Freeing Ourselves from Idolatry’s Grasp
A Feature Review of
The Uses of Idolatry
William T. Cavanaugh
Paperback: Oxford University Press, 2024
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Reviewed by Aaron Klink
William Cavanaugh established his reputation for astute commentary on religion and politics in numerous prior books on theology, politics, and culture. The Uses of Idolatry is a dense but revealing multi-disciplinary exploration of idolatry as it is defined by the Christian theological and philosophical traditions. This review will offer some highlights of a complex work full of careful, detailed argumentation that defies easy summary.
Roughly, Cavanaugh argues that Christians can be lured by the false gods of economics and nationalism that seek to offer experiences of “transcendence” through material goods or devotion to the nation-state. It should not be surprising that Cavanaugh, who wrote his dissertation under Duke theologian Stanley Hauerwas, notes that it is only through the practice of Christian worship that we can reorient our commitment to the triune God, who alone is the proper source of transcendence for those who profess the Christian faith.
Cavanaugh argues that idolatry is a useful concept in its ability to overcome binaries between, “believers and nonbelievers by showing that we all believe in something; we are all spontaneously worshiping creatures whose devotion alights on all sorts of things, in part we because we are material creatures, and the material world is beautiful” (5). The book argues that capitalism attempts to offer transcendence through the acquisition and use of material goods. Nationalism offers transcendence by encouraging devotion to the nation-state as a way of giving people values to defend and a sense of membership in something larger than oneself. Christian tradition has long been aware of the temptation to idolatry of false gods. Cavanaugh insists that liturgical practices can form individuals to trust in the triune God to fulfill their desire for transcendence.
Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age argues that society abandoned the “transcendent frame” that sought to make meaning in relationship to the divine and replaced it with the “immanent frame” that seeks meaning-making in relationship with the visible world. Cavanaugh’s close reading of Taylor’s text demonstrates Taylor’s difficulty in clearly defining religion. Taylor argues that despite its lack of a notion of a transcendent God that Buddhism is a religion. At the same time, Taylor argues that nationalism cannot be a religion even though individuals suffer, kill, and die to defend the honor of the nation-state as they used to do the same to define God’s honor. Cavanaugh notes that any object when perceived wrongly that objects in the right cultural context can offer themselves as routes to transcendence and thus be “religious.” I believe Cavanaugh missed an important opportunity here to explore how some in the United States fuse nationalism with Christian theology to create a new hybrid form of idolatry. Cavanaugh finds Taylor’s distinctions between “immanence” and “transcendence” to separate “believers” from “non-believers” to be too imprecise as a general frame and argues that authors must make the distinction discerningly on a case-by-case basis.
Cavanaugh explores how Hebrew and Christian scriptures define idolatry, aided by his use of James K.A. Smith’s notion that all humans are worshiping creatures. Both nationalism and capitalism create rituals that offer, “the seriousness of the kind of loyalties people still hold in a disenchanted world” (107). In fact, most of those the Bible accuses of idolatry do not deny God’s existence, rather they give loyalty to the things of the world and seek beauty in them rather than in God alone. In addition, the Bible calls the practice of making human leaders of nations or other organizations idolatrous as well. The main point is that one does not have to be an atheist to adopt an “immanent” frame; one only has to orient one’s life around things that are not God.
Cavanaugh’s blistering critique of consumerism suggests that adhering to it “invites magical thinking and delusions of omnipotence, with freedom and fulfillment of our wants available at the click of a mouse” (327). He goes on to note that the only way to break free of consumerism is to realize that things are made in order to serve the neighbor, not to deliver a false sense of transcendence. Many of us remain willfully blind to the ways companies like Amazon participate in injustice: exploiting Chinese prison labor, poorly paid garment workers in unsafe conditions in Bangladesh, etc. Unlike religion or even nationalism, consumerism promotes narcissism that does not sacrifice the self but seeks to sacrifice others for the sake of one’s own fulfillment.
Finally, Cavanaugh offers a sophisticated defense of liturgy’s power to shape human desire. Cavanaugh’s mentor Stanley Hauerwas has made this general argument for decades, but Cavanaugh advances it by rooting it in the Roman Catholic focus on the sacramental potential of things in the world rather than on intellectual formation alone. Importantly, liturgy respects and reflects the human need to interact with creation in sacramental ways. Capitalism on the other hand, promotes the consumption of creation– not the respect for creation– and in this way represents a distortion of liturgy. Cavanaugh argues that consumerism and nationalism have made us become rooted in ideas rather than in material realities which are attempts to escape from the finitude of our bodies and lives. Making a complex argument that defies easy summary about the way that the incarnation overcomes idolatry, Cavanaugh concludes that, “The goal [of the incarnation] is to present the invisible God in visible form but without thereby reducing God to something that can be grasped or manipulated. God makes Godself accessible to humans, but on God’s terms, not ours” (358).
Cavanaugh rigorously engages a vast array of interdisciplinary scholarship. I could not help feeling that the book is a diagnosis of the contemporary forces seeking to offer false promises of transcendence that only God holds. Contemporary marketing learned something from the Israelite construction of the golden calf: if you can convince individuals that they need something to thrive, they will abandon everything to acquire it unless their hearts are strongly cleaved to something they believe will satisfy their desires. The Uses of Idolatry contains a powerful theological anthropology, which explores the various forces in contemporary times: nationalism, consumerism, and faith that promises transcendence. But if we’re able to truly worship God who was made known in the incarnation, and if we can see others as image bearers of the incarnate God, perhaps we can begin to break free from idolatry that holds us so firmly in its grasp.
Aaron Klink
Aaron Klink is Chaplain and Bereavement Coordintor at Pruitt Health Hospice in Durham, North Carolina. As a writer and speaker his work focuses on how churches can faithfully minister to the ill and suffering and on Lutheran theology. An ordained pastor in the Church of the Brethren he received his M.Div. from Yale and a Th.M. from Duke Divinity School where he was the Westbrook Fellow in the Program in Theology and Medicine.
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