In Charles Taylor’s long pathfinding of our road to secularization one crucial step he notes in the tradition of “Latin Christianity” the development of what he calls “the new police state” (Kindle Loc. 1440) where churches, governments and leaders attempt to organize the lives of their citizens in rational ways.

There are certain common features running through all these attempts at reform and organization:

(1) they are activist; they seek effective measures to re-order society; they are highly interventionist;

(2) they are uniformizing: they aim to apply a single model or schema to everything and everybody; they attempt to eliminate anomalies, exceptions, marginal populations, and all kinds of non-conformists;

(3) they are homogenizing; although they still operate in societies based on differences of rank, their general tendency is to reduce differences, to educate the masses, and to make them conform more and more to the standards governing their betters. This is very clear in the church reformations; but it also is true of the attempts to order people’s lives by the “police states”;

(4) they are “rationalizing” in Weber’s double sense: that is, they not only involve an increased use of instrumental reason, in the very process of activist reform, as well as in designing some of the ends of reform (e.g., in the economic sphere); but they also try to order society by a coherent set of rules (Weber’s second dimension of rationality, Wertrationalitat).