...Kolakowski on Marxism, Ernest Gellner on nationalism, and Emilio Gentile on fascism (among others), has shown how these movements assumed many of the dimensions and functions of religion for their followers, despite often being expressly anti-religious, or at least anti-Christian, in their rhetoric.

This dynamic is most apparent in the great totalitarian ideologies of national socialism and communism, which Eric Voegelin and Raymond Aron described respectively as "political" and "secular" religions. Gentile's careful taxonomy of political religion has been particularly important in clarifying both what the concept means and its usefulness for understanding the totalitarian phenomenon. The interesting question is to what extent the treatment of ideology as form of religion can or should be applied to democratic political movements and what it might reveal about the nature of democracy.

It is important to be clear on the sense in which the word religion is used in this context. Describing an ideology as a political religion is not a matter of using a metaphor or drawing an analogy. It is not a reference to the role that the residues of a repudiated faith might play in giving form to the political ideas of an individual or a culture. Nor is it concerned with the politicisation of traditional religion or the political mobilisation of religious forces, both of which might be said to underlie religion's return to prominence in politics internationally and also domestically in Western countries such as the United States and Australia. An ideology or a philosophy of life is not a religion unless it takes on the attributes and functions of religion, and it is only in cases such as this that treating an ideology as a political religion is justified.

To understand the meaning of the word religion we could consider religion not as a natural kind which can be defined by reference to a shared essence found in all its instances, but in terms of family resemblances. It is on this basis, for example, that Buddhism is counted as a religion even though it acknowledges no god to worship. The nature of family resemblances is that members of a family will share different attributes with each other but no one member will possess all the attributes of the family. Christianity, for example, may well be the most complete form of religion, but the attributes of animism or ancestor worship are unknown to it.

Political religions are the product of two factors: anthropological necessity and secularisation. The anthropological necessity is the permanent nature of the religious instinct in human beings. Two arguments for this might be evidenced. In Beyond Evolution, Anthony O'Hear observed that "there is in our nature as self-conscious but finite beings an ontological tension which naturally expresses itself religiously". At the heart of this is our experience as thinking creatures of "both the infirmity and transcendence of reason". Reason subjects all beliefs and practices to corrosive scrutiny, but is unable to...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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