literal instructions that "God" said had to be followed. The urge was there. The narrative stories used to communicate religious ideas were followed obsessively, and then they were written down making them permanent and separating the stories from any connection to the immediate reality. This led to the confusion between what could be communicated by metaphor and what could be communicated literally and precisely.
It was clear that written records could be used to literally direct the actions of hydraulic engineers and traders. When an engineer writes down the words for "ditch," "brick," "dam,"or "Build," that can direct another persons actions. But writing down a word for God does not make it point consistently to whatever is meant when one person uses the word to another. Whatever is meant my the word "God" is still inexpressible in any human language - except through metaphor. Attempts to interpret the metaphors literally do not increase their reliability as guidance to how to react to reality. But this still only mattered to the individuals central to the religious hierarchy. No one else had access to the Bible or the ability to read it at least not in significant numbers. Government and religious organizations continued to overlap.
It was the development of printing and the printed Bible that forced the separation of government from the hierarchical church. The breakaway of Protestant Christianity from the more tradition-based governance of the Roman Catholic Church permitted a separation of many governments from the control of Catholicism. The Protestants, wanting to avoid the requirements of traditional Catholic hierarchy as the source of religion, abandoned tradition as being too imprecise. Instead the Protestant churches adopted a direct reference to the written word as found in the new and consistent Bibles they distributed so widely.
Since the Bible provided a consistent record of the words used by earlier religious leaders to explain God and religion, it appeared to be more precise than human tradition could ever be. So much of European religion became based on the 'more precise' unchanging Bible rather than the tradition that has always been the major basis for the Roman Catholic Church. The political leaders like Henry VIII of England were delighted to take advantage of this weakening of the authority of the Catholic hierarchy.
The problem that religion is in fact a study of a subject which is beyond literal words can be easily overlooked when the words are bound up and printed in a single official book. Before the printing press, every Bible was handwritten. Bart Ehrman in his book "Misquoting Jesus" points out that there is no original copy of any document in the Bible, and there are more errors in the various handwritten copies of the Bible than there are words in the book itself. Having a committee judge which of the many flawed documents does not provide any assurance that the final results of their deliberations are any more accurate than the choices which did not make the cut. But printing the Bible does make it appear concise and reliable. But the process of printing Bibles was not something that happened in a vacuum.
Writing effected a lot more than just religion. Written documents allowed the existence of larger government with a much more effective ability to collect taxes, while written records of wars and armies allowed larger and more effective armies to exist. Larger armies required larger governments with more effective methods of taxation if they were to survive the wars. One extremely significant problem with that is that bigger governments with more effective armies would often fight over differences in religion.
The European Religious Wars established that having a government that enforced the literal application of religious metaphors created a lot of death and destruction and little else. Worse, the mixture of large organized religion with large government caused both bad government and bad religion.
Religious fundamentalists and a lot of Evangelists don't want to accept the separation of religion and government because it limits their ability to force others to believe in religion as they do. Since they know THE ANSWER and all others must therefore be wring, what else is government for except to enforce acceptance of the revealed Truth? But if religions are to control government, the first issue to be established is the political one of which religious denomination will dominate government. But even within religions the organization itself can become a problem.
The religion, as exemplified by metaphor and personal experience , is not the same thing as the organization that works to spread a specific brand of religion. Power politics is frequently confused with religion. The Pope's recent declaration that only Roman Catholicism is Christianity is a power play intended to maintain his position at the top of the hierarchy. It is not a religious teaching. It is a symptom of the confusion of religion and government. This is a very common confusion. There is no major religion in the world that was not adopted and spread by an aggressive government early in development of it's organization. Separating religion itself from the organizations that have been used to spread it is not a skill widely practiced.
This is why I contend that most of the flaws so frequently found in the public expression of religion come from confusing religious organizations with government and from trying to turn the metaphors of religion into literal instructions that must be followed by everyone. I'm still not going to accept anyone who tries to convert me to their religion.
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