American Idol(atry)
an interview with William T. Cavanaugh
Followers of Cracks in PoMo are likely familiar with the work of Dr. William T. Cavanaugh (and if they aren’t they should). Bill’s scholarship—including masterpieces like Torture and Eucharist, Being Consumed, Migrations of the Holy, The Myth of Religious Violence, and Theopolitical Imagination—have majorly shaped Cracks in PoMo’s mission as well has having influenced many of our contributors. Bill’s presentation on the idolatry of Amazon (which was later published as an essay in Commonweal) has been referenced in a number of my articles, and was the basis of my discussion with Bill when he appeared on the pod in 2021.
In this post, I asked Bill some questions about his latest book The Uses of Idolatry published by Oxford U Press. Do yourself a favor an pick up a copy ASAP.
Cracks in PoMo: Much of your thesis on idolatry is informed by Max Weber and Charles Taylor’s writings on the concept of “disenchantment.” In what ways does your thesis both build on and diverge from them?
Bill Cavanaugh: Although Weber is known for his idea that the modern world is disenchanted and Taylor is known for seconding that idea, I argue in the book that neither Weber nor Taylor really buys it. Weber writes of the Entzauberung –the un-magic-ing – of the modern world in a few of his writings, but he also writes of the “polytheism” of modernity, that “many old gods ascend from their graves.” Marx and Nietzsche thought we could liberate ourselves from the old gods, but Weber was a pessimist who thought we would and did just make new ones to oppress ourselves. Here he is thinking primarily of capital and the bureaucratic state. Weber thinks the war-making state out-religions religion, and capital is just as inscrutable and transcendent as any god.
Taylor accepts the more conventional reading of Weber and the disenchanted secular world, but ultimately Taylor is a Catholic, and he doesn’t really think we can do without God. He tips his hand on page 768 of his massive A Secular Age when he posits that exclusive humanists who claim to remain within the immanent frame are in fact “responding to transcendent reality, but misrecognizing it.” People still worship, but many don’t acknowledge God. I argue that Taylor needs a theology of idolatry to give an accurate account of where we are now.
What characterizes modernity is not disenchantment but the condition of having learned to describe ourselves as disenchanted. We have learned to use a whole set of binaries – enchanted/disenchanted, believers/nonbelievers, religious/secular – that don’t so much describe the world as it is but rather establish certain kinds of power relations, one of which is the superiority of the modern “secular” West over more benighted “religious” societies, both past and present. We like to congratulate ourselves on having left worship behind, but in fact we worship all kinds of bullshit. In the book I concentrate on nationalism and consumer goods, but there are plenty of other idolatries: race, technology, celebrity, etc.
You write about the fact that much of the enchantment or “fulfillment” of shopping on Amazon Prime banks on the process of making the product and transporting it to your door being “hidden” from your sight (and knowledge).
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to make a connection to the concepts of the “occult” (literally meaning worship of that which is hidden…that which is hidden in darkness) and the “diabolical” (that which separates us from the truth…which is false or deceptive). Is it fair to bring up concerns about consuming products from mega-corporations make us susceptible to the power of dark spirits?
I think that’s a really perceptive insight. One of the arguments of the book is that there is no sharp divide between the “spiritualism” of the global South and the “materialism” of the North. The North has its own version of the charged objects that pervade practices of witchcraft. A collector paid $3 million for the ball that Mark McGwire hit for his 70th homerun in 1998, despite the fact that it was physically identical to every other ball used that season. The physical object had been invested with an occult power; to possess it was worth enough money to feed and house and clothe a crowd of desperate people. The fantasy world in which consumer culture marinates us requires not just our rapt attention to products but also our lack of attention to the personal and social and environmental costs of the entire system that makes products appear on our doorsteps. This is indeed diabolical, in the etymological sense of that which separates us from the truth. As I think about what is missing from the book, I wish I had explored the scriptural notion of the “powers and principalities,” diabolical powers that hold us captive through our own actions.
In our discussions, we’ve gone back and forth about the moral implications of shopping from Amazon Prime (or any other company that exploits their workers). I’ve tried over the past few years to avoid online shopping and to go instead to patronize locally-owned businesses.
As much as I agree with your point that it’s a more humanizing and fulfilling experience to shop in person at small businesses, the prospect of doing this regularly sometimes feels untenable…knowing that I can quickly and cheaply buy things online. What do you have to say to people who want to shop in a more human way but feel themselves inhibited by their lack of time, energy, and money.
I am susceptible to charges of elitism because not everyone can afford to shop at the farmer’s market, where organic tomatoes and eggs from humanely raised chickens often cost more than conventional produce at the Mega Lo Mart. I fully acknowledge that reality. The reason many people are forced to shop at the Mega Lo Mart is both that it has put local stores out of business and because the wages at the Mega Lo Mart are so low that people feel compelled to shop there too. Low low prices come in part from low low wages.
The problem is systemic; Amazon, Walmart, and other corporations thrive by amassing power to which the rest of us are increasingly subject. Those who have more choices, people with money and leisure time, cannot simply shop their way to a better world. If we can, we should shop sacramentally, as David Cloutier recommends. But as I argue in the book, we should think of such shopping not as a manifestation of our virtue but rather as penance for our complicity in a diabolical system that destroys God’s creation and discards so many people. We cannot simply shop our way out of such a system. In addition to changed habits of consumption, concerted collective action is required: labor organizing, shareholder activism, anti-trust action, creating cooperatives and ethical businesses, and so on.
I sometimes ask audiences if they know what organic tomatoes used to be called. The answer, of course, is “tomatoes.” We need to ask how a plant grown in dirt with water became an exotic luxury item available only to the well-to-do. The answer will reveal a lot about deliberate government policies since the 1970s meant to shift power toward a corporatized food system. It is all about the concentration of power.
In all honesty, I had my phases of worshiping certain brands and consumer products. But perhaps my greatest weakness has been getting sucked into the cult of celebrity. Since I was little, I would learn every fun fact about, purchase every piece of merch connected to, and “stan” for or defend these celebrities–to the point that I made fandom a part of my identity. I soon realized this was a dead end, and made me act in idiotic, irrational ways.
But after my conversion to Catholicism, I found that this impulse was revived by the tradition of revering and asking for the intercession of the Saints. Of course, we are taught not to worship saints.
Yet I do feel there to be something satisfying in knowing everything about the saints, buying their “merch” (statues, paintings, scapulars, etc), and spreading their cult. Plus, you can actually “communicate” with them in a way you can’t with celebrities. What are some ways that Christianity channels idolatrous impulses in positive directions?
The final chapter of the book is on Incarnation and sacrament as antidotes to idolatry. In the Christian tradition, the antidote to idolatry—the identification of divinity with merely created material things—is not to try to keep the spiritual and the material apart. Instead, Christianity brings God and materiality together in Jesus Christ, the enfleshment of divinity in a human being. Incarnation is one way of recognizing that material creation is good; the flesh is one of the languages that God speaks through. We are material creatures and it is hard for us to worship an invisible God. Athanasius and Augustine see us looking for God among the things of this world and God coming to meet our gaze there in the person of Jesus. Though it seems like idolatry to worship a man, the descent of God into a man reverses the dynamic of idolatry: instead of us reaching up and trying to bring God within our grasp, God pours Godself out and takes the form of a poor man who is tortured to death. Instead of humans aspiring to become gods, God becomes human, and changes pride into humility. God uses our idolatrous tendencies to divinize the material to give us divinity in Jesus.
Sacraments follow the logic of Incarnation. God meets us in the material, in bread and wine and water and oil. Catholicism is especially full of sensory experiences like art and music and incense and sacramentals like relics and rosaries and icons, all things that appeal to us idolaters looking for divinity in the material. All such practices can be twisted into idolatry, as Calvin feared. But they can also be channels for encountering God in the material world and following the kenosis of Christ in our lives.
You write a lot about how brands have in a sense filled the spiritual vacuum of our disenchanted age, becoming quasi-religions of their own. You also mention how Marx warned us about this when writing in Das Kapital on commodity fetishism. Can you say a little bit about how our idolatry of brands has incentivized us to create brands out of ourselves, and how social media further enables this impulse?
When Marx wrote about commodity fetishism, he did not simply mean the exaggerated importance we give to material things. He meant more specifically the twinned dynamic of treating things as persons and persons as things (“personifizierung der Sachen und Versachlichung der Personen”). We see the personification of things in the development of brands since the late 19th century. Before the Quaker Oats man, one of the first brands, people bought nameless oats out of barrels at the store. The more people became separated from relationships with other people in the process of consumption—the farther we got from knowing the farmer who grew the oats or the shopkeeper who sold them—the more the products themselves took on personality. “My baloney has a first name, it’s O-S-C-A-R…” Why does baloney need a name? What does a cartoon Tony the Tiger have to do with the cereal in the box? The more we relate to products rather than people, the more personality the products take on.
The opposite end of this dynamic is the reification of people. Humans involved in the production and delivery of products become invisible; we click on Amazon, and the product magically appears on our doorstep. Human beings are resources from which value is to be extracted. The spread of social media has fueled this dynamic not through the invisibility of people, but through their visibility. This happens in at least two ways. One way is the extraction of data from people through “free” social media platforms, data that is sold to marketers. As the saying goes, if you are not paying for the product, you are the product. The other way is by encouraging people to brand themselves. We no longer belong just by being born into a community; in a market society, we belong by making ourselves marketable. Marx did not foresee the rise of social media and the commodification of the self, but it fits squarely into his notion of the “thingification of persons.”
So-called “postliberal” discourses have been gaining more and more traction, especially in theological circles. Many people who identify with these discourses cite your work. To what extent do you identify with the postliberal project(s)? In what ways is it promising, and what are some of its pitfalls?
To my knowledge I have never used the word “postliberal” to describe myself, and I don’t like a lot of what goes under that label today. If liberalism is meant the priority of freedom over the good, then I see the philosophical problems with liberalism, especially if freedom is defined negatively as freedom from others. Insofar as liberalism is the political form of capitalism, I am not a liberal.
But the loudest voices using the “postliberal” label today are people who think that the problems can only be undone by the guardians of the good taking over the coercive power of the state; this is Patrick Deneen’s proposed “aristopopulism.” There are some among them that even think that cozying up to the likes of Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump is worth the power that could be gained. We need, Deneen writes “Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends.” The idea that the guardians of the good would be left standing after such a power grab is delusional. And whatever ends would be achieved are unlikely to be Christian ones.
One of the most interesting things I see in the present “vibe shift” or changing of discourses is what some call a “horseshoe” between seemingly opposing ideological views. For example, we see orthodox Christian theologians in dialogue with postmodern philosophers, supporters of the populist left and right (Bernie and Trump supporters) coming together to critique the political establishment and sharing a concern about working class issues, and religious conservatives are in dialogue with queer theorists. What are some other sites of such “horseshoeing” that you’ve noticed in the last few years?
I can think of three “horseshoes” that are immediately relevant to this book. One is the connection between secular political theology and Christian political theology. Heirs of Carl Schmitt on the secular left have recognized the truth of his dictum that modern politics is just theology in disguise. This is what theologians would call idolatry. Christian political theologians read Schmittians like Giorgio Agamben, Paul Kahn, et al., but as far as I can tell, the latter have not yet returned the favor.
The second “horseshoe" that comes to mind is the conservatism of Karl Marx. I have been struck, reading Marx again, how he can be read as a prophet denouncing the destruction of subsistence farming and village life by enclosure and industrialization. Granted, Marx ultimately regarded such destruction as a necessary phase in the move toward utopia, but there is so much in Marx’s critique of capitalism that would warm the heart of a Front Porch Republic kind of conservative.
This is related to a third type of “horseshoe.” So many Christians in the US see nationalism and capitalism as hallmarks of an authentically Christian society. I think they are poison not just to Christendom but of Christianity itself. Trumpism is not the revival of Christianity in America; it is its death rattle. Those interested in saving Christianity in the nation should make common cause with those opposed to Christian nationalism.
What are some of your own idols? And what has helped you to break free from them?
Who says I have broken free from them? I would not be able to write a book on idolatry if I weren’t an idolater. If it is true that we all worship, it is also true that we all worship badly. I have tried to write a book that insofar as possible is sympathetic to idolatry. As the book of Wisdom implies, albeit briefly, we are idolaters because God has made the world beautiful and we are material creatures. The problem is that we end up making little gods of things, and they end up eating us.
My personal idolatries include security, most clearly manifest in my retirement account. I have tried to stick to socially responsible investing, but that mostly just eliminates nuclear weapons, tobacco, and companies that grind up puppies and use them for fertilizer. Another of my favored idolatries is my own intellectual work. I write books so I can be smart and tell people what’s what. I don’t know how people can stand me.
Your work addresses rather daunting issues that have a tight grip over our world today. A lot of people who write or speak about similar issues turn to nihilistic or fatalistic ideologies, or just give up hope altogether. Somehow, you manage to keep quite the sense of humor. How do you still manage to laugh, and what role do you think humor can play in our rather grim times?
Salvation history is a comedy, in the classical sense that it has a happy ending. We are able to hope because we have been assured that God is in control and that ultimately the cosmos is aimed toward redemption, not perdition. I think this also enables us to do comedy in the other sense, that is, laughing at funny things, especially ourselves. We do not have to take ourselves seriously because making history come out right does not depend on us. In fact, I think we are not only enabled but obliged to be hopeful and not take ourselves too seriously. It is when we think that the drama depends on us winning that we are at our most violent.
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For me, this reads very esoteric and intellectual. However, I would be very interested in knowing more what is behind "our lack of attention to the personal and social and environmental costs of the entire system that makes products appear on our doorsteps." Although I do most of my shopping thru Amazon, I do not lack attention or interest in the "costs". Like the cardinal in the movie Mission who wants to see the missions even though he knows in advance that he will close them. He doesn't want to shield himself from the pain of his actions.