> Religions tend to become the opposite of what they preach.
I'm not a fan of such generalizations, not least of all because the term "religion" is itself commonly thoughtlessly applied and vague. Every human being has a religion according to a technical reading of the term because every human being takes something as the highest good to which all others goods are subordinate and to which he offers some kind of worship. So the question isn't whether someone is religious, but what they are religious about, and then, how good and true their religion is, whether their religion is the best, whether it is the true religion, etc. (Shocking perhaps to the adherents of the blandness that is moralistic therapeutic deism.)
> The church of Jesus became an actual state for centuries.
The Church never became a state (though I'm not sure what this is insinuating about the alleged teachings of Jesus). Those with authority in the Church have historically had both ecclesiastical authority and secular authority, yes, and this continues to this day (the pope is the prime example as he is both the supreme pontiff and monarch of the Holy See, and historically, has been the monarch of, e.g., the Papal States). But so what? There is nothing in the teachings of Jesus that contradicts the notion of secular authority or that those in the Church might also have such authority. Indeed, it is in the teachings of Christ that we find the very distinction between and recognition of religious and secular authority and institutions in the first place (e.g., Matthew 22:21). The liberal notion of the separation of Church and State is just an exaggeration of this distinction (which is why liberalism is, quite literally, a Christian heresy). You cannot make sense of this distinction outside of the broader Christian tradition. This is probably one reason why American attempts to spread the Gospel of Liberal Democracy have generally been hamfisted failures in other civilizational contexts. In any case, the state is a natural institution according to the natural law and a necessary institution.
Here's an interesting explanation of the significance of the Holy Roman Empire that you and others might find interesting[0].
I'm not a fan of such generalizations, not least of all because the term "religion" is itself commonly thoughtlessly applied and vague. Every human being has a religion according to a technical reading of the term because every human being takes something as the highest good to which all others goods are subordinate and to which he offers some kind of worship. So the question isn't whether someone is religious, but what they are religious about, and then, how good and true their religion is, whether their religion is the best, whether it is the true religion, etc. (Shocking perhaps to the adherents of the blandness that is moralistic therapeutic deism.)
> The church of Jesus became an actual state for centuries.
The Church never became a state (though I'm not sure what this is insinuating about the alleged teachings of Jesus). Those with authority in the Church have historically had both ecclesiastical authority and secular authority, yes, and this continues to this day (the pope is the prime example as he is both the supreme pontiff and monarch of the Holy See, and historically, has been the monarch of, e.g., the Papal States). But so what? There is nothing in the teachings of Jesus that contradicts the notion of secular authority or that those in the Church might also have such authority. Indeed, it is in the teachings of Christ that we find the very distinction between and recognition of religious and secular authority and institutions in the first place (e.g., Matthew 22:21). The liberal notion of the separation of Church and State is just an exaggeration of this distinction (which is why liberalism is, quite literally, a Christian heresy). You cannot make sense of this distinction outside of the broader Christian tradition. This is probably one reason why American attempts to spread the Gospel of Liberal Democracy have generally been hamfisted failures in other civilizational contexts. In any case, the state is a natural institution according to the natural law and a necessary institution.
Here's an interesting explanation of the significance of the Holy Roman Empire that you and others might find interesting[0].
[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2020/12/what-was-holy-roman...