ABSTRACT
Ask many people today to defi ne “religion,” and they will respond by describing dogmatic dedication to a massive, bureaucratic institution. Sometimes in the United States we hear the expression, “don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” meaning: don’t get taken in by an ideology, a personage, or a fad to the extent that you give your life to it. The saying is a reference (albeit a slightly mistaken one) to the 1978 deaths of Peoples Temple members from poisoned Flavor-Aid. Though many people today no longer know why Kool-Aid stands in for a kind of fatal gullibility in common idiom, it’s clear that popular opinions of religion expect it to be a source of oppression rather than an opportunity for resistance. As we’ve seen since the beginning of this book, however, religion is a complicated phenomenon, and thus, we might expect that its relationship to social power would be complicated as well. In fact, were we to sum it up, we might describe religion as a whole, in its relationship to social power, as both strikingly powerful and immeasurably malleable . These two factors, taken together, help to explain why religion can be at times so dangerous to oppressed groups, and at other times such a powerful force for social justice.
