In the past several centuries, our culture has been permeated by the idea that growth and progress are the hallmarks by which to judge the world. Today this ideology appears to be declining in proximate proportion to the rise of an environmental ideology (environmental paradigmsin academic literature). It is shown that in the process of becoming ideological, these paradigms (the antithesis of the progress ideology) have become more convincing to those both inside and outside academia by adding an understanding to our past, present, and future. It is proposed that major ideologies are, unlike the progress ideology, structurally similar, and that academic environmental paradigms duplicate this dominant ideological pattern. This dominant pattern theme is demonstrated by first contrasting the conceptsparadigmandideology, illustrating how they merge conceptually, and verifying the similarity of two historically major ideologies, Marxism and Christianity, with environmental paradigms.