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Religion as Political Resource: Culture or Ideology?

RHYS H. WILLIAMSt

While empirical studies of religion's involvement in political life abound, there remains a great deal of fuzziness about the concepta that best capture it. Two often-used approaches are "religion as culture" and "religion 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 naturee. Examples from empirical studies of religion in politics demonstrate the different ways in which religion acta as a political resource, and the usefulness of the proposed analytic distinction.

INTRODUCTION

This essay reviews several approaches to understanding religion as a political resource: a brief review of the predominant social structural approach; a culturalist approach that emphasizes values and an "implicit" definition of culture; and a culturalist approach that considers religion as "ideology." After offering a critique of these approaches, I draw upon the work of Antonio Gramsci to suggest a conception of religion as a political resource that keeps a clear analytic distinction between "culture" and "ideology" in order to further the ways in which religion can be understood politically in all its empirical complexity. The study of American politics has a long history of treating religion as an important independent variable. That is as it should be - religion has been intertwined with the nation's politics and purposes since its inception. Importantly, current understandings have abandoned the "either/or" characterizations inherited from the nineteenth century. Religion's political impact is neither exclusively as a prop of the status quo nor only as an emancipatory force for society's marginal populations. Empirical investigations have shown religion to be active on many sides of political struggles. Religion has legitimated regimes, siphoned potential grievances into other-worldly concerns, provided organizational support for social movements, and offered a conception of justice that mobilized participation for change. What remains unclear, and often in dispute, are the conceptual lenses with which to frame these empirical processes. In particular, conceptual fuzziness in culture theory continues to hamper our understanding. This essay hopes to contribute some clarity.
RELIGION AND POLITICS

A "social structural" tradition for understanding religion and politics has used voting studies, public opinion data, interest group mobilization, and policy analysis to assess the ways religious cleavages translate into political differences. This approach has been profitable. Marsden recently claimed, not without reason, that when combined with ethnicity, religion "has been the best predictor of political behavior throughout most of the

t Rhys H. WilIiams is associate professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL 62901-4524; (618) 453-7610; WILLRHYS@SIU.EDU. JOllrnal for the Scientific Stlldy ofRelif[wn, 1996,35(4): 368-378 368

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history of the United States" (1990: 380). For example, observers such as Kleppner (1970) and Menendez (1977) have found religion's role as an "identity marker" to be remarkably robust in quantitative analysis of political behavior. Jelen (1993) concludes that support for the "new Christian Right" is heavily mediated by a "group-based heuristic" of in-group and out-group identification. That is, identity, particularly a sense of collective identity, has important political impact distinct from any given set of religious beliefs or political opinions. Religion's organizational contributions to politics are also well studied. For example, Morris (1984) documents the extent to which southern Mrican-American churches were the organizational infrastructure of the early civil rights movement. Similarly, the rise of the "New Christian Right" in the late 1970s was largely along the lines of the social networks already existing within the Southern Baptist Convention and the Baptist Bible Fellowship (e.g., Liebman and Wuthnow 1983). However, a recent argument maintains that indicators of social location, such as denominational affiliation, are less important in determining political postures than they were previously. For example, Wuthnow (1988) notes a "restructuring" of American religion in which denominational differences have receded and cross-cutting ideological differences have emerged in their place. The expansion of thil' argument to a "culture wars" thesis by Hunter (1991) and others has increased the idea's visibility and made it the subject of much debate (see Davis and Robinson 1996; Evans 1996; Kniss 1993; Yang and Demerath 1996). Community studies, such as Demerath and Williams (1992), and studies of particular issues, such as abortion (see Jelen and Chandler 1994) show that along with the resilience of social location and institutional identities, ideological cleavages organize much of the current religio-political interaction. As the restructuring argument implies, a "culturalist" approach to understanding politics and religion rivals social structural explanations. The culturalist perspectIve appears in a variety of forms and with a number of variations of which the "restructuring" thesis is but one example. The most common approach, of course, is a focus on individuals' beliefs and values drawn from survey research. The assumption is that religion forms deeply held values that are the basis for more ephemeral political attitudes. These values and their attendant political attitudes produce "opinion publics" of like-minded individuals, who are moved or mobilized by issues depending on such variables as issue salience, action opportunity, and leadership. A theoretical concern with this approach to understanding the cultural connections between religion and politics is that it reduces culture to the aggregate of individual values and opinions. Religion loses some of its essential "socialness" when considered at the individual level alone. There is also an empirical concern with "opinion instability" in survey research. Analysts such as Neuman (1986) and Hart (1992) have studied the value-opinion connection and question its consistency and determinacy. A tradition at a higher level of abstraction is what might be called the "basic American values" argument. For example, Parenti (1967) locates several values based in Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism, and traces their appearance in American political culture. Huntington (1981) defines a number of values that compose the "American creed"; he charts how periods of "creedal passion" in American politics follow, by about two decades, periods of revivalist passion in American religion. Reichley (1985) traces religion in American public life through a variety of historical periods, drawing out parallels between developments in American religion and developments in American politics; for example, the rise of evangelical inclusion as a religious principle and the expansion of the conception of citizenship. Ladd (1987) identifies the subcultural values that produce differing contemporary political orientations between "secular" and "religious" America.

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Wald (1992) offers a variation on this view when he notes three theologically based beliefs among the New England Puritans that became shaping institutional principles of the new nation. Covenant theology, original sin, and status as the chosen people were Puritan theological commitments embodied in the constitutional order in the separation of powers, the limitations on governmental control, and a desectarianized notion of a civil religion. Again, the basic logic is that culture-wide religious values were translated into features (either values or institutions) of the political system. Certainly, this tradition of inquiry has given us many insights on religion and American political culture. Too often, however, it falls into a type of "reflection theory" (Griswold 1994) where the content of culture is viewed as a reflection of more fundamental processes in the social world. As a result, reflection theories focus on the production processes of cultural objects for clues to the underlying social realities. The interpretation of values and ideas - the meanings that cultural objects have for the people who regard them - is thus assumed rather than investigated. Another way to conceptualize religion's cultural influence on politics is through the lenses of interpretive anthropology. Geertz 0973a; 1983) has produced a 'number of important essays that explore the connections between the "sacred cosmos" and the political order; these social constructions come together through such collective mental products as "worldviews" or an "ethos." In this perspective, religion is a shaping force for political life because of religion's existence as a "cultural system." That is, religion helps establish a clear sense of "what is" as well as "what ought to be," and in a smoothly operating culture, aligns the two in both the social world and the cosmos. Religion helps justify social organization and the shape of the sacred, each with the "borrowed authority" of the other (Geertz 1983). Ginsburg (1989) takes a similar tack at a less abstract level. She investigates the political conflict surrounding an abortion clinic through the analysis of the participants' worldviews. She relates how their sense of social and moral order works to shape and consequently reinforce their convictions about how political life should be organized. What is contested is not just practical policy but the moral meaning of the lives of community members and the vision of what constitutes a "moral community." This interpretive perspective is a version of what I call a "religion as culture" approach. Religion influences political relationships because religion is central in the creation of symbolic worlds; in particular, religion shapes the phenomenology of culture members. To absorb a religious worldview is to absorb a set of taken-for-granted assumptions about one's duty to God and to society. The ordering of relations among societal members - part of the essence of politics - is part of the essence of religion. In that sense, religion affects political life "behind the backs" of participants; its influence is often effective without the active awareness of those experiencing it. Religion is "implicit" culture (Wuthnow and Witten 1988) in this regard, an effective, ifnonarticulated, set of organizing principles. While it has a "sense-making" component, the religion-as-culture approach focuses heavily on affective and identity-oriented functions. Religion is less about beliefs, per se, than about meaning in the world. As this paper's title implies, however, one might think of religion as an explicit "ideology" rather than an implicit culture. The analytic implications are very different, and depending upon the definitions of the terms, the normative implications have also been quite distinct. The use of "ideology" has often been restricted to idea systems that "distort" reality (Williams 1977: 55). And many who have sought a less restrictive definition of the term have continued to keep its negative implications. However, the sociology of American religion has always noted religion's "double function" oflegitimating both privilege and protest (e.g., Billings and Scott 1994). Religion as a conservative force (e.g., Johnson 1976; Liebman and Wuthnow 1983) and religion as a progressive force (e.g., Epstein 1991; Smith 1991; Casanova 1994) are both available in the

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empirical and theoretical literature. So what does it mean to term something "ideology" rather than "culture"? How can an analytic distinction be preserved that ren10ves the Illost obvious normative biases? I turn first to that very contested concept - ideology.
THE IDEOLOGY CONCEPr

A common use of the term ideology equates it with any idea system characteristic of particular group or class (e.g., Williams 1977: 55). This approach is common in pluralist political analysis and parallels in many ways functionalist approaches to "culture." That is, ideology is a set of symbolic objects generally considered a functional requirement of all selfaware groups. In the same way that a human group cannot be without culture, it cannot act politically without an "ideology." In this sense any set of political attitudes, beliefs, or values, could be designated as at least part of an ideology. Making "ideology" applicable to any system of thought has led to studies of, for example, the "American" ideology - either as the predominant set of political values held by Americans (e.g., Gans 1988) or as the idea system that dominates the political process and thus has shaped American political life (e.g., Hartz 1955). But as noted above, many attempts at a "neutral" definition (Thompson 1984: 4) has often given ideology a negative valuation; ideology is thought to be "bad," "unreasoned," or dogmatic political ideas, and is contrasted with reasonable or pragmatic ideas (see Geertz's critique, 1973b). Liberal pluralist theory has generally elevated pragmatism and compromise, and thus coherent idea systems can be a threat to the conventions of practical politics. After criticizing many pluralist approaches to ideology, Geertz (1973b) offers one of his own. He views ideology as a particular type of "cultural system," one that is referenced specifically on the political ordering of social relations. Ideology is held by people within a culture and is distinct from the culture concept only in that its organizing principles regulate political understandings. In that sense, ideology is similar to "religion" or "commonsense" - they are all "cultural systems" that are aspects of meaning creation. Geertz claims that ideologies arise during times of cultural crisis. When received patterns of meaning (with regard to politics) fail to keep the world in some sort of interpretive order, ideologies are a cultural response. This is clearly connected to Geertz's "constitutive" approach to culture - culture is the sense-making tools people use to create the social world and interpret the natural world. Ideologies emerge as comprehensive systems of meaning at times when current cultural systems seem unable to handle social change. The resonance with Wallace's (1956) "revitalization" theory and McLoughlin's (1978) theory of religious revivals is clear - ideologies do not "cause" political disruption (as pluralist pragmatism might have it) but are a "consequence" of the failure of the extant system to work fully. Importantly, as in his approach to culture, Geertz emphasizes the implicit moral order in ideologies, in that they are descriptions of "what is" as well as "what ought" to be. Again, affect, meaning, and identity are major analytic components. Ann Swidler (1986) adapts Geertz's insights by noting that during "settled" times, culture "holds" people, binding them to legitimate ways of acting, thinking, and feeling. During "unsettled" times, however, new ways of apprehending and interpreting reality arise, and are contested by groups contending for influence. Ways of life lose their taken-for-granted status and become more contentious and contested. Thus people come to "hold" ideologies. Ideas become more malleable and are used strategically to promote and legitimate a particular vision at the expense of others. In sum, culture is both accepted and acceptable ways of seeing and knowing, and ideology is the articulated idea systems that emerge when culture "fails." Hackett (1991) used this model effectively in discussing religious and social change in colonial New York.

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The Geertzian-Swidler model understands ideologies as potentially available to any group or class in society. In that sense it is a neutral definition of the term - discounting for the moment the functionalist implication that ideologies are the products of cultural disruption and the social and psychological distress that entails. Their important - and in my view questionable - analytic move is to divorce ideology completely from any analysis of the distribution of power in society and to remove from the definition any specific orientation to power. Ideology becomes an almost apolitical phenomenon. When pushed to its logical conclusions, Geertz's and Swidler's culture-ideology dichotomy basically replicates a stasis-change distinction, with "culture" representing the forces of stability and "ideology" a force for change. The stasis-change distinction comes to resemble a diachronic version of the conservative-liberal dichotomy, but instead of a normative side-taking, it is a functional definition. In this view, religion can be either culture or ideology depending on circumstances, but it remains stuck as either one or the other, and participates on one side or the other of social struggles. And yet, as analysts such as Kertzer (1988) have noted, any collective political action requires both cultural processes of solidarity and identity as well as ideological justification. Certainly, a culture of solidarity reinforces existing social relations, but challenges to the status quo also rely upon ritual, symbolism, and the production of collective identity. Locating either culture or ideology on only one side of any social cleavage misses the social processes they share. Marxian scholars have been the major developers of the ideology concept. If they have kept ideology focused on power relations, they have too often had another theoretical problem in their tendency to reduce all cultural dynamics to ideology. Marx's pithy phrase was "the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas" (Marx and Engels 1965: 61). Following that dictum, marxian-influenced traditions point to the uneven resources for developing idea systems and to their unequal distribution throughout society. They argue that some groups suffer disproportionately from ideology while others expound it. Ideology is something ruling classes "do to" subordinate groups, what Abercrombie et al. (1980) refer to as the "dominant ideology thesis." Dominant groups use control of the production of mental life to sponsor ideas inimical to political challenge. These constitute ideology, which helps produce the distorted understandings or false consciousness that function to reproduce a class society (Williams 1977: 55). Consequently, the inference drawn by many scholars has been that ruling classes more or less strategically deploy justificatory ideology while subordinate classes more or less passively accept it, having fewer resources with which to respond. Some versions of marxian thought have associated ideology less with "falsity" (in a factual sense) than with mystification, obfuscation, and veiled meanings (Bourdieu 1991; Larrain 1979). According to Larrain, an idea system becomes an ideology as it makes the social and political world seem natural, taken-for-granted, and immutable. Thus, ideology "disguises" the socially constructed, exploitative aspects of society, not necessarily through factual errors or "distortion," but rather through becoming such a part of the taken-forgranted cultural repertoire that disadvantage seems natural and inequality immutable. In this version of marxian theory, ideology "naturalizes" the political world in much the same way as religion aligns the world as it is with the world as it should be. Bourdieu (1991) explicitly describes religion's legitimation function as "naturalization" (1991: 32-33). This "tacit, dispositional, and pre-reflective" component of religion-as-culture leads to a situation where religion is often "'mis-recognized' as a logic of 'disinterest'" (Swartz 1996: 75,77) toward the world - ultimately, an ideological function that implicitly reinforces existing domination.! Bourdieu (1991) and Geertz (1973a) in effect concur on the "reality constructing" aspects of religion's social function as "culture"; they differ on whether this also makes religion "ideology."

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The ideology-as-naturalization perspective is in an important way the inverse of the Geertzian or revitalization position. In the latter perspective, ideologies arise to deal with cultural crises; they are new forms of sense-making when extant forms are in question or under attack. If political ideas become widely accepted, they cease to be ideology and become part of the standard cultural order. Conversely, in the marxian or naturalization paradigm, ideas are not ideology until they become such a part of the standard cultural order that they are taken for granted. In the revitalization perspective, ideology can come from almost any sector of society, since sense-making is a universal phenomenon. In the naturalization paradigm, dominant groups "have" ideology since they have the material and intellectual resources, or, as Bourdieu would say, the "cultural capital," to disguise and mystify power relations.
GRAMSCIAN APPROACHES TO CULTURE AND IDEOLOGY

Obviously, any approach that automatically considers religion as ideology is not useful for understanding religion in politics. Reducing religion to a superfluous gloss over material interests and discounting the genuine affect and emancipatory potential in religious commitments produces one-sided theory and ignores much empIrical reality, However, the writings of Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1971) can help balance the power-oriented and meaning-centered approaches to ideology. Gramscian theory keeps a focus on the roles that ideas play in domination while still recognizing the necessary ideological work done by subordinant groups, particularly those organizing social or political movements. Gramsci reasoned that political control requires both coercion and consent. While the state is the principal agent of coercion, it is not primarily responsible for the creation of consent. The institutions of civil society, such as the church or the educational system, create the cultural forces that legitimate the status quo; this set of forces Gramsci labeled "hegemony." Political challenger movements need to engage hegemonic forces with ideational and symbolic weapons of their own, as they must question the "naturalness" of the status quo's power - in effect they must disentangle how the social world should be from how it is, offering a critique and legitimation for collective action. Gramsci's analysis of hegemony included a recognition of both culture (roughly equivalent to what Gramsci called "common sense" or "folklore") and ideology (or what Gramsci called "philosophy"). According to Boggs (1976), the former terms resemble the idea of a group culture or the neutral sense of the term ideology - the practical understandings, conventions, or way of life that is characteristic of a social group. The latter term (ideology/philosophy) denotes an organized set of conceptions but with a transformative relation to lived culture. That is, Gramsci recognized that consciousness was not merely a passive reflection of material conditions but also had an autonomous moment. In particular, the heterogeneity and relatively apolitical nature of common sense could be reorganized into more stable symbolic forms that could function as weapons in the political arena. Importantly, both dominant and subordinant groups can produce ideologies; much of Gramsci's work is on the importance of the intellectuals who produce both ruling and challenging ideologies. Fulton (1987) notes that Gramsci paid considerable attention to religion in his analysis of hegemony. In particular, Gramsci used the paired concepts "religion of the people" and "religion of the intellectuals" to parallel the distinction between the more generic terms common sense and philosophy (1987: 203). It is not who holds the religious values that distinguishes popular religion from religion of the intellectuals but the relative degree of intellectual coherence and the relation to immediate experience and lived culture. As an institution, the Catholic Church of Gramsci's Italy had a "total social praxis" and was

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in that way a rival to the integrated socialism Gramsci was espousing (1987: 202). Gramsci did note religion's potential power to sponsor social change as well as to resist it. Thus, Gramsci had a more cognitive conception of ideology than do many in the interpretive religion-as-culture tradition, and a more constructionist conception of ideology than many marxian theorists. He kept ideology and culture analytically distinct by separating the relative articulation and coherence of ideology from the practical lived aspects of culture/common sense. He took religion seriously as a source of social power because of its abilities to combine the experienced, everyday, "life-world" of the people with an intellectually elaborated theoretical system (Fulton 1987: 214). In that sense, religion is a tremendous political resource, combining the emotional and cognitive elements of action with a universalist legitimation. Drawing upon the influences outlined above, I have in other contexts (WilIiams and Demerath 1991; WilIiams forthcoming) argued that ideology is best defined as more or less formal systems of thought that benefit a particular group or class of people, but where the ideas themselves are presented as universally true or valid:
Ideologies are belief systems - articulated sets of ideas that are primarily cognitive ... primarily articulated by a Apecific social class/group, that function primarily in the interf'sts of that class or group, and yet are presented as being in the 'common good" or as generally accepted ... (Williams and Demerath 1991: 426-27; emphasis in original)

This definition helps keep ideology distinct from culture more generally, preserves its connection to issues of power and privilege, and yet recognizes the extent to which many groups develop ideologies. It defines ideology based upon the character of the symbolic system itself, rather than a definition based upon which groups use it or how it is used. And yet, it does not conflate ideology with any and all belief systems.
RELIGION IN POLITICAL STRUGGLES

Building on Gramsci's work has been useful for the study of religion and politics. As noted, it recognizes that religion has both an affective and a cognitive component, and that it can both reinforce and challenge extant relationships of power. It can preserve an analytic distinction between culture and ideology, demonstrating religion's empirical role as both. Several examples of recent empirical work on religion and politics demonstrate these advantages. Billings (1990) uses Gramsci's insights directly in his study of two different labor struggles. This is particularly useful for sociologists of religion as Billings revisits the site of Liston Pope's (1965/1942) classic tale of religion and inequality in Gastonia. Billings examines religion's role in the dominant cultural hegemony, the owners'ideology, and in the formation of labor's oppositional ideologies. Along with such "structural" resources as leadership and autonomous organization, religion helps to shape the cultural processes by which groups construct their interests, understand their situation, and conceive of alternative arrangements. As Billings notes, the most important resources that religion offers are "discursive," such as moral authority, an oppositional identity, or conversely, a justification for quiescence. The symbolic structures of the predominant religious tradition became the vehicle for political understandings in both of the conflicts Billings documents - one of which led to open opposition and successful resistance, the other of which led to labor's defeat. Thus, while remaining rooted in a lived culture, religion also became an ideology, an organizing principle for the reordering of society (or at least, for mobilizing collective action), clothed in the universalist language of God's will and transcendent justice. Smith (1994) has built upon his earlier work on Liberation Theology (1991) to tackle directly the relations between religious and political culture in Latin America. While this is

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obviously not a U.S. case, it is theoretically instructive for my purposes here. Smith compares the potential for encouraging democracy in Latin American Protestantism versus that same potential in the base communities informed by Catholic Liberation Theology. In this analysis, Smith asks to what extent the worldviews that undergird the two religious traditions produce both direct ideological tools and the implicit cultural understandings that would help facilitate democratic political arrangements. While Smith argued in his earlier work that Liberation Theology helped produce the "cognitive liberation" necessary for collective action (1991), when it comes to fostering democracy more generally he considers religion less as ideology per se. His focus is less on the direct political content of the belief systems and that content's direct effects on collective action. Instead he treats religion as culture by studying the extent to which religiously legitimated worldviews contain the potential for democratic transformation. Thus, Smith offers an analysis of religion both as culture in the formation of worldviews, and as an ideology that is specifically predicated on social and political change. Jelen (1995) recently examined the roles religion plays - both positively and negatively - under three different models of American political culture. Consensus theories, dualistic theories, and pluralistic theories each have different assumptions about the status and functions of political culture. In each theoretical case, religion as an institution and religion as a set of symbolic resources can serve to support the dominant political culture or to undermine it. Though Jelen does not do so, it would be tempting to think of religion as "culture" under the consensus model and religion as "ideology" under the other two models. However, this would replicate the confusion I am trying to avoid. In each case, I think it is more useful to examine how religion is used empirically to determine its role as a political resource. Jelen's attention to religion's democratic and antidemocratic potential is well grounde"d in political processes and the uses of religion by particular groups, and is a contribution to that process. Demerath and Williams 0992; also Williams and Demerath 1991) examine religion and politics in Springfield, Massachusetts, in which religion appears as both culture and ideology. On one hand, the civic culture is permeated by Catholicism. Catholicism is the city's predominant faith, and the city's political establishment is even more overwhelmingly Catholic. Thus, Catholicism permeates public life, from elections, to civic celebrations, to the institutions of civil society. But the Church, as an organization, has little direct political influence. Religious identification is no longer synonymous with political loyalty. And both political activists and ordinary citizens often claim that the Church only plays an active role in a few salient issues, such as abortion (Demerath and Williams 1992). However, the cultural boundaries of Catholicism interact with Springfield's Protestant history and contemporary understandings of secular political authority to set the parameters of the political arena. There is a largely shared (though not consensual) set of lenses through which the social world is interpreted; it is a taken-for-grantedness that is rooted in Catholicism, even though it is often not recognized or articulated as specifically Catholic. Indeed, claims that it is specifically Catholic are often discounted with the language of "civic religion" (Williams and Demerath 1991) or community ecumenism (Demerath and Williams 1992). Catholicism as a "political culture" involves "identification with, but not unitary interpretations of, shared cultural symbols and language" (Burns 1996: 38). Thus, specific claims about Catholicism's influence can go unrecognized even as that influence helps shape boundaries. Religion can be ideology as well. Coalitions of religiously based activists - usually ecumenical and usually led by clergy - used specifically religio-moral arguments to press their claims for political action. On several different issues, in varying combinations of religion, race, and gender, political challengers used the "cultural power" (Demerath and Williams 1992) of religious symbols to force their issues onto the public agenda. That is,

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activists connected moralized premises about justice, opportunity, and equality - which were relatively widely shared - to particular (and particularly contested) political and policy decisions. Of course, religion is not the only source for ideological arguments in political struggles. Williams and Demerath (1991) document an "ideology of community" used by Springfield's political establishment as its own cultural resource. City Hall tried to defuse activists' claims with its own version of what Springfield, as a "community," should be. There is certainly an implicit moral landscape in the notions of community, neighborhood, and consensus that comprised the ideology of community. City Hall based its ideology on the moral legitimacy of duly constituted political authority. The polity's legitimacy gave the status quo's defense a moral authority with which to battle the religiously based ideology of the challengers. The implicit moral landscape of the ideology of community did have, however, some important affinities with religious understandings, for example, calls for reconciliation and "forgiveness." But in this case, the religious component was "culture" - taken-for-granted assumptions about how a moral society should be organized and how its people relate to each other. Thus the "ideology of community" used religion as culture, while drawing ideological ekments from sources other than religion per se. On tho other hand, the challengers' cultural resources were religion as ideology, in which the religious arguments explicitly linked universalist claims to particular policies and outcomes. Williams and Alexander's (1994) study of rhetoric in 1890s American Populism reveals religion as both culture and ideology within one political movement. It shows the extent to which the empirical role of religion is not so neatly carved into distinct analytic categories; and yet religion functioned in different ways at different times while it mobilized and sustained collective action. Discussing religion as ideology highlights the active, cognitive use of symbolic forms, but it is misleading to reduce the religious culture necessary for political action to pure instrumentality. Billings is clear about that in his study of religion in labor struggles:
... for people living in a culture of religiosity, it is less a matter of their using religion to achieve secular ends than of their becoming able to see through their religious culture toward political goals in such a fashion that their religious discourse and practices become oppositional (1990: 8-9).

This point illuminates aspects of American Populism. Populism was an economic-political movement based on the grievances of small landowners in the Midwest and South. But because these were also areas dominated by a religious culture of evangelical Protestantism, a new social vision had to be framed by religion. Speakers such as Mary Elizabeth Lease and Lorenzo Lewelling, and writers such as Ignatius Donnelly consistently made their points and illustrated their narratives with biblical allusions, scriptural references, and evangelical rhetoric. They communicated with the cultural forms that rural midwestern and southern Protestants were trained to hear. But religion was also an ideological tool. A particular religious language that Williams and Alexander call "prophetic civil religion" used the moral authority of religion to connect Populist principles and policies to righteousness and God's will. Certainly, this made for effective partisanship, but it involved the core elements I have defined as ideology Populism was a belief system articulated in the interests of small landowners that clothed its claims in universalist truths. People were able to "see through their religious culture toward political goals," as well as use religion to press for political advantage. Religion was a strong element of the movement culture of Populism, attracting supporters and creating solidarity; it was also a component of Populism's ideology, justifying bimetalism, trustbusting, and political reform.

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CONCLUSION

I have offered an analytic distinction between culture and ideology as a way of finding the most useful "sensitizing concepts" for understanding the varied ways religion affects politics and political action. Empirical studies have demonstrated that religion can comfort and challenge political arrangements or political actors. How it "works" in each case is an important conceptual issue, and having distinct analytic cat.egories with which to make such comparisons advances theoretical and empirical concerns. In a review and critique of recent social-movement literature, Hart (1996) argues that while the increased attention to cultural processes is welcomed, the implicit definition of culture being used is often too narrow. In particular, studies of social-movement culture have often underplayed the role of religion. This is unfortunate for two reasons: first, religion is so common in the empirical world that to ignore it is to miss much of what is happening; and second, an understanding of religion offers certain analytic advantages in the study of culture. Hart's second point, in my view, reinforces this essay's central thesis. Religion is a useful resource for social movements because it is a great source of what I have called both "culture" and "ideology." Religion shapes the identity, the sense of solidarity, and the 3l0ral outrage that are integral to social-movement cultures. Motivated believers are the core of any collective action. At the same time, religious doctrine and theology can offer coherent and elaborated cognitive rationales that diagnose social problems, prescribe possible solutions, and justify the movement's actions - often in the cause of universal verities. Thus, religion as a political resource is both culture and ideology, with both theoretical and empirical significance for the study of politics and collective action.

NOTES

An earlier version of the paper was presented to the 1995 annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, St. Louis. The author thanks Jay Demerath and Gerald Platt for all they have taught him about culture; arguments with Gene Burns and Fred Kniss about religion as a political resource were the immediate prompts for this particular essay.
1 Bourdieu does not reduce all culture to ideology; he recognizes the autonomy of cultural fields and the specific social processes those fields contain. Specifically, Bourdieu recognizes religion's capacity to be both culture and ideology in his major theoretical essay, "Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field" (1991). His central concern, however, is with the development of "religious interests" and their role as cultural capital in the "monopolization of religious goods" - that is, the politics inherent in the shaping of the religious field (champ). In other words, religion itself is the "dependent" variable in Bourdieu's essay. My concern here is more focused on the influence of religion on power and political mobilization - what might be called religion as an "independent" variable. Nonetheless, Swartz (1996: 80, 83) accurately notes the similarities between my concerns and Bourdieu's work.

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