Promotion: "Counterfeit Gods"

This entry is to promote one of my favorite writers, Tim Keller. His new book "Counterfeit Gods" has hit the stores in October 2009. Get someee!!!

Idols in Our Culture

"At the heart of every culture is its main "Hope," what it tells its members that life is all about. [Andrew] Delbanco traces three phases of American civilization by looking at the fundamental hope of each era, which he names in sequence "God, Nation, and Self." In the first era "he was chiefly expressed through a Christian story that gave meaning to suffering and pleasure alike and promised deliverance from death." In the second phase, 'the Enlightenment removed a personal God... and substituted... the idea of a deified nation.' This second phase, which Delbanco says only began to pass away during the 1960s, transferred older ideas of sacredness to America itself, so that it came to see itself as the "Redeemer nation" whose system of government and way of life was the hope for the whole world.

Today the need for transcendence and meaning has detached itself from anything more important than the individual self and its freedom to be what it chooses. Among younger people, the older flag-waving "America first" mind-set is out. Now life is about creating a self through the maximization of individual freedom from the constraints of community.

Delbanco's cultural analysis is essentially an idol analysis. The age of "Self" explains why the maximization of profit has take on power that it has. Now we see the complexity of what shapes and drives us. Any dominant cultural "Hope" that is not God himself is a counterfeit god. Idols, then, do not only take individual form, but can be corporate and systemic. When we are completely immersed in society of people who consider a particular idolatrous attachment normal, it becomes almost impossible to discern it for what it is.

We should not think that one culture is less idolatrous than the next. Traditional societies tend to make the family unit and the clan into an absolute, ultimate thing. This can lead to honor killings, the treatment of women as chattel, and violence toward gay people. Western, secular cultures make an idol out of individual freedom, and this leads to the breakdown of the family, rampant materialism, careerism, and the idolization of romantic love, physical beauty, and profit."

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This chapter really made me sick to my stomach. History has repeated itself, and we are living in the last phase of a crumbling civilization. Like all the other great empires in the past, America has gone from focusing on God, then nation, and now.. individuals. No wonder divorce rates are sky high and we mold our lives around our career. We are selfish and the philosophy of the "survival of the fittest" has permeated through our mind, body, and soul. As Keller says, "it becomes almost impossible to discern it for what it is", by the time it gets to the last phase - "Self" - it is too late. Unless, somehow, God humbles our hearts, we are hopelessly blind to our coming destruction. I am fearful for our nation and pray God will show mercy to us all...