The Socialist Ideal.

John Lennon had a big hit with this idea. It is the Socialist ideal of everyone being - not only equal - but the same. It is the reason 'fashion' now dresses down; poverty is style. It is the reason that positions of power withing government bureaucracies and many corporate structures - not only do not discriminate on the basis of gender or race - but they do not employ on the basis of intelligence either, which is why we have such stupid public decisions and the vast waste of public money. The problem is not religion at all, and abolishing or repressing it would not solve anything. It is the denial by certain religions and sects of others that they are the only, true faith, and their policy of prosteletising. Xians are the worst, especially the Roman variety, and they have been copied by some Moslems.  [Posted to New Whig as a response to a comment to the Plea to Palestinians.]
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There is something illogical about a faith that proclames its mono-theism and then postulates deities outside or apart from its own.  Any form of worship of Universal Consciousness worships the same undivided, single Divinity, by what ever name, or how ever imagined or perceived or represented, or lacking name or any form of representation. The totality of everything can only be a single entity.  Arguments about its size or whether it is infinite are irrelevant because it is not necessary to know about it in any detail, only that it is everything, by definition.

The worst are the faiths that postulate a divided divinity or argue that the universal consciousness is not total and universal at all but there is another, countervailing consciousness.  Again the Xians are the worst. 
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The remaining European Monarchies are mostly the Protestant countries.  A visible difference between the Roman and Protestant versions of Western Catholicism is the pomp and ceremony of the former compared to the austire simplicity of the second.  It can be seen in Church Architecture and vestments as well.  In ancient and mediaeval times, Court life contributed to the public expression of religion, that was itself austere at a personal level, with oaths of poverty by clergy.  Eventually there were seperate streams of ceremony and public spectacle, those associated with Royalty and those of the Church.  In the Roman Catholic countries, the popular desire for spectacle and the emotion of participation in a energy-charged communal event continued to be provided by the Church, and the loss of monarchy was not felt in this way, but in Protestant countries, where religion had abandoned all public show of the spectacular, Monarchy has survived because it provides the visual spleandour that represents the whole society as something vastly greater than the individual.