Religious Ideology

I’m reading The Divine Magician at the moment which is a book by Peter Rollins who is a prominent figure in ‘Radical Theology’. It’s really interesting and provides some fascinating alternative perspectives on well-known Bible passages. He rails as much against atheism as he does small ‘o’ orthodox Christianity.

One quote from the book that particularly appealed to me is this:

The sad reality is that Christianity has become the paradigmatic example of an ideological system.

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…churches are ideological in that they create their own constellation of beliefs and practices that tell their congregants how to think and behave. A denomination, for instance, will offer dogmas, doctrines, and rituals that to a greater or lesser extent let everyone know how to interact with the world.

In this way, the church offers people guidelines concerning both the law and what it means to transgress that law. Even though most people in the church won’t know what many of these laws are, they still find themselves subject to them, being rewarded for staying within acceptable practices and punished for stepping outside of them.

Yet ideology is more complex than this, for an ideology not only provides a set of rules describing what is acceptable and what is unacceptable, but also tells us the acceptable ways in which we can go against what is acceptable: it tells us both how to conform and how to not conform in a conformist way.

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I remember talking with a woman who confided that she had doubts concerning a literal resurrection. She was an elder in her church and a longtime worship leader, but she told me that if she spoke publicly about her doubts, she’d likely be asked to step down from her position. I asked whether she thought the other elders might have similar questions. Her response was telling: “Well, I suppose they must, I mean, many of them have been doing this for years. I really can’t imagine that they don’t.” In other words, if she was correct, the real transgression in her community lay not in having doubts about the Resurrection but in speaking them. We can outline this in the following way:

Law: Don't doubt the Resurrection

Acceptable Transgression: You can, just don’t talk about it in church.

Unacceptable Transgression: Talk openly about it in church.

I guess this appealed to me because I feel penalised for being genuine to myself, for voicing an ‘unacceptable transgression’.

But it runs deeper than that: because I stepped over an ‘unacceptable transgression’ boundary I was punished even while still a member of my old ecclesia. In many different ways I was side lined and prevented from voicing any opinions openly. I was expected to accept without questioning, or at least without questioning in an ‘unacceptable’ way, what respected members in good standing asserted.

That is a hard place to inhabit, and over the years it took its toll on me. In fact it’s probably the most significant factor in making the decision I did at the time which was to ‘no longer regularly attend the meeting’.