Both religion and ideology are sets of beliefs or ideas which try to explain how things work in the world and society and based on it create a set of rules people may follow. Both espouse world views that are seen as complete by their followers: as “total” systems, concerned at the same time with questions of truth and questions of conduct. Both consider opposing views as incorrect. Both tend to impact human psychology in similar ways through creating an ‘us and them’ mentality. Louis Althusser argues that religion is a part of the ideological state apparatus. Along with education and the media, it transmits the dominant ideology and maintains false class consciousness. False consciousness denotes people’s inability to recognize inequality, oppression, and exploitation in a capitalist or authoritarian society because of the prevalence within it of views that naturalize and legitimize the existence of social classes.
People can polarize into various ideologies, including tendencies towards political left- and right-wing extremism, and religious fundamentalism. If sociologists refer to religion as being ‘ideological’, they typically mean the beliefs and practices of that religion support powerful groups in society, effectively keeping the existing ruling class, or elites, in power. Thus, while remaining rooted in a lived culture, religion can become an ideology, an organizing principle for the reordering of society (or at least, for mobilizing collective action), clothed in the universalist language of God’s will and transcendent justice. Someone who may have seen a connection is the psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) who argued that humanity has “religious instinct” – a deep need to worship something, make sense of the world and develop world-views. Secularists might argue this instinct is a by-product of evolution and our desire to understand our surroundings.
Ideology can act as a supplement to religion, or as its replacement. Indeed, the interpretation of freedom suggested by the church can be a way to resolve some social and political tensions in modern society. However, the problem is that there is no single theological interpretation of what freedom is. Another problem is that it is difficult to translate a healthy theological interpretation of freedom into a political praxis. In other words, even though the churches have a huge potentiality to overcome ideologies, they often get trapped in them. Ideologies function in the realm of theology in the same way as they do everywhere else: they stereotype the truth; make it more comprehensible and translatable into social and political action. This comes at the expense of various aberrations in the perception of truth. When the church identifies itself with one of the ideologies, it dramatically reduces the truth, which it expresses.
Ideologies reduce the relationship of human beings with God to moral and civil values, and turn metaphysics into a civil religion. Ideologies polarize religious groups. They make the church, in the description of Daniel Izuzquiza, “divided between traditionalists and progressives, conservatives and liberals, those accentuating identity and those stressing dialogue, ‘Christians of presence’ and ‘Christians of mediation,’ and so on.” The church cannot create an ideology-free zone, but it can disarm ideologies. It can provide a framework where ideologies would not harm. The first step to the disarmament of ideologies would be to recognize that there are ideologies in the church and they are different from the church as such and from theology. “The terrible paradox,” as Olga Sedakova puts it, is that “ideology penetrates into Christianity and is not recognized as opposite to it.” Ideologies thus should be recognized in the church, and the church should accept that it is dangerous to be identified with them.1
Evolutionist Richard Dawkins hypothesized a similar reason why religion has created such a lasting impact on society. His theory is explained by the creation of ‘memes’. Comparable to genes, memes are bits of information that can be imitated and transferred across cultures and generations (Dawkins, 2006). Unlike genes, which are physically contained within the human genome, memes are the units or “genetic material” of culture. As a vocal proponent of atheism, Dawkins believes the idea of God is a meme, working in the human mind the same way as a placebo effect. The God meme contains tangible benefits to human society such as answers to questions about human transcendence and superficial comfort for daily difficulties, but the idea of God itself is a product of the human imagination (Dawkins, 2006). Although a human creation, the God meme is incredibly appealing, and as a result, has continually been passed on through cultural transfusion.
One of Weber’s explanations for the origin and persistence of religion in society concerns its role in providing a meaningful explanation for the unequal “distribution of fortunes among men” (Weber, 1915 (1958)). This is religion’s unique ability and authority to provide a theodicy – an attempt to construct and deal with how belief systems work – an explanation for why all-powerful Gods allow suffering, misfortune and injustice to occur, even to “good people” who follow the moral and spiritual practices of their religion. Religious theodicies resolve the contradiction between “destiny and merit” (Weber, 1915 (1958)). They give meaning to why good or innocent people experience misfortune and suffering. Religions exist therefore because they (successfully) claim the authority to provide such explanations. Each form of theodicy provides “rationally satisfying answers” to persistent questions about why gods permit suffering and misfortune without undermining the obligation of believers to pursue the religion’s values.2
The Black Death altered the fundamental paradigm of European life that included socio-economic and religious belief and practice, unleashing the forces that made the Renaissance possible. The Renaissance yielded scholars the ability to read the scriptures in their original languages, and this in part stimulated the Protestant Reformation. The 16th century reformers considered the root of corruptions to be doctrinal rather than simply a matter of moral weakness or lack of ecclesiastical discipline. Kuhn denied that science is constantly approaching the truth. Kuhn observed, “each paradigm will be shown to satisfy more or less the criteria that it dictates for itself and to fall short of a few of those dictated by its opponent … no paradigm ever solves all the problems it defines…” Instead of recognizing that a paradigmatic change is necessary in mainstream economics, the economic profession stubbornly sticks to their existing mathematical models.
Kierkegaard describes truth as a leap of faith, and as the becoming of the individual’s subjectivity. While speculative thinking reflects on concrete things abstractly, subjective thinking reflects on abstract things concretely. Kierkegaard made a distinction between objective and subjective truth. For Kierkegaard objective truth merely seeks attachment to the right object, corresponding with an independent reality. On the other hand, subjective truth seeks the achievement of the right attitude; an appropriate relation between object and knower. For Kierkegaard it was subjective truth that counts in life: how we believe is more important than what we believe. It doesn’t matter what you believe so long as you are sincere. Kierkegaard argues that the falsehood of objectivity may be revealed by a lack of need for personal commitment, and by lack of need for decision-making, while the truth of subjectivity may be revealed by a need for personal commitment, and by a need for decision-making.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) believed that human reason is rationalization, and truth is simply the name given to the point of view of the people who have the power to enforce their point of view. Whatever man can make work in order to achieve his purposes becomes the truth in the system. There is no objective reality behind truth – different perspectives produce different truths. Nietzsche believes that science at its best keeps us in a simplified suitably constructed and suitably falsified world, and that the artificial world that concerns us is a fiction. Instead of using truth as the highest standard of value, Nietzsche argues, individuals need to develop their own powers of judgment and to produce ideas and ethics that will strengthen them and help them to live. Nietzsche believed, one should be conscious of the illusory nature of what is considered truth, thus opening up the possibility of the creation of new values.
Neoliberalism as an ideology contemporarily refers to market-oriented reform policies such as “eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers” and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, state influence in the economy. Inequality is recast as virtuous. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve. So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. This ideology was developed as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power. In reality, neoliberalism increases income inequality by rewarding those who are already wealthy, while providing fewer nets for poorer populations to fall back on. It is necessary to rebalance the power of corporations supported by an ideology serving the interest of financial capital and globalized elites – in order to create a successful society.
Neoliberal ideology is so useful to society’s most powerful people – as a scholarly veneer to what would otherwise be a raw power grab. Truth, much like knowledge, is bound to power and similarly operates amidst the individuals and institutions that generate and sustain it. The economic elite do not hesitate to present their ideology as interpretation of truth. The “truth” the market reveals is never in actuality some eternal, given fact. The market is never a neutral arbiter of truth, so the “truth” it reveals about government practice has always required interpretation. Social computing shows that you don’t necessarily have to read people’s brains to influence their choices. It is sufficient to collect and mine the data they regularly – and often unwittingly – share online. Nietzsche observed: “Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.”
Ideology is a form of social or political philosophy in which practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones. It is a system of ideas that aspires both to explain the world and to change it. Ideology is the set of personal values about politics, while philosophy is the set of values about life in general. Philosophy has a pragmatic approach in its theories, whereas ideology is all about beliefs belonging to a particular group of people. Another important difference between philosophy and ideology is that philosophy is objective in its approach, whereas ideology is dogmatic in its approach and beliefs. Ideology is a set of beliefs that favours the interests of a group. For example, beware of the green high-tech entrepreneurs and their allies in finance who are part of the capitalist elite that is enriching itself at the expense of the middle class. Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems – is a system of abstract thought applied to public matters and thus makes its concepts central to politics.
1http://ekmair.ukma.edu.ua/bitstream/handle/123456789/11060/Hovorun_Ideology_and_Religion.pdf?sequence=1
2https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontosociology2ndedition/chapter/chapter-15-religion/