Fr Alex Swain

Beloved in Christ,

There is a psychological disorder, called “Celebrity worship,” which is “an obsessive fascination with a famous person” and is associated with “problematic internet use, maladaptive daydreaming, and desire for fame.”[1]

Humans have a tendency to worship idols. It has taken many forms over the millennia of human existence, but it is a recurrent enough pattern.

The Holy Bible is replete with God admonishing Israel against idolatry. Idolatry seems to be a central sin. And a central demand of God is for us to assess, and reassess, our lives for idols. They have a perpetual tendency to keep popping up like a weed that we just can’t seem to get rid of!

St. Paul encourages us today to “flee from the worshiping of idols,” and the Old Testament laments the building of altars to idols, which “Hezekiah had destroyed.”

Manasseh, an evil king of Israel, not only rebuilt the altars of Baal and Asherah but “shed very much innocent blood, until he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another.”

Idolatry is so insidious and so particularly dangerous because it shifts our focus and our worship from the true God—a God of justice and judgement, compassion and mercy, who calls us to right worship and right action in the care of the orphan and widow and stranger—to that which is creation.

And this, then, leads to horrendous evils—like Manasseh and the shedding of innocent blood.

In our current context, it can look like submission to the powers and principalities that govern this world. The reliance on the strength of the self and of supposed unfettered power of a nation to do whatever it wants to do. To disappear people. To demand absolute submission to their agenda.

Worship of the state is no less an idol than worship of Baal or Asherah.

The starting point for resistance to idol worship is, first, to root in our faith and trust in God. “So whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God,” as St. Paul writes.

Do everything for the glory of God—the God who is the Creator and Sustainer of all things, a God of justice and judgement, a God of compassion and mercy, a God who calls us to right worship and right action in the care of the orphan and widow and stranger.

—Fr Alex

[1] Zsila, Á., McCutcheon, L. E., & Demetrovics, Z. (2018). The association of celebrity worship with problematic Internet use, maladaptive daydreaming, and desire for fame. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 7(3), 654. https://doi.org/10.1556/2006.7.2018.76