Ideological Function
What socio-historical role does religion, particularly the prophetic and Messianic
religions of Judaism and Christianity, play in the midst of this globalizing
crisis? Do these religions have anything concretely liberating, hopeful, “new,”
and revolutionary to offer for the redemption of humanity and the creation
of a better future society? Or, are these religions merely legitimating and har-
monizing functional systems within the given antagonistic social totality?
Within modern capitalist civil society, there are a variety of acceptable and
harmless – at least to the capitalist class system itself – ideological functions
of religion as a social institution. These non-prophetic, non-Messianic, non-
eschatological, harmonizing social responsibilities of religion arise from the
antagonistic bourgeois system’s imperative for increased pattern maintenance
and legitimization. As the system’s class, race, gender, age, regional, national
and international antagonisms become more extreme as they are now in U.S.
society, the system’s need for ideological religious legitimization increases as
well. It is not by happenstance that the Rational Choice Theory of religion
was and continues to be developed as paradigmatic in the field of the soci-
ology of religion during the same time as the increasing socio-political influence
of the so-called “Christian/Evangelical Right” in U.S. society. Both are symp-
tomatic civil religious responses to the increasing crisis of capitalist society.
Such responses can be heard not only from political and military leaders,
TV evangelists, and media personalities but also from the pulpits and poli-
cies of many mainline churches. The socially critical, prophetic, Messianic
and eschatological substance of the Judeo-Christian religion, which is nom-
inalistically mouthed and appealed to for consolation in the midst of the
increasing social antagonisms, is corrupted to now overtly legitimate the
antagonisms of capitalist society by abstractly glossing over them through
such nationalistic notions of equating the will of God with the action/poli-
cies of the nation. As expressed by the political theologian Johann Baptist
Metz (1980, chapt. 3) another facet of such “civil” or “bourgeois religion” is
the escapist diversion of people’s attention from any religious concern for or
critical knowledge of the social inequalities, which translates into not loving
one’s neighbor, through the privatization of religion into a mystical, spiritual
relationship between the individual and God. This bourgeois privatization
of religion has reactionary social manifestations and consequences, however,
through the formation of “evangelical” or fundamentalistic churches, who
either moralistically continue religion’s supposed withdrawal from any involve-
136 • Michael R. Ott