Ústav
religionistiky
Gary Lease, Ideology. In: Willy Braun & Russel T.McCutcheon,
Guide to the Study of Religion, Cassel: London & New York 2000,
s. 438 – 451
FRVŠ
1890/2005
Téma: Interpretace náboženské skutečnosti
"Ideology" marks the twentieth century as no other term. Since the social and
political upheavals in the United States and France at the end of the eighteenth century,
revolution, of course, has laid claim to first rank among modern-era concepts. And since
Freud, the notion of "the unconscious" has gained strong currency as the chief marker of our
age. But neither term has the breadth and extension of ideology; neither concept has exercised
such inclusiveness as ideology; and neither\or has replaced so many others as has ideology. It
is not to be wondered, then, that the study of religion, that many-headed Hydra of modernity,
is inextricably, even intimately, linked to the notion of ideology.
Ideology as Category
Ideology does not take its origins in Western culture's antiquity or even in the Middle
Ages, as do so many other political and social concepts. Rather, it is in the overthrow of these
older, traditional categorical systems during the French Revolution (1789) that the word first
was formed. In the beginning, the so called French Ideologists sought only to name their new
science, but due to Napoleon's later use of the term, and the resulting political/public relations
campaigns, the word lost its original philosophical and quite a-political meaning, to be
transformed into a polemical slogan during the first half of the nineteenth century. As a result,
the notion assumed its status as a battle cry, a function it has not lost to this day. It is also in
this guise that Marx and Engels appropriated the term and provided it with the specific
meaning that still attaches to this label in many disparate areas of dispute. The end result is
that the very term ideology has bee ideologized.
Initially, ideology refers to a pattern of thought, a way of life, and a political course of
action-in other words, a more or less coherent system of ideas-that are bound to sets of ideas
with little or no connection to reality, indeed are opposed to experiential reality. Ideology thus
presupposes a gap between theory and practice, between idea and reality. It is only when the
belief in the primacy of thought is attacked as the reverse of what the actual state of human
consciousness is, that ideology also assumes the secondary meanings of illusion and selfdeception.
In this form, then, ideological criticism becomes the process by which
unrecognized impediments in the process of establishing truth are revealed.
For the purpose of the study of religions, however, it is important to note that the
current primary reference of the concept ideology is to a special form of illusion, namely the
belief that ideas are the chief elements in human politics and history. Despite logical
consistency, the presence of scientific rationality, and even practical evidences, what
characterizes ideology in its usual applications is the hidden, even repressed role of the key
historical, social and economic interests, motives and determinations that produced the
seemingly disembodied system of ideas to begin with.
The History of Ideology
It was the French Ideologist, Antoine Destutt dl' Tracy (1754-1836), who first coined
the term "ideology" (1801-1807). As the founder of a science of ideas, Destutt hoped to study
the origin of human conceptualization, not as norms but as products. Such a science would, in
his view, serve as a foundation for the rest of human knowledge. Following the English
philosopher John Locke, Destutt sought merely to observe and describe the actions of the
human mind, emphasizing that ideology, properly conceived, would hl' nothing other than a
part of zoology. This is so, according to Destutt, because all ideas take their origin in the
senses and achieve expression in language. By investigating the relationship between ideas
and the (linguistic) signs that matched them, hl' hoped to achieve for his science of ideas the
same strict precision that rules in such other fields as mathematics and the natural sciences.
As such, ideology would be the scientific basis of human society: politics, law, morality and
education would flow from it.
The influence exercised by the Ideologists, however, throughout revolutionary and
post-revolutionary France, especially in the form of a-religious and empirical teachings in the
schools, led to a clash with Napoleon. Initially hl' had been friendly toward the Ideologists,
even inviting Destutt to accompany him on his military campaign in Egypt. But after
assuming sole power in France in 1799 (the coup of the 18th Brumaire), Napoleon saw the
need to consolidate his position by restoring, in a controllable form, both church and state
(Concordat with the Roman Church, 18(1). This move led inexorably to a break with the antitheological
and liberal teachings of the Ideologists. There was little doubt in Napoleon's mind
that the Ideologists, now disqualified by him as merely "metaphysicians and fanatics," were
working counter to his notions of supreme power. Indeed, their concepts of state and society
were, for the Emperor, but abstract theories that had nothing to do with political reality. By
giving the term ideology a new meaning, Napoleon attempted to make the Ideologists
ridiculous: an idea is for him no longer a sensually grasped content projected by the human
imagination, but rather merely a theory disconnected from reality. As such, any discourse
about ideas was disqualified as substanceless theorizing. With one blow Napoleon had turned
ideology into a pejorative characterization of all philosophical theories, particularly those that
may have laid claim to some practical political legitimacy. As a consequence, ideology was
seen throughout Europe as the hallmark of dreamers, theoreticians, doctrinaire professors,
people of principle, writers of fiction, insane projections, and so on. This was especially true
for the followers of natural law theory and the supporters of a restoration of the monarchical
political order that had been swept away in the tide of the French Revolution. True, and
particularly in Germany, there was also a positive conception of ideology: Goethe, and later
Heine, saw the power of ideas realized in the wars of liberation fought precisely against
Napoleon, and they viewed their victory for freedom as the reverse of his version of ideology.
But in the ma in, ideology remained at the mid-nineteenth century a term of derision and a
polemical slogan-a sense of the term that we still find in use to this day.
Of long-lasting importance for the development of the term ideology is, of course, the
role played by Karl Marx. Tracing the history of ideology in Marx's writings is extreme\y
complicated. For one thing, the key text authored by Marx and Engels dealing with ideology,
The German Ideology (1970 [184546]), was not published in any form until early in the
twentieth century (19031904), and in its entirety only in 1932. Apparently, both Marx and
Engels thought that the notion of ideology was so transparent that a precise delineation of its
meaning was unnecessary. The result was a myriad of different nuanced uses of the term in
their writings, which in turn led to a wide number of Marxian-based conceptions of ideology
that could simply not be undone by such late revelations of what Marx and Engels may have
thought ideology was at the beginning of their careers. What is clear, however, is that Marx
found the notion of ideology associated with Napoleon to be the proper one: ideology for him
was, at least to begin with, an act of theorizing that was distant from reality, and above all
foreign to political practice. From this point of departure it was not long before Marx spoke of
his now famous "alienated consciousness," a consciousness permeated by abstract projections
and mental spider webs. Only later was one able to see that already in The German Ideology
Marx and Engels had made this interpretation of ideology even more precise. Here they took
on the so-called Young Hegelians, those critics of Hegel who, in the judgment of Marx and
Engels, had stood reality (and also Hegel) on its head: ideas, concepts, thoughts, projections
do not determine human life and history to maintain that position is to turn the true
relationship between being and consciousness ideologically upside down. Of course Marx and
Engels did know what that relationship should be: it is only individuals, their actions and the
material conditions of their lives that determine their history; the entire mental production of
human beings is conditioned by the development of the products of their labor and the
exchange of those products. According to Marx and Engels, ideologies, unfortunately, see this
process in reverse: rather than viewing the progression of consciousness from material
production, ideologies maintain the independence of thought and spirit.
One consequence of this legendary position-consciousness does not determine life, but rather
life determines consciousness-was that, in the Marxian view, morality, religion, metaphysics,
and other ideologies lose any claim to social and historical autonomy. Since Marx and Engels
argued that the genuine relationship between humans and reality lies in the material
preconditions of life, it was easy for them to proceed to the analysis of the products of human
action as the source of an empirical confirmation. Reality was expanded to include, however,
not only the material conditions but also the social conditions of human life, namely the class
interests that were hidden by ideologies. In fact, in later Marxian thought, this becomes one of
the chief tasks of ideology: to hide the true interests that lie behind the goals and acts of the
power-wielding classes (e.g., the nobility, the bourgeoisie). This forgetting of the genuine,
material motivations for thought and action is the product of self-delusion rather than
conscious intention: ideology is therefore a process of self-alienation. Consciously or not,
such self-alienation as found in religion, morality, and so on, is therefore revealed as a lie.
Ideology results from the attempt to make the super-structure of ideas autonomous and
independent of the true relationship between consciousness and reality. Indeed, for Marx
religion is one of those areas of human activity that, by its very nature, must understand its
norms and beliefs as eternal, holy and, above all else, as unchanging; as such, religion strives
to break the connection between itself and the class interests that lie at its foundation.
Religion, in other words, is ideology per se.
The post-Marxian development of socialism and social democracy, however, led to
often quite different results. Georg Lukacs (1955), for example, considered a reified or
independent consciousness as the product of capitalism's terrible effect on the worker. Such
an autonomous consciousness must achieve ideological maturity, must gain accurate
knowledge about its true class situation-l11ust, in other words, reach a state of authentic class
consciousness. At that point, for Lukacs, ideology is no longer a theory independent of
practice, but instead is the location of unity between theory and practice. This is, however, a
position that neither Marx nor Engels would have represented. Nor would Theodor Adorno's
(1964) understanding of ideology have been happily accepted by Marx and Engels. Ideology
in his sense is precisely society itself, but society in its essential appearance. For Adorno there
is no false consciousness that is independent of society, making ideologies somehow stand
apart from history. Rather, the consciousness that is ideology is the duplication of the society
from which it springs. Although Herbert Marcuse viewed ideology as restricted to the onedimensional
reality of technological development, Jürgen Habermas went even further,
finding ideology in the identification of possessions and humanity. One of the most recent
attempts to reconceptualize the notion of ideology is found in the work of the sociologist
Niklas Luhmann (1977) who sees ideology as the "value system by which members of a
society determine which consequences of their actions are acceptable and which are not. For
Luhmann ideology is primarily, if not completely, comprehensible as a function of human
society, not as separate and autonomous thought.
Critique and Evaluation
Religion, observed the sociologist Peter Berger (1969), is the "audacious attempt to
conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant." Or put another way, religions
are systems of meaning, and as such they are ideologies. For if the history of the term has
taught us anything, it is that, whether considered to be false or authentic, ideologies are
precisely systems of ideas that are organized to produce meaning for human actions. And
religions are exactly such constructions, claiming to be models for all other theorizing.
Religion is therefore not simply one ideological creation among others-though it is certainly
that-but also a key node for the distribution of power or control over the texts and limits of
consciousness. Luhmann is therefore correct when he maintains that the key to understanding
ideology is its function: a religion represents just such a function as the self-evident pattern of
human experience, and thus of reality.
But religion and ideology are not the only constructs to share the function of providing
meaning: world-views, mythologies and cosmologies also strive to systematize human
meaning. Are they therefore a\1 the same as ideology? Hardly! Despite Ninian Smart's (1981,
(983) tendency to mix and match these categories, the lines of distinction are important to
observe. A world-view, for example, deals with the difficulty of comprehending the
relationship between humans and the world in which they are located, and imposing a
meaning upon that connection. A cosmology, on the other hand, strives to present as complete
a picture as possible of the relationship between the world and the nature that inhabits that
world, humanity included; such a presentation may or may not lead to the establishment of
meaning, or a pattern of relationships between all the players.
Mythology is perhaps the most difficult of these categories to determine, and at the
same time the most relevant to understanding both ideology and religion. For mythologies
deal directly with constituting data as self-evident; analyzing mythology seeks to understand
not only how this process works, but also to what purpose it is undertaken. It is only within
such a framework that we can ask about religion, ideology, world-view and cosmology.
One can perhaps most easily grasp the function of mythologies as the metacodes
which govern the choice (selection) of the actual interpretive codes used to decipher
experience and the expression of experience. Myths, in other words, both govern the choice of
a code (world-view, cosmology, ideology, religion) and judge its application. Precisely as
meta-code, mythologies establish what gets to count, or what is considered self-evident in a
culture, be that in the realm of the so-called sacred or the general cultural code.
Religions, as specific forms of ideology, are culture-wide interpretations or code
applications, dedicated to making manifest the latent meaning behind the text of the culture at
large; myths, particularly in their manifestation within a religion, are the governing tools or
codes by which this product is performed. These basic tools or codes are always about
relationships: origins to world to humans. A major consequence therefore of understanding
religions as ideologies is that they only make sense when viewed as human productions rather
than as external impositions. Finally, religions also allow the accessing of world-views and
cosmologies by establishing an absolute claim to do so: the meaning of the world, or a Worldview,
and the representation of that world, or a cosmology, can only, according to religion, be
interrelated by means of that religion and its mythology. Precisely, however, because religions
are ideologies, and therefore changeable, every person has a world-view, and every person
has a cosmology, but not every person has a religion.
Traditional religions, however, particularly those in Western culture and those
claiming universal legitimacy, reject any identification with ideology as inauthentic and
destructive. For them religion cannot be ideology for the simple fact that religions (or their
religion) are true and thus certainly are not in any sense manifestations of an alienated
consciousness. In contrast, the view represented here, following Louis Althusser's (1971)
lead, holds that ideologies are the inevitable result of human consciousness. Among the key
functions of consciousness is to process the myriad stages of identification with which human
beings construct the world around them. As the chief too! for doing so, consciousness makes
use of definition, or the establishment of relationships as objects which are consequently
subject to use and control. To identify both self and world and have them remain stable and
separable, consciousness stamps them as independent and external, rather than seeing them as
the products of cultural and representational imagination. As a result, humans are constantly
bringing forth new identifications and linking them up with previous identifications in a
feverish attempt to provide definitions capable of covering all possible experiences. Such a
plurality of definitions, in turn, demands a catalog or ranking of their relationships of one to
another; tests are produced which allow one to locate new definitions within the catalog.
These catalogs are ideologies.
The presence of such catalogs in human lives, and more particularly in commonly
shared human lives, leads inevitably to a struggle over the power to control their formation
and their application. Who, for example, defines the ranking with a particular catalog? How,
and with what force, is that primary definitional act exercised? The answers to these questions
form the stuff of ideologies, or the dynamic process by which such catalogs cease to be ever
changing, contestable systems of judgment and, instead, come to be understood as selfevident
and fundamental to human existence. Such self-evident systems of definition and
classification must constantly be legitimated in order to head off the collapse of the intricate
patterns of relationship, which make up the supportive ideologies. Any society, I would argue,
is forever and inextricably bound up with the process of sustaining its basically shared
catalogs of definitions and classifications for human experience of the world. Any society, in
other words, is always producing and legitimating sets of ideologies.
In order to sustain such sets, or systems of ideologies, authority is needed to impose
them on those segments of a society, which may have constructed quite different, or variant
catalogs of definitions. Force may be employed, and the role of law codes to regulate the
function of such force in maintaining broad-based ideologies is well known. Constitutions for
example, have as their reason for being the provision of such a self-evidently understood and
accepted framework for ideologies and their attendant rules of enforcement (law), that the
very basis of the societies for which they were created cannot be called into question.
Religion, on the other hand, frequently serves as the label for those systems of legitimation,
which attempt to anchor their foundation outside of, or external to, the ideologies being
legitimated. In either case, stability is the desired product. And stability promises a constant,
unvarying pattern of relationship between inside and outside, or more prosaically, between
self and others. In overcoming separation and distinction, stability of ideology becomes both
inclusive and exclusive, that is, it assumes all experiences available to the society in question
and rejects all those experiences which might be used to question the accepted set.
But what happens if such questioning does occur? What happens if the stability, no
matter how powerfully enforced, breaks down and the catalog of definitions, which makes up
a society's ideologies no longer is understood to be self-evident? Inevitably, chaos and the
competition of ideologies results. It is precisely religion, however, always the preeminent
discourse of definition, that is opposed to such chaos. Together with law, religion works
tirelessly against the dismantling of ideological systems, trying to stem any encroaching chaos
by shoring up the once-self-evident catalogs of definitions which are the substance of a
society's ideologies. Religion, in other words, is always the enemy of revolution, since
revolution can only mean the subversion and destabilizing of ideological systems. As such,
revolution is also the ever-present shadow of religion. Where you find history and religion,
ideology and revolution both lie at their roots and are not far behind. For both history and
religion are not true in the sense that their stories are full, complete and forever unchanging,
though each would have you believe that is indeed the case. Rather, history and religion are
only interpretations, are better, ideological narratives: how one views, represents and
comprehends a subject, event or experience is very much dependent upon the ideology
underlying the interpretive effort; that is why history and religion are so full of mysteries, not
clarity. There are no real artifacts to go on: you have to reconstruct it all. Due to the
interspacing of ideology between us and reality, the past, present and future are not selfrevealing:
we have to make it up. Not every ideology is a religion, but every religion is
ideology.
Ideology and the Study of Religion
There is widespread agreement that doing religion is not the same as studying religion.
If we were to take the notion of religion as ideology as our point of departure, then three
directions offer contemporary and future scholarship the most fruitful sources for the study of
religion: tracing the natural history of religions; the interaction between religion and the law;
and the anchoring of a theory of religion in the biological sphere.
A so-called natural history seeks to trace the emergence, or prima I identity; development, or
mature identity; and dissolution, or death of identity. Understanding religion as ideology
grants us the flexibility to apply such analytic categories to religions. This is so because
tracking the development or patterns of change in a particular religion over time allows us to
understand it as ideologically determined, that is, as contingent. Without a coherent account
of the process of change that lies between the narrated emergence and the present point of
observation, establishing the identity of a religion becomes difficult if not impossible. And
without an identity, there is not intelligibility. One need only witness the current chaos
reigning in the world of Christian origins: soon tracing this area of study will have mainly
ethnographic interest.
The result of such an approach would mean that one never comes to closure on what
constitutes the object of such a history. The target, or particular religion under review, would
always be shifting, would always be contingent, would never be final, just as with our other
rational objects of knowledge. Indeed, the evidences that one might adduce for such a history
would also always be in movement. The ethical, moral, ritual and intellectual choices that
adherents of a specific religion consider to be demanded by their beliefs, or demanded by
religion in general, would constantly be changing, would never be absolute. A natural history
of a religion could never, therefore, posit the reality or, better, the validity of any religion's
claims or persuasions (beliefs) as the object and intelligibility, hut rather only the origins, the
history and the death of such claims and their resulting functions. In other words, desire and
need are not identical: a genuine science of religion would acknowledge that a choice of
reality does not constitute hegemony over all of reality or over others. Study of religion,
precisely as ideology, is not the giving or bearing of testimony to the truth of a particular
religion, or of religion in the abstract: it is not an act of belief.
The question of what place religion occupies in our larger social life is an almost
classic case of the intimate relationship between religion and the law, as well as to the broader
political setting in which law is found. A colleague of mine observed some years ago that the
parallel to the slogan of that well-known Jewish teacher of antiquity, Jesus of Nazareth, who
said that the meek shall inherit the earth, was none other than the observation of that
contemporary social critic and baseball manager of the 1950s, Leo Durocher, who noted that
nice guys finish last There are very real tensions between these two stances, tensions that
come from competitive ideologies. In our own time we have seen National Socialist Germany
co-opt the major Christian churches in its spasm of totalitarian control and self-destruction,
using particularly Roman Catholicism to organize public ritual and the celebration of fascist
political dominatiol1. Again, in Yugoslavia, or more specifically Croatia, we have seen the
church co-opted by a national movement hardly distinguishable from its German masters;
now Archbishop Stepinac, who welcomed his fascist allies with such cmhusiasl1l, is being
praised by the Roman Catholic Pope as a martyr and has been beatified. In the United States
there continues sharp controversy over whether the Congress and the states should amend the
Constitution to permit prayer in school classrooms; the struggle is, of course, over the
questions of "which prayer?" and "whose composition?" Religion and law, in other words, is
one of the most thorny but also most potentially fruitful areas for the study of religion today
precisely because it is in the law, and in a religion's relationship to the law, that the struggle
between competing ideologies becomes most clear.
As biologists probe ever deeper into the structure of the human brain, as the final mapping of
the human genome becomes ready for us in the next few years, more and more students of
religion are questioning the possibility that religion is hard-wired into the human genetic
structure. Or at the very last, that evolutionary hangovers (experiential adaptations), rather
than specific genes, lie at the heart of the human creation we call religion. What if, for
example, we were to view religion as a set of artifacts, artifices and strategies by which the
human species moved from being a prey species to a predator species? In other words, what if
the ideological understanding of religion took as its point of departure a notion of religion as a
complex strategy designed as a system of values, reinforced by ritual, to locate our origin and
our fate ol1tside of ourselves, with the goal of this strategy being the effort to cope with an
initial prey experience and eventual shift to outright predation, ultimately ending in preying
upon ourselves? What if the ghosts of predators past, and still chase the human species
displays its strategic adaptations for surviving those predators? Other constructions are, of
course, not only possible but likely if one were to take seriously the ideological character of
religion.
Understanding religions as ideologies will liberate the study of religions and their
traditions in ways we can only dimly anticipate, leading to more profound, and more accurate
ways of determining both the role religions play in wider society, and the definitions of what
gets to count as religion in that society.