3.3 Themes of Ideologies: Nation, Class, Land, Environment, and Religion

Themes are the subjects ideologies keep returning to

Once you can define ideology and name identity factors, Social 30-2 asks you to identify themes of ideologies. The usual list is nation, class, relationship to land, environment, and religion. A theme is a subject an ideology organizes itself around. Classical liberalism returns to the individual and to property; Marxism returns to class; fascism returns to the nation; some religious ideologies return to sacred law; many Indigenous political teachings return to land. Gender, as you saw in the previous section, is an identity factor more than a theme on this list. Keep it there.

These themes are the vocabulary of Part B source matching and of Part A Assignment I key concepts. Related Issue 1 may be only 4 to 12 of 60 items, but later related issues on liberalism, responses to liberalism, and citizenship reuse the same themes. If you cannot tell nationalism from ultranationalism, or stewardship from exploitation, you will misread sources that look like current events.

Appreciate various perspectives: each theme can be taken in more than one direction. Nation can mean self-determination or exclusion. Land can mean kinship or title. Religion can mean a theocratic state or a protected private conscience.

Nation: nationalism, ultranationalism, and internationalism

At 30-2 understanding level, keep three related ideas distinct.

Nationalism is a belief that a nation — a people with a shared identity, often language, culture, history, or political community — should have self-determination. Canadian Confederation debates, Quebec nationalism, and First Nations assertions of nationhood are not the same movement, but they all treat nation as a political we. Nationalism can be civic (belonging through citizenship and shared institutions) or ethnic (belonging through ancestry). A moderate nationalist source defends the nation's right to exist and to make collective choices.

Ultranationalism takes national loyalty to an exclusionary extreme. The nation's interest outranks other people's rights. Ultranationalist sources often demand purity, glorify conflict, and treat minorities or outsiders as threats. Interwar fascism is the 30-2 case study: the nation becomes an organic body that can demand obedience and violence. Ultranationalism is not being proud of Canada. Pride can be nationalist without being ultranationalist. The difference is whether other groups remain fully human and rights-bearing.

Internationalism emphasizes cooperation across nations — trade, diplomacy, the United Nations, humanitarian aid, climate agreements. An internationalist source argues that some problems (pandemics, refugees, war, carbon) cannot be solved by one nation alone. Internationalism does not automatically mean erase your language. A source that supports UN peacekeeping can still value Canadian identity.

A typical 30-2 triangle: Source I is a flag-waving speech about sovereignty; Source II is a poster that dehumanizes foreigners; Source III is a call for a global climate treaty. Match them to nationalism, ultranationalism, and internationalism. Do not call all three patriotic.

Class: bourgeoisie and proletariat as a Marxist theme

Class is a theme about economic position and power. Karl Marx made class the centre of an ideology. The bourgeoisie own the means of production — factories, capital, large-scale property. The proletariat sell their labour because they do not own those means. Other classes (peasants, small owners) appear in Marxist writing, but 30-2 source items most often use the owner/worker pair.

Return to the factory-owner-versus-union cartoon. As an identity factor, the union may also be about culture or gender. As a theme of ideology, the cartoon is usually class. The owner's balcony labelled MINE is bourgeois property; the picket sign FAIR SHARE is proletarian collective interest. A Marxist interpretation of history, which you already met, is this theme stretched across time.

Not every mention of money is Marxist class analysis. A classical-liberal source may talk about wealth as a reward for individual effort and still reject class struggle as the motor of history. Name class as a theme when the source organizes the world into economic groups with conflicting interests, not when someone merely buys a coffee.

Modern 30-2 sources may show gig workers, oil-sands camps, or chief-executive bonuses. Translate them into the theme: who owns, who labours, and whether the speaker thinks that relationship is natural, unjust, or reformable.

Relationship to land: Indigenous worldviews and Lockean property

You have already met land as an identity factor. As a theme of ideology, land answers: what is land for, and who may decide?

Many Indigenous worldviews — again, not one single view — treat land as a living relative, a source of law, and a trust for future generations. Authority can sit in treaty relationships, hereditary or elected leadership, and responsibilities to animals and water. The theme is relationship, not inventory.

John Locke offered a very different theme. In his labour theory of property, mixing one's labour with land that is treated as unowned (waste) creates private property. That argument was later used, in colonial practice, to treat Indigenous territories as empty or unused if they were not farmed in a European style. A Lockean source on a 30-2 booklet that says title comes from improvement is not a small legal technicality. It is an ideological theme that clashes with treaty and kinship land.

A source pairing you should practise: an Elder describing a hunting territory as identity and law, beside a settler title deed or a real-estate advertisement. The question is not who loves nature more. The question is which theme of land each source uses — relation and responsibility, or commodity and exclusive title.

Métis Settlements and Inuit land-claim regions (such as Nunavut and Inuvialuit) show that Indigenous peoples also use modern legal title and self-government tools. Using law is not becoming Lockean. It can be a way to protect a non-Lockean relationship inside a state that speaks the language of title.

Environment: stewardship versus resource exploitation

The environment theme asks how humans should treat ecosystems. Two poles appear constantly on 30-2 sources.

Stewardship (or a related conservation ethic) treats air, water, soil, and species as a trust. You may use them, but you must not exhaust them. Some religious teachings (care for creation), some liberal environmental laws, and many Indigenous laws of respect for animals all can support stewardship — from different identities. Do not credit stewardship to only one culture.

Resource exploitation treats nature primarily as inputs to production and profit: timber, bitumen, minerals, hydro power. Classical-liberal and developmental-nationalist sources often defend exploitation as jobs, growth, and standard of living. An Alberta oil-sands advertisement and a photograph of a tailings pond are both environment-theme sources with opposite prescriptions.

A careful 30-2 reading notices mixed positions: a worker who wants both a paycheque and clean water; a government that regulates emissions while promoting exports. The exam still asks which pole a given source emphasizes. Saying that both sides care about the environment is usually too vague for a multiple-choice stem.

Religion: theocratic versus secular liberal states

As a theme, religion asks whether sacred authority should rule public law.

A theocratic tendency holds that religious law or clerical authority should govern the state. Historical examples 30-2 students meet include Calvin's Geneva as a case of religious discipline, and modern examples such as Iran after 1979, where Islamic law and clerical institutions structure the state. You do not need a seminary course. You need to recognize a source that says God's law outranks the legislature.

A secular liberal state, in the sense 30-2 uses, protects freedom of religion while refusing to make one church the source of criminal and constitutional law. Canada is a useful example: the Charter protects freedom of conscience and religion, and Canadian public institutions are not a theocracy, even though religious citizens participate fully in politics. France is sometimes used to illustrate a stricter public secularism (laïcité). Quebec debates over religious symbols in public employment show that secularism itself is contested. Read those sources as competing perspectives, not as a cue to sneer.

Do not treat every religious source as theocratic. A Sikh Canadian defending the right to wear a turban in an RCMP uniform is usually arguing for liberal religious freedom, not for a Sikh theocracy. A source that wants to criminalize other faiths is closer to theocratic or ultranationalist exclusion. Read the prescription.

Putting the five themes to work on sources

When you open a Part B cluster or an Assignment I booklet, ask: is this source mainly about who the people are (nation), who owns and who works (class), what land is (land), what we may do to living systems (environment), or whether God governs the state (religion)? Then ask which direction the source takes — nationalist or ultranationalist, bourgeois or proletarian, kinship or title, stewardship or exploitation, theocratic or secular liberal.

The factory-owner cartoon is class first. The river-as-relative quotation is land first, with identity factors sitting underneath. A climate-strike poster is environment, possibly mixed with internationalism. A sermon that says the courts must implement scripture is religion as theocratic theme.

Write those labels in the margin. Related Issue 1 will not be most of the 60 questions, but Assignment I key concepts — and later items on liberalism and its critics — reuse this list. Independent Social Studies 30-2 practice by OpenExamPrep at /practice/ca-ab-diploma-social-30-2 can drill theme identification. It does not replace the provincial sitting.