Secularized Worship

On how the pattern of Revelation—systems demanding total allegiance and reshaping their servants—reappears across political ideologies and corporate cultures

Related:

• The Battlefield of Attention: What the Ancients Knew About Worship and Power

• The Alchemy of Power: How Liberation Becomes Administration

• From Galilee to Empire

I. The Pattern to Watch For

The Book of Revelation identified a mechanism: institutional power tends toward totality. It begins by asking for participation. It ends by demanding worship. The beast doesn’t announce itself as a beast—it appears as order, prosperity, civilization. Babylon doesn’t market herself as a trafficker in human souls—she appears as luxury, opportunity, the good life.

The mark isn’t branded on the unwilling. It’s accepted by those who want to buy and sell, who want access, who want to be part of the system that distributes goods and status. The coercion comes later, once the system has become necessary. By then, refusing the mark means economic death.

And the worshippers don’t remain unchanged by their worship. They become like what they serve. They take its shape. The container shapes the water.

This pattern doesn’t require emperors or dragons to manifest. It appears wherever systems grow powerful enough to demand everything—your time, your loyalty, your identity, your inner life—and subtle enough to make that demand feel like opportunity rather than coercion.

Three case studies. Same mechanism. Different costumes.

II. The Father of Nations: Stalin’s Secular Religion

The Soviet Union presents the clearest modern example of Revelation’s pattern because it was so explicit. Having officially abolished religion, the Bolsheviks discovered they had not abolished the human capacity for worship—only redirected it.

Stalin’s cult of personality systematically appropriated religious forms while emptying them of transcendent content. The Soviet press bestowed titles that would have been familiar to any biblical reader: “Father of Nations,” “Brilliant Genius of Humanity,” “Great Architect of Communism,” “Gardener of Human Happiness.” The title “Father” was deliberately chosen to displace the Orthodox priests, also called “Father,” suggesting that Stalin and the Church were competing for the same psychological territory—and that the state intended to win.

The propagandists understood what they were doing. They adopted the Christian traditions of procession and devotion to icons through the use of Stalinist parades and effigies. Giant portraits carried through streets functioned exactly as religious icons had functioned: as focal points for collective devotion, objects that made the absent leader present. Private homes developed “Stalin rooms” featuring his portrait—domestic shrines for the new god.

Consider this hymn by the poet A.V. Avidenko, representative of the genre:

“Thank you, Stalin. Thank you because I am joyful. Thank you because I am well... Centuries will pass, and the generations still to come will regard us as the happiest of mortals, as the most fortunate of men, because we lived in the century of centuries, because we were privileged to see Stalin, our inspired leader... Everything belongs to thee, chief of our great country. And when the woman I love presents me with a child the first word it shall utter will be: Stalin.”

This is worship. Not worship-like, not quasi-religious, not metaphorically devotional—worship. The structure is liturgical. The emotional register is ecstatic. The imagery places Stalin at the center of all meaning: joy, health, fortune, love, birth, the first words of children. Everything belongs to him. Everything flows from him.

By the late 1930s, people would jump out of their seats to stand up whenever Stalin’s name was uttered in public meetings. Nikita Khrushchev later described this as “a sort of physical culture we all engaged in.” The description is telling—it had become bodily, automatic, trained into the nervous system. The worshippers had been reshaped.

The mark, in this case, was ideological conformity visibly displayed. But the dynamic was the same as Revelation described: worship demanded, participation in the system contingent on compliance, and those who complied gradually taking on the character of what they served. A system built on terror produced terrified people who perpetuated terror. A system built on lies produced people who could no longer distinguish truth. A system built on the surveillance of inner life produced people who surveilled themselves.

The confession extracted under duress doesn’t purify the confessor. It breaks something. And the one who watches his neighbor confess learns to suspect his own thoughts. The worship of the lie makes liars of the worshippers.

III. The Struggle Session: Mao and the War on the Private Mind

If Stalin’s cult appropriated religious devotion, Mao’s Cultural Revolution appropriated religious confession—and weaponized it.

The struggle session (pīdòu dàhuì) was a public ritual of forced confession and humiliation. The accused would be surrounded by a mob, forced to wear a dunce cap or placard of denunciation, and subjected to hours or days of screaming, spitting, beating, and demands for confession. The purpose was not primarily to punish past crimes but to break down the self and rebuild it according to revolutionary specifications.

The mechanism was explicitly described. Mao compared thought-policing to “a surgeon who saves a patient by removing an infected appendix.” The infected appendix was any thought, loyalty, or identity that existed independent of the Party. The goal was to achieve what observers called “exercising control over the spirit”—total colonization of the inner life.

What made struggle sessions particularly devastating was the requirement that family members, friends, and colleagues participate in the denunciation. Wives were incited to denounce husbands. Children were required to report on parents. Neighbors joined the mob to avoid becoming its next target. The sessions didn’t just punish individuals—they systematically destroyed the social bonds that might support any identity other than Party membership.

The poet Shao Yanxiang called the letters of self-confession that emerged from this system “a first-person struggle session.” Even Deng Xiaoping, who would later repudiate the Cultural Revolution, wrote to Mao in 1972:

“I have made a great many errors... The root of my errors is the fact that my bourgeois worldview has not been utterly eradicated, and the fact that I have become estranged from the masses and the truth.”

The confession ritual reached deep into childhood. Schoolchildren wrote confessions to their teachers for minor infractions—a practice so pervasive it became, in one scholar’s phrase, “the national route to literacy.” You learned to read and write by confessing your thought-crimes.

Here is the pattern of Revelation at its most explicit:

The mark on the forehead and hand. The Cultural Revolution demanded that devotion appear both in thought (forehead) and action (hand). Private disagreement was as criminal as public dissent. You could be denounced for your facial expression during a meeting. The inner life itself was under jurisdiction.

Economic participation contingent on compliance. Those denounced lost their jobs, their housing, their children’s access to education. The “class enemy” was expelled from the system of goods and status. You could not buy or sell—metaphorically and literally—without demonstrating ideological purity.

The worshippers becoming like what they worship. The millions who participated in struggle sessions—as denouncers rather than denounced—were not unchanged by the experience. They learned to suspect everyone, including themselves. They learned to perform belief regardless of what they actually thought. They learned that survival required a kind of perpetual self-surveillance. The system of mandatory confession produced people who confessed even their private thoughts to themselves, finding them guilty.

Nearly 125 million Chinese were either killed or “struggled against” during the Cultural Revolution. But the deeper damage was to the social fabric—the destruction of trust, the breaking of families, the colonization of consciousness. A generation learned that the Party was omnipresent, that no thought was truly private, that even love and loyalty were subject to political revision.

The three-body problem of political physics: you cannot predict your own trajectory because everyone around you is also being pulled by the same impossible forces, and the system produces chaos by design.

IV. The Leadership Principles: Corporate Capture in Soft Focus

Totalitarian regimes are instructive because they’re explicit. They announce their intentions. They make their mechanisms visible through sheer intensity.

Corporate cultures operate the same mechanisms in softer focus. The demands are gentler, the consequences less violent, the participation more voluntary—at least initially. But the pattern persists: systems asking for compliance, then loyalty, then identity; access contingent on conformity; and worshippers gradually reshaped by what they serve.

Amazon’s Leadership Principles offer a useful case study because they’re so well-documented and so explicitly intended to shape employees rather than merely direct them.

The company has 16 principles, including:

• Customer Obsession: Leaders start with the customer and work backwards.

• Ownership: Leaders are owners. They think long-term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company.

• Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit: Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.

• Bias for Action: Speed matters in business.

• Frugality: Accomplish more with less.

On paper, these sound like reasonable business principles. In practice, they function as a comprehensive system for identity formation.

The principles are not merely guidelines for behavior—they’re the vocabulary in which employees must describe themselves. Every interview, every performance review, every promotion decision requires demonstrating adherence to the principles through specific stories using the STAR framework (Situation, Task, Action, Result). The employees who advance are those who can narrate their entire professional existence in this vocabulary.

A Fortune investigation found that the principles function like “a way of life that employees are judged on before they are even hired, steeped in from the moment they join, and scrupulously followed thereafter with the devotion of religious converts.“

The article quotes employees describing how the principles can become instruments of control rather than guidance. “Disagree and commit” was intended to prevent groupthink during planning while ensuring unity during execution. In practice, employees reported, it became “a cudgel to quash any level of pushback.” As one former manager put it: “The joke by the time I left was if you didn’t like something, you could disagree and commit or disagree and quit.”

Here’s the mechanism:

The mark on forehead and hand. Success at Amazon requires not just acting according to the principles but thinking according to them. The STAR framework demands that employees internalize the principles so thoroughly that they can produce stories demonstrating their adherence on demand. The principles don’t just shape what you do—they shape how you narrate your own experience, which gradually shapes how you experience it.

Economic participation contingent on compliance. Employees who fail to demonstrate the principles don’t get promoted. Those who visibly dissent get managed out. The system doesn’t need to threaten violence—it controls access to status, income, and career advancement. In an economy where Amazon-scale employment represents a significant portion of available opportunities, that control is substantial.

Transformation of the worshipper. Employees describe absorbing the principles until they become automatic, applying them not just at work but in personal decisions. The vocabulary becomes their vocabulary. The values become their values. They cannot think about problems without thinking in Amazon categories. They become the thing they serve.

The difference between Amazon and the Cultural Revolution is, of course, enormous. No one is beaten. No one is killed. Employees can leave—though “disagree and quit” suggests the real limits of that freedom when you’ve been reshaped to fit a system you now depend on.

But the mechanism is structurally similar. A comprehensive system of formation. Conformity tied to access. Identity gradually absorbed into institutional vocabulary. The worshippers taking the shape of what they worship.

V. What the Pattern Reveals

Each case study shows the same progression:

Stage 1: Participation. Join the system. Learn its rules. Understand what it rewards.

Stage 2: Compliance. Act according to the system’s expectations. Demonstrate loyalty through performance.

Stage 3: Formation. Begin to think in the system’s categories. Its vocabulary becomes your vocabulary. Its values become your values.

Stage 4: Identity. You cannot distinguish yourself from your role. The system hasn’t just shaped your behavior—it has become the lens through which you see everything, including yourself.

Stage 5: Propagation. You now enforce the system on others. You become an agent of formation, teaching newcomers the vocabulary, evaluating their conformity, rewarding those who take the shape and punishing (or ignoring) those who don’t.

The brilliance of Revelation’s symbolic vocabulary is that it names this progression without being limited to any single historical manifestation. “Babylon” is not Rome alone—it’s any system that intoxicates through luxury and traffics in human souls. “The beast” is not any single empire—it’s whatever political power demands worship and kills those who refuse. “The mark” is not a specific technology—it’s whatever separates those who can participate from those who cannot, based on their demonstrated allegiance.

And the central insight holds across every case: you become what you worship.

Serve a system built on lies, and lying becomes natural to you.

Serve a system built on denunciation, and you learn to suspect everyone, including yourself.

Serve a system built on “disagree and commit,” and you learn to silence your disagreement once the decision is made—first outwardly, then inwardly.

The container shapes the water.

VI. The Difficulty of Seeing the Water

What makes these systems so effective is that they feel natural from inside. The fish doesn’t know it’s in water. The devotee of Stalin genuinely experiences gratitude. The Red Guard genuinely believes they’re purifying society. The Amazon employee genuinely values customer obsession.

This is not to say that all systems are equally bad, or that we can escape systems entirely. We are social creatures who live in institutions. The question is not whether we’ll be shaped but by what—and whether we can see the shaping while it’s happening.

The ancient Hebrews had a technology for this: the Sabbath. One day in seven, you stop participating in the system. You stop buying and selling. You stop producing and consuming. You remember that you are not your role, not your productivity, not your place in the economy. You practice being something other than what the system makes of you.

The early Christians had another technology: worship of a God who could not be captured by any empire. “My kingdom is not of this world.” To worship the Lamb who was slain was to have an identity that no emperor could kill, because it had already passed through death. The mark of Christ couldn’t be removed by removing you from the economy—it was internal, invisible, and therefore beyond the reach of any beast’s administration.

These technologies work because they create points of resistance to total capture. They maintain something in the self that isn’t formed by the dominant system. They keep open a gap between identity and role, between the soul and its institutional shape.

Without such technologies, the capture proceeds without interruption. The system asks for a little more. Then a little more. Then everything. And by the time it’s asking for everything, you can no longer imagine refusing—because the part of you that would have refused has already been reshaped.

VII. The Question Revelation Asks

Revelation doesn’t primarily ask: What will happen?

It asks: Who will you serve when it costs you everything?

The people who first read this text knew the cost. They lived in a world where refusing to offer incense to the emperor’s image meant losing your business, your position, your life. They knew that genuine Christians “cannot be induced” to curse Christ—and that this inability carried a price.

The text’s wild imagery was designed to strengthen them for that choice. To reveal the beast beneath the benefactor. To show that Babylon’s wine, however sweet, ends in slavery. To make visible the claim that every system makes on its participants: Worship me, and I will give you access.

The claim is always the same. The costumes vary.

What the ancients knew—and what modern case studies confirm—is that the choice of worship is the choice of formation. Give your attention, your allegiance, your daily practice to a system, and that system will shape you. You will become like what you serve.

This isn’t mysticism. It’s observation. The Stalinist becomes suspicious. The Red Guard learns to denounce. The corporate climber thinks in corporate categories. The worshipper takes the shape of the worshipped.

“Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them.”

The only protection is to worship something that can’t be captured—something beyond the reach of any economy, any empire, any institutional demand. Something that shapes you toward freedom rather than toward service of the shaping system itself.

The Lamb who was slain, standing.

The kingdom that is not of this world.

The water we’re swimming in.

Choose your worship carefully. You will become what you behold.