I'm not arguing that "democracy is good" as such (though I would argue that it is a good in itself, but that's a separate argument). But more important is the feeling of power over one's own circumstances. When your life really is under the control of other intelligences, whose aims you don't know and which aren't the same as yours, then it makes an intuitive sense that everything is controlled by such an intelligence.

I don't know for sure that that's the mechanism -- I'm not an historian, though I do have a layman's interest in history, especially recent European history -- but democracy and secularism at least seem to correlate very strongly, and I've seen the above proposed as a mechanism, and it makes sense to me...