Some people think their prophet can do no wrong, some people think other’s prophets can do no right.
Some people think their nation can do no wrong, some people think other’s nations can do no right.
Are a country’s national heroes equivalent to a religion’s prophets and saints in inspiring irrational devotion and shadowless narcissism ?
And is a nation’s political philosophy it’s religious creed ?
Do religion and nationalism inspire the same sort of aggression, pride, subservience, or even achievements ?
In my opinion, a better view is that both certain types of organized religion and certain types of nationalism are both examples of a “true belief”, of the sort defined by Eric Hoffer in his book The True Believer.
I would expect the number of people who think this way is exceedingly small. Even the “love it or leave it” crowd didn’t think the United States was infallible.
A lot has been said about nationalism/patriotism. Not the least of it here.
Which types ?
BTW, the phrase organized religion is used a lot, but I can’t think of an example of anyone naming a disorganized one, can you ?
And would a disorganized religion be of the type you mention ?
Certainly in the case of both the USA and USSR whose state ideologies ( distinct from economics ) eventually converged in silliness: this is one of the main sources for the mockery America receives from other countries.
Wikipedia — American civil religion
…a nonsectarian quasi-religious faith in the United States with sacred symbols drawn from national history. Scholars have portrayed it as a cohesive force, a common set of values that foster social and cultural integration. The very heavy emphasis on nondenominational religious themes is quite distinctively American and the theory is designed to explain this. The concept goes back to the 19th century
…
“America is God’s chosen nation today.”
“A president’s authority…is from God.”
“Social justice cannot only be based on laws; it must also come from religion.”
“God can be known through the experiences of the American people.”
“Holidays like the Fourth of July are religious as well as patriotic.”
“God Bless America”
…
The American Revolution was the main source of civil religion. It produced a Moses-like leader (George Washington), prophets (Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine), apostles (John Adams, Benjamin Franklin) and martyrs (Boston Massacre, Nathan Hale), as well as devils (Benedict Arnold), sacred places (Valley Forge), rituals (raising the Liberty Tree), flags (the Betsy Ross flag), sacred holidays (July 4th) and a holy scripture (The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution).
And whilst the USSR had the Marxist religion, with it’s Trinity, Marx the Father, Lenin the Son and Stalin the Holy Ghost, with a plethora of minor saints and mediators, rituals and holy books, this co-existed with and was conjoined with the separate love of Holy Mother Russia the State, the Eternal, the Third Rome, Repository of the Slavic Soul.
Less extreme, but other countries have their own versions of worship of the nation; even say somewhere as small as Taiwan. This was inevitable with the linked decline in monarchy and respect for God: rulers then needed to focus the aspirations of the ruled upon things most beneficial to the rulers.
Interesting quotes.
And so for some Edward Snowden is a reforming protestant prophet taking the nation back to it’s founding creed, and for others he is dangerous heretic or even a fallen angel. His story effectively functions like religious myth ?
Why is economics distinct from the state ideologies of USA and USSR ? I thought the two were different aspects of the same thing ?
The ones in which identification with the religion (or, alternatively, with the nation) is expressly believed, and acted on, by their followers to take the place of and/or absorb identification with other forms of belonging (family, nation (if religious), religion (if nationalist), etc.).
Religion in in more aggressively millennial form is an example (rather than, say, someone who happens to belong to the United Church because it has a nice kindergarten program, and has good bake sales).
There are tons of “disorganized” religious people about - think of any number of things that could loosely be described as “New Age”. Generally speaking, such beliefs are not sufficient to motivate complete absorption into a collective, because there lacks any significant collective.
One point is that those who identify totally with a particular movement are very different from those who simply belong to one. You can’t necessarily identify them by the content of the ideology the movement they identify with happens to profess - Jim Jones used the same Bible as (say) our local United Church, but I would not expect their congregation to commit suicide en mass. 
Similarly, lots of people are patriotic, even nationalistic, without declaring that their country can do no wrong, or wanting to massacre and invade outsiders.
A further point is that those who identify totally in a particular movement are more similar to each other than they are to those who do not, but who belong to that movement. Jim Jones’ followers were more like unto hardcore Nazi nationalists than a United Church congregation, even though his ideology had nothing to do with the Nazis - the common thread is that self-identification with a particular movement was more important than any other consideration (including their own lives, those of their children, etc.). It is this fanatic extremity that makes these people formidable (and frightening).
So there’s something I didn’t know in that wikipedia page, the Pledge of Allegiance had the “under God” part added in 1954.
Those are good points. Fanatics of different faiths and nations i think do resemble each other more than other’s of the same creed. I remember an interview with an irish Loyalist paramilitary who said if he was born a Catholic he would be doing the same thing but for their side - it’s more the personality than the truth of the creed.
I would say though that the New Age does have something of a founding organisation in the Theosophical Society (it could be argued anyway), but how organised the entire New Age field is - I don’t know. I can’t think of any immediate equivalent to central prophet or Pope though it has numerous saints and sages.
But the New Age is globalist, and so antithetical to nationalism, which is why so many nationalists and Christians regard it as the work of Satan, it unnerves them in having no borders.
Because whilst the national fervour and country-state admiration ( which does not mean the defenders of state are always the same who are defenders of X government [ eg: in the American case some of the most fanatical believers in ‘America’ are also suspicious of all governmental authority, including the American ] ) is pretty much the same, the ostensible aims of each’s economy and each’s purpose were in the one case to maximize production to serve the market and foster the interests of the wealthy and in the other to reach communism, a mystical state of being in which there was neither market nor government.
Both demanded sacrifice and hard work from the masses, the purported beneficiaries in order to reach the dream.
Both were mindless — not in a pejorative way, but in an ant’s nest way — and ultimately materialistic. Idealism drove the means, materialism the aims.
I get you.
Sharing some properties does not mean equivalence.
They’re both subsets of tribalism. Each can also be broken down further into geographic regionalisms (e.g. north vs. south) or sect vs. sect.
This is the core truth. Humans are essentially territorial pack animals. The more sophisticated we become, the more we elaborate on that basic theme. But whether it be Warriors fans vs. Clippers fans, Mac vs. PC, Gelupga vs. Kagyupa or Mon vs. Khmer, it’s all the same instinctual shit at a base level.
Does seem to be that way for many doesn’t it ?