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2025 – Volume 6 – Issue 1

98
Ecclesial Futures – DOI: 10.54195/ef23526

B O O K  R E V I E W

DOI: 10.54195/ef23526

Cavanaugh, William T. 2024. The Uses of 
Idolatry

New York, NY: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 978-0-19-767904-3

Reviewed by Scott J. Hagley

It is difficult to attend a football game at Lambeau Field in Green Bay or Anfield in 
Liverpool and not recognize the tell-tale signs of religious enthusiasm. Sportscasters 
call these cathedrals to sport and capital “hallowed ground” in reverence to the 
storied histories of these two clubs. Fans throw themselves into certain liturgies, 
learned by imitation and repetition and passed on from generation to generation: 
singing the songs, drinking the beers, dressing in the colours, carrying totems for 
luck and good fortune. And when Steven Girard hits a strike from 35 yards out to win 
in stoppage time, or Aaron Rogers heaves a sixty-yard pass into the back corner of 
the endzone with seconds on the clock, tens of thousands of people are thrust into 
the kind of revelry usually reserved for the sawdust trail. For all our interest in the 
“secular West” and our age of “disenchantment”, the signs of religious commitment 
are present for those with eyes to see.

In The Uses of Idolatry, William Cavanaugh explores the intense religiosity of our 
secular age, arguing that we willfully misunderstand the current moment by using 
terms like “disenchantment” to talk about late modernity. As Anfield or Amazon or 
resurgent nationalisms demonstrate, we live in an age of misenchantment, not disen-
chantment. Drawing together Durkheim and Augustine, Cavanaugh reminds us that 
we are, in fact, worshipping creatures who cannot help but create rituals and litur-
gies to integrate and organize our social life according to particular social goods. That 
we no longer do this by way of explicit religious communities does not change the 
functional religiosity of things like consumer capitalism and nationalism.

For Cavanaugh, “disenchantment” serves a polemical purpose, creating a sense 
of discontinuity between modern and pre-modern societies and flattering us with 
stories of rational progress. But a closer look at our theories of modern disenchant-
ment makes such polemics harder to sustain. Cavanaugh turns to Max Weber’s 
theory of rationalization and Charles Taylor’s framing of the immanent frame to 



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show how the enchanted nature of human society is never able to be written out 
of the story. Weber, for instance, uses rationalization to describe the migration of 
religious belief form one realm to another. Capitalism, shaped by Puritan “inner 
worldly aestheticism” empties the world of meaning, trading ends for means and 
giving us over to the impersonal forces of the market and technology – the “iron 
cage” of modernity. Weber, Cavanaugh notes, does not use “death of God” language, 
but rather describes modernity as a new form of polytheism. The old gods are resur-
rected – Apollo become capital (41). As with former polytheistic eras, we are pushed 
and pulled by forces beyond our control, with the difference being the impersonality 
of modern bureaucracy and technology and capital flows, along with the possibility 
of choice. But make no mistake, Weber found the “border between enchantment 
and disenchantment” hard to defend (43). Cavanaugh concludes: “An exchange has 
taken place, whereby God has been depersonalized, reduced to merely immanent 
and impersonal forces of human creation, while the most mundane and rational 
processes and institutions have been divinized … enchantment and disenchantment 
are inextricably entangled” (47).

Cavanaugh identifies a similar tension in Charles Taylor’s work, arguing that Taylor 
is unable to maintain the binaries that describe our current age as secular, such as 
belief/unbelief, religious/nonreligious, immanent/transcendent. Drawing from Emile 
Durkheim’s functionalist theory of religion, Cavanaugh shows how Taylor’s account 
ignores modern religious activity that falls outside the bounds of religious belief. 
Capitalism and nationalism, for example, exhibit a Durkheimian religious func-
tion, but no discernible belief in God or gods, and so they fall to the side of Taylor’s 
account. Secularization, Cavanaugh argues, “is the very invention of the religious/
secular binary and the process by which certain things got labeled religious and 
others did not” (99). For “it is not religion that has declined, but Christianity” (102).

Because our world is misenchanted rather than disenchanted, idolatry offers a 
useful framework for thinking about the nature of Christian practice and theology in 
two different ways. At the most basic level, idolatry describes the objective worship 
of false gods in modern life. Working with the biblical tradition and Augustine, Cava-
naugh explores the corrupting nature of idolatry, misdirected desire that distorts our 
sense of self, God and world. Here Cavanaugh echoes traditional jeremiads against 
the evils and dangers of idolatry. But idolatry offers a second, more nuanced frame 
for thinking about modernity. Not all idolatries are created equal. Turning to Jean-Luc 
Marion’s phenomenology of the idol and his notion of “splendid idolatry”, Cavanaugh 
places nationalism and consumerism on the continuum of idolatries. While nation-
alism certainly distorts our relationship with one another and God, it contains a 
“splendid” dimension as well. As a type of “splendid idolatry”, nationalism draws us 
out of ourselves and cultivates in us a desire for something greater than the self, an 
urge to give ourselves to something transcendent. Consumerism, however, does the 



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reverse. It offers a self-enclosed and enclosing form of idolatry, a hall-of-mirrors that 
leaves one worshipping the self, or the image of the self.

Those familiar with Cavanaugh’s other works on capitalism and nationalism, such 
as Being Consumed and Migrations of the Holy, will not be surprised that the book 
ends with a meditation on the Sacraments and Incarnation. The consequence of 
misenchantment, he argues, is not materialism but rather a form of disembodiment, 
an attempt to escape from the world of things and our existence as creatures. In 
Cavanaugh’s view, the Incarnation affirms God’s solidarity with creation, offering the 
possibility that what is created can be icon and not only idol. The Sacraments – distin-
guished from principles of sacramentality – place us within the story of God and 
God’s people and on the continuum between idol and icon. They are given by God, 
a concrete place in which God gives of Godself, but they are also a practice we give 
ourselves to, thus speaking in a kind of “‘middle voice’, in which humans are neither 
simply active nor passive in the face of God’s action” (375). Idolatry, in the end, “can 
be healed only by encounter with the living God … [for] to worship the incarnate God 
is to participate in God’s kenosis; rather than grasp God, we allow ourselves to be 
poured out in the encounter with God, to receive the presence of God as a gift” (382).

In many respects, The Uses of Idolatry introduces important and troubling lines 
of inquiry into the tired “Post-Christendom” discourse. By subverting well-worn 
accounts of Weber and Taylor, he shifts attention away from declining church 
attendance to what he calls the “migrations of the holy” in Western contexts. And 
by interrogating late modernity with a thick understanding of idolatry, he affirms 
the importance of Christian worship and sacramentality in this misenchanted time. 
But it is also here, in considering the Sacraments, where Cavanaugh becomes the 
most predictable and perhaps the least demanding of his readers when considered 
against the “splendid” and “unsplendid” idolatries of nationalism and consumerism, 
or of pop culture and sports fandom. The rise of violent ethno-nationalisms in the 
United States and Europe within and amid Christian communities affirms Cava-
naugh’s basic insight regarding idolatry and late modernity. However, the fact that 
this is happening, not only among evangelicals and Pentecostals, but also within 
Catholic and Orthodox communities characterized by the type of sacramentality to 
which Cavanaugh appeals, raises new questions about the conditions of possibility 
for encountering the living God, and what faithful witness to this God looks like in 
our misenchanted time.

About the Reviewer
Scott J. Hagley, Associate Professor, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Contact: 
shagley@pts.edu

mailto:shagley@pts.edu

	Reviewed by Scott J. Hagley
	Cavanaugh, William T. 2024. The Uses of Idolatry

