Why religious nuts? Religion isn't necessary for repressive regimes, in fact they often ban religion because they see it as a threat. People believing in a higher authority than them? That just won't do, they want to be the highest authority.
I think you'll find that "religious" repressive regimes always claimed to have ultimate authority, usually by claiming that people had to go through them to get to God. People claiming individual access to God was heresy and punishable by death.
I agree.
Still, I would suppose that out of all the repressive regimes in history, the vast majority were religious.
I can think of 3 off the top of my head. The Soviet Regime was very anti-religion. According to Karl Marx, religion was a sedative drug used by those in power to control the masses.
Yet . . . was the Soviet Regime really not religious?
The State had it's ceremonies, it had a life philosophy, it mandated a government definition of good and bad, and "sinners" were "excomunicated" to the gulags in Siberia.
I would argue that the Soviet Regime had more in common with a religious theocracy than differences.
Or--to put it another way--the State was supposed to be everyone's higher power.
The Third Reich seemed--on the surface--to be a facist government that wasn't religious, but again--is this really true?
Hitler demanded worship (Heil Hitler!), he used occult sources to guide his foreign and domestic policies, he eliminated people who practiced the wrong religions, and his political rallies seem to resemble old-time tent revivals, in the sense that there's worship of that higher power.
Again, I believe that Nazism had much in common with religion.
I'm not familiar enough with the People's Republic of China to intelligently discuss their politics, but I would suppose that the combination of a strict doctrine, supression of dissent, required ceremony, and "othering" anyone who's different has much in common with organized religion.
It's the same old story, except that the serial numbers are filed off and it's given a fresh coat of paint.