You are right in that I tried to keep well and far away from any form of organised religion for pretty much my entire life, yes.

However, the resurgence which I’ve mentioned seems, to me at least, to have started once the Feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements gained enough mass to be able to significantly influence the policy-making areas of society. At least from personal experience, the Church (speaking primarily about Orthodox and various Catholic denominations, which are more prevalent in our area) mostly kept out of your business as long as you didn’t “shout it out” too loudly and kept out of theirs, so to speak - sure, a lot of people have always muttered stuff under their breath when faced with the reality of things, but I honestly believe that most people aligned with said organisations were in a sort of denial about these aspects and chose not to interact with them, in a way.

In addition, people in our area seemed to pragmatically drift away from the cismale-centric view of organised religions, anyway. Domestic violence and sexual abuse have still been fairly prevalent, not going to deny that, but they seemed to stem from how the men have been raised more aggressively on principle around these parts, rather than any concrete religious foundation. People mostly accepted that men and women are essentially equal from, as I’ve said, a pragmatic standpoint, as men and women have pretty much always worked side-by-side here. May be a result of the fairly agrarian and subsequent “Communist”/“Socialist” tendencies which have been prevalent up until relatively recently - couldn’t exactly deny that women are as capable as men when they were openly and constantly doing mostly the same things and just as well.

But as soon as the aforementioned actionable progressive mass had been reached, the counter-action started. Again, not saying it’s ever been significantly better just because the Church kept its mouth shut so far, but it’s definitely getting worse than it has been in, say, the past two or three decades - case in point, we didn’t see Advisory Councils on Biblical Womanhood (Jesus Christ…) being established, because, I believe, they didn’t think they should have taken things seriously enough to do it until now. And while we’re not seeing such councils popping up around here, we are seeing the Church going berserk and shoving its way into politics in a much more active and aggressive manner than the passive influence they were convinced they had - which they did, in a way, but nowhere near what they now want.

This may just be a difference in what levels we’re analysing, as I see this recent uptick, even if present on a relatively smaller timescale, is indicative of a fresh sort of panic, which I believe is and will continue to be more aggressive and thus more dangerous than just ignoring the problem and hoping it’ll go away by praying. It’s a ‘knowing there’s a sleeping bear in the nearby caves’ vs. ‘waking it up by making too much noise’ situation (I’m all for the noise in this case, just to be clear).