ABSTRACT
I suggested in the opening chapter that any set of ideas at any one time and place can either be taken seriously on their merits or treated as ideology, explained in terms of their function in respect of social status and power. Of course, we can do both at once, but there is a tendency for the one approach to undermine the other. If we construct sociological explanations of belief such that we are inclined to say, ‘They would believe that, wouldn't they?’ there is a tendency to consider the ideas as less important in themselves. Correspondingly, if we think that a body of ideas is logically compelling or ethically coherent, the explanations of why they may have been believed in a particular context seem less important. In understanding Isaac Newton's theological preoccupations it may be important to understand the social setting of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, but this is generally less true of his theory of gravity. Protestant theology in general presents a good example of this distinction. On the whole, in the twentieth century it has been widely discussed as ideology, but studied as doctrine only in narrow segments of society; many more people can tell you the difference between Marxist and Weberian accounts of the causal relation of Protestantism to individualism and capitalism than can tell you what Luther and Calvin actually believed.
