The reason I suppose that to-do list item was sparked was after reading Tim Keller's "Counterfeit Gods," which is a fantastic tour through idolatry as it's crafted by those of us in today's world. The book does a terrific job of taking the concept of idolatry beyond the Sunday School concept of strange, foreign people crafting statues to worship. Instead, Keller launces from Ezekeil 14:3's telling of how the elders of Israel had set up "idols in their hearts."
Likewise, Keller isn't afraid to step into political idolatry, which is something I tend to find way too much interest in. For a sampling, here's an outtake from Chapter 5, "The Power and the Glory" ...
The Idolatry of Power
Reinhold Niebuhr was a prominent American theologian of the mid-twentieth century. He believed all humans struggle with a sense of being dependent and powerless. The original temptation in the Garden of Eden was to resent the limits of God had put on us ("You shall not eat of the tree ..."; Gen 2:17) and to see to be "as God" by taking power over our own destiny. We gave in to this temptation and now it is part of our nature. Rather than accept our finitude and dependence on God, we desperately seek ways to assure ourselves that we still have power over our own lives. but this is an illusion. Niebuhr believed this cosmic insecurity creates a "will to power" that dominates our social and political relationships. He observed two ways this works itself out.
First, said Niebuhr, pride in one's people is a good thing, but when the power and prosperity of the nation become unconditioned absolutes that veto all other concerns, then violence and injustice can be perpetrated without question. When this happens, Dutch scholar Bob Goudzwaard writes:
... the end indiscriminately justifies ever means .... thus a nation's goal of material prosperity becomes an idol when we use it to justify the destruction of the natural environment or allow the abuse of individuals or classes of people. A nation's goal of military security becomes an idol when we use it to justify the removal of rights to free speech and judicial process, or the abuse of an ethnic minority.
Niebuhr believed that entire nations had corporate "egos." and just as individuals, national cultures could have both superiority and inferiority complexes. An example of the former would be how America's proud self-image as "the land of the free" blinded most people to their hypocritical racism toward African-Americans. A society can also develop a sense of inferiority and become aggressive and belligerent. Writing his book in 1941, it was easy for Niebuhr to identify Nazi Germany as an example of this form of power idolatry. Germany's humiliation after Warld War I left the whole society eager to prove its power and superiority to the world.
It is not easy to draw an exact line between ascribing value to something and assigning it absolute value. There is likewise no precise way to define when patriotism has crossed over into racism. oppression, and imperialism. Yet no one denies that nations have often slid down that slippery slope. It is no solution to laugh at all expressions of patriotism, as if it were an evil thing in itself. as we have seen all along, idols are good and necessary things that are turned into gods. C.S. Lewis wrote wisely about this:
It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses - say mother love or patriotism - are good, and others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad .... There are situations in which it is the duty of a married man to encourage his sexual impulse and of a soldier to encourage the fighting instinct. there are also occasions on which a mother's love for her own children or a man's love for his own country have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness towards other people's children or countries.
Here's Keller's video intro to the book:
