Against my better judgment ...

[BainsBane]

265. Religion is ideology

Many disparate ideologies. Like all ideologies of oppression, it has also served as a tool of resistance. The examples are many: Nat Turner, Tupac Amaru II/ Tupac Katari, the Contestado Rebellion, Canudos, the Cemiteriada, many of the popular uprisings surrounding Mexican Independence, The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, Brazil, hundreds of slave revolts, and daily resistance in the slave quarters as documented by a series of historians of the US. Even the Iranian Revolution and many fundamentalist movements in the the Middle East. We don't like the world they seek to create, but religion has served as an ideology they have used to organize themselves and overturn secular dictatorships.

The same is true of the law. It serves as a form of social control but the oppressed have marshaled it for their own purposes, such as in manumission cases in Spanish- and Portuguese- American courts. Religion, I believe, has empowered more social movements because it does not require the cooperation of authorities as legal resistance does.

Part of my problem with many of the critiques of religion is that they are one-dimensional. Religion, like other ideologies, can be very complicated, and is often understood quite differently by the powerless than by the powerful who use it as a tool of oppression. Yes, it has served the purposes of conquest and war. I don't think I need to cite those examples here because people are familiar with many of them. It's the popular struggles that are less well known, but nonetheless important.

For me, religion isn't about whether a God exists. I consider that the least important aspect of it. It has meaning for peoples and their communities and because of that it is real--not necessarily the content of their beliefs but the relationships and communities they form around them.