We tend to associate worship with churches, prayers, and belief in God. But consider what worship asks of us: devotion, sacrifice, trust, and a willingness to organize our lives around something we regard as supremely important. By that measure, worship is hardly confined to religious people.
In his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, David Foster Wallace put it plainly: “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” Money, beauty, power, intelligence, achievement, politics, nation, nature, technology, health, family, even the self can occupy that highest echelon. Whatever we put there becomes the standard by which we measure our worth and decide what deserves our sacrifice.
We rarely make that choice consciously. Nobody wakes up intending to worship professional success. We simply give it more and more of our time and attention, then our relationships, our inner peace, and perhaps our integrity. Wallace called these unconscious commitments our “default settings.” Our calendars, bank statements, browser histories, resentments, and anxieties may reveal them more honestly than our words.
Religion makes such commitments explicit. It gives people a shared account of where they came from, how they should live, and what might save them. Its stories, rituals, and communities express those beliefs and pass them on. Rejecting God does not necessarily remove the human need for some kind of religion.
Speaking at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club in 2003, Michael Crichton argued that religion cannot simply be removed from the human psyche. Suppressed in one form, it “merely re-emerges in another...” He saw this happening with environmentalism, which could adopt the structure of the religion its adherents believed they had left behind.
Christianity begins with a good creation (Eden) and a fall (Adam and Eve’s pursuit of Godlikeness). It has sin and repentance (David and Psalm 51), saints (Mary, Peter, and Stephen), purification (baptism), and communion (bread and wine at the Last Supper). It teaches judgment (Christ’s separation of those who cared for “the least of these” from those who ignored them), forgiveness (the Prodigal Son and the thief on the cross), and salvation (reconciliation with God through Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection). Its ultimate promise is resurrection and a restored creation.
Environmentalism takes on a parallel structure: a good creation (untouched, pre-human nature), a fall (industrialization and mass consumption), sin and penance (carbon emissions and offsets), saints (revered figures such as Greta Thunberg and Al Gore), purification (recycling and dietary restrictions), and communion (organic food). Judgment becomes environmental catastrophe, forgiveness requires changed behavior, and salvation comes through sustainability. Its ultimate promise is a restored planet.
Political movements can tell similar stories of an ideal past, a fall into corruption or oppression, and redemption through allegiance to the cause. They develop saints and martyrs, sacred texts, purity tests, heretics, and excommunication. Their promised land may be a restored nation, perfect equality, technological transcendence, or personal liberation.
The resemblance does not make these causes false or unimportant. Caring for the environment, seeking justice, and loving one’s country are worthy commitments. Science is indispensable. But when a cause becomes sacred, evidence may be accepted only when it confirms the creed, and disagreement treated as a moral offense. Devotion can begin to defeat the judgment that made the cause worth pursuing.
A Chesterton insight, expressed by Émile Cammaerts in his 1937 book “The Laughing Prophet”, eventually became a familiar paraphrase: “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t then believe in nothing; he believes in anything.” Disbelief leaves the altar open. What we place upon it matters, because even good things can become destructive when we ask them to supply our entire reason for living.
Worship money and no amount feels sufficient. Worship beauty and every birthday becomes a small defeat. Worship power and you fear losing it. Worship intelligence and every smarter person becomes a threat, every mistake an exposure. Wallace warned that most objects of worship “will eat you alive.” We ask them to establish a worth they can never finally secure.
If you worship health, illness will feel like a personal failure or cosmic injustice. You can exercise, eat well, take your vitamins, and submit to every recommended screening. You probably should do all of those things. But you still cannot command your cells, prevent every accident, or negotiate with age. Every body eventually deteriorates. Every one of us will die.
Family is harder to recognize as an idol because our love for it is so plainly good. Our children deserve devotion, our marriages deserve care, and our parents deserve gratitude. Yet children grow into lives that no longer revolve around us. Spouses have needs and purposes of their own. Our parents age, become frail, and eventually die. We cannot love any of them enough to prevent change or loss. The distinction matters. Grieving a parent is the cost of love. Losing every sense of purpose when that parent dies is the danger of having made one relationship carry the whole meaning of life. Family deserves our love without being made responsible for our very identity.
Even our own goodness can become an idol. Wanting to “be a good person” or “spread joy” assumes that goodness exists or that joy matters. An atheist can be an extraordinarily good person. But science alone cannot tell us what we ought to value, and good intentions cannot settle every moral question.
A parent may conceal a painful truth out of love and cause greater pain later. Another may disguise anger or control as honesty and do needless harm in the name of truth. Knowing the difference requires wisdom, prudence, humility, and attention to the experience of those who came before us.
And knowing what is right does not ensure that we do it. We hurt people, rationalize selfishness, and excuse in ourselves what we condemn in others. We may be better than someone else, but comparison is a poor substitute for goodness. If our peace depends on believing ourselves virtuous, every failure must be ignored or explained away.
This is where Christianity becomes compelling to me. It understands the predicament: we need a foundation for our worth, yet cannot secure it through possessions, relationships, control, or even our best behavior. Its answer is the grace of God.
Salvation cannot be earned by being a little better than everyone else. It comes from a God who knows us completely, loves us anyway, and offers forgiveness without requiring us to pretend we deserve it. We can admit our failures because they do not have the final word.
That freedom asks something of us. As G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1910, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” Christianity asks us to surrender our false/fallible idols, forgive those who have injured us even when they neither ask for nor deserve forgiveness, love those who do not love us back, and trust a God we cannot fully comprehend.
Faith cannot be forced; coercion would defeat the point (side note: that is precisely why God gave us free will, so we could choose to love Him). But this promise deserves consideration: we can care for our bodies, pursue worthwhile causes, love our families, and strive to do good without requiring any of them to save us. Their value need not depend on their permanence, or our worth on our success in preserving them.
Everything else we worship will eventually leave us, or we will leave it. The Christian promise is that God will do neither. He loved us before we could earn it, loves us after we have failed Him, and will still be holding us when we no longer have the strength to hold on to anything at all.
Perhaps that is the final question: not what you can cling to while life is good, but what will hold on to you when it is not.
Postscript
A friend recently sent me a recollection from his visit to Gethsemani Abbey, where he first heard a beautiful Benedictine chant: Mortem cotidie ante oculos suspectam habere, “Keep death daily before your eyes.” He tries to make it a daily prayer: “Lord, keep before me daily the image of my own death.”
That prayer seems particularly fitting here. Remembering that we will surely die asks us to confront what we worship while we still have time to choose.