Ideological Religion in World Politics

In this chapter I start by questioning the common perspective across multiple traditions that equate and reduce religion to ideology.1 In the following section, I then engage with definitional debates about ideology and religion. Here I draw in particular on scholarship in religious studies to suggest that religion – especially in our modern largely secularized world – should be approached as its own category of analysis and practice, which is distinct from that of ideology. Yet, I also maintain that while religion should not be understood as ideology it can and does become ideological. In the chapter’s third section, I address how to think about this relationship through an engagement with the concept of ‘religious ideology’ found in the field of ideological analysis. I argue that the commonly adopted category of religious ideology suffers from a degree of conceptual stretching and propose that it should be seen instead as a specific form of a broader concept, which I label ‘ideological religion’. I identify three general kinds of ideological religious phenomena and place these on a continuum: on the one end is that of political theology, at the other end is that of religious identitarianism, between them I situate a more narrowly defined concept of religious ideology. The travelling direction on this spectrum is from ideological expressions of religion that have a deeper and thicker connection to religious structures and theologies, to those that have a weaker and thinner connection instead. The fourth section explores what is distinct about ideological religion and why we should take it seriously in world politics. First, I emphasize how religions are complex, multivocal, and relatively independent social entities. This means that ideological religion will often be hard to neatly categorize on our conventional political spectrum going from left to right and that it will always be – to a greater or lesser extent – nested, embraced, and contested from within larger religious traditions and communities themselves. Second, I highlight how ideological religion has the power to exacerbate, more so than initiate and cause, violence and war. Third, I argue that ideological religions are among the main challengers of the existing international political, economic, and ideological status quo represented by nation- states, capitalism, and the liberal international order.