Yeah basically, concepts like “civil/civic religion” describe this well. It’s like the set of shared beliefs a society uses to justify itself, similar to ideaology, and the best definition of ideaology I know is, “the mechanism that harmonizes the principles that you want to believe with what advances your material interest.” Like in one sense partisan politics in the US right now can be summarized as two factions of the same civil religion.

The thing that frustrated me with these atheists is they both view religion as man made and contingent on societies, yet they treated it as this trans-historical essential set of beliefs and practices in the same way the most fundamentalist religious sect would. Like take the dumbest most insane religious sects, that’s how these atheists understood religion too. When you see religion as something actually socially constructed and embodying the time period, then you can actually understand it on a material level. These atheists think you can just take this concept of “religion” and cleave it away, because they think it’s this separate thing. They view western history in this really reductive way like: 1. smart greeks and romans 2. religious bullshit and smart people are killed 3. enlightenment and secular society wins but the battle isn’t yet won. None of them actually liked learning about history either unless it was to find out who the good guys/bad guys were in reference to religion, exact same as how fundamentalist sects understand history.