We spoke about this a little at the workshop, but perhaps you could add some clarification. Since all of our analytical categories have potentially problematic political implications (and neutrality seems impossible), how do we adequately deal with the the difficulty of finding and using terms that do not in some way serve to delegitimize some group or other?

Let’s take the term religion. With respect to the notion of religious violence, Cavanaugh is certainly convincing. As is your point about using the term “ideological” in the case of Ron’s typology. I think it might also be appealing here for more reasons than simply because “ideological” seems more conceptually adequate here (i.e., that “ideological” is something common to all instances of so-called religious violence as well as comparable forms of violence by states, insurgent groups, etc.). For instance: (1) everybody in the conversation seems to agree that violence is bad; (2) “ideological” has enough of a bad/deplorable/repulsive quality to it that it pairs well with violence; and maybe (3) we want to contest the discourses that cast “religion” in general as bad.

But, in other instances, is “ideology” as an analytical category less unproblematic than “religion”? For now I can think of three reasons that it isn’t:

(1) This too can be used in a derogatory and dismissive manner (“they” are “ideologically” driven, whereas “we” aren’t).

(2) Many religious groups or persons that I know would resent this classification. They might say: “This is not ideology: this is about who we are in our deepest selves and as a people; it’s our identity; it’s all that we find beautiful and good and true about life; it’s our deepest experience of reality, which our codified doctrines can’t adequately represent,” etc. So they would resent a characterization of a vital part of their lived experience as being the same sort of thing as membership in this or that political party. Eliminating the category, collapsing it to “ideology” (or even “culture” or “tradition” or “discourse”) eliminates the qualitative distinction of worth that is entailed. They would want to insist that there is a distinct phenomenon at hand, not simply in their own lives, but also in those of many others.

Here Riesebrodt points out the importance of “referential legitimation” underlying the concept of religion; i.e., “religious” institutions and groups often recognize not only each other as being such, but also third parties. Neglecting this and characterizing these groups as “ideological” seems tantamount to saying, look, you may choose to call this religion but it’s *really* just ideology. This would just reproduce the sort of problem of delegitimation we want to avoid to begin with. (An extension of this argument would be Luc Boltanski’s and Nathalie Heinich’s critique of Bourdieu’s approach: it neglects the “critical capacity” of ordinary actors in favor of capitulation to the denunciations of the scholar from on high, which only serve to reproduce the power of the latter. [I'm not entirely sold, but maybe that's because I desire this power]).

(3) Simply on the conceptual level, ideology is too cognitive, in-the-mind, and with the pretension of coherence and totalization. Sociologists such as Chaves point out that the conflation of religion and ideology/belief is highly misleading for the study of religion; religious groups and persons are much too incoherent, much more habit- and practice-driven than idea-driven, etc. Whatever it is that sociologists of religion, at least, want to denote by the (admittedly reductionist) concept of religion, “ideology” is much too reductive a reduction.

Eliding the category of religion in such instances would seem problematic not simply functionally but also politically. To complicate it further, the same label might be embraced wholeheartedly by a group as an adequate representation of their identity while simultaneously being used by another group to further delegitimize them. Eliminating the category to prevent abuse by the latter becomes unhelpful to the former.

So to return to the question I asked at the beginning: What do we do as scholars? Would it suffice to be more reflexive and transparent about what is gained and lost in the reductionisms/categories we employ? Add longer disclaimers? I’m not sure I have any good answers at the moment.

References:

Boltanski, Luc. 2009. De la critique. Précis de sociologie de l’émancipation. Paris: Gallimard.

Chaves, Mark. 2010. “Rain Dances in the Dry Season: Overcoming the Religious Congruence Fallacy.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 49(1):1–14.

Nathalie Heinich. 2007. Pourquoi Bourdieu. Paris: Gallimard

Riesebrodt, Martin. 2003. “‘Religion’: Just Another Modern Western Construction?” Religion and Culture Web Forum, December 2003. http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/webforum/122003/