The New Cathedrals: How Every Side Divides Us
The architecture of division hasn’t changed — only the materials. Stone became slogans, scripture became branding, and presence became code.
I walked away from faith a long time ago. Not out of rebellion, but out of study. My background in architecture taught me to see churches not just as houses of worship but as machines of control. Gothic cathedrals, with their soaring vaults and stained glass, weren't only about beauty. They were engineered to shrink the individual, to channel awe upward, and to keep ordinary people tethered to the institution.
The sermons were about humility, love, and grace; the structures were about obedience, hierarchy, and fear. The clergy preached faith, but what they practiced was power. Once I saw the blueprint, I couldn't unsee it.
Today, that same blueprint is everywhere — not just in white evangelical nationalism or Silicon Valley, but across the entire political spectrum. Every side has learned to build cathedrals. Every side divides to control. The materials differ — faith, identity, technology — but the architecture remains the same. And if you want to see the real blueprint, follow the money.
The Right's Cathedral: Faith as Weapon
Jesus said, "Sell your possessions and give to the poor" (Luke 12:33). Turning Point USA raised $85 million in 2023¹. None went to feeding the hungry. None went to housing the homeless. It went to luxury resort conventions, social media campaigns, and building a political machine.
Charlie Kirk dismissed empathy as a dangerous "New Age" word, saying he preferred "compassion." But his compassion is selective: reserved for the in-group, withheld from the rest. Jesus said, "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Mark 12:31). Kirk teaches that your neighbor, if liberal or immigrant or gay, is an enemy of God.
The budgets of other evangelical groups tell the same story:
Alliance Defending Freedom: $102 million annually for legal battles against LGBTQ rights, not for the poor²
Focus on the Family: $135 million revenue, declared itself a church in 2017 to hide donors³
Liberty Counsel: $27.8 million raised for "religious freedom" lawsuits, zero for soup kitchens⁴
Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple. These groups turned the temple into a Super PAC. They preach Christ but fund Caesar, weaponizing compassion and rejecting empathy because empathy is dangerous: it might cross the line of tribe and undo their architecture of division.
That architecture of division is all for power, not of the church as they say they represent, but political power only, just dressed up with a cross.
The Left's Cathedral: Identity as Fortress
The prophet Amos condemned those who "trample on the poor" while performing righteousness (Amos 5:11). The left performs justice. But look at the budgets.
Black Lives Matter Global Network raised $90 million in 2020. The co-founder bought properties worth millions while local chapters demanded funds to organize⁵. Columbia University pours millions into DEI administrators while its service workers strike for living wages. The Southern Poverty Law Center sits on a $500 million endowment while poverty in Montgomery remains unchanged⁶.
These organizations preach redistribution while hoarding wealth. They preach solidarity while fracturing humanity into micro-identities with their own vocabularies and rules. A unified working class might demand real change. A thousand factions can only fight each other for scraps. While they splinter into factions, the money flows upward — to consultants who police vocabulary at $5,000 per workshop, to six-figure administrators managing division, to conferences at luxury hotels where the privileged perform awareness while the actually marginalized serve the coffee. The fragmentation keeps people too busy defending their specific identity to notice who's profiting from the division.
And empathy? It's carved into categories. You must check your privileges, pass the tests, use the right words before you qualify to feel with another. That's not empathy; it's compassion redefined as compliance. And just like the right, the left depends on this narrowing. True empathy — across class, across ideology, across identity — would threaten the whole fortress.
That again this fortress of identity is all for power, not for the marginalized as they claim to represent, but political power, dressed up with a rainbow flag.
Silicon Valley: The Meta-Cathedral
Silicon Valley used to mock faith. Now it monetizes it. Peter Thiel funds Christian causes while Palantir builds the surveillance state. Marc Andreessen tweets Bible verses while declaring that amassing personal wealth is itself philanthropic. They've discovered what bishops always knew: faith is a powerful control structure.
But look at their actual giving. The Giving Pledge — their attempt at performative charity — has been a spectacular failure. Only 9 of 256 signers have actually given away half their wealth. Meanwhile, their fortunes tripled⁷. Elon Musk, worth over $400 billion, has given less than 1% to charity⁸. Jeff Bezos sits on $235 billion while Seattle's homeless camp outside Amazon's doors. America's billionaires hold $5.7 trillion but have donated only 3% of that in the past decade⁹.
Tech doesn't pick a side. Its real genius is building the infrastructure for every cathedral. The algorithm doesn't care if you're watching Kirk or DEI seminars. It just knows anger keeps you scrolling:
Facebook made $117 billion in 2021 on outrage¹⁰
Right-wing content generates 65% more interaction through rage
Left-wing content spreads fastest when calling out enemies
Every culture war battle lines their pockets — $10 billion in political ads in 2020 alone
They profit from the fight itself. Now they're building digital priests: AI pastors for conservatives, therapy bots for progressives, customized sacred texts for every denomination of division. Empathy becomes a service. Compassion becomes a product. Human connection is flattened into an interface.
The Death of Empathy
This is the common blueprint. Every cathedral rejects empathy because empathy is uncontrollable.
The right calls it weakness. The left rations it by identity. Tech simulates it and sells it back for $9.99 a month.
Compassion, in their hands, is safe. It's sympathy from a distance, extended only to those deemed worthy. Empathy is dangerous because it erases distance. It forces you to feel what another feels, even if they don't belong to your tribe. Empathy breaks walls. Compassion keeps them standing.
Every cathedral also teaches us who deserves our grief. We fly flags at half-mast only for our own dead. The right mourns fallen officers but not Black men killed by police. The left holds vigils for approved victims but goes silent when the perpetrator doesn't fit the narrative. Silicon Valley doesn't mourn at all — it monetizes tragedy, feeding us whichever deaths drive clicks.
The mother who lost her son to gang violence and the mother who lost her son in Afghanistan are both just mothers with folded flags and empty bedrooms. But our cathedrals won't let them mourn together. That would break the architecture.
That's why true empathy is revolutionary. It dissolves the "us vs. them" every cathedral depends on. It refuses the architecture of division.
Cracks in the Cathedral
The blueprints look airtight. But real life breaks through.
A grandmother once refused to attend her granddaughter's gay wedding. She spoke with the cathedral's voice: sin, shame, immorality. For years she was cut off. But when the couple later visited, cooked together, stayed over during holidays, something shifted. Today she welcomes them with love. That's not distant compassion. That's empathy lived face-to-face.
The same story repeats:
A father who mocked trans people until his son came out
A progressive who dismissed rural "red state" voters until she saw foreclosure hollow out a coworker's town
A church elder who judged addicts until his nephew overdosed, and now spends weekends volunteering at a recovery center
Each was trained by their cathedral to divide the world into "us" and "them." Each escaped through empathy — not the abstract kind, but the embodied kind that happens when you can't look away from another's humanity.
What We've Lost
When people say the founders built America on faith, they misunderstand. Their true faith was in showing up — in messy, embodied communication. Town halls where you had to argue face-to-face. Churches where you sat beside neighbors, not political tribes. Empathy made real through presence.
That is what all these cathedrals destroy. They intermediate every relationship through branding, bureaucracy, or code. They charge us — in dollars, loyalty, or ideological compliance — for what used to be free: human connection.
Refusing to Kneel
As an atheist, I don't measure the world through belief in God. But I do measure it through structure. And the structures I see rising now — in politics, in activism, in technology — are cathedrals of extraction dressed in the language of salvation.
The old cathedrals at least left us the commons: the green, the square, the hall. The new cathedrals colonize even that, turning every interaction into division and transaction.
Resistance begins with refusing to kneel — not just with money, but with loyalty and performance. Meeting each other in spaces the cathedrals can't reach. Face to face. Refusing to be divided.
The architecture has changed. The function has not. Once you see the blueprint, you can't unsee it.
And once you see it, you can choose something simpler: to feel with another human, without checking their tribe first. That's the only heresy that threatens every cathedral.
Footnotes
¹ Turning Point USA Form 990, 2023; Fortune, September 2025; ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer.
² Alliance Defending Freedom Form 990, 2023. ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer.
³ Focus on the Family Annual Report, 2023; Organization declared itself a church in 2017 per IRS Form 990.
⁴ Liberty Counsel Financial Statement, 2023-2024.
⁵ Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation Form 990, 2020; AP News reporting.
⁶ Southern Poverty Law Center financial reports; Washington Post investigation, 2019.
⁷ Institute for Policy Studies Report on Giving Pledge, August 2025; CNBC.
⁸ Forbes 400 List, 2023; Alliance Magazine.
⁹ Fortune, September 2025; WSJ analysis of Altrata data.
¹⁰ Meta Platforms Annual Report, 2021.
¹¹ Alphabet Inc. Annual Report, 2023.