Religion and Political Ideology: A Closer Look

AMERICA’s mainstream media is once again focusing our attention on the democratic presidential primaries and, in characteristic fashion, is painting a thirst-for-power relationship between Hillary Rodham-Clinton and Barak Obama, with the result that ordinary Americans will fail to gauge clearly the candidates’ political records. Particularly, the mainstream media, for the past two months or so has focused our attention on the relationship between Democratic presidential candidate Barak Obama and his mentor, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright; in other words, the media is pontificating on possible reasons why Barak Obama took the position to disassociate himself from Dr. Wright’s rhetoric and the resulting consequences of Dr. Wright’s rhetoric on Obama’s chances for clinching the Democratic nomination.

Whether Democratic super-delegates choose Barak Obama as the presumptive Democratic nominee who, if the political pundits are accurate, will face the Republican John McCain for the highest office in this republic is another topic of discussion. Our main concern here is a far more serious one: the often misguided notion that Religion is a political ideology, or that Religion can be distorted for political gain. This line of thinking is erroneous and far from the Truth. Note here that I emphasize Truth with a capital “T”. “Truth” transcends history, space and time while political ideologies center on human ideas that aim to encapsulate a comprehensive vision of human reality.

Human history is replete with various forms of political ideologies. Within the modern American political environment, for instance, liberalism and conservatism characterize the majority of its political discourse; those of us who lean “left” on political matters are called “radical liberals”, while those of us who lean “right” are called “conservatives”. Conservatism, for example, arose in England as far back as the eighteenth century as a counter-attack against the revolutionary ideals of the French Revolution of 1789; it held that political institutions and social mores evolved naturally over the centuries and is therefore not to be tampered with by human agents. Radical liberalism is the diametrical opposite of conservatism; this ideology can be traced to the ideals championed by the French Revolution. Radical liberalism proclaims that political institutions are “organic” and therefore subject to change by human agents. Both political ideologies don not admit of any religious affiliation.

But what of political ideologies that uses Religion to secure its aims and objectives? The result is that the capital “T” of “Truth” is reduced to a “t”, that is, “truth”. In other words, human political ideology, identified as the “truth”, supplants Divine “Truth”.

Theologians representing the three established revealed Religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – point to a difference between a “universalist” versus a “particularist” vision of Religion. The “universalist” type refers to the notion that a Religious tradition is universally applicable to all human beings, while the particularist vision of Religion applies to the experiences of a particular group of human beings. We see throughout human history that many actors, who cloak themselves in religious garb, subscribed to the particularist vision of religion. Their chief motivation is to inject religion with political ideology to further their political agendas.

A critical inspection of Western societies reveals that they are stratified or organized into class structures. Marxism, an influential but pernicious ideology that grew out of the French Revolution, asserts that the wealthy among us strive to maintain its “separateness” from the poor to achieve political and economic gain by developing their own political rationale for maintaining that “separateness”, or the “status quo”. Marxism has become a political critique of Western economies for the past 60 years or so and this ideology has allowed many anti-capitalist intellectuals to help the poor liberate themselves from the “status quo” to formulate a new “vision” of society, preferably one based on no class distinctions.

Prior to becoming the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, Cardinal Ratzinger, as he was called prior to assuming the name “Benedict XIV”, wrote an interesting article on religion and political ideology. Among his duties as Cardinal was to refute existing political ideologies deemed contradictory to traditional Roman Catholic theology. On the subject of “Liberation theology”, one that interprets the Christian Gospel through a Marxist lens, he makes the point that this brand of theology supplies a new, comprehensive interpretation of the Christian reality. Liberation theology, he held, declares that all reality is political; and because of this political reality, political action is a sign of liberation. Liberation Theology, in his words, is the “…idea of turning to the world, of responsibility for the world”. He asserts that Liberal theology arose from a critique of traditional Christian theology that was deemed too abstract in form and that does not answer the moral challenges faced by poor communities. According to Cardinal Ratzinger, tradition Catholic Church theology represented a totality that transcends time and space; but now liberation theologians say that the experience of the community determines the understanding and the interpretation of Scripture. Liberation theology found its roots among the intimate relationships between Catholic clergy and poor communities in Latin America during the 1950’s and 1960’s, at a time when traditional Catholic clergy realized a disconnect between the “abstract” formulations of traditional Christian theology and those “concrete” moral dilemmas poor communities face on a daily basis.

If the Marxist interpretation of Christian Scripture revolves around the economic basis of society, then Black Liberation theology centers on the issue of race. The transition between Liberation theology and Black Liberation theology is a natural one, if we consider the painful history of race relations in American society. While Liberation theology paints the wealthy as the “oppressors” and the poor as the “oppressed”, Black Liberation theology paints “whites” as the “oppressors” and “blacks” as the “oppressed”.

Advocates of Black Liberation theology, among them the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, assert that “white religionists” fail to relate Jesus’ Gospel to the existential pain of being black in a “white racist society”. Black Liberation theology is the theological expression of a people that was historically deprived of social and political power. For Black theologians who subscribe to this perverse thinking, blacks need their own theology to help them navigate a racist society.

If we consider, for example, the Rev. Dr. Wright’s rhetoric, now seen on the mainstream media and on YouTube as a perpetual loop, Dr. Wright paints Hillary Clinton as a member of an oppressing class, i.e., “rich, white people” who is hopelessly incapable of understanding oppression – “ain’t never been called a n-gg-r”.

This perverse line of thinking, that of distorting religion within political ideological dress, is not unique to Christianity; it has led to distorted interpretations of Judaism and Islam. For Islam, the tragic event of 9.11 is testament to this view. Even though the mainstream media point to the Saudi national Usama bin Laden as the mastermind of this horrific attack, we note here that whoever orchestrated this horrific level of carnage and destruction pales in comparison to how far-reaching and devastating the effect that political ideologies can tarnish great Religions. The Western powers, through the mainstream media, refer to this ideology as “Islamo-fascism”.

Zaid Shakr lays bare the far-reaching consequences of mixing political ideology with Judaism and Islam in a recent article. He warns Muslims against “allowing the reduction of our religion by…political imperatives”. Zionism, that menacing ideology that forms the backbone of the modern state of Israel, threatens to transform mainstream Judaism by providing a potent political rationale for dehumanizing Palestinian Arabs through violence and retribution. “We should never hope”, asserted Zaid Shakr, “to see the day when, if possessing the requisite firepower, Muslims would visit upon the civilian population of Israel the sort of savage violence we see decimating the innocent civilians of Gaza and Lebanon”.

Placing Islam in ideological dress is dangerous and upsetting because its teachings become subjective. This scenario convinces non-Muslims that Islam advocates a goal of global domination and as such does not advance the principle of co-existing with other faiths and communities.

The writer is a recent revert to Islam and can be contacted at: drummondhugh@verizon.net