What you call "pattern of splitting" is a feature.

In a decentralized society political power is decentralized, much like you have different music genres, or universities or restaurants.

People are still able to communicate, read and write and influence each other even if they wear slightly different hats.

Alas those who dont have motivation to self-select forward tend to get left behind, end up in a big, easy to manipulate block. The un-motivated & tuned-out end up centralized.

It isn't just the left.

The revolutionary rightwingers are endlessly fragmentary - the militia, white supremacy and various theocratic movements each have a ton of complicated history of fragmentation and infighting.

I suspect the phenomenon is partly a function of relative powerlessness combined with the emotional high-stakes of being marginalized combined with the personalities attracted to such groups.

Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/1095/

> perhaps similar to similar patterns within protestant christianity

Dead on. Once you eschew centralized authority, the group fracturing as everybody discovers their own slightly different version of truth seems inevitable.

... it's a feature that makes Protestant Christianity relatively healthy. Salvation is between you and God, no terrestrial authority can say "you've displeased me, you're going to Hell". Or rather, they can, but you're free to go to the church across the street which believes roughly the same thing.

This is backwards! Religion should not adapt itself to the people. It is not a democracy. How can an organization claim to represent the will of god when they are shaped by the market process you describe into an average of human desires?

How can an organization claim to represent the will of God at all? There is no salvation except that which is negotiated between the individual and God (or many gods, or no gods, or what have you). No Earthly church or temple or synagogue or mosque or coven or what have you has the authority to dictate how you connect with the broader universe in which you exist.

The knowability of god seems itself a false & deceitful pretense. Accepting any organizations interprettation of what facts tales & stories they have seems to many like folly.

We have to listen, quietly & somewhat individually & in small groups, for the heartbeat of god. The only earnest truth is that it's a interpretation.

Unsurprisingly, I really enjoyed Newell's similarly titled, "Listening for the Heartbeat of God" (1996), on early celtic christianity, https://books.google.com/books/about/Listening_for_the_Heart...

Because if enough people dislike what God is telling them, they'll leave for the church across the street that says that God has, in fact, revealed something slightly different and more agreeable.

Many humans desire a religion that claims to represent the will of god.

A strong tendency to split seems to be a feature of the left in general.

I think it’s a feature of most extreme ideologies - an above commenter points out the endless fragmentation of the extreme right between religious and racial ideologies