Religion or no, social stratification is kind of baked into our societies. Its not something that's isolated to one period of time, one section of geography, or language, or belief system, or economic or legal system. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as the systems are fair. But figuring out what is "fair," and who gets to decide and enforce those concepts of fairness is where we've struggled as societies throughout history and will probably continue to do so. In defense of religion, there's tons of writings that embrace fairness, social stratification or no, from concepts like what makes a just ruler, to generosity and hospitality, to honesty and humility, to adherence to concrete laws and concepts of justice. But religion is often like a Rorschach test in a way, where what we choose to focus on as individuals and societies is often just as much as a reflection of us as it is a reflection of the religion. I think right now, we're very much in a time where we're reflecting on that concept of fairness in regards to modern society. Whether we're looking at wage inequality, automation, disparities in wealth, the impacts of economies on societies and the planet, we're in times of great change and uncertainty. Things are changing very rapidly and with a lot of uncertainty. I think articles like this will keep popping up in the coming years, as more and more people really start to think about these ideas, to varying degrees of depth and success. A lot of them will be from Millenials and Gen Z, because while these things aren't new, they're new to them.This is one of the core complaints atheists and agnostics generally harbor towards organized religion in general.
And our biology. Dunbar's Number shows that the human animal is capable of maintaining about 150 'meaningful' social relationships. Anyone outside that rather small circle is just an 'acquaintance' or less. You can (and many have) debated the exact value of Dunbar's Number, but not the base premise. Humans are a pack animal. That pack can only be around 100 animals before it begins to fragment into smaller groups. Those groups need a way to define who is "in" and who is "out" of the group, so stratification happens on multiple levels. Our new technologies that allow us to simulate close connections with thousands of people further tax the limited resources of our internal social map and capabilities, and force us into pretending a closer connection with more people than we can actually connect with. The result is isolation due to your own internal filters/capabilities knowing you are not fully engaged with as many people as you pretend to be. If you moved into a cabin in the woods, how many people would actually visit you? That's the measure. That's the fear. Religion or no, social stratification is kind of baked into our societies.
Indeed, that seems to be part of the picture as well. I also sometimes wonder how strong the correlation between the sizes of a society and its institutions and how drastic and engrained social stratification is. I've never looked into it, but I can imagine its often pretty strong.