The Problem of Ideology: Toward a Religious Studies Without Guarantees

“Ideology” has always been a dangerous word in religious studies. In its classical formulations, ideology seems to mostly undermine the credibility of religion as a distinctive, or even interesting domain of human behavior, relegating religion to the domain of mere falsity. This has led many scholars of religion to avoid the term altogether, or, in other cases, to deploy it as a blunt instrument in polemical contest against scholarship disparaged as theologically compromised. This roundtable adopts a different approach. Convening a group of scholars whose work engages ideology from different vantage points, we contend that there is more to the concept than its history of use and misuse in our field. Together, we seek to move beyond the tokenization of ideology that has characterized its uptake in religious studies, and to exemplify how a sustained reappraisal of ideology might open neglected trajectories for critical discourse within the field.