This is Season Three, Episode Five is here, featuring Dr. Bill Cavanaugh, professor of Catholic studies at De Paul University in Chicago and director of the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology, a research center housed in the Department of Catholic Studies and focusing on the Catholic Church in the global South—Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Bill is one of the most significant Catholic theologians of the 21st century, having written numerous important books in the past 25 years, such as Torture and the Eucharist, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire, and The Myth of Religious Violence. Today we are focusing on his new book from Oxford University Press, The Uses of Idolatry, where the gods of consumerism and nationalism are discussed.
It was a delight to speak with an old friend, but it’s even more delightful when an old friend happens to be a great theologian, who is funny and warm. Lucky me to have this conversation with Bill and lucky us to be able to listen to this conversation. Bill says early on in the podcast, “I mean, in some ways, the thesis of the book is really simple. And it’s not terribly original, right? It’s the idea that we don’t live in a secular world where worship has waned. We live in an enchanted world, you know, an idolatrous world where people still worship lots of things but not God.” It might not be original, but it is provocative, and I know not everyone agrees with it, such as perhaps Charles Taylor. One of the things I love about Bill’s work is that he takes on big questions and is not afraid to offer big answers.
I loved talking about and subsequently thinking about disenchantment and enchantment, especially regarding the claim that modernity is disenchanted. I think Bill is right to push back on that and part of it emerges for me and my understanding of the world as an historian of antiquity. I think there is a portrayal of the ancient world as fundamentally more enchanted than people of the ancient world described it. That is, the portrayal of ancient people tends to romanticize them in comparison to modern people. Bill wrote in the The Uses of Idolatry, “there is no “race” of humans who experience the world entirely as immanent; there is rather a set of people in the West who have learned— for various reasons having to do with how power is distributed in Western societies— to describe their world as immanent and disenchanted, while they are still involved in all sorts of worship.” (9) In the same way, the ancients were not all walking around enchanted while their children died and while they tried to afford food or the rent.
I loved talking about and thinking about what constitutes religion, and the difference between magic and religion, if there is one, and how nationalism and consumerism might fill the God gap for us. These ultimately Bill says are simply idols, splendid or unsplendid.
Bill spoke about and wrote about how the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ as an antidote to idolatry. I wondered whether there are such antidotes in other religious traditions. Among indigenous peoples for instance? How do people who are not Christian counter idolatries like nationalism and consumerism? Must one be a Christian/catholic to worship a/the true God? That’s not Bill’s argument and we discussed how this is the book as a Christian theologian he can write, but I raised the possibility of bringing together scholars of other religions to discuss the questions of idolatry, especially of nationalism and consumerism, which seem like universal gods, from the point of view of other religion standpoints and traditions.
Bill has a clear audience in mind of course, “The first audience is those who claim to believe in God, primarily but not exclusively the Christian community. To claim to believe in God is not necessarily to worship God in reality. I hope that this book will help Christians and others to think more deeply about our own practical idolatries and to seek God’s help in remedying them and healing a broken world. The second audience is those who claim not to believe in God. I hope that the theoretical and empirical work of this book might demonstrate that the supposed divide between “believers” and “nonbelievers” is perhaps not so wide as is often assumed” (6). I think he’s right, but I see that third audience, those who follow other religious traditions and how they might respond and do in practice respond to realities of nationalism and consumerism.
What Matters Most is produced by the Centre for Christian Engagement at St Mark’s College, the Catholic college at UBC. The CCE is a centre at St. Mark’s College that explores the Christian and Catholic intellectual tradition and seek to learn from others, other Christians, members of other religious traditions, and from those who do not claim any particular or formal religious affiliation.
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John W. Martens