Page 61 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Ideologies 45

In studying ideology in culture, then, there are several strands of inquiry
that one can pursue. One concerns ideas that become the bases of social
action. An example, in the US in recent years, would be the way evangelical
Christianity has provided undereducated people with an ideational justifi -
cation for pre - modern attitudes toward race, gender, and sexuality. “ Old
time religion ” – a particular selection of biblical quotes – thus becomes the
basis for a drive to turn back modernity.
Religion is probably the most obvious example of an ideology defi ned
as a group of ideas that seem coherent but that foster misperceptions and
misrepresentations of the world. Evangelicalism has achieved a place of
prominence in popular culture in recent decades, abetted in part by politi-
cal leaders like George W. Bush. Timothy LaHave ’ s Left Behind novels and
movies, for example, were extremely popular. In the first book in the Left

Behind series, Rapture , the taking of true believers to heaven by God,
happens suddenly, and those “ left behind, ” who have not achieved perfect
salvation, must do battle with the Anti - Christ in order to save the world.
In Left Behind , those actually left on earth are portrayed as not possessing

a sufficiently disciplined relationship to Jesus. In rural working - class
culture, a highly formal kind of discipline often serves as a proof of virtue,
a way of contradicting the way the social system of reward distribution
seems not to confirm the worth or value of people in that situation in life.

By manifesting strict discipline, they contradict the low value they are
assigned in the culture and affi rm their true capacity and virtue.
Like many rural conservatives, evangelicals tend to order the world into
rigid moral categories such as the saved and the damned. Large categories

of understanding replace more flexible, detailed, and scientific ways of
knowing that are only available to better educated people in, usually, more
wealthy regions. Their way of knowing also operates within a narrow range.
Conservatives view the world empirically out to an horizon and fear what
lies beyond, especially if that takes the form of institutions like the federal
government and the United Nations that take income from them in the
form of taxes and thus appear to be threats to their ability to survive in a
harsh economic world founded on the principle of mutual predation or
“ competition. ” For them, the world operates according to rules that seem

beyond their knowledge and control. Insufficiently educated and untrained
to perform critical thinking, they see the world imperfectly and inaccu-
rately. The way the world works, especially as it affects their lives in terms
of prices, taxes, and employment, seems a matter of fatality, and their pes-
simistic understanding of it, shaped by a sense of frustration or inability