In a terrific first lecture in a class I’m taking on the history of modern European religious thought, my professor gave us two contrasting quotes. We're looking at Political Theology, and William Cavanaugh and Peter Scott write, in the introduction to their Blackwell Companion to Political Theology:

Political Theology is the analysis and criticism of political arrangements (including cultural-psychological, social and economic aspects) from the perspective of differing interpretations of God’s ways with the world (page x).

Believers might call this looking for God’s hand in our power relations; Unbelievers can track the exact same histories and call it the history of religious thought.

Mark Lilla, on the other hand, sees even the study of religion as amounting to letting in the back door the evils we (meaning the West, although Lilla is dangerously close to using the Royal We in the quote below) have with great effort successfully driven out the front door:

We find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men, stirring up passions that leave societies in ruin (The Stillborn God, page 3).