Abstract

The relationship between religion and ideology deals, above all, with the effects of religion on society and politics. This will be one of the issues I shall deal with in this chapter. A first caveat: though I will be referring, below, to liberal religious people, this piece deals above all with liberal religion. In doing so, it presents those liberal versions of different religions as coherent wholes. Yet what their adherents (liberal religious people) make of those views is another matter: many of them will not follow the code lock, stock and barrel, but will pick and choose what to respect. Another qualification: insofar as I shall be dealing with society and politics, my focus is not on ‘liberal polities’, but on religiously liberal people in such societies; in discussions, these different approaches to liberalism are often not clearly kept apart. ¹ I have dealt at length with liberal religion in my book of the same name (de Kadt 2018), and I will try not to repeat myself here. Even so, some overlap is inevitable.