Everything. If I achieve nothing else worthwhile in this life, I want to try to instill in people a sense of understanding about the ways in which politics, economics, and religion are historically intertwined.
In the modern world, our notion of religion is that it is primarily about what we each believe. If you subscribe to set B of metaphysical concepts alpha, beta, and gamma, you belong to religion X. In the past, though, religion was as much about the way we acted and ordered our lives and structured our society as it was about belief. Many religious movements are rooted in social discord and radicalism, and if we overlook this, we miss what is in my opinion the real purpose and function of religion in human history.
Just in the present day, for example, you would miss the reason Muslims are angry at the west, or the reason the Chinese government suppressed the
Falun Gong movement. Don't forget Martin Luther King, Jr.; turning his birthdaty into a holiday demonstrates one way our society has undermined the radical nature of his message by drawing attention to him as a figure (and conveniently obscuring others like Malcolm X).
If religion sends a radical message, a message of social change, then it is in the interest of those who stand to lose the most to find a way to co-opt the message of religion. They do this by isolating and persecuting those who are at the heart of the religious movement. If this doesn't kill the movement, they are then free to promote a "santized" or "safe" version of the religious message to those outside of the center of it. A religion which is only about belief and not about action is effectively a tool of pacification, by which the people in power short-circuit the use of religion as an agent of social change.
A number of scholars have set out to demonstrate that the Christian movement got its start as a movement of the poor and disenfranchized, bearing a message of egalitarianism and solidarity, banding together to heal and support one another in times of crisis. See for example
Burton Mack on the miracle stories in the gospels,
John Dominic Crossan on the social importance of healing, Elaine Pagels on Christian sexual abstenance as a reaction to Roman and Jewish laws requiring marriage and reproduction and therefore a means of personal freedom, or Robert Funk and Walter Wink on the Sermon of the Mount as a radical manifesto. Crossan, specifically, has put together an interesting argument about Christianity as originating in a peasant revolt protesting Roman economic oppression in Galilee. It was one of several radical Jewish movements protesting Roman oppression and opposing the High Priest as Rome's puppet; the residents of Qumran appear to have been another such group.
The Gnostics were also another such group, in the estimation of Kurt Rudolph the most radical of all:
Gnosis originally represented an ideology related to the dependent classes of the Hellenistic cities which was meant to contribute to the establishing of a new identity after their own intellectual world had largely broken down. Gnosis took account fully of this situation in various ways: it offered a support to the individual, even a certain nearness to God through the idea of a divine kernel in man. A close relationship to God became possible even for the "man in the street" without priestly mediation, without temple, and without cultic practices... The dependent classes... were left to develop their own concepts, and... thus Jewish apocalyptic and esotericism and the Oriental faith of salvation in the form of the mystery religions also became means of expression of social protest. Gnosis was without doubt the most radical voice in this circle. Its rejection of the moral tradition and the visible world of government (including the supernatural) is an attempt to solve the social problems of the time under an unambiguously religious banner. ... Thus Gnosis can be largely understood as an ideology of the dependent petty bourgoisie which however feels itself called to freedom on the ideological-religous plane. (Gnosis, pp. 291-292)
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