idol worship

an idol isn't just what you love, but what condemns you.

you may not understand who or what you follow, but you might understand idol worship more easily when you consider who can condemn you.

many children worship their parents. their parents provide their entire world, and they also have the power to take away anything they choose to. when love is involved, punishment can always be personal. to feel beloved by them, to follow them, to please them can feel like the the entire point of existence. and to stray from their principles, to live in violation of their rules is a form of hell, to be separate from them and to risk living without their love.

what i describe is not a perfect or ideal model of family, one where love can feel conditional—yet this is the way many people grew up. even in a healthy family, the fear that love can be something withheld if you do something wrong persists.

it is much easier for most of us to love our parents more than we love God. i know I do because i don’t think I love God very much at all because i don’t understand God. i know i would LIKE to love God, to know God, but God is very inaccessible to me despite my knowledge of my own blessings.

when an idol is defined as someone with the power to condemn, i start to see its rejection as a form of liberation. it is not JUST the demand of a selfish God who wants us to love only them. if God is more than a being, but the truth and love and everything that is good beyond our own understanding, worship is meant to become transcendence, insofar as mortal existence can experience. maybe it does require a form of nonattachment, typically considered a buddhist principle. This is how I justify God’s command for Abraham to kill Isaac. Death as a form of separation from your loved ones is a post-Edenic construct. There is no perfect fairness on earth, but for a person to die is just a form of return to sender.

i don’t think idol worship isn’t just about chasing something (money, success, etc) that can never love you back. But every form of idolatry, even rooted in love, becomes a form of cruel optimism**. The love of God is supposed to protect us from danger. Living for someone else, especially someone who is harmful or in some way abusive, is not an easy mode of being to escape. It’s hard to even distinguish what harm can look like.

Not every escape from a harmful situation is about the pursuit of God in its stead. Yet the part of human dignity that wants to live and thrive is something that God has given us. God is a creator. God has full autonomy. And God lives in us and through us. An abusive relationship is like a sort of forced idol worship where a person must give up parts of their autonomy and their reasons to exist. They are forced to give that to someone who has never deserved it and in fact wishes to destroy that which connects them to the divine, because that is one more resource of their victim that they would be deprived of.

When we talk about idol worship, we don’t always talk about our lack of agency. parental worship by their children is instilled from a young age, even with parents’ best intentions. other times, idol worship is the result of a purposeful destruction. it can take a lot of work to reject the idols that were forced onto us. The basic premise, could be “what in your life do you bend over backwards to serve, at the expense of your own well being? What consumes you so much you have no room in your life?” What if idol worship is not always a result of our own sinful nature or selfishness? Yet the decision to reject it lies with us all the same.

**cruel optimism: “a relation [that] exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.”