Religion as Political Resource: Culture or Ideology?

Abstract

While empirical studies of religion's involvement in political life abound, there remains a great deal of fuzziness about the concepts that best capture it. Two often-used approaches are as and as ideology. In some perspectives culture and ideology are treated as mutually exclusive modes of religio-political phenomena; in other perspectives the two concepts are conflated. This article argues for an analytic distinction between culture and ideology that still preserves their interactive and often complementary natures. Examples from empirical studies of religion in politics demonstrate the different ways in which religion acts as a political resource, and the usefulness of the proposed analytic distinction.