One more passage from Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love
In the final analysis, religions don’t speak of love. Because they are only interested in it as a source of intensity, in the subjective state it alone can create, in order to direct that intensity towards faith and the Church and encourage this subjective state to accept the sovereignty of God. The main outcome is that Christianity substitutes devout, passive, deferential love for the combative love I am praising here, that earthly creation of the differentiated birth of a new world and a happiness won point by point. Love on bended knee is no love at all as far as I am concerned, even if love sometimes arouses passion in us that makes us yield to the loved one.
In Praise of Love (pp. 66-67)
Two kinds of responses to love, according to Badiou, include (1) the kind that ultimately absorbs difference (two-ness) into unity (one-ness), and (2) the kind that preserves the difference. The subordination of love in religions is an example of the first type of response.
Going back to religion, in our present time, as a solution to the crisis of fragmentation, meaning, lack of community, etc., is a collective move back to the Father’s house. It would involve negating already-gained insights and hard-earned distinctions. It is motivated toward a sense of safety, familiarity, and other similar promises. They say, “there is no such a thing as a free lunch”, and we should probably act fast and create a similar cliché about the cost of moving back into the Father’s basement as an adult, especially if the authoritative Father has plans for controlling the offspring’s behavior. The Father’s plans not only go beyond love, but they involve the suppression of something without which love ceases to exist–the recognition and maintenance of true alterity.