February 17, 2021

Hold on. This blog post promises not to be easy reading. Simple, perhaps, the way navigating a maze is simple – one foot in front of the other. But, like a maze, the subject is potentially frustrating, possibly frightening. At least, frightening enough to prompt my feet to the floor at an ungodly hour this morning (is there an hour from which god would be absent?). I thought of my children three, and of Ideology.

Ideology.  

1. “the body of doctrines, myth, belief etc., that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class, or large group. 

2. such as a body of doctrines, myth, etc., with reference to some political or social plan, as that of fascism, along with the devices for putting it into operation.

         The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd Edition

 Ideology – 2. ideal or abstract speculation, in a depreciatory sense, unpractical or visionary theorizing or speculation.

           The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 1971, vol. I

 The French borrowed from the Greek, and we English speakers borrowed from the French: a study of (λόγος, reason, plan); idea (ιδέα form, pattern).

And while I’ve fairly forgotten all Koine Greek, if I remember anything, it is that ideas and plans are controlled by people as subjects. Consequently, in the case of ideology, we need an I.de.o.logue, an adherent of an ideology. One, says my on-line dictionary, “who is especially uncompromising and dogmatic.”

I thought of my two grandfathers. On the Roberts side, a religious ideologue, he who once rose from a pew during a Sunday sermon and declared to God, the preacher, and all who sat stunned in pews, that the teaching from the pulpit was “Wrong!”  With a slap of his hand on his well-worn King James Version of the Bible, he finished his “idea,” took the hand of his six-year-old granddaughter, Carole, and stormed from the sanctuary. You’ve never seen a “body of doctrines” till you’ve seen the religious set that belonged to John Roberts. The Bible said it as he saw it, he believed it, and that settled it. He was a good man with a closed mind.

Merriam-Webster Collegiate Definition of an Ideologue: 1. “an often blindly partisan advocate or adherent of a particular ideology 2. an impractical idealist: Theorist

Brilliant, but likely “blindly partisan,” was Oliver Fayette ‘Pop’ Parsons, my maternal grandfather, the man long called Mr. Parsons by his wife, twelve years his junior, and fifty years sorry. Pop’s proud ideology sprang from southern beginnings: the white man was just below God and the angels. All else fell under the white man—women, children, people of color, animals of any sort, ownership, and authority. It’s hard to reason with a man with a gun, a whip, and a strong mind made up. He was charming. He was sure of things. He was not a good man.

I’m not sure how my gentle father and my amazingly fair-minded mother sprang from such sources. I’m not sure that my three children and I realized until lately how easily, quickly, effortlessly ideologies can override, overrun, overwhelm the priority of belonging to one another; how readily ideologies will claim the space where love belongs, where reason might rule, where respectful questions should overrule intransigent exclamations. Enough of what I insist upon, and you insist otherwise; of doctrines and beliefs held bereft of a hint of unease or humility.

 That is what got me up early this morning. That, and my love for my children who hold ideologies separate from my own, and from one another. How did these three spring from a single source yet manage to walk so differently through a maze of “doctrines, beliefs, myths, etc.”? Our love is strong, but Ideologies have loud voices yelling directions to those of us putting one foot in front of the other in this maze of postulations. Me thinks, Best to walk together while holding different thoughts.

I’m thinking of my three children. I’m thinking of our ideologically divided nation. I’m thinking, one doesn’t have to especially like Jesus to strongly approve of his idea that when it boils down to essentials—love one another. I say, if that’s not possible, at least assume a healthy dose of humility.