Worldviews and Interests
In the fall of 2020, I finally got the chance to teach a course on Religion and Politics from a sociological perspective. Here’s a bit about how and why. Edited and updated.
“Finally! Religion and Politics! A course about the two things people don’t talk about in polite company (at least in the U.S.)!” Is it because politics and religion are seen as divisive? This is strange, given that politics is, to put it simply, the art of how we live together. The word politics is related to the Greek word polis, for city-state, polites, which means “citizen.” Politics is inevitable because humans are social critters—we need one another to survive. We are political because we have to be; nothing made by human persons is untouched by politics. So why does it divide us so often?
But a bit of a thought experiment can show exactly why it so often does divide. Say there are two people who live in a community: a public schoolteacher and the owner of a small construction company. One candidate is running on a ballot to get more money to the schools. The owner of the construction company knows that if this bill passes, it will mean higher taxes. Fortunately, there is another local candidate running on a ballot to cut taxes, even if it means the public schools will go into debt. The teacher and the owner of the construction company have different interests. Interests in this sense aren’t like hobbies: I’m not talking about stamp-collecting or goat yoga or playing the digeridoo (I’ll leave you to wonder which of those is actually something I do). Interests are what we want and need in order to continue living in a community. So our two citizens may live in a community together, but they want and need different things, economically.
So that’s it, right? Politics involves balancing competing interests. And the competing interests involve fighting about money, about what is in individuals’ economic self-interest. There are people all over the political map who will tell you that it all comes down to economics on some level. Whatever we’re fighting about, we’re really just fighting about how resources are distributed—no more or less. Interest, in the “last instance,” as Friedrich Engels once famously remarked, means economic interest. But then, the schoolteacher votes for the candidate who wants to cut taxes, and the construction company owner votes for the candidate who will raise taxes.
How to make sense of this? If politics is really just about resources and economic interests, then why do people vote against their own interests? The schoolteacher and small business owner must just not know what their interests really are—otherwise they would never vote like that! It’s easy to imagine a situation in which the small business owner has children and the schoolteacher does not; they are voting in the best interests of their families, not just themselves. Maybe.
But I would like to offer a different way to understand these two citizens. Maybe they didn’t get their own interests wrong, because maybe politics isn’t really just about economic interests after all. What our interests are, and what we think our interests are, cannot be so easily separated. Maybe arguing that politics is really just about economic interest is a sneaky a way to say that politics should be all about economic interests, and not about something else. Maybe it’s simpler to just argue, based on the way people actually behave, politically, that politics is, at least sometimes, about something else.
But what else? What about religion? How we define religion says more about our own religion than it does about religion in general. Without getting tangled up in what religion does or doesn’t mean, let’s say religion is a big part of where we get our worldviews. Worldviews are ideas about how the world and the universe are ordered, what kinds of things do and don’t happen or exist, and what kinds of things people should or should not do. Worldviews are tricky things. We don’t pay attention to them most of the time. They’re a bit like the air we breathe, taken for granted. And like the air we breathe, when they get polluted, start to thin out, or disappear entirely, you will likely fight for your life to catch a breath again.
I would argue that if you really want to understand political interests, you have to think about conflicting and competing worldviews. That’s how you’ll really understand why the schoolteacher and the owner of the construction company voted the way they did—in ways that seemed to be against their economic interests. Let’s imagine that the schoolteacher is a devoutly conservative Protestant, and the construction company owner is an avowed atheist. The same political candidate who wants to cut taxes also opposes things that the schoolteacher also opposes on moral grounds, and those moral grounds are based on a certain religious worldview. The same political candidate who wants to raise taxes also supports initiatives that line up with the construction company owner’s secular worldview.
It would be easy to imagine a world in which our construction company owner and public schoolteacher are friends, who meet for coffee and live in a community together and have hobbies in common. It would probably be equally easy to imagine a world in which they are bitter enemies. It is assumed by those who defend liberal democracy (itself a worldview, or what some would call an open society with philosopher Karl Popper) that people with incompatible worldviews can in fact live peaceably and build community together. This is based on the belief that my worldview and your worldview, even if incompatible, can coexist in a spirit of tolerance and mutual respect, within the boundaries of impersonal legal frameworks. The U.S. may be the longest-lasting experiment in liberal democracy that has ever existed on earth, and it would be an understatement to point out that the ideals of “tolerance and mutual respect” have by no means been constant guiding principles.
That’s the tragic side of this art of living together—that fateful word “we.” In the Greek city-states often hailed as the founders of democracy, there were clear-cut dividing lines between the citizens who had political voice, and the non-citizens (including both women and slaves) who did not. In trying to learn to live together, especially in a society like the U.S., which is home to many conflicting worldviews, it is not surprising that interests often clash. And when interests clash, people begin to visit, or re-visit, what it means to be a citizen, and even who “we” really are. When worldviews pull us in different directions, societies can and do become politically polarized. It’s easy to see that the U.S. is a rather polarized place right now. But considering how worldviews inform interests can show why it is polarized, as well as what might happen in the future.
I’m a sociologist, not a politician or a religious leader. Social science research is about description and analysis. I use data and evidence to figure out what religion and politics actually do, and how they’re related to how people interact and live together. I would argue that “religion and politics” really means understanding how worldviews and interests are related to one another.
Some of the things I say and write probably seem cynical. This is because politics is an art form involving trade-offs that sometimes violate the boundaries of personal morality. It is also because most of us are not accustomed to thinking about “religion” in terms that go beyond our own views of what religion is—and does. Studying religion and politics sociologically means an opportunity to see yourself in relation to others, in terms of religion and politics, learning what’s at stake, where you stand, and with lots of patience and a bit of luck, maybe find mutually beneficial ways to move forward.
