Everyone Worships. Part Two.

Everyone worships. This worship of ourselves takes on many forms. 

Everyone worships. Often we end up worshipping ourselves. This worship of ourselves takes on many forms. We refer to these forms as culture. And for every person there is a cultural expression that serves to exalt that part of us that we enshrine. Think about the cultural expression of sports, for example. Sports serves to highlight that part of our competitive nature as we live vicariously through representative athletes in our favorite sport. Through the exploits of these athletes, their winning and losing, we project ourselves. Nostalgically we relive our own past athletic exploits or we fantasize about abilities we never possessed. In both cases the professional athlete becomes our religious representative and we pay homage to the athlete in our culture by filling stadiums, purchasing merchandise, and perhaps most importantly, we “buy in” to the athlete’s or teams’ performances with the price of our emotions. We are engaged in winning and losing on a visceral level. The same may be said for the movie star, musician, authors, or politicians. We elevate others in society, chiefly because we our religiously bent to worship ourselves. 

We elevate others in society, chiefly because we our religiously bent to worship ourselves. 

So then these “icons” become religious points of identification, or idols, that accentuate the most celebrated characteristics of ourselves. We dress like them, we seek to think like them, to walk and talk like them. We are steeped in worship. And as James K.A. Smith points out, “The forms themselves are pedagogies of desire that teach us to construe and relate to the world in loaded ways.” Our misguided worship of ourselves, in turn, impacts how we treat one another. Again, Smith observes, “Subtly, then, we’ve construed our relationships largely in terms of competition-against one another and against the icons of the ideal that been painted for us. In the process, we have also objectified others: we have turned them into artifacts for observation and evaluation, things to be looked at-and by playing this game, we’ve also turned ourselves into similar sorts of objects and evaluated ourselves on the basis of our success at being objects worth looking at.” 

Smith argues that this kind of worship takes place most often in our culture at the altars of consumerism. Indeed, consumerism may be the universal or “Catholic” religion of the 21^st Century. According to Smith, the practice of consumption’s “redemption lives off of two ephemeral elements: the thrill of the unsustainable experience or event and the sheen of the novel and new. Both of these are subject to a law of diminishing returns, and neither can last. They both slip away, requiring new experiences and new acquisitions. And the by-product of such persistent acquisition is a side we don’t see or talk about much: the necessary disposal of the old and the boring. So while the liturgy of the market invests products with an almost transcendent sheen and glow, enchanting them with a kind of magic and pseudograce, the strange fact is that the same liturgies encourage us to quickly dispense with these products in a heartbeat.” 

This consumer culture has taught us that the objects of our pious devotions, will not forever be worthy of our worship.

This then is a contributing factor to how quickly we become disillusioned with others and with ourselves. This consumer culture has taught us that the objects of our pious devotions, will not forever be worthy of our worship.