Opinion | The Wages of Idolatry

In his book “You Are What You Love,” the philosopher and theologian James K.A. Smith points out that what most deeply drives us is often not what we articulate as our deepest love. In other words, he says, you may not love what you think you love. We may not worship what we say we do. Part of why idols can remain invisible to us is that they are often not individual in nature. Typically, communities, nations or subcultures have particular idols, which become so normative that they are no longer recognized as idols. They become the water we swim in.

The idea of idolatry explains why evil often feels like more than the sum of its parts, more pervasive than just individual actors and actions can account for. It’s why lots of seemingly nice individuals can end up living in a society full of oppression and dysfunction. In his book “Seek the Peace of the City,” theologian Eldin Villafañe notes how our actions are not merely transactions between one person and another but are more like threads in a “complex web” of social existence. The institutions and structures that form us “seem to have an objective reality independent of the individual, and thus can become oppressive, sinful and evil.” Individual actions ricochet within the larger whole in far darker ways than any person can orchestrate alone.

What does this look like on a societal level? Days after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Fla., in 2018, I tweeted, “If you want to know who or what a culture worships, look at what people are willing to let kids die for.” I was thinking about idolatry. The United States has a profound devotion to guns.

We are, German Lopez reported in the Times, “a global outlier when it comes to gun violence,” with more gun deaths, by far, than any of our peers. With more guns in the United States than people, many see gun ownership as part of their identity and an inalienable right. Guns take on a sacred quality among devotees. Sometimes this is overt, such as the trend highlighted by The Atlantic last year of Catholic gun enthusiasts posting illustrations of saints holding AR-15s or photos of guns draped in rosaries. Usually, idolatry presents with far more subtlety. Most people would not valorize violence. They would not profess a worship of weapons. But our devout attachment to guns springs from a broad societal adoration of power and of individual rights. These interact with other cultural idols, like money, in complex ways as the gun lobby buys an outsize voice in politics. Our inability to pass meaningful gun control measures is irrational. Idolatry, however, is impervious to rational arguments because it is driven by passions deeper than cognition.

The gun debate makes sense only when we understand that individual gun owners are mostly very kind, friendly people who love their kids and their neighbors but who, despite evidence to the contrary, share a kind of cultural faith that guns are a means to security, safety and freedom. They articulate the problem of gun violence in individual terms; the problem, they argue, is the sin of the individual who pulls the trigger, who commits murder. And of course, that is a grievous sin. However, to cast America’s gun deaths as purely the fault of individuals is to deny a broader cultural idolatry that makes any individual sin far easier to commit.

story originally seen here