Is Religion an Ideology?

Call religion an ideology in front of a believer and you will get a reaction. Call liberalism a religion in front of a liberal and you will get the same reaction. Both flinches are telling: each side senses that the label is doing work, and that the work is not merely descriptive. So it is worth asking the question slowly. Is religion a type of ideology? The honest answer is that it depends on which of the two lives of the word "ideology" you have in mind, and that religion fits one of them cleanly and the other only sometimes.

The Descriptive Sense

In its neutral, sociological sense, an ideology is a comprehensive system of ideas that does three things. It explains how the world is. It says how the world ought to be. And it binds a group of people around that shared picture, so that holding the picture becomes part of who they are.

Under this definition religion is not merely like an ideology. It is one, and probably the oldest and most complete example we have. Every major religion has a cosmology, an ethics, and a community. Every one of them tells its members where the world came from, what a good life looks like, and who counts as one of us.

Clifford Geertz saw this clearly. He wrote two companion essays, "Religion as a Cultural System" and "Ideology as a Cultural System", and treated both as the same kind of thing: a system of symbols that supplies a model of reality and a model for acting in it. The parallel titles were not an accident. Durkheim gets to the same place from the other direction. For him religion is whatever sacralizes a group's shared values and holds the group together, which means that nationalism, with its flags, anthems, martyrs and holy days, is doing religion's job. Robert Bellah gave that thought a name, "civil religion", when he applied it to the United States.

So on the descriptive definition the question answers itself. Religion is a species of the genus ideology, and the only interesting work left is to say what distinguishes the species.

The Pejorative Sense

But "ideology" has a second life, and it is the one most people hear. In the Marxist sense an ideology is a set of ideas that serves the interests of a class or a ruling power while presenting itself as natural, eternal and true. Ideology in this sense is not just a worldview; it is a worldview that lies about where it came from.

Religion is the founding case. Marx's line about the opium of the people is only the most quoted version of a much older suspicion. And the suspicion is often justified. The divine right of kings told the peasant that his king was chosen by heaven. Karma told the untouchable that his caste was the just consequence of a previous life. "The poor you will always have with you" has been read, for two thousand years, as a reason not to do much about the poor. In each case a social arrangement that benefits someone is presented as the order of the cosmos, and the person it does not benefit is told that questioning it is questioning God.

Yet the fit is not universal. Religion has just as often been the ideology against the ruling order. The Hebrew prophets denounced kings and priests in God's name. Millenarian revolts from the Peasants' War to the Taiping Rebellion were driven by scripture. Liberation theology read the Gospels as a manifesto for the poor against the landowners. Early Christianity itself was a movement of slaves and women that Rome persecuted precisely because it refused the civic cult. Whether religion serves power or attacks it is a historical question, not a definitional one.

So in the pejorative sense religion is often an ideology, but not by nature. It is a tool that has been in the hands of both sides.

What Religion Adds

If religion is a species of ideology, what marks the species? Three features, I think, and they are worth separating because they are usually run together.

A transcendent referent. An ideology like liberalism or socialism makes claims about the social and natural order. Religion makes claims about a reality beyond that order: a God, a soul, an afterlife, a cosmic law. This is a difference in subject matter, and it has a consequence. A political ideology can, at least in principle, be refuted by events. When the prophecy fails, the movement is in trouble. A religion's central claims are placed where events cannot reach them, and that is not an accident of design.

Ritual and embodied practice. Ideologies have rallies, slogans, songs and anniversaries. But religion's practice is denser and it is tied to the body and to the life cycle. Birth, coming of age, marriage and death all pass through it. Daily prayer, dietary law, dress, the calendar and the week are all shaped by it. A person can hold a political ideology and do almost nothing about it. A religion is something you do, and the doing is what makes it stick.

An epistemology of revelation. This is the deepest difference. Modern ideologies claim to be the product of reason or science. Marx called his work scientific socialism. Liberalism presents itself as what any rational person would agree to. Even when these claims are false, they are the claims being made, and they invite the reply "show me". Religion grounds itself in revelation, tradition and faith, and it says so openly. It does not claim that you could have worked it out yourself. It claims that it was told.

This last difference is the one that matters most in practice, because it decides what kind of argument you can have. You can argue with a socialist about whether the theory of surplus value is correct. The argument may go nowhere, but both sides agree on what would count. With a claim from revelation there is nothing to check, and the believer will tell you as much.

Why the Label Is Contested

Once you see the three differences you can also see why the label is fought over. Calling religion an ideology is rarely a neutral act. It strips religion of the special standing it enjoys in law, in tax codes, in schools and in manners, and puts it on the same footing as liberalism or socialism, where it can be argued with, mocked and voted against. That is usually the whole point of the move, and the people making it know it.

The reverse move is just as rhetorical. Believers call atheism "also a faith" and call secular humanism "a religion" in order to drag secular worldviews down to the same level. If everything is a religion then religion is nothing special, but also nothing to be ashamed of, and the atheist's claim to be reasoning rather than believing is dismissed as self-flattery.

Both moves are fighting over the same prize: whether religion gets to be exempt from the ordinary rules of argument. The descriptive claim, that religion is a system of ideas which explains, prescribes and binds, is simply true. What the fight is really about is whether the three features that distinguish religion from other ideologies earn it a pass, or whether they are exactly the features that should make us more suspicious of it, not less.

I know which way I lean. A system of ideas that places its central claims beyond the reach of evidence, embeds them in the body before the age of reason, and grounds them in an authority that cannot be questioned has not earned an exemption from argument. It has described the conditions under which argument is least likely to happen. That is not a reason to treat it more gently than any other ideology. It is a reason to treat it with more care.