Religion, Culture, and Politics

This chapter presents a conceptual framework for understanding the interaction of religion, ideology, and politics. The framework’s key insights are: i) culture and ideology provide a shared mental framework for interpreting the world; ii) ideology is malleable, and it can be used to justify a wide set of empirical realities in a manner that is consistent with the prevailing mental framework; iii) religion is particularly adept at shaping this mental framework because it attempts to explain the unknown; iv) because co-religionists share a mental framework that depends on a (religious) interpretation of events, religions are particularly likely to be co-opted by individuals who gain a comparative advantage in religious interpretation; v) religious authorities are useful for legitimating political rule because of their comparative advantage in interpreting events as well as their platforms for creating common knowledge. The chapter concludes with several historical examples from various religions of the political and economic consequences of religious legitimation of political rule.