Pistis Christou

In many of my past few posts, I have been talking a lot about ideology. Ideology is a common term used in modern political discussion to reference what ultimately amounts to a system of ideas that influence how people interpret life and the world. Here ideology fits more within the idea of a conflict of cultures, or political parties, etc. My usage of ideology is a bit more specific; I am referring to the dramatic influence on our thinking that significant centers of power, whether it be government institutions, culture-creators, religious organizations, etc., have to make us think and feel a specific way about certain topics, issues, experiences, so that we are never capable of consider alternatives thinking and behaviors that may be more appropriate. For me, ideology is not a statement about truth vs falsehood or good vs. evil, but rather a statement about how these centers of power narrow our thinking to fit within certain fixed patterns. In saying this, I am not making a veiled argument for antinomian forces of no control and absolutely free expression of anything to be labeled under “creativity.”

Rather, I am critiquing the stranglehold ideologies have on us to control the way we think such that we tend to fit different events in our lives, whether it is something we ourselves are doing or something we are witnessing, into the pattern of thinking and to exclude all other possibilities from the get go. For instance, if a person has a dramatic religious experience, an ideology of materialist science would rule this out as being some naturalistic explanation from the start; it is illegitimate from the start to consider other possibilities and how the events in question may fit with these novel forms of thinking. The power of ideology is to go beyond proposing a good direction we should move towards that is good much of the time; it has a way of ruling out any other possibilities such that our way of thinking about events are fit into specific, repetitive patterns.

Furthermore, the formation of ideology is not necessarily the intentional construction of any one person or organization. It can be when some person or persons have unilateral control in which it is instituted through repressive measures that keep people in outright fear. But, more often than not, the ideologies of larger societies and cultures are perpetrated through this mild aversion to being judged that stems from seeing how people who thought and taught like that were punished. While those who are punished may be evil themselves, they are taken of symbols of something that isn’t necessarily evil itself. For instance, radical Jihadists get punished can subtly perpetuate the notion that to be Muslim, to think like a Muslin is dangerous and evil. Or, take what happens in the media portrayal of African Americans, who are shown to be punishes for various crimes that the community judges severely (ranging from the truly heinous to drug charges) and the formation of thinking is to think these type of people are dangerous, so don’t think and speak like them, such as in musical style of rap or slang language they use. Even if no one consciously thinks “hey, lets portray Muslims or African-Americans in a negative life” or even if “these people we are talking about are dangerous,” there is the often subtle, unconscious, largely unintentional propagation of certain ways of thinking: “don’t be this, don’t act like that” drawing connections between the various aspects of specific religions or ethnicities to dangerous way to think and behave. I use the example of Muslims and African-Americans not to simply propound on the ideological effects or religion or race, but to show how various ideologies can gain control over the power of thinking, even in subtle ways.

I also point to how thinking is control more directly, labeling people who make certain types of arguments as foolish, superstitious, etc. For instance, the often (pseudo)prophetic discourse of preachers who say such and such natural disaster is a judgment against some sin. The repeated denunciation of such false, and in these instances understandably offensive, discourse can propogate an aversion to ever speaking of any sort of judgment, that the only legitimate type of religious speech is affirming and soothing. Or, for something less tame, people who attribute all sorts of events to being a miracle from God can be labeled as superstitious, engaging in magical thinking, etc can propagate the idea that is somehow intellectually irresponsible to see the hand of God working in certain events. But even away from religion itself and to the topic of something like abortion; I was just recently a part of the discussion where I was trying to broadly defend the possibility of abortion in the cases where a mother’s life is threatened by the fetus, it was treated as if I was treading on some sacred ground in the conversation; this has been formulated because in the place I had this discussion, my home state of Mississippi, we have constantly talked about again and again the evil of abortions, to the point that it has an ideological control on even considering that the life of the mother also has value worth and thus can be considered rightly worth saving in life-threatening pregnancies.  Even the way they engaged me were with straw-men, saying I am making more of an extreme argument than I am actually making, would have the effect of treating any discourse that speaks for a certain topic, even in a qualified, nuanced, and limited way, is construed as the pathway towards unrighteousness and evil and therefore a way of thinking that is to be avoided; the ideology of pro-fertility, in many ways similar to but often confused with being genuinely pro-life, can control thinking to such a point that it is a evil, sinful consideration to think that a woman can have the sanctity of life worth saving also.

In all these cases, through various mechanisms, the way we construe people and situations are controlled by thinking patterns enculturated into us as these type of events occur again, again, and again. Ideology makes the way we pay attention to reality very inflexible, inclining us to fit events into nice, tidy categories of knowledge, rather than allowing for a hermeneutical flexibility that considers what we have learned but allows for other construals of events to make sure past learning is an actually good fit for present experience, rather than assuming it is based upon superficial, surface similarities.

How does one break free from such an ideological stranglehold on our thinking? At the core, one provides legitimacy for another way of thinking. One recognizes that while many of the express values of the ideology can have value, there are other perfectly legitimate construals, more legitimate than the ideology, and thus it is the ideology itself that needs to be limited and challenged. This is, of course, hard, because the enculturation of ideology has essentially formed and directed the human proclivites towards cognitive dissonance reduction that psychological defenses such as denial, projection, fantasy, etc. in such a way as to create shields from listening to and receiving any challenge to the extent and breadth of the ideology. For instance, you show the error of a certain way of thinking with harder to argue premises, pointing out not just that they made mistake but how their own way of thinking lead them to their error. It is here that cracks in the cognitive strangleholds of ideology can be formedd.

This is the story of the early Church, particularly the Pauline mission throughout the Roman world. The Romans had an impressive array of religio-political propoganda that through constant repetition would reinforce the vested interests of the present political powers, such as appealing to the goddess Roma as the guarantor of Roman prominence and the quasi-divinification of the Roman Emperor. However, beyond this, the idea of a Roman peace, Pax Romana, legitimated the moral purposes behind Roman power towards a moral value that we can all appreciate; we all want something we call “peace.” Furthermore, Greek Stoicism had become part of the ruling philosophy of the Empire, perpetuating a naturalist ideology and a view of logic, language, and epistemology that was essentially proposed human wisdom is the representation of the natural order and that God is known through knowing this natural order. And don’t underestimate the value of natural order to political powers, because ruling ideologies will often times suggest that they have the right understanding of the way the world truly is and so any sense of instability or possibility for dramatic change would counter the powers legitimacy.

In the midst of this context, Paul’s evangelistic mission would challenge this ideological stranglehold of thinking through two critical pieces of “data” that would be presented to others: 1) the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the tradition of others seeing him resurrected body and 2) the power of the Holy Spirit, both in publicly visible dramatic events and personal impacts within the heart occurring in himself as a weak vessel. These two “data points” would firstly provide a decisive challenge to the religious, political, and philosophy ideology of the period by providing legitimate testimony of events and direct witnessing of events that challenged the ideological control on thinking.

However, Paul was not like a mindless iconoclast who was tearing down everything to simply tear it down to build his own vision among the early Christians. Rather, his own stated purposes in 1 Corinthians but implied elsewhere was to place down the foundation of Jesus Christ and get people to have faith in the power of God. Rome wasn’t the true enemy, as Romans 13 suggests, but there was a need for resistance and rejection of its ideology, of its “wisdom” as saying anything to be trusted about God and therefore the ultimate fate of the world that God created.

It is this breaking free from ideology, which Paul would call the renewal of the mind in Romans 12:2, that would allow people to be transformed so as to truly comprehend God and His will. But this form of thinking wasn’t about abstract principles, rules, and systems, but a thinking that can recognize the way sin manifest controls one’s life in the flesh and to resist its control because of God’s enabling this through the Son’s victory over sin and death that is personally realized in people’s lives through the Spirit. Prior to this, people would be enslaved, with any thinking that attempted to resist the impulses of sin being conquered by the colonial forces of sin in the flesh. Considering the flesh for Paul was not simply one’s own body in a vacuum, but the very way we engage in the larger world, the imperial forces of life, which has sin at the top of the hierarchy in his letters to the Romans but almost assuredly is partially and implicitly directed towards Roman power and culture, exhibits control through this flesh. Therefore, to put to death the deeds of the flesh wasn’t some devaluing of human life and its desires, specifically, but rather the way sin has taken advantage of human desires, including through one’s social relations. A) Through the Spirit’s leading as b) the believer puts to death the deeds of the flesh and c) comes into a mind that is renewed to be flexible enough to think in fresh, new ways free from the stranglehold of ideology, Christians begin to fully realize the impacts of their liberation in Christ.

Thus, the Christian journey is not simply a breaking free from sin as some evil impulse, nor even a freedom from the negative consequences of death, but the very powers that can engender and enculturate a pattern of thinking that resists any other forces that would fight against these forces of sin and death. Liberation and sanctification promotes a novel experiences of life, (but one that is not a pretense for egocentricity and abuse but one centered around the love for God and for people) which had been previously been unconsciously controlled through the insidious power of ideology steaming from reasoning influenced by perceived dangers; this liberation and sanctification can be construed and labeled by others as bearing some resemblance to the obvious sins and errors and injustices as the past based upon surface, or even imagined, resemblances. Both Jesus and the early Christian movement were routinely classified as politically revolutionary and rebellious, seeking to try to overturn the political order, when in fact God was working through His Son and then the Body of Christ to bring forth the realization of His power and love, to order life on the earth in accordance to the will of heaven by God’s earthly presence, regardless of whether that would ultimately include or exclude Roman power depending on how it fulfilled it’s commission as God’s minister (it ultimately excluded it). But, since this put the current ideology and political order into question, it would out of fear and self-preservation be looked upon with suspicion, ideologically labeled by other subversives of the past.

To summarize, ideologies are more than simply a prevailing set of thoughts and values, but they exhibit a rigidifying control of thinking that can control perception of life events without necessarily any intentionality on the behalf of anyone. The early Christian movement, particuarly as lead by Paul, exhibited a resistance to this ideology and the way it influenced behavior and thinking, but this was not in the name of some direct resistance of Empire but rather with the goal of seeing the glory of God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit come to and fill the entire earth. Ideology was resisted so that people could be free to come to realize and embody the good life in both their action and thinking that God intended for them and all of creation.

In other words, ideological resistance, new patterns of thinking, and struggles against sin were all instrumental parts of the early Christian movement, but these are not themselves core values that defined the ultimate purpose of believers. Being counter-cultural apart from conformity to Christ is of no value. New patterns of thinking apart from the transformation of the Spirit is of no value. Struggling against some bad actions without living a life pleasing to God is of no value. But rather, the calling from God to journey on the path laid out by Christ through the leading of the Holy Spirit brings the resistance of ideology and the controlling strangleholds it has on behavior and thinking into orbit as necessary for the specific goal of seeing the powers of heaven realized on earth in the believer’s lives.