Resisting the Drive to Do Better
A Feature Review of
Baal and the Gods of More: Rescuing Church Growth from Idolatry
Andrew Root
Paperback: Baker Academic, 2026
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Reviewed by Pete Ford
Andrew Root’s newest book, Baal and the Gods of More, offers rich insights that stimulate fruitful conversations. As in his previous books, Root draws heavily on cultural criticism. Footnotes are filled with long quotations showing the breadth of his reading. However, this is more than an academic rant against a certain church growth technique.
Pastorally, Root helps us see that the drive to “do better” is antithetical to resting in our identity as children of God. Throughout the book, Root clarifies that growth for the sake of growth (“the ideology of the cancer cell,” says Edward Abbey) is different from growing into being a type of person. In the final chapter, Root brings this full circle to discuss how we are children who are growing into a relationship with God.
Root’s primary concern is what he labels escalation, the never-ending need to produce more. To parse the difference between healthy maturity and enslaving escalation, Root traces the story of two pastor brothers amid church decline: one is scrambling to use better techniques, and the other criticizes the American church for not “doing better” at reaching marginalized groups. In the end, both are caught in the same logic of escalation, which Root identifies with the idolatry of Baal. He draws a parallel between the Protestant church’s situation of decline today and the way that the divided kingdom after David and Solomon relied on Baal worship to offer stabilization through escalation.
In the second chapter, Root quotes from Hartmut Rosa’s Resonance to explain “dynamic stabilization.” (I’m a fan of how he has unpacked Rosa’s body of work in many of his books.) The church growth movement used technique to target the Boomer generation, and the Emergent Church used celebrity—both relying on the same logic of escalation.
Root relies on other cultural critics to label these two primary ways we “ride the bull of escalation”: techno-optimism and identitarianism. Either we find “better techniques” for church growth, or we attribute the Protestant church’s decline to its failure to keep up with marginalized identities. Interestingly, the cult of celebrity brings together both, using personality as a technique to “grow the church.”
The phrase “the church can do better” is the logic of escalation, says Root. “To be able to ‘do better’ assumes that some kind of expended energy…can move the agent, through its own power, into excellence.” He says that neither “creative production” nor “identity affirmation” is enough to stabilize church growth. “The church will become all about doing, serving network or personality capital, and not about the Crucified One who invites us into being.”
Root spends a whole chapter surveying what Robert Gordon called the “special century” (1870–1970), which coincided with the “Christian century.” During this time, the rate of GDP growth in just a few years exceeded the growth during most of the Middle Ages. However, “special” in “special century” means unrepeatable, as the digital revolution has not increased productivity, leading to a decline in GDP growth since 1970.
Like the kings of the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah “who live after the golden era of Solomon, we Protestants living inside GDP decline at the end of the third industrial revolution have sought foreign systems of stabilization because we have lost faith in the Word of Yahweh.” As we feel our cultural capital slipping away, we try to take matters into our own hands.
Root’s reading of 1–2 Kings largely follows Walter Bruggemann’s commentary, critical of Solomon’s “golden age.” Root says that David was close to Yahweh in prayer because he didn’t try to contain Yahweh in a temple. In contrast, Solomon used his wisdom to hoard riches and made politically expedient marriage alliances, treating God as an object for cultic stabilization.
Because Root says that God was the agent who divided the North/South kingdoms, I wish he had clarified if he was saying that the decline Protestants feel today is a punishment for unfaithfulness or just part of the cultural GDP decline. While the trends Root explores have explanatory power, I also wanted to hear him speak about how GDP is not a complete measurement of society.
Throughout the book, Root refers to Elijah’s prophetic voice against the way of Baal, but he delays turning from cultural criticism to the Biblical texts until about two-thirds through the book. Because he doesn’t explicate Elijah’s desert message until later, some statements earlier in the book seemed anachronistic. For example, he says, “To draw from Elijah’s imagery, the cross puts the desert into the body of Jesus himself.” It wasn’t clear until the penultimate chapter what lessons we can learn from Elijah’s opposition to Baal worship.
Baal was the god of storms, which both display power and bring crop fertility. At one point Root mentions that even today the bull is a symbol of good markets on Wall Street. I am curious to hear Root say more about the symbol of the bull—whether power and fertility are distinct patterns of escalation. There are many threads like this I’d like to see him pursue in his future books.
According to Root’s framing, Elijah’s drought is less punishment and more an undermining of Baal’s authority. In fact, the desert is the best opportunity to encounter Yahweh. “Yahweh is the God of the desert who creates life where there is only impossibility.” For example, in 1 Kings 17, Yahweh provides daily bread for Elijah—just enough without any extra accumulation to trust in. Perhaps today’s desert is a merciful opportunity.
In the final chapter, Root returns to a contrast he set up in the first chapter between fertility and relationality. He places a picture of Artemis of Ephesus next to an icon of Mary holding Jesus. Root follows Martin Luther to argue that a healthy view of the Virgin Mary encourages us to live relationally as children in the “maternal embrace” instead of instrumentally. Mary’s Magnificat parallels the Davidic tradition of the Psalms, where a relational prayer life teaches us to rest in our identity as children of Yahweh.
I was encouraged by Root’s connection between children and the Sabbath. Root points to children as an example of good growth—what he has called “growing into.” “Sabbath makes us children because Sabbath makes growth have an end (the double meaning of ‘end,’ both a cessation and a purpose).” (Alexander Schmemann made a similar argument in For the Life of the World.) Unlike Baal’s insatiable appetite for more, Yahweh invites children into rest. Indeed, Root reminds us that “no escalating growth can make them more or less a child.”
Through the book, Root is clear that the church cannot “do better”; we can only obey by trusting that “God is speaking and moving, that God is an actor as a relational reality.” Because God is already at work in the world, may we—like Mary—prayerfully discern how we can participate together with the Trinity.
Pete Ford
Pete Ford is a stay-at-home dad as well as a digital marketer for Christian publishers and nonprofits. By night, he is a reader, focusing on topics including nonviolence, time, the built environment, and spiritual practices like Sabbath.
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