ABSTRACT
None of the theologians in the emergent tradition has a strong version of historical materialism according to which ‘the mode of production in material life determines the general characteristics of the social, political and spiritual processes of life.’ Such a strong version can be found in the Marxist Louis Althusser who suggested that religious practices such as prayer were an ‘ideological intervention’ where religious people learn to say, Amen, i.e.—so be it-to the ‘reproduction of the relations of production.’1 This is because the church functions primarily as a ‘religious ideological State apparatus’ (RISA),2 which is distinct from a (repressive) State apparatus yet in service to it through means not explicitly violent. The church as a RISA ‘always-already’ constructs subjects such that
the subjects ‘work’, they ‘work by themselves’ in the vast majority of cases, with the exception of the ‘bad subjects’ who on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments of the (repressive) state apparatus. But the vast majority of (good) subjects work all right ‘all by themselves’, i.e. by ideology…. They are inserted into practices governed by the rituals of the ISAs. They ‘recognize’ the existing state of affairs, that ‘it really is true that it is so and not otherwise’, and that they must be obedient to God, to their conscience, to the priest, to de Gaulle, to the boss, to the engineer, that thou shalt ‘love thy neighbour as thyself, etc. Their concrete, material behaviour is simply the inscription in the life of the admirable words of the prayer: ‘Amen-So be it.’3
