ABSTRACT
Embedded within every religion are the basic elements of political philosophy. This is the case because religion is built through stories of origin and destiny and offers both proclamations and explanations of freedom and order, judgment, meaning, and hope. Religion is often the source for founding myths that collect a people into a political community and give them purpose. Religion holds up transcendent standards of justice by which a people can measure its collective actions. In prescribing a path to salvation, religion, as Max Weber noted (Gerth and Mills 1946), tells a people not only what it is saved from but what it is saved for. In short, religion offers models of and for personal and collective reality.
