Religion is, and always has been, a tool used by those in power to legitimize the status quo.
Its primary purpose is to shift responsibility for actions onto fate and thus divert attention from the fact that it is people who are responsible for these actions. In this way, even the most unfair and exploitative conditions can still be portrayed as just: the king by the grace of God, the kingdom of heaven that awaits the patient after death, hell that punishes the greedy, making it unnecessary to hold them accountable in this life, and so on.
This also works in reverse to strip people of the self-confidence that they can achieve things through their own efforts: Thank God for the food he has put on the table, for your success, and for everything else, because he has given it to you in his infinite generosity - don’t even think of making demands.
In this sense, religion provides a justification for hierarchies in society. It cements the status quo in the interests of the powerful.
Hence: People who do not question this narrative - which serves their own exploitation - but have made it the purpose of their lives are quite strange, because they are thereby harming themselves.
Religion certainly plays a regulatory role within society - historically, for a very, very long time. It also promotes values such as charity, empathy, and humility as virtues. The problem, unfortunately, is that this system of order is frequently abused in practice - just like the legal system, whose guidelines are often derived from religious values. So it is not religion itself that is the problem, but the way it is abused.
A good example of this is the ultra-conservative Christians in the U.S.: Since this ideology is being exploited politically to promote a ruthless form of hyper-capitalism that serves only a tiny elite, there is no room for values such as humanity and empathy, which the Bible clearly prescribes as positive values. Thus, inhuman policies are legitimized in the name of God and Jesus, though only those aspects of religion that enable the propagation of “in-groups” and “out-groups” are utilized. On the one hand, this serves to convey a sense of community, and on the other, to deny all rights -including the right to exist - to anyone who does not belong. Of course, this could no longer be reconciled with Christian ethics, but since this is not about ethics but about power, these schizophrenic movements are nevertheless very successful.
This logic is present in nearly all forms of religious extremism - from ultra-Christians to fanatical Muslims and Jews to Hindus and so on. These fundamentalist movements always have one thing in common: they are not interested in good, peaceful coexistence, but solely in the dominance of one group over another, which is because they are political movements whose leaders use religion merely as a means of power to legitimize their inhumane ideology.
But please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here: It is not religion itself that is the problem, but the way it is abused to pit people against one another and distract them from who actually benefits from the corresponding policies.
This effect is by no means limited to religion: the same can be achieved, for example, by emphasizing nationality - in this case, concepts such as “foreign infiltration” serve as a backdrop of fear, so that the corresponding out-group can be denied basic rights, even their humanity.