It is a facile observation that capitalism is like a religion, or, more precisely, that it does much the same thing as religions do. The evidence for this is the incompatibility of an established, religiously governed way of life with capitalism. Islamic banking is a non-sequitur. It's an unresolved dialectic or a preposterous joke. The absurd notion of the 'conflict of civilizations' finds its moment of truth in the manifest incompatibility of these 'civilizations' with the one force which dissolves them all: capitalism. If a 'civilization' comes into contact/conflict with capitalism, e.g. "Islam" vs. "the Western world," then the civilization is on the verge of extinction. Religion is an atavism, like all other forms of community, like all binding agreements except those supported by the institutions of capitalism such as the law and, what really supports the law, the organized violence of the state. The servile nonsense called protestantism can of course support capitalism, but those religions which forbid usury and condemn profit, while always coexisting with forms of unequal exchange, cannot coexist with the enshrining of unequal exchange as the basis of the social order. What happens to them when placed on this precipice is perhaps what we are witnessing today - what we call fundamentalism and explain in the stupidest way.

But a question: what are the dual histories of Christianity and capitalism in Russia? Christianity and feudalism? How did the church respond/what happened to the church in the early 20th century? What is the relationship between devout Christians and incompetent capitalists?