"Tolkien's Modern Middle Ages"

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

Gondor had a 'strong political ideology', didn't it? No religious bent there. In fact Gondor seems much more secular at the time of the War of the Ring than at earlier times.

Yes; it's definitely worth remembering the remarks in Letter 155 that in Gondor "when the 'Kings' came to an end there was no equivalent to a 'priesthood': the two being identical in Númenórean ideas. [...] It is to be presumed that with the reemergence of the lineal priest kings (of whom Lúthien the Blessed Elf-maiden was a foremother) the worship of God would be renewed, and His Name (or title) be again more often heard."
Hence my specification of "false religion"; worshipping Sauron (or Morgoth) was self-evidently false to a well-informed person in Middle-earth. The King, by contrast, was a distant descendant of Lúthien, and thus of Melian, and thus, in a peculiar way, Eru Himself, and therefore seems to have embodied the spiritual Truth with a capital T.

So I suppose Gondor's political-religious system is, within the systems and workings of Middle-earth/Arda/Eä, legitimately derived from that Truth, while an "ideology" in the modern sense might be thought of as a system of political beliefs intended to explain or rationalise the workings of humanity or history according to subjective standards, which are often not necessarily verifiable; I think Professor Tolkien's use of the term "Sarumanism" embodies this concept: a set of unfalsifiable truisms, essentially, about the world and humanity, which tend to serve an interest rather than unambiguously representing reality.

Perhaps there is an "ideology" in Mordor: Sauron's love of order and coordination; it's just one that only motivates Sauron alone (or once did), not something he needs to convince his slaves of to make them follow him (he has more blunt methods of doing that). Again, perhaps that is identifiable with "modernity" by comparison to the works of Orwell in which the ideology only really matters to the elites, who have the "privilege" of interpreting and manipulating it to suit their own interests.

EDIT: Interesting ideas from denethorthefirst as well! I shall give them some thought.