Our culture is just as idolatrous as any other

Our culture is just as idolatrous as any other

With Black Friday now in the rearview mirror and the holiday season upon us, much will be said about the pervasiveness of materialism and consumerism in our culture. It will probably all be true. Even though European-American culture is the wealthiest and most affluent in the history of the world, we still crave more, and manufacturers are all too happy to accommodate, and facilitate, that craving.

So what does this have to do with idolatry? Traditionally an idol referred to a physical statue, of a deity that people would worship, pray to, and sacrifice to. These would typically be in the form of animals, humans, or bizarre hybrids. Elaborate legends and myths told the stories of these alleged deities and prescribed the means by which they preferred to be worshiped. Needless to say, our culture is proud to have moved past the times of those ancient superstitions and learned to rely on the empiricism of science.

Or have we? Of course we think it’s ridiculous to bow down to a statue of a fish and worship it, thinking it has the divine power to grant our wishes. But I don’t really think we’ve advanced beyond the thought patterns of the ancients.

Let’s move past the means by which the ancient pagans worshiped and ask why they worshiped such statues. It wasn’t because they were inherently more stupid than we are; it’s taken several thousand years of great minds building on each other’s knowledge — and most of the rest of us putting our trust in the knowledge of the brightest — to get to where we are today. They worshiped these idols because they realized that many things in their lives seemed to be decided by forces outside their control, and they believed that by attempting to appease those forces they could get what they wanted. So they prayed to the rain god for rain, the sex god for sex, the war god for victory, the fertility god for children.

So their worship of the gods wasn’t really about the gods; it was about what they could get from the gods. The rain god was useless without rain; the sex god was useless without sex. There was no worshiping the deity for the deity’s sake — they were a means to an end, and that end was the real object of their worship. When they worshiped Venus, they were really worshiping sex; when they worshiped Mars, they were really worshiping victory and conquest. When they worshiped Mercury, a god of trade and profit, or Plutus, the god of wealth, they were really worshiping material goods.

And we’re not all that different. Worship, after all, does not have to mean bowing down to or praying or singing to something or someone. At its root, worship is something much simpler. It comes from the Middle English word weorthscipe, which is a compound word composed of the elements of our modern words worth and ship. So worship could be understood to be worth-ship — attributing to someone or something ultimate worth. So when we attribute to anything, with words or actions, a level of worth higher than God — that is, when we give anything or anyone but God first place in our lives — we are giving them worth-ship. We are worshiping that person or thing. We are worshiping an idol.

The only difference between us and the ancient pagans is the way we pursue what we want. We don’t worship Venus to get sex; we just worship sex and pursue it ourselves. We don’t worship Plutus to make money; we just worship money and go after it ourselves, sometimes by any means necessary. We don’t worship some god of riches to get material goods; we just worship the goods themselves and spend half the holiday — the one where we’re supposed to be giving thanks for what we have — stampeding through the front doors of stores to save $50 on stuff we really don’t need, because we crave even more. The only difference between us and them is that we cut out the middleman. We might be less superstitious than they were, but does that really matter? Their motives and ours are exactly the same. It’s not any less foolish. Their gods were a means to an end, and we just use a different means to the same dead end: stuff that will wear out, break, and fade away, and experiences that are ultimately meaningless.

It’s not that we never need material things. It’s not that it’s always wrong to get material things that aren’t essential to our survival. Buying and owning material things is not idolatry, but spending more time and energy and care on getting more stuff than about God — that’s idolatry. Idolatry has as much to do with our motives as our actions. And I’m guilty of it too.

The big problem, I think, is that in America we don’t take idolatry very seriously. In fact, many of us don’t think there’s any idolatry at all in America. But idolatry is just as big a problem in 21st-century America as it was when the Old Testament prophets made long and emphatic pronouncements condemning it. We should take an idolatrous heart very seriously and examine ourselves to see whether an idolatrous heart is in us.

About the Author

Clay