Political Vision and Illusions

From the jacket of the 2003 book Political Visions & Illusions by David T. Koyzis:

The end of the Cold War has brought about more than the triumph of some political ideologies and the disappearance of others. In fact, the collapse of communism has created a vacuum quickly being filled by various alternative visions, ranging from ethnic nationalism to individualistic liberalism. But political ideologies are not merely a matter of governmental efficacy. Rather, political ideologies are intrinsically and inescapably religious — each carries certain assumptions about the nature of reality, individuals and society, as well as a particular vision for the common good. These fundamental beliefs transcend the political sphere, and the astute Christian observer should thus discern the subtle ways in which ideologies are rooted in idolatrous worldviews.In this comprehensive study, political scientist David Koyzis surveys the key political ideologies of our era, including liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, democracy and socialism. Each philosophy is given careful analysis and fair critique, unpacking the worldview issues inherent to each and pointing out essential strengths and weaknesses. Koyzis concludes by proposing alternative models that flow out of Christianity’s historic engagement with the public square, retrieving approaches that hold promise for the complex political realities of the twenty-first century. Writing with broad, international perspective and keen analytical insight, Koyzis offers a sound guide for Christians working in the public square, culture watchers, political pundits and all students of modern political thought.

From the Introduction:

“Ideology, Religion, and Idolatry.”

So what is an ideology? At this point I shall tip my hand and indicate that I view ideologies as modern types of that ancient phenomenon idolatry, complete with their own accounts of sin and redemption…Ideologies attempt to offer a total explanation for the world and its history and thus all ideologies contain totalitarian elements. They read the whole of reality through a single idea and deny the possibility that any genuine knowledge can be attained through experience apart from that idea. In contemporary parlance, they exempt themselves from a “reality check.” It is a short step from ideology to totalitarianism…

[Ideology] attempts to eliminate different interests and to mold the people in accordance with a single idea. It tries to simplify the complexity of society into a monolithic vision…Politics is content to make do with the existing state of society and to conciliate whatever interests are currently there. Ideology attempts to remake, not only government, but education, industry, art, even domesticity and private affections…

For [Czech Republic President Vaclav] Havel, ideology threatens not only politics but also the ordinary aims of life itself…In what he labels the “post-totalitarian” societies of the former Soviet bloc, ideology claims to offer the people a sense of identity and dignity while in reality stripping them of this. “It is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality,” [Havel writes]. It contructs a world which assimilates all people into a self-contained alternative pseudo-reality in which slavery passes for liberty, censorship for free expression, bureaucracy for democracy, and arbitrary power for legal authority…[P]eople are compelled to “live within a lie”…

Christians are, of course, concerned with truth, both in absolute and relative senses. Truth is an attribute of God, and Jesus calls himself the way, the truth, and the life (Jn. 14:6)…If…ideologies represent fundamentally flawed conceptions of the world, then we Christians are obligated to take them seriously and to try to discern in exactly which ways they go wrong…I shall concur with the tradition that sees ideology as a type of false consciousness, and will argue further that it is rooted in the biblical category of ideology…

I believe a case can be made that those phenomena normally classified as ideologies do indeed originate in idolatrous religion. These include liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, ideological democracy and socialism, among others…

[A] precondition contributing to the rise of ideologies is the secularization of the Christian faith and of the cultures… Used here…secularization means nothing less than the increasing rejection of the Christian faith by a society as a whole…

[I]deologies are inescapably religious… It…might be more accurate to say that an ideology flows out of the (idolatrous) religious commitment of a person or community…

Idolatry takes something within God’s creation, attempts to elevate it above the boundary separating Creator from creature, and makes of it a kind of god….[I]dolatry further tries to bring the rest of creation into the service of the invented god….

[E]veryone serves a god of some sort…[E]veryone is transformed into the image of the god she serves…[P]eople structure their society in their own image…

[E]ach of the ideologies is based on a specific soteriology, that is, on a worked-out theory promising deliverance to human beings from some fundamental evil that is viewed as the source of a broad range of human ills…”The mature ideology is a false revelation of creation, fall and redemption.” Christianity sees Jesus Christ as the source of salvation; the ideologies see salvation coming to us through, for example, the maximization of individual freedom, the communal ownership of all wealth, the liberation of the nation from foreign rule, the submission of individuals to the general will and so forth…

[T]he ideologies tend to locate the source of this fundamental evil somewhere within the creation…Thus the ideology can be seen to partake of that ancient heresy of Gnosticism, for which the physical world is deemed intrinsically sinful, and salvation is viewed as deliverance from its supposed confines…

[I]deologies have a fundamentally distorted view of the world, and hence of government and politics. This distorted worldview has tremendous consequences for political practice, because people inevitably live out their religious worldviews. Because the followers of ideologies see the world as not belonging to God but to themselves, they misunderstand the character of the world…

[Ideologies] are…rooted in the predominant secular belief in human autonomy, according to which human beings determine the course of their own lives without reference to God’s will…

[T]hese goals themselves become gods to which ordinary flesh-and-blood people may have to be sacrificed…

[T]he heart of the argument of the book…is that it is possible to transcend the ideologies and to embrace a spirit more compatible with the Christian understanding of creation, fall and redemption…

We…will argue…for a biblical – and hence creational and redemptive – understanding of politics and its place in God’s world. We shall, in short, offer an alternative vision – one which, it is to be hoped, will take us beyond the reductionisms and idolatries of the ideologies insofar as it offers a truer and fuller account of the world and of politics…