Can the Americans excise, or even acknowledge, the idol of idolatry?

Sometimes, a second look at a word, practice and theme in a very old culture can offer insight into some of the energetic vibrations today.

Almost extinct from contemporary vernacular is the word, idolatry….according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “In Judaism and Christianity, the worship of someone of something other than God, as though it were God. …Gross of overt, idolatry consists of explicit acts of reverence addressed to a person or an object—the sun, the king, an animal, a statue. This may exist alongside the acknowledgement of a supreme being: e.g. Israel worshipped the golden calf, at the foot of Mount Sinai, where it had encamped to receive the Law and the covenant on the one true God….A person becomes guilty of a more subtle idolatry, however, when, although overt acts of adoration are avoided, he attaches to a creature the confidence, loyalty, and devotion that properly belong only to the Creator. Thus, the nation is a good creature of God, but it is to be loved and served with an affection appropriate to it, not with the ultimate devotion that must be reserved for the Lord of all nations. Even true doctrine (e.g. true doctrine about idolatry) may become an idol if it fails to point beyond itself to God alone.” (from Britannica.com)

Without sliding into the theological ‘weeds’ about whether or not mediation between God and humans is or can be ascribed to, for example, the Virgin Mary, let us consider the slight, if not more explicit, notion that even the contemporary church could be faulted for, at least from the outside, elevating bishops and popes to a position evoking, if not actually incarnating idolatry. Prostrating oneself at the foot of a bishop, as a required act in the liturgy that ordains one to the priesthood, for example, is, by inference if not actually by expectation, an act of submission, (of course, symbolically to God, through the Bishop) that reverences the position at the top of the ecclesial hierarchy. From the website, desiringGod.org, John Piper, writes: “Enjoyment is becoming idolatrous when it is starting to feel like a right, and out delight is becoming a demand.”

Clearly, we live in a western, and especially a North American culture in which ‘right’s have become something very close to sacred. Have they become idols? And the pathway that has led much contemporary thought, reflection and discussion to that point is the interjection of “law” as the intersection of an individual’s safety, security and freedom, with the state’s need to oversee, monitor, sanction and exercise responsibility for what is deemed to be the “good of the whole”. And while there is a ready and accessible understanding of something that is “elevated” and while there are multiple examples of things and persons whom a culture holds in high esteem, even erecting statues to them, the convergence of the importance of the “law” and the much mor subtle and almost unconscious linking of  the law to what citizens consider sacred, is, in any society regardless of the demographics of a dominant religion.

It is now part of the daily news feed from the U.S. that includes the eulogies of Rev. Al Sharpton for too many slain black men, too often by white law enforcement officers, in which Rev. Sharpton, a half-century, disciplined, and dedicated soldier of the civil rights movement in the U.S., president of the National Action League, declares his ultimate goal to have legislation passed that will take a substantial bite out of the deeply embedded racial hatred that so strangles many of the hopes and dreams, not only of individuals and families, but also of the nation as a whole. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted by many southern states after the Civil War, including literary tests as a prerequisite to voting. The Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2019 establishes a targeted process for reviewing voting changes in jurisdictions nationwide, focused on measure that have been used to discriminate against voters. Also in 2019, a bill known as the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, passed the House of Representatives, (228-187) (waiting Senate approval). This bill would restore and strengthen parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, certain portions of which were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013; it would bring back the Voting Rights Act of 1965’s requirement that certain states pre=clear certain changes to their voting laws with the federal government.

Without in anyway denigrating the somewhat poetic and certainly passionate and even sacred commitment of Rev. Sharpton and his colleagues to racial equality, justice and fair treatment on the streets, and in the schools, churches and business and government institutions, to an outsider, albeit an interested one, it seems that this issue of racial equality and justice is, like a slippery gram of mercury sliding in and out of favour among both groups of citizens, political parties, and even the courts, with people like Rev. Sharpton, and before him Martin Luther King, Jessie Jackson, John Lewis, and many others, heroically chasing this talisman at the heart of the American culture, without much hope of wrestling it to ground.

It is not that such heroic initiatives, studies, the doctoral theses, political punditry and debates, including the passing of laws, are without value. It is certainly not without honour and conviction and commitment and humility and modesty on the part of civil rights activists and their leaders that the United States has been suffering from the cancer of racism for 400 years. Some 600,000 Americans were slain in the Civil War, and in 2019, for example, according to statistica.com, 6,446 black men were murder victims in the United States. Over the past several weeks, some 47 states have introduced legislation that would restrict access to voting to minority voters, (mainly black and brown), and the rampant abuse of the power of white law enforcement against black men has garnered headlines and a heightened consciousness around the world, even embarrassment, as viewed by the current president, Joe Biden, of the state of the American society.

It is both trite and tragic to note that laws, in and through their composition, political debate and in their prosecution in the courts, have not resolved the fundamental hatred that has infested the American body politic. Whether it has also infected the American soul, is open to legitimate and vigorous debate. An observer from another planet or country could, upon visiting the United States for the first time, observe with reasonable justification and legitimacy, that, having dedicated, perhaps even come to the place of idolizing “LAWS,” as a “nation of laws” and expected those laws to eradicate all the stain of racial animus, hate, bigotry, fear and what is an inordinate need for power over, that such devotion, adoration, and even approximate worship of those laws, is a path no longer worthy of a self-respecting, self-honouring, and self-proclaiming society and culture.

There are so many layers to the elevation of the military to the status of an idol, both as an establishment and as a self-sustaining religion that merit unpacking. Start with the national belief of the “special” status of the nation itself and its people, and the long-standing sacralizing of the military establishment, (depicted only as defence, yet belying that notion by inserting itself into multiple conflicts. Then there is the elevation of multiple heroic figures in so many fields of endeavour, beginning with the elevation of military service, and elevating to even higher heights of what some might consider idolatry, the sacrifice of those 600,000 in the civil war, and the hundreds of thousands in both world wars, the Korean War, the Afghan and Iraq wars, and the whole military establishment, in both social and culture uniforms, medals, national budgets that far outstrip the risk and the danger to the homeland, only misperceived and misrepresented as an existential threat to the nation. The rationale behind this national myth has taken root in the culture perhaps in order to provide political justification for decisions by legislators most of whom have an insatiable appetite for the bases, the military academies, the military equipment manufacturers, available through the earmarks that have been barnacled to annual budgets for generations.

Enhancing, and thereby embedded in the culture of pre-eminence, itself an American idol, self-defined in the first instance because it was the Americans who threw off the British monarchy under the battle cry, “No Taxation without representation”….and maintained and enhanced through all of the many, albeit worthy and recognized and trumpeted by the American political, cultural and even emotional mind-set, that eventually became corrupted by the very supremacy it believed it had achieved. You see, it is not only individuals who have supreme power that can be and are corrupted by that power; it is also nations themselves, that, with the steroid-based encouragement, rhetoric, pork-barrelling, and an entertainment that continually casts up on the nation’s screens, heroes of the wild west, including the anti-heroes, both of whom, in various demographics, have their hero-worshippers. Even Al Capone, the celebrated gangster, has his American hero-worshippers, all of whom presumably recognize the sinister, devious and dark activities of his way of living.

Having however generated a culture that not only thrives on, but has an insatiable need for the epic, whose proportions attach themselves to individuals, especially men, schooled in the annals of Greek and Roman History, supplemented by those of British and French heroism, it is no accident that “everything is (and has to be) bigger in Texas, the epitome of American idolatry. Not only as an aside, but it is not co-incidental that the Dallas Cowboys are rendered “America’s team” in the vernacular of
American sport. Being the best, knowing one is a member of the cast of the best nation in the world, and whether consciously or not, growing and developing in a culture that imbues its young with those expectations, as the dreams of each and every parent, is, without doubt, inculcating the very young with pressures, expectations, dreams and a predictable anxiety, insecurity and insufficiency in far more young people than sociologists have yet to document. The American way, rather than prevent such a cultural entrapment, is, ironically, to generate the largest and most expensive and also most tragic (in terms of human loss and deprivation) incarceration system for all those men and women whose lives could not and did not live up to such unrealistic fantasies.

And, to corroborate that approach, by hiding all of those “lesser” human beings behind bars, thousands for merely a pittance of a crime, is only more evidence of the idolatry of the perfect image that has and continues to grip the American psyche in a national self-sabotage from which the only path out of the conundrum, is to have a public, long-lasting, full-throated, and authentic historic period of catharsis, a cleansing of the hubris, the idolatry, that has gripped too many generations, permitting only a small percentage to rise to the top, only then to be so epically celebrated as to render even those men and women into mere Hollywood papier-mache figures….heroic in the eyes of the nations’ adolescents, and in many cases, hollowed out by the inordinate pressures of that idolatry.

Rev. Sharpton noted that there were air fresheners in the vehicle of Daunte Wright’s car, when he was shot, and that Sharpton and the lawyers and the supporting cast of hundreds had come to Minnesota to “freshen” the air from the stench of racism that prevails. On that note, the congregation applauded, as they did when he derided the law enforcement officers who arrested George Floyd, for having an outdated sticker on his vehicle. Calling for justice, new laws, a reformed law enforcement culture, training, staffing, accountable and transparent, in a nation in which the truth has already been sacrificed to the ravages of a cultural, wealth, educational, and opportunity divide that divide itself is so dependent on a culture that has created it, seems, from this vantage point, to be like John The Baptist, quoting from the Book of Isaiah, expressing a highly unpopular idea, a voice crying in the wilderness, (in John’s case, exhorting the people to prepare the way of the Lord). Today, a voice crying in the wilderness is a voice telling people about the dangers in an important situation or the truth about it, but nobody is paying any attention.

In a culture that has elevated power, money, social status and superiority, including supremacy and supremacists, even to the street status of tolerable, it is time to take down the idol of idolatry that has infused itself into the very heart, mind and soul of the American nation. Air fresheners, and “tagging” the law enforcement culture in Minnesota as racist, (while the Attorney General has announced a complete and critical review of the policies and practices of the law enforcement establishment of that state) are like batting locusts from the savannahs in Africa, with a single hand.

It is the culture of idolatry, the multiple, various, demographic, and even ethnocentric idolatries, that have become embedded, like a national tumor, right in the heart of the nation that demands removal. And, there are no laboratories, and no sanctuaries, and no academes, and no courts that have either the power or the consciousness needed for that cartharsis.

It will have to be left to the poets, the playwrights, the composers, the novelists to depict the American national demise, in order for the nation to come to its senses, to moderate its expectations, and to bring its national feet back to the ground on which all of those battles, and street gang fights, and those insidious power-tripping murders of the innocents have been enacted.

And, even then, will anybody be paying attention?