A further response might be that if we adopt my reasoning, then there will be too many things that can influence politics, and which also need to be banned. Foreign TV shows, books, and ideas can all affect our society’s political values, and people’s opinions on controversial issues. If we ban foreign religious preachers, then should we not also ban people who import all of these things? This seemingly ridiculous conclusion only demonstrates the weakness of the Home Affairs Minister’s reasoning. He suggests that banning foreign entities from promoting local causes allows Singaporeans to decide on controversial issues on their own. In doing so, he fails to acknowledge that our political values are not derived from some inherent, independent, self-existing Singaporean identity, but is in fact a product of different external influences – religious, cultural and ideological.

The writing in this piece gets increasingly incoherent as it goes along. So Singaporean's national, and political identities are a product of external influences. How does that follow that external political influence should either be allowed, or that external religious influence should be prevented?

So the writer's conceding that popular culture, commercial businesses and economic policies, all have influence on national identity, and so political identity. It's obvious that they don't think this means that they should all be banned, that would be going the way of North Korea. What makes religious separate from all these, and closer to direct political influence, especially in an increasingly irreligious society? That's some grade-A cognitive dissonance there, society cares less about religion, therefore it's a bigger threat to national identity.

Direct political interference is avoided by all nations, because external parties aren't invested in the local ecosystem, which isn't to say that the ideal is to ban all influence from non-invested parties, which isn't even feasible to begin with. There's no perfect solution to prevent some incredibly charismatic external party from coming in and brainwashing Singaporeans to act to their benefit, but at the end of the day the goal is just to force them to have to act upon Singaporeans, and not the system.

People aren't just re-programmable automatons, they make their, sometimes/often irrational decisions based on stimuli, and they can deal with the consequences. Politics is the one sphere where they're given explicit, direct decision-making power, at least under the democratic ideal. Compared to economic and social spheres, it's a lot faster-acting, which is why you can afford to have external influence in those filter through the people and affect their decisions, but you can't afford to have external parties acting directly upon politics.

If someone could explain to me just how the writer, or anyone, justifies grouping religion together with politics, instead of together with socio-cultural activities, or even economic ones, please do chip in.