What you describe is the practice of all authoritarian Empires. To stay in control you exclude, different “truths” with patronizing oppression if you don’t cause too much threat or through violence.

The genius of Catholicism was assuming other “pagan” practices and including them in the narrative and structure that upheld its authority. Until, that is, the empire was threatened by Reformers and modernists. Many ancient and medieval structures were benign and tolerant of differences but put down violently dissenters who they saw undermining the empire and the authority of those who ran it.

The genius of American democracy was putting religions and philosophy and their institutions in the private sphere and politics and its institutions in the public sphere (which Jefferson called the “separation of church and state”). But since the public is a made up of private individuals, it is more an ethical distinction than a separation—a key distinction of a public sphere with respect for and even protection of the private beliefs and behaviors of people. The people in concert (eg politics) work out the rules that protect diversity in private in a way that maintains a united State and serves the liberty from oppression of all. Ex unum ex pluribus.

This is the potential new civil war we are experiencing today between those who value both personal privacy and Christian (or Islamic or Hindu) nationalism. The nationalists oppose wokeness (eg those who value DEI). The liberationists oppose authoritarianism within and among states.