Idolatry and the Constitution

In my preaching through First Kings, I came across the following from Peter Leithart’s Brazos Theological Commentary on 1 &2 Kings (Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, 2006), where he begins his comment on 1 Kings 21, pp. 152-3:

Americans, if they believe in idolatry at all, believe it is a victimless sin. Though it is debatable that the framers of the American Constitution envisioned a secular state, the First Amendment has come to be understood as a protection of all religious belief, though not a protection of religious behavior (e.g. polygamy is not a protected religious behavior). According to contemporary interpretations of the First Amendment, it makes no social and political difference what people believe. They can worship a thousand gods or none; they can worship Allah or Jesus; and it has absolutely no public consequences. All can live in harmony and peace despite our religious differences, because the sacred canopy overarching all our particular religious commitments is a commitment to the American system. Particular religions are subordinated to the American civil religion, a religion to which all Americans adhere. Whatever we are ethically or religiously, we are all hyphenated Americans: Christian-Americans or Buddhist-Americans or Muslim-Americans or atheist-Americans, but always Americans. This is what O’Donovan had in mind when he suggests, shockingly to many American Christians, that the First Amendment “can usefully be taken as the symbolic end of Christendom,” since, whatever the intentions of the framers, it “ended up promoting a concept of the state’s role from which Christology was excluded, that of a state freed from all responsibility to recognize God’s self-disclosure in history” (1996, 244-45).

Indifference to idolatry has its roots in the early modern period. According to a common telling of the story, Europeans discovered that theology was bloodily divisive and concluded that the only way to restore comparative harmony was to expunge theology from the public square, forcing theological decision and debate into the recesses of the conscience or, at best safely behind the walls of the church (Pannenberg 1989, 12-15). William Cavanagh vigorously and persuasively challenges this account of secularization arguing that the wars of religion did not move religion into private space but instead invented the modern concept of religion (2000, 15-42). Besides, all efforts to establish social harmony on the foundation of theologically neutral concepts of nature and human nature are doomed to failure. To found a constitution on the premise that human beings are something other than the image of God is not to found a constitution on neutrality. It is, so Christians must testify, to found a constitution on falsehood.

Scripture does not treat idolatry as morally or politically indifferent. What and how we worship shapes the kind fo persons we become. After describing false gods as speechless, blind, deaf, immobile, and powerless, Psalm 115, says that “those who make them will become like them, / everyone who trusts in them” (115:8). Idolaters are as dumb, blind, deaf, and impotent as the gods they worship. On the other hand, as the Gospels demonstrate, those who turn to Jesus in faith are healed of all such diseases. Worshipers of the living God live.