The Cult of the State

The Age of Enlightenment--considered in purely political terms--was itself merely the transition from one epoch of nationalist warfare, during which states still found it necessary to use religious institutions as instruments of power, to another epoch of still greater nationalist warfare, during which religious rationales had become obsolete, because the state had become its own cult, and power the only morality.

David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions, 86-87