Properties of religion
+ Religion emphasizes human imperfectibility.
+ Religion emphasizes personal responsibility.
+ Religion is authoritarian: it favors social order and strong authority to maintain order.
+ At the same time religion has a strong libertarian current: it refuses to acknowledge that the state is omnicompetent and resists attempts to make it omnipotent. It insists on the inviolable integrity of those intermediate institutions which stand between the state and the individual — particularly the family, which is seen as the basic cell of society.
+ Religion underpins the achievements of high culture in the Western tradition. It fosters intellectual and artistic elites.
+ At the same time religion promotes a conception of the organic society in which popular culture is permeated with the same religious values as high culture.