&gt; A person&#x27;s national identity was directly tied to one&#x27;s national religion.<p>A point I often bring up when people discuss things done &quot;in the name of religion&quot; that seem either counter to the themes of said religion or just odd under that justification.<p>And I say this as a non-religious person under the common usage of &quot;religious&quot;.<p>For a lot of people, and possibly to a greater extent in different places and different times than the modern, western world, there is little distinction between &quot;creed&quot; and national&#x2F;cultural identity.  Religion wasn&#x27;t just where you went to church or temple on Saturday or Sunday but rather it&#x27;s another term for the distinct identity of a group.  Ideas of divine laws and rules of behavior mix with the shared cultural, ethnic, and historically geographical identity of your tribe or nation.<p>Just as now we might talk about the things you <i>must</i> believe and practice to be considered a true Christian or a true Muslim, there were things you had to accept and behaviors you had to practice in order to be a &quot;real&quot; Roman or a &quot;real&quot; Hebrew.  I think this was more of an identifying factor than our modern concept of nations and religions.<p>So when you wonder how someone could do a thing because of their religion, and so many people do different things based on the same religion, I often think about it in terms of how people act differently even though their motivation may fall under the scope of &quot;because I&#x27;m an American&quot; (or any other nationality).  &quot;Nationalism&quot; almost serves the same purpose as &quot;religion&quot; when transposing between secular and sacred frameworks.<p>I&#x27;m admittedly not an expert on this but it&#x27;s something that interests me in terms of history and anthropology.