WILLIAM T. CAVANAUGH. The Uses of Idolatry. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2024. Pp. 504. U. S. $29.99 (paperback)
We live in a secular age, a disenchanted world marked by a retreat of the spiritual and the rise of the rational. Luminaries from Max Weber to Charles Taylor have crafted impressive treatises to explain how modernity is, by definition, disenchanted. While some people of faith may lament this, and some secularists may celebrate it, few people—anywhere across our polarized culture—dispute the truth of this claim. But what if it’s wrong?
That is the argument that Catholic political theologian and ethicist William Cavanaugh advances in The Uses of Idolatry. “What characterizes the modern West,” according to Cavanaugh, “is not disenchantment but rather the condition of having learned to describe ourselves as disenchanted” (2). Building on his earlier work (e.g. The Myth of Religious Violence, Migrations of the Holy), Cavanaugh problematizes the foundational binary of sacred/secular. Cavanaugh relentlessly—and effectively—demonstrates how leading theorists deploy categories like “religious” and “irreligious” in arbitrary ways, often to justify certain power claims or legitimate particular social arrangements. Everything connects—and everything might be spiritual.
As Cavanaugh acknowledges, “to make these kinds of arguments is to question some of the most prevalent stories modern Western people like to tell about ourselves” (1-2). Cavanaugh builds his complex case with bricks both confrontational and conciliatory. He begins with confrontation: head-on critiques of both Max Weber and Charles Taylor. Directly—yet respectfully—he illuminates the “unthought” present in both, demonstrating how their explanations of disenchantment elide the ways spirituality emerges in every facet of reality.
Weber, in Cavanaugh’s reading, is not an atheist but a polytheist. Exploring Weber’s religious language (e.g. “many old gods”), Cavanaugh concludes that even for Weber, “the sacred has not been drained out of the modern world; it has migrated from the church to the state and market” (50). The world of modernity is not disenchanted but misenchanted.
Turning to Taylor, Cavanaugh shows how even his seemingly comprehensive tome (A Secular Age) struggles to consistently sustain a meaningful distinction between sacred and secular. Taylor’s treatment of Buddhism provides one example, rock concerts another, and the way he stops just short of calling consumerism “magic” yet a third. Underlying all of these struggles is the inherent instability of the sacred/secular divide. What Taylor lacks, according to Cavanaugh, is a theology of idolatry. Worship has not disappeared but has been deformed.
Cavanaugh then devotes the remainder of the book to developing this theology of idolatry. Beginning with Scripture, then incorporating Augustine and the French phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion, Cavanaugh shows that idolatry—rather than disenchantment—best explains the modern condition. Idolatry provides the pieces missing from both Weber and Taylor’s accounts: showing how humans become enslaved to systems of our own making (Weber) and how humans improperly respond to our spontaneous desires for transcendence (Taylor).
Surprisingly—and in sharp contrast to much anti-idolatry polemic—Cavanaugh’s treatment of idolatry is conciliatory even as it confronts. Idolatry is at the root of much that ails us, but addressing it requires sympathy, not condemnation. Idolatry-critique, for Cavanaugh, is not a means of asserting Christian supremacy but lamenting the common lot of all humanity. As he repeatedly insists, we all worship, and we all worship poorly.
To demonstrate, Cavanaugh turns to two types of idolatry: the “Splendid Idolatry of Nationalism” and the “Unsplendid Idolatry of Consumerism.” In today’s milieu, the chapter on nationalism may be of most interest, particularly to Anabaptists. Unlike some contemporary treatments of nationalism and religion, Cavanaugh goes out of his way to find the most serious and philosophically sophisticated proponents of nationalism. Weighed in the balance, though, even these justifications are found wanting, unable to resolve the tension between the devotion that nationalism requires and the devotion that discipleship requires. As in much of Cavanaugh’s work, the influence of Stanley Hauerwas is evident, yet Cavanaugh’s tone diverges from Hauerwas’s. Nationalism can, at times, inspire some (limited) forms of virtue in its adherents. “Nationalism splendidly draws upon what is best in homo liturgicus,” Cavanaugh notes, “while simultaneously directing lethal levels of devotion toward what is not God” (218). A willingness to die—and to kill—for that which is not God may be the sine qua non of idolatry.
His critique of consumerism—which entails a critique of capitalism and a charitable reading of Marx—is less sympathetic: “Consumerism . . . seems to invite nothing more noble than stuffing the self with things” (280). The consumeristic experience of feeling dominated by our own creations provides a perfect case study of idolatry. Cavanaugh deftly shows the ways that commerce—particularly e-commerce—presents as a type of enchanted magic while masking deep human suffering. “My enjoyment of my stuff would be spoiled if I thought too long and hard about the young Thai girls who made my things or the use of fossil fuels in their manufacture and delivery, so I repress that knowledge” (328). Cavanaugh is entirely right to point to the suffering caused by consumerism that is hidden from view in many affluent societies. Even so, Cavanaugh’s argument would be strengthened by grappling with the genuine innovations (such as in health care, agriculture, communication, transportation, etc.) that have come about within our idolatrous devotion to the market.
Cavanaugh writes for an academic audience, but his insights have profoundly practical and pastoral applications. By insisting that our age is not disenchanted but misenchanted, not bereft of the divine but overrun by idols, he offers a welcome, necessary corrective to much of our contemporary discourse. Cavanaugh goes on to propose that sacramentality—learning to see created things as suffused with, but not synonymous with, God—is a path toward wholeness. This remedy may ring hollow for many Protestants, not least Anabaptists, but all Christians can agree with Cavanaugh’s ultimate conclusion: “The incarnate God is the key to healing idolatry” (395).