We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

The Most Subtle of Idolatries
In our fallen state, separated from our true source center, we live from the knowledge of good and evil regardless of the particular idols from which we try to get life. [see yesterday’s post] Some people choose secular idols and thus adopt a corresponding set of criteria of what is good and what is evil. Money, prestige, security, pleasure, and so forth are good, while financial burdens, being overlooked, insecurity, discomfort, and so forth are evil. Religious people, on the other hand, choose religious idols and thus set up a different set of criteria for what is good and evil. Religious people’s beliefs, rituals, and behavior are good, while those other people, insofar as they are different from their own, are evil.
Jesus suggested that those who strive to get life from religious idols are actually further from the true source of life precisely because religious idols don’t appear to be idols to those who get life from them. Those who know they are sick are more likely to receive a physician, while those who mistakenly think they are healthy ignore him (Matt 9:12). How it must have shocked the religious establishment of his day to hear Jesus proclaim that the prostitutes and tax collectors would enter the kingdom of God before the Pharisees (Matt 21:31).
The real issue is not what kind of idols people embrace but whether they are trying to fill the void in their souls with an idol at all. So long as people strive to get life from an idol of any sort, they block themselves off from their true source of life.
Since the religious idol usually requires that their sense of worth is associated with their religious performance, they usually look good. Indeed, in all likelihood, they will look better than those who have a genuine relationship with God. Looking good is the religious idolater’s way of life. They are vigilant about their own beliefs and behavior as well as those of other people.
In fact, however, this hypervigilance is evidence not of genuine spiritual health but of an inner emptiness and sickness. It is evidence of a spiritual pathology. The very attempt to fill the emptiness of their lives by their beliefs and behaviors rather than God prevents them from ever getting their emptiness really filled.
Not that the emptiness cannot be placated for periods of time; it can. If people’s idolatrous religious strategies for getting life are successful, as they were with the Pharisees, these people will derive some surrogate life by believing they do all the right things, embrace all the right interpretations of Scripture, hold to all the right doctrines, engage in all the right rituals, and display the right spirituality. They will get even more surrogate life by looking down on those who don’t do and believe all the right things as they do. Indeed, they may experience even more surrogate life by entertaining a “holy anger” toward those who do not conform to their way of thinking and behaving. But the positive feelings offered by religious idols are fleeting. The emptiness returns, driving religious idolaters to further futile attempts to get life by their religion.
—Adapted from Repenting of Religion, pages 82, 89-90
Category: General
Tags: Religious Idolatry, Repenting of Religion
Related Reading

ReThinking the Source of Life
Over the next few weeks, we will be exploring the twelve convictions of the ReKnew Manifesto. The first of which focuses on where we get life. In many of my writings, I speak about the source of “life.” By this I mean one’s core sense of identity, worth, significance and security. Over the years, I’ve…

God in Our Image
zen Sutherland via Compfight We came across this piece written by Jonathan Storment earlier this month and we had to share it here. The title of the piece is Everyday Idolatry: My God. He does a great job of outlining the ways that we twist God into whatever we need him to be to prop up…

Repent! … From the Sin of Religion
People often think that being Christian is about “being religious,” but loving others in the way that Christ instructs us is about as far removed from religion as anything could be. Religion, as I use the term, is a system of beliefs and behaviors one embraces as a means of getting life—whether this be feeling…

Religion that Blinds Us to God
For a variety of reasons, many Jews at the time of Jesus had come to believe that heaven had been closed since the writing of the last book of the Old Testament. God was distant and no longer active among his people. Their religion focused on holding fast to the law God had given in…

Quotes to Chew On: Religious Violence
“The myth of religious violence promotes a dichotomy between us in the secular West who are rational and peacemaking, and them, the hordes of violent religious fanatics in the Muslim world. Their violence is religious, and therefore irrational and divisive. Our violence, on the other hand, is rational, peacemaking, and necessary. Regrettably, we find ourselves forced to bomb them into the higher rationality.” ~William Cavanaugh,…

The Deadly Nature of Religious Idolatry
I’m in the process of fleshing out the core convictions of ReKnew as I laid them out in the “ReKnew Manifesto.” Our first core conviction concerns where we are to get our LIFE from, so in my previous post on this topic I addressed “The One True Source.” Before moving on to the second core conviction…