That top down model goes pretty deeply into the culture.

Consider that democracy and republicanism originated in panthesitic cultures. The Ancients viewed monotheism as monocultural. One people, one rule, one god. The Romans adopted Christianity to solidifiy the establishment of the Empire and erase reminders of the Republic.

Which validated monarchy for the next 1500 years. When the West went back to less centralized political systems, it required the separation of church and state, culture and civics.

Logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell.

Conflating the ideal, which is aspirational, with the absolute, which is elemental, tends to validate the more obsessed and control oriented and should have been addressed by the philosophers, but much of philosophy has been an epic fail.

Consider that good and bad are not some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. When good is viewed as aspirational, rather than elemental, conflicts tend to become a race to the bottom, of us versus them, as all the higher order nuance and subjectivity is suspect.

Which is a round about way of saying we are fucked. People are still socially primitive and barely beyond nuclear poo throwing apes.

Organisms synchronize, ecosystems harmonize.

More yin and yang, than God Almighty.