Create a power structure that facilitates abuse. When you have groups of people strategically deprived of God's Love at certain times, they turn on each other like starving rats.
When you're born so dependent, into a world of emotionally neglectful "gods", it creates the need that that religion supplies. It steals a part of your soul and holds it hostage until you give more of your soul over to it.
"Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence.)" --William S Burroughs
There's a reason these same fundamentalists distrust 'big pharma', believing no entity that profits off of treatment will allow for a cure. This reasoning gets misguided, but the recognition of conflict of interest is still there. Religion is the Opiate, the existential painkiller, to the masses.
But in Fundamentalist religion, shit gets turned up to 11, and it becomes the protector of the very things that make people flock to it. Think of the movie Chocolat, with the priest who tries to reconcile the abusive man with his wife.
Such a union only serves the church. It is a bureau of the state to maintain the hierarchy. At the feet of clay, we find the nuclear family to hold it all up. And we see where "family values" come into play. We see the base of the pyramid. Once that falls, it all comes down.