You sure you went back far enough?

Consider that democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. Essentially the family and cycle of life as godhead. The young god, born in the spring, of the old sky god and the earth mother. Though by the time of the Olympians, Zeus didn't give way to Dionysus, providing more fertile ground for the story of Jesus, as the new rising against the old.

By the time the Romans adopted it as state religion, it too had started to calcify and so the monotheism served to validate the Empire rising from the ashes of the Republic. The Big Guy Rules.

The origins of the Trinity hidden behind the spector of the Holy Ghost, as the Catholic Church is the eternal Institution.

Ancient Israel was a monarchy, for which monotheism served as a useful eschatological basis.

When the West went back to populist forms of government, it required 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.

The universal is the elemental, not the ideal. Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The creed and heroes at the heart of a culture are ideals, but they are not universal.

The problem with making morality an absolute and not an ideal, is that when the fear of god died, as moral policemen, it left only the Will to Power to fill the void and those best at that game are not the knights in shining armor, but the amoral assholes who lie, cheat and steal as a matter of principle.

When monarchy and the notion of war as among the nobility collapsed in World War 1, total war rose to take its place. The Germans, losing that war and the monarchy, fell back to the rankest tribalism.

Now it appears that is the only lesson truly learned.