"Brandishing religion" is something only the truly contrite can do with smug self-confidence. You might think this is a bad joke, but I'm serious. It goes beyond the simple stupidity of the unthinking religious professors. To truly make a sword of truth of your belief/conviction, you sorta need to know how to use the weapon effectively.
effectively asserting a religious principle or belief requires you to know the difference between ungodly power, or force, and the power to communicate a truth to someone who is reasonably interested in it. "Casting pearls before swine" is a harsh metaphor, perhaps, but certainly a person who really doesn't care to listen is not going to be willing to let you twist his arm, or his mind, and let you drag him over to the horse trough and let you make him drink.
Nice wisdom in a lot of little clichés. You can lead a horse to water. . . perhaps. . . . but you can't make him drink.
Organized religion, particularly statist religions, routinely depart from this wisdom and attempt to impose "religion" on the citizenry. Marxism is perhaps the worst offender in human history on this count, whatever it is you think it is or ought to be, it incorporates within its dictums the assertion that it must win politically, and defines as virtue any stratagem deemed helpful to that quest, and is willing nay eager to destroy the "unbeliever" or noncompliant from the living world.
The charm with some of the old religions lies in the open invitation to seek a higher "wisdom" of some kind, together with a principle of tolerance for others and even an implied duty to serve others unselfishly.
The question has arisen in this forum of what it takes to be a "holy" man. Well, if you are defending someone less able with a sword, putting your life on the line, you could be holy, perhaps, but I think you would sorta need to be one who hopes to deflect the necessity of injuring anyone, if realistic enough to act decisively nevertheless if there is no such possibility. Or, you could be someone with any of a number of other virtues standing out in an appropriate time and place, doing what can be most helpful for others. In either case, it involves a capacity to subordinate "self" according to some appropriate principle of goodness.
Gandhi, though a sort of "Marxist", chose to still hold on the good of his Moslem, Hindu, and Christian associations, and applied the good principles, putting himself on the same ground as those he sought to serve. A lot of his political ideas reflected some modern idealisms marginally resorted to in Marxist propaganda. . . . but Gandhi was honest, and he really meant to relieve the people of India from an oppressive colonial captivity. He chose a principle of non-violence that required a willingness to stand for what is right, taking a sort of moral high ground, and just absorbing and making bad publicity of the proffered abuses of authorities. He used it, effectively, to convince the populace in general of the wrongness of the colonial authority. Without a public willing to believe in that authority, the British effectively lost influence and the ability to rule.
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Gandhi was one of the few who has effectively "brandished religion". He did it with sublime humility.