As God's unruly friends are painfully aware, in the thoughts and lives of most people, religion rarely rises above an organized or collective expression of inherited prejudice. Of course, the same could be said (and ought to be said) about patriotism and, frankly, any other ideological loyalty.
What distinguishes ideology from mere ideas is its supposed self-evidence. Consequently, one of the primary tasks in the non-sectarian academic study of religion is to revive students from the stupor that overtakes their minds when drinking from religion's ideological waters of Lethe--a form of "refreshment" that many of them consume quite liberally from childhood on. As this "awakening" occurs--what is really a coming to self-consciousness--the basic principle must be established: religion is not so much the problem as is operating in one's daily life on auto-pilot. That is the real enemy. For a person to be "educated," i.e., to have attained an acceptable level of active intelligence, the mind must run on all cylinders. And once the practice of awakening the mind is acquired in the study of religion, the student must learn to extend that practice to other areas of thought and life--not least of which is the political.
It is, in fact, in this way that the academic study of religion contributes to the construction of democratic selves and the aspiration towards democracy that, one hopes, will someday infect the general population of the United States as it appears to have infected populations in other parts of the world (Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Tunisia, Sudan, etc.). But we are a long way from the dawning of that happy day and there is much, much work to be done in the meantime.
