There are few theological issues that offer us more consistent clarity in Christian scripture than the claim that Idolatry is the problem or evil from which most other evils stem. Nevertheless, I did not grow up learning about idolatry, and I certainly did not learn to identify the idols in my own culture. When I did, the idols were in someone else’s culture, not my own. And on the rare occasion a christian leader mentioned idols, the ones he (it was always a he) mentioned seemed…weak. Cell phones, girlfriends, football, and social media didn’t seem to address the deep and pervasive brokenness I saw tearing our lives and world apart.
As a reminder, idolatry happens whenever someone substitutes God for something else. When the thing we depend upon and look to for life, well being, hope, rescue, and ultimate wholeness isn’t the one true God, but something less. The reason idolatry is such a concern to God isn’t because God is insecure and needs all of our attention to stroke an ego. God commands against idolatry and names it as a sin and violation of God’s intention because idolatry destroys us and creation. It dehumanizes us and others and it leads to a broken, fragmented, violent, and miserable world.
Biblical anthropology assumes that human beings submit themselves to and thereby worship some system of belief that is beyond their immediate selves. The social sciences agree with this. It is rarely a matter of “will we offer ourselves and our sense of reality to a larger story, system or God?” but rather “which story, system, or God will we offer ourselves to?”. Even the non-religious might agree with this. Perhaps the system of reason and science provide a stabilizing framework from which to handle life’s existential and personal depths. In a diverse religious and non-religious atmosphere, talking about idolatry can immediately seem like another case of religious judgmentalism. But let me quickly state that I am wholly concerned with the community called Christians, the bodies called the church, and in dentifying the idols which we are engaged with.
But why do we serve idols instead of God? The clearest answer is fear. Faith is hard and life is hard. And out of a desire to find security, easier answers, and some sense of order and control in a complex world, we, often unknowingly, settle for less. But another factor is power. We want to be in control of our own lives and we want to be able to control the chaotic world around us so that we can be safe and happy. Idols offer us a sense of this and so we choose them. So we don’t see our idols because they truly have become for us a god. They comfort, strengthen, renew, and save us in our minds. Even if they ultimately fail at all of these things and drive us into deeper despair.
But one of the biggest reasons we don’t talk about the elephant in the room that is idolatry is because we find it almost impossible to identify and recognize our own idols. “We” find it easy to identify “their” idols, but not our own. Just as a reminder, idols are not often worshiped as a complete departure from God. Instead, as we see in one of the most famous stories of idolatry in the bible as the rescued Hebrews worship a golden calf in the desert, idols cozy up as near to God as they can and gradually replace our trust, our stories, and our heart for God. Idols are familiar, gently and gradually interwoven by the power of fear and reassurance into the way we see reality. They are the water we swim in, the air we breath, the trees in the forest.
Finally, we don’t talk about idols because the people most invested in them, unknowingly or not, do not want us to. The stories of the prophets, and I include Jesus among them, naming the great sin of idolatry among the religious leadership and institutional forces is rich. And the outcomes for those prophets is almost ubiquitous: strong and often violent resistance from the status quo. We don’t talk about our idols because doing so would challenge and eventually threaten the dominant foundations our society, church, and worldview is built upon. Leaving many in a perceived dystopia of ruins.
Yet, if Christians and the church have any hope for healing and any hope to restore our witness in the world, it begins with repentance, and repenting of our idolatry in particular. In my upcoming post I will begin naming a few of the idols in my own culture that are powerfully at work in the church today. Most of these idols are ideologies, which have many similarities with religious systems. And let me state that like all idols, these have some character or allure that are fundamentally “godly” and good. Otherwise they would not be so powerful.