Book review: The Uses Of Idolatry by William T. Cavanaugh, ISBN: 9780197679050, 504 pages, Oxford University Press (2024).
Perhaps the most common title for our times is secular. Ours is, so the story goes, a secular age. In its usual telling, it goes something like this: Once upon a time we were young and naïve and religious. The world was enchanted, back then, and the sacred was near at hand. But now, for good or ill—because the story can be told with glee or lament in the voice—now we live in a universe, not a cosmos; we believe not in a deity but in ourselves. Now we inhabit an immanent frame and have no need for the hypothesis of God.
The aim of political theologian William T. Cavanaugh’s new book is to shatter this stained-glass drama by introducing what he takes to be a better term for describing our age: idolatrous. In The Uses of Idolatry, he argues that we ought not think of ourselves as disenchanted but mis-enchanted, and in so doing he not only critiques the old secularization narrative, but begins to write us a new story through which we might better understand ourselves and our times.
Both of these tasks, the one critical and the other constructive, are necessary for his project. The former is necessary because, he thinks, efforts to describe our age as secular or disenchanted misunderstand what has changed in our modern times. “What has declined in the modern West is not belief in transcendence,” Cavanaugh contends, “what has declined is belief in God.” What is different is that the sacred is no longer “confined to gods but applies to all sorts of realities commonly labeled ‘political’ or ‘economic’.” The holy has not fled through the wardrobe into Narnia, in other words, it has fragmented. And this means that the problem with secularization stories is that worship remains as prevalent as ever—it’s just that what (or who) is being worshiped has changed.
In Cavanaugh’s hands, idolatry turns out to be an essential theological concept, and The Uses of Idolatry an important book for a post-Christendom church, like ours, that is frantically searching for adequate categories of self-understanding. Although there is much that theological scholarship cannot accomplish, one thing theologians can do is, as Pope Francis has recently put it, is serve as “the scouting party sent by Joshua to explore the land of Canaan,” and help us to find “right paths towards the inculturation of the faith.”
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Patrick Gilger, S.J., is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Director of the McNamara Center for the Study of Religion at Loyola University Chicago. He is America’s Contributing Editor for Culture.
With thanks to America and Patrick Gilger SJ, where this article originally appeared.
