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Yes, I agree. The only established state churches, btw, exist in the UK and a couple of other minor places. I think Russia may have reestablished the Orthodox Church, but I’m not entirely sure that it’s a state church in the full sense.

However, one thing you could say about Christianity is that it has always been opposed to the state. In its bad times, it’s been in alliance with the state, but sometimes in its good times, this has also been true.

And sometimes, being the state church worked out well for Christianity. For example, the Spanish royal expeditions to the New World were required to provide priests and missionaries to bring Christianity to the population of this unknown place...and one thing Columbus, Ponce de Leon and Pedro Menendez all said about the Indians was that they were fully human in every way. Thus, they could be converted and baptized.

Prior to that, nobody knew that part of the world and the speculations ran amok. My favorite was the “monopods,” a big foot hopping around with an eye on top. This was a common feature in some mediaeval descriptions of the world.

So if you were a created human, you could make it to being a saved (and thus immortal) human, thanks to the state sponsored missionary activities.

But then there were the conflicts, and the problem over time is that the churches have gotten more and more accommodating to state control.

So they no longer defend humanity. Christians surely should do this, since we have the only real anthropology and understanding of what it means to be humans. But all of the Christian churches - including, alas, the Catholic Church, which should be the bedrock of the Christian Faith - have ceded their authority to the state.

This was particularly visible during the “shutdown,” when almost all of the churches, Catholic or Protestant, abandoned their people and shut down or went virtual.

Interestingly, I’m seeing that the ones that refused to do this are blossoming now.

And they’re being called “Christian nationalists.”