How religion has been wielded as a sword and a shield, turning faith into fuel for conquest, colonization, and control...and why equality has always been its greatest threat.

Religion has always had two faces. On one side, a private faith that heals, guides, and gives meaning to lives lived in difficulty and wonder. On the other, a weapon sharpened by kings, generals, and politicians, wielded not to save souls but to secure land, labor, and loyalty. The pattern is old enough to be mistaken for destiny. Demonize a group. Call them cursed, dangerous, foreign. Convince the faithful that God Himself demands their removal. Then offer treasure on earth for the rulers and treasure in heaven for the poor who sacrifice themselves in service of the plan. It is less about worship than about obedience, and less about salvation than about control.

The fallacy has always been hiding in plain sight. Empires knew they could not build armies out of the wealthy few, so they conscripted belief. If the masses can be persuaded that conquest is holy, they will carry the sword, build the ships, and march under the banner without ever seeing the gold that flows into someone else’s treasury. From the Crusades to the colonization of the Americas to the enslavement of Africans, the script has not changed. The language of God is borrowed, twisted, and set loose on people desperate for meaning, safety, or purpose. And each time, the blood spilled in the name of heaven watered the wealth of those who sat above the battlefield.

Borders were never divine. They were drawn by men who measured land with rulers and rifles, carving maps that suited their profits. Yet entire generations are taught that crossing an invisible line makes someone illegal, unworthy, even cursed. The rhetoric is dressed in religious clothes. Politicians invoke God and country as if the two are the same, as if the divine is most concerned with paperwork and fences. The truth is simpler and uglier. Borders are tools. They create exploitable labor pools, they divide the vulnerable against each other, and they feed a politics of fear that guarantees votes for those who promise to keep the “outsiders” out. Faith is pressed into service to sanctify the lie, to soothe consciences while families are torn apart at checkpoints and children are locked in cages.

The American version of this strategy is hardly new. Colonization of this land was framed as manifest destiny, a divine right to take what was never freely offered. Enslavement was justified with twisted scripture, preaching that Africans were destined to serve. Segregation was defended from pulpits as the natural order. Today, authoritarian strongmen wrap themselves in crosses and flags, promising God’s plan will be fulfilled if only the right people are silenced, deported, or erased. The choreography is seamless because it has been rehearsed for centuries. And sometimes the performance is literal. Men in tailored Sunday suits cosplay Christ’s crucifixion by dragging a stage-prop cross—complete with wheels at the base for easier transport—down the center aisle of a megachurch or stadium, while thousands applaud their devotion. Theatrics stand in for theology, and accolades for faith become the currency of power.

It is not religion itself that is the enemy. Faith has built communities, fueled abolition, and sustained people through unspeakable loss. What must be confronted is the way belief is conscripted into empire’s service, again and again, without enough people asking the most basic questions. If God is love, why does His plan always seem to require someone else’s chains? If faith is supposed to free, why does it so often appear at the edge of a sword or the barrel of a gun? If belief is sacred, why is it most often invoked to protect power and property, not people?

The strategy never changes. Demonize an enemy, promise salvation later, and send the faithful into the fire. Sometimes the promise is earthly treasure, land or status for those who fight. More often the promise is deferred, a heaven reserved for those who endure hunger, poverty, or persecution without complaint. The cruelty of this bargain is not an accident. It is the design. Because what terrifies empire most is not heresy. It is equality.

Equality threatens every order built on hierarchy. It dismantles the fantasy that some are born to rule while others are born to obey. Authoritarian faith does not only fear heretics. It fears women who live as free, unowned, unbowed. Entire traditions are written to keep women confined to childbearing or servitude, and entire theologies constructed to make that confinement feel divine. To acknowledge women’s full humanity would be to expose the lie that power belongs to men by default. And without that lie, the whole structure begins to shake.

What keeps it steady is complicity. In every age, there are groups who learn they can protect themselves — or even profit — if they simply go along with what the powerful demand. The promise is always the same: obedience will be rewarded, dissent punished. Some are granted scraps of privilege to ensure their silence. Some are offered a place nearer to power so long as they defend it. This is how hierarchies endure. Not only through violence, but through bargains that convince ordinary people it is safer to side with cruelty than to risk equality.

And cruelty always needs a target. The machinery runs on othering. Pick a group, mark them as cursed, sinful, dangerous, un-American. Then make their destruction a holy task. It has never mattered who the scapegoat is — Black people, queer people, atheists, immigrants — what matters is that the faithful have someone to fear and someone to hate. That is how obedience is forged, how violence is excused, how power keeps its grip.

In America, the logic metastasized into something even stranger. Faith became fused with firepower. “God, Guns, and Country” became a creed, as if the Bible itself had commanded the right to bear arms. The gun is not in scripture, but it has become a sacrament. An instrument of death reframed as divine protection. A weapon held up in pulpits as proof of righteousness. In this theology, the gun is not just a tool. It is a portable altar, a symbol of belonging, consecrated by fear and baptized in patriotism.

This is the genius and the insidiousness of the gospel of greed. It convinces people that obedience is righteousness, that cruelty is holy, that borders and walls are sacred. It persuades the vulnerable to fight wars that do not serve them, to vote for leaders who will rob them, to defend systems that will never defend them back. And all the while, wealth rises quietly in the background, built on the sacrifices of those who believed they were serving God’s plan when they were only serving someone else’s empire.

The common-sense questions remain. Who benefits from this? Who profits when neighbors are turned against each other over a line on a map? Who gets richer when women are silenced, when workers are cheap, when wars are justified as divine? The answer is always the same. The few at the top. The men with the crowns, the titles, the corporations, the guns.

What we are up against is not new. It has been called crusade, conquest, colonization, slavery, apartheid. We could call it authoritarianism, but that feels too polite, too abstract. What it has always been is a gospel of greed, dressed in robes, carrying a cross, demanding obedience while it builds empire on the backs of the faithful. To see it clearly is not to abandon faith. It is to rescue it from those who use God as a mask for their own hunger.

We live in a world we must share with each other. No border, no wall, no sermon can change that fact. If belief is to mean anything, it cannot continue to be conscripted into service of conquest. It cannot continue to be weaponized to justify cruelty. It cannot continue to demand that some lives be diminished so others can rise. What terrifies empire is equality. And what terrifies those who live on its spoils is the day we all decide to ask the obvious questions out loud. 

Tasha Monroe

Founder, Simply Edyn & Co.

Writer & Editor, The Commons Dispatch