First: the little play on words ("demoni...") was not intended to imply that the people themselves are demons, but that they demonize those unlike themselves ("demonization/denomination"). Extreme viewpoints tend to inspire this kind of behavior. You are quick enough to point it out on the left. My experience is with the religious.

I also work with someone who is at once fundamentalist and a librarian. She is a very interesting person: she orders things that are in direct opposition to her religious convictions on purpose, and has asked me to review her orders from time to time. She also has a rather pugnacious reputation among members of her own church because she tells them how miserable they are to the unsaved. They consider her, I have gathered, to be one of the crosses God has given them to bear.

Look at the history of the world and tell me that most of the time, when the knock came at the door, it was not a representative of religion, either in its own clothes or clothed in the garments of its secular minions, who came to take life, limb, liberty, and property. We live not only in the present, but enmeshed in the fabric of history. Even our 20th century "secular" murderers have had some connection to religious sentiments, if only in their choice of targets. Pol Pot would appear to be an exception, but he was a student of Robespierre; the latter attempted to establish a Revolutionary religion to supplant the influence of the Catholic Church. Religion is the master of orthodoxy, as well as the first and greatest commissioner of thought police in human history. Also, many a religious "reform" has been undertaken with a cool eye on the property of the unorthodox. Consider the confiscation of property by Henry VIII of England, and by Fendinand and Isabella during the Reconquista and the Inquistion. The Salem witch trials -- the pattern of accusations and property forfeiture -- are interesting that way as well.

I suspect that the average member of a mainline Protestant sect in the late 20th and early 21st century in a Western nation (though I will except the Southern Baptists here) has little emotional understanding of this. Having grown up Catholic, in an ethnically very Catholic, very insular community, but a Catholic in America, I have more understanding of this emotionally, but less experience of the kind of oppression that forms a part of my birth religion's past. This oppression comprises the present in nations which are currently governed by religious authorities. When the terrestrial authorities claim to speak for God, and God does not directly contradict them, it's very difficult to appeal to a higher authority.

Thoreau, in his statements about philanthropy, didn't need to refer to religion. His audience lived in Massachusetts in the early 1800s. It would have been obvious to them. Disestablishment of religion had been a controversial issue there. People were burned at the stake for witchcraft within 100 years of his life. People were hung for being Quakers and exiled for religious dissent within 200 years of his life. And this by civil authorities working in close cooperation with Puritan clergy, who called the shots. Reaction to that was part of the genesis of the Transcendentalist movement; reaction to the cold rationalism that informed our Founders was the other part. When Thoreau talked about giving one-tenth to charity, he was talking about tithing, a practice instituted and governed by churches. This practice still had power over people in spite of the separation of church and state instituted by the infant Constitution, because that's the kind of power religion can wield: the power to threaten damnation in the next world, the power to isolate and intimidate in this one.

I know better than to think that this can never happen here again. People still tithe, and they do so for the same reasons, though it's less widespread than it once was.

You are concerned about the coercive powers of civil government. I have never mocked that. They are considerable. However, the IRS will seldom send agents after your children; I have had mine physically threatened in the name of religion by people attempting to convert them. The county social worker, when confronted with family violence, will seldom recommend that a battered wife be subservient to her husband and return to her batterer under pain of excommunication. This issue is such a problem among the stricter churches here that it was the subject of one and a half pages in the Family section of the local newspaper just this month. (One church's advice: "Buy a new nightie.") You can say people have a choice. If you are threatened with Hell, and believe it, that's eternity. Even a jail term for tax evasion isn't that long. If your children are threatened, how constrained would you feel in your everyday life? How much liberty would you have, or would they have, if you had to worry not only about the random dangers to which we are all exposed, but also about very specific and targetted ones?

(We got to the other side of that particular threat by going public. Other people have been reluctant to do so, because they didn't want to be labelled "troublemakers" by the community and shunned. This is the sinister side of evangelism.)

I have to pick someone up at a football game. I may return to this.

Regards--
Mary Anne