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              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 self-deception.
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 anti-theological 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 one-dimensional 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 World-view, 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 self-evident 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 self-revealing: 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.