It is quite literally the civic cult’s version of prayer. You just need sufficient faith, sufficient devotion, and the divine order laid down by the Constitution will set things to right. Anyone who doesn’t harbor this devotion within themselves, who refuses the simple task of performing the holy rites or who participates with insufficient faith and virtue, is a moral abomination, a traitor and a heretic whose impiety has brought about the decay of the Republic by allowing wicked spirits to rise in its divine ranks.

I don’t like to compare things to religious structures and reasoning systems in general because people overplay that a lot, but this is like literally the foundational groundwork of how a religion dynamically and intuitively forms around this desperate need to find control and agency in an arbitrary and dangerous world. The Constitution is a nascent god in the way a flood-prone river, an imposing mountain, the very concept of violent storms, etc would be named and personified to make an idea that people could address and appeal to, that the community’s customs and social mores could be intertwined with as a means of social control and reinforcement. Thus any failure to pay proper obeisance to these anthropomorphized-concept gods, any failure to perform the rites as established, is a moral failing that endangers the community by threatening its tenuous “control” over these dangerous forces.

Like I’m not just being glib here, because this is literally magical thinking within a religious framework that defines acceptable means of appeal to the “divine” concept of the law and state and creates a moral framework centered on devotion to the system and proper enactment of its rites, where the “expected and proper” result is complete adherence by every member of the community to these ideals which will simply make things “good” again if they perform their special ritual prayers hard enough.