There is a trend in political and legal cultures toward treating religious beliefs as arbitrary and unimportant. This is supported by a rhetoric that implies that there is something wrong with religious devotion and any appreciation of the role of the mystical, the irrational and the spiritual in human affairs. Religions are a way of denying the authority of the mundane and as such are radically destabilizing propositions central to civil resistance with respect to a variety of political situations. However society has a vital need for such an independent moral force that will question and resist simple (and potentially tyrannical) majoritarian rule.