There is a recurring historical observation that civilizations in decline are made up of societies whose religiosity have undergone a concurrent decay. Yes all fine and well, but a couple of caveats. We can acknowledge the vast complexity of religiosity and the many forms that it is expressed in throughout time and within a given society. But within the multitude we typically associate with "civilization" - the teeming expansionary mass of a procession of waxing and waning empires - the religious fervor that draws its vitality from a luminous awareness and reverence for the entire living field tends to be taken up - for a plethora of reasons both essential and pragmatic - to serve a political and economic machinery that is largely exclusionary and inflationary, which is ultimately in a bid to displace that very living field supposedly revered.
If your religious vision is an exclusionary and even genocidal one, then it doesn't matter how sublimely uniting your vision is; dissolution is baked in from the start. You've established a pathway to salvation - which is, ostensibly, unity with creation - and then set the conditions for that pathway to violently move away from you with every step towards it. The decay of religiosity is inevitable if you've declared war on the vast majority of creation.
To be generous here, it really must be pretty enthralling to be able to violently vanquish your enemies and completely wipe out everything that opposes your nature, and then to preside over the unfolding splendor of your provincial ideas and sensibilities as they come to dominate the earth. We see this ecstasy in ancient accounts that rejoice over the favor of the gods - or god - that bless them with this terrible fortune as they sack their enemies' settlements and cities, as a surfer may delight in harnessing the devastating energy of the "ultimate wave," being in the right time and place and possessing the proper means to ride it without being crushed.
But unlike the ocean's waves, that is a wave that is necessarily composed of one's peers - over time, of one's ancestors and progeny - and which rolls right over one's fellow humans, right along with the rest of creation, and eventually that wave does break, and it breaks hard for everyone involved.
