POWER

The South African anti-apartheid campaigner Desmond Tutu is reported as saying in the 1980s that if someone suggests ‘there is no connection between religion and politics, then they must be reading a different Bible’ to his own. Although this is a comment specifically directed at Christians (after all Tutu was the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town), there is still much poignancy in what he says. There is a commonly held idea that somehow the cultural spheres of religion and politics are separate – a view that is somewhat at odds with the many ways in which religions are bound up with systems of power. At a different end of the spectrum to this, perhaps, is the view that all religions are only about the operation of power. This is expressed particularly in the idea that religion is a means for those in power to keep their power, most famously associated with the analysis of the philosopher and activist Karl Marx. In this chapter, I will be exploring some of the ways in which we

can talk about religion in terms of power, and vice versa, looking in particular at the work of Max Weber, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault. I take as a basic assumption that religion and power are not separate and at odds, but instead are closely bound up with each other, and are both ways in which we can talk about culture.