Yaacov Yadgar (YY): Reading your work, The Uses of Idolatry, is a transformational experience. You engage with ideas and socio-political realities in ways that force one to rethink what might otherwise go unnoticed as un-self-reflective “truth.” Probably the most consequential of these alleged truths is the sociological and historical consensus, which we usually date back to Max Weber, and of which Charles Taylor’s work on secularism is a more modern iteration, that we live in a “disenchanted” world. Enchantment, you argue, hasn’t gone away; rather, it has “migrated” to other realms, transforming on the way. Can you explain what you mean by “enchantment”, and why you take such a critical approach to the ideas associated with Weber and Taylor?
William Cavanaugh (WC): Disenchantment is the common English translation of Weber’s Entzauberung der Welt, literally the un-magic-ing of the world. When I started working on this book, I went looking for Weber’s definition and was surprised to find not only that he doesn’t define the term but rarely uses it at all. The idea is supposed to be that religion, originally the agent of rationalization, has been pushed aside by the same process of rationalization, leaving a world devoid of spirits, mystery, and ordered meaning: the iron cage. What I found, however, is that even Weber doesn’t fully buy this story. For Weber, the gods are always human inventions, and modernity is not exceptional. “Many old gods arise from their graves,” he writes in “Science as a Vocation” (24). The state produces a more effective “religion” in war, for example, producing transcendent devotion and sacrificial community that churches can only envy. Money is “entirely transcendent and absolutely irrational”; we are ruled by capital, not vice-versa. Calvinism not only helped produce capitalism; it was replaced by it. Marx and Nietzsche thought we would be free once we got rid of the gods. Weber was more pessimistic, believing humans have a perennial tendency to be dominated by our own creations. So my problem is not so much with Weber, but with superficial readings of Weber, though as a Christian theologian I think, pace Weber, that not all divinity is of human manufacture.
Likewise, I try to tease the “unthought” out of Taylor. He largely buys the disenchantment narrative: Once selves were “porous” to the spirit world, and the world was full of “charged things” like saints’ relics that could effect changes in the external world. Now we are “buffered” selves, and meaning is interiorized; prayer changes our thoughts and feelings, not the world around us. Disenchantment means that God is optional in ways that were unthinkable pre-modernity; optionality is our new naïveté, as Taylor says. And yet, when Taylor tells the story of the collapse of post-war Breton Catholicism and its replacement by consumer culture, he remarks “It is almost as though the ‘conversion’ was a response to a stronger form of magic, as earlier conversions had been” (490). Taylor’s “almost” protects the boundary between transcendence and immanence; elsewhere “putatively” and “verges on” do the same work. I ask Taylor to drop the hedge words and question these binaries of religious/secular and transcendence/immanence. People watching the shopping channel for hours at a time are not buffered selves, and sports memorabilia are as charged as any saint’s relic. Disenchantment is not our experience of the world, but the way we have been taught to describe our experience. And if optionality is not optional, then we have succumbed to a more subtle, but just so more powerful, form of rule by our own creations. Idolatry is the relevant theological category that Taylor, as a practicing Catholic, needs.
(YY): The idols force themselves into the conversation, but before we let them in, I must ask: Why, then, is it so important for modernity to sustain this “myth” (as in untruth) of its disenchantment—or, may we dare say, of its “secularity”?
(WC): Western modernity is defined by its relationship to its “others,” both in time and in space.
Insofar as modernity is an Enlightenment project, it is defined over against the past. We are enlightened, that is, shining a light to break the “Dark Ages,” which were weighed down by superstition and irrationality. We were once subject to fear of spiritual forces beyond our control, but now we have learned to tame those fears through the cold light of reason. We once looked backward to past traditions for guidance; now we look confidently forward toward a new day. Yadda yadda yadda. It is worth noting that this progressive view of time is in some measure a holdover from the Jewish and Christian past and its linear view of salvation history and eschatology more generally.
The myth of disenchantment also reinforces our western sense of superiority over our spatial others, that is, the non-western world, which is populated by allegedly atavistic displays of belief in spirits of all kinds. There is supposedly a yawning gap between the enchanted global South and the disenchanted North, which is why we cannot recognize any similarity between, for example, fetish objects in Africa and sports memorabilia in the U.S. The baseball Mark McGwire hit for his 70th homerun in 1998 sold for $3 million, despite being physically identical to every other ball used that season, but the enchantment/disenchantment dichotomy allows us to erect an impassible barrier between us and them.
In short, the myth that we are disenchanted is a form of self-congratulation used to marginalize those who do not fit the secular paradigm.
(YY): The critique you offer of this self-delusionment of western modernity is distinctly “theological”: you name this (denied) modern enchantment an “idolatry,” and your critical engagement with it takes the form of an “idolatry critique.” I find your stance to be brilliantly illuminating and insightful: you force the “political” to address the “theological” baggage it has simultaneously assumed and denied. I am guessing that some skeptical readers would have dropped your book at this point, wrongly assuming that you are saying something like: “Mine is the correct form of worship, yours is wrong.” But you are quick to note that this admittedly problematic accusation of idolatry is not at all what you have in mind. So, what does “idolatry critique” mean, and how does one name something idolatrous without assuming such a self-righteous judgmental stance?
(WC): Using the language of idolatry is certainly a provocation. There is good reason why the term has largely been dropped from polite company. In the scriptures, accusations of idolatry were accompanied by violence against those who worshiped differently, and colonial history is full of charges of idolatry against the local “heathens” who required “civilizing” by the (usually Christian) colonizers. In official Catholic discourse, the language of idols and idolatry is almost entirely absent from the documents of Vatican II, partly as a way of repenting of our own sins against, for example, the Indigenous people of Latin America.
And yet, Pope Francis—the very embodiment of the spirit of Vatican II—revived talk of idolatry, usually in the context of critiques of capitalism. Francis learned from liberation theologians like Hugo Assmann and Franz Hinkelammert in the 1970s and 1980s who argued that, unlike in Europe, the problem in Latin America was not atheism—no god—but idolatry—the wrong god, namely, capital. These theologians in turn had picked up the language of idolatry from Karl Marx, of all people, who frequently resorted to biblical imagery; for example, capital was Moloch, the Canaanite god who demanded child sacrifice. The theological concept of idolatry is indispensable because it reveals the divinization of created things, and thus the mythological status of secularization theory. The difference between Marx and the theologians is that Marx wanted to do away with all gods, and Christian theologians like me hold out hope that there is a true God to save us from ourselves.
This does mean that, at some point, we will need to try to distinguish true worship from false worship. But this does not necessarily lead to the self-righteous judgement of others, if two protocols are kept in the forefront. First, as I try to emphasize in the book, there is a sympathetic moment in the very notion of idolatry, which is the recognition that we all worship. Even the most misguided idolater is in search of transcendence, something larger than the small self. I don’t think Marx’s goal of eradicating worship will work because we are worshipping creatures. Granted, this is a normative claim with which some will disagree, despite all the evidence I marshal in the book. That’s fine. But I think even nonbelievers in God can appreciate the way the ubiquity of worship levels the playing field. Rather than dividing humanity into “believers” and “nonbelievers,” we can recognize that we all believe in something. Tell me what you believe, I’ll tell you what I believe, and then we can have a conversation.
Second, as I repeat in the book, we all worship, and we all worship badly. In my case, just because I claim to follow Jesus doesn’t mean I actually do so. Idolatry critique should primarily be self-critique, as in fact it is in the Bible. The prophets spend most of their time condemning the idolatry of their own people, not that of others. I intend idolatry critique as a set of practices, primarily for my own fellow Christians, to try to follow a good God instead of the many bad ones on offer. At some point, I will need—with fear and trembling—to make normative claims about what God I think is good. But I will need to acknowledge that God is not an answer I have but rather an Other who throws my life into question. And I will need to be open to learning from what other traditions say and don’t say about God.
(YY): There is, then, something distinctly universal in your argument (“we all worship”), and something which is presumably “parochial” (yours, you say, is a committed Christian, Catholic critique). Let us address the former first: you begin the book with a quote from David Foster Wallace saying simply: “There is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships.” (The earworm of Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody” was drilling its way in my head throughout my reading of your book: “Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord/ But you’re going to have to serve somebody”). The two most universal idols of our era are nationalism and the market, and you focus your discussion in the book on each of them. Yet there is something distinctly different in the way the worshiping of each affects our lives. Nationalism is, in the terms you employ in the book, a “splendid” idolatry, while consumerism is “unsplendid,” depressive almost. Can you say something about how idolatry critique helps us see how each of these idols influences our lives in such distinct ways?
(WC): Thanks for mentioning the Dylan song, Yaacov. I tried to shoehorn it into my chapter on Augustine, but ultimately dropped it. John Lennon wrote a song in response to Dylan’s song which Lennon titled “Serve Yourself”: “You gotta serve yourself / Nobody gonna do it for you / Well you may believe in devils and you may believe in lords / But if you don’t go out and serve yourself, lad, ain’t no room service here.” The two songs perfectly represent Augustine’s two loves—love of God or love of self—from which we have to choose.
Nationalism is splendid because it aspires to serving something larger than the self. It is full of lofty ideals and self-sacrifice for one’s fellow citizens. There is a large body of scholarly work on nationalism as a “religion.” In the nineteenth century, nationalism comes to replace Christianity as the most significant public devotion in the west, though Christianity retains some social power as a support for national identity. Consumer culture also invests divinity into created things, but it is corrosive of networks of social solidarity, putting the focus on satisfying the desires of the self, often at the expense of the laborers who make and deliver our products. Marx’s commodity fetishism actually mirrors a dynamic found in the Psalms: making idols imputes life to inanimate objects while taking life away from human persons.
In the end, though, I argue that there is less difference than we suppose between splendid and unsplendid idolatries. Nationalism ends up being a type of collective narcissism, a worship of the “we,” just like Durkheim said. Your distinction, Yaacov, between a Jew’s state and a Jewish state captures this: the former is defined by the will of the “we,” not by any higher ideals. The danger of collective narcissism is the negative effects on those others, both external and internal to the nation, who threaten the dominant group’s self-image. War, scapegoating, racism, and exclusion are not incidental but endemic to nationalism. At the same time, consumerism is not only isolating but creates certain types of community. One group of studies in the journal Marketing Science titled “Brands: Opiate of the Non-Religious Masses?” found that brand loyalty is inversely proportional to loyalty to traditional religion.
I try to point to other types of belonging that aren’t exclusive and narcissistic. Ultimately, as Augustine saw, idolatry and self-worship are two sides of the same coin. We try to assert our autonomy, but end up serving gods of our own making. Worshipping a true God, on the other hand, does not negate the self but ennobles it, bringing it into communion with a higher self, God, and a wider self, our fellow human beings, without exception. Of course, worshipping in truth is not just a matter of what we say, but what we do.
(YY): Let us conclude with the “parochial” aspect of your argument. I suspect that many readers who do not share your Christian commitments might find the ending of your argument, where you consider Christian principles of incarnation and sacrament as antidotes to idolatry, most difficult to come to terms with. So much of Jewish and Muslim traditions, for example, is aimed exactly against any notion of the carnality of the divine. Yet it is obviously clear that Jewish and Muslim societies have not been better guarded against the idolatries of nationalism and the market. Do you think the reaction to these universal idols should be particularistic in nature, that is to say—each tradition should come up with its own defenses against them?
(WC): Yes, I don’t think we can come up with some universal theological Esperanto that hovers above all the particular traditions. I am certainly incapable of doing so, and so I stick to what I know in the final chapter, trying to develop some Christian protocols for me and my fellow Christians to worship less badly than we do. To be “parochial” in this way is certainly not to say that only Christians can be saved from idolatry or that Christians have nothing to learn from other traditions or that our traditions have nothing in common. Indeed, I show the incarnational logic in the Hebrew scriptures, what Martin Buber calls making “the spirit incarnate and sanctified in everyday life” (3). I quote Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik on the descent of God into the world. Different traditions will work these matters out in different ways, and I think a conversation on idolatry across traditions would be very rich. I recently contributed an essay on nationalism and idolatry to a Muslim publication. But precisely because idolatry critique should first and foremost be self-critique, we need to start with our own practices and our own theological resources.
