Excerpts from the book "America's Expiration Date" Part 2

While Heraclius was able to restore much of the Byzantine Empire, wars with the Sasanian Empire and Muslim armies, and his failure to settle religious disputes within Christianity, left him weakened and contributed to the loss of several of his provinces.

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Contributing to Byzantium’s decline was what we might today call “mob politics,” an appropriate label for much of what describes modern America. Mob politics then, as it has now, replaced serious debate aimed at discovering what is true and finding solutions to challenging problems. The mob politics of the Byzantine era involved something called the circus factions, which were basically composed of fans of various chariot race teams. Recall the chariot race scene in the film Ben-Hur, with the partisans in the Roman crowd cheering their favorite driver or jeering the others, and you get a sense of what the circus factions looked like, except these partisans had strong political overtones and affiliations.

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[T]he Byzantine Empire was a theocracy, and history has shown that once a religion is institutionalized and forced upon people, it loses its power and vitality. The challenge for any nation is to allow religion to function freely without giving it “official” status. That was the vision and hope of America’s founding fathers, who wanted the state kept out of the church while protecting the “free exercise” of the faith of believers.

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America’s founding fathers, who wanted the state kept out of the church while protecting the “free exercise” of the faith of believers.

Source: America's Expiration Date: The Fall of Empires and Superpowers… and the Future of the United States (2020) by Cal Thomas.