The publication of William T. Cavanaugh’s The Uses of Idolatry comes as a somewhat belated contribution to the debates and discussions on secularism and secularization that came about in the wake of Charles Taylor’s well-known book, A Secular Age (2009). In some ways, one could interpret the overarching task of The Uses of Idolatry as correcting the argumentative presupposition which grounds Taylor’s book—namely, that the world has become secular.

According to Cavanaugh, the modern West has not so much become disenchanted with faith, but rather misenchanted. With the decline of institutional religion (and especially Christianity across the West), what has come to replace it is idolatry in the form of nationalism and consumer capitalism, of which he is critical. He calls for a corrective to this state of affairs—what he describes as an embrace of sacramentality. I will come to discuss this in greater detail later on.

In the first two-thirds of the monograph, Cavanaugh lays out the theoretical foundations of his argument. He does so with two strategic pairings. The first pairing consists of Max Weber and Charles Taylor, effectively tying them together to discuss the idea of disenchantment and secularization. The second is Augustine and philosopher Jean-Luc Marion to formulate a theory of idolatry, before moving on to specific studies of idolatrous phenomena, namely that of capitalism and nationalism.

One of the first things to notice about Cavanaugh’s reading of Taylor is his assertion that the latter’s argument can be considered—rather simply—as arguing for “disenchantment,” specifically the idea that the modern West is disenchanted. And thus to write that “what characterizes the modern West is not disenchantment but rather the condition of having learned to describe ourselves as disenchanted” (p. 2) is to directly counter Taylor’s description of secularity as a “supernova” or an “immanent frame.” Instead, according to Cavanaugh, secularity is something that we have been convinced to consider as core to who we are in the modern West. But in reality, Cavanaugh attempts to show that we are not in fact disenchanted. We are living in a far more complicated situation, full of phenomena such as “commodity fetishism, ritualized nationalism and faith in the ‘invisible hand’ of the market,” he notes (p. 2). These can be described as forms of idolatry. The problem is that we do not see them as such. And because of this, we fail to see that we still live in a world full of worship—it just simply doesn’t take place in churches. Thus, we are not living in an era of disenchantment but rather misenchantment—a term put forth by Eugene McCarraher to describe capitalism’s adoption and adaptation of the “aspirations to transcendence, metaphysical implications, and sacramental practices traditionally embedded in Christianity” (p. 335).

So it is not that worship has disappeared but that it has “migrated from the explicit worship of god to the implicit worship of things of human creation” (p. 1). And this is precisely how Cavanaugh uses the term “idolatry.” It is his name for “misdirected worship” (p. 4). Needless to say, as a Catholic theologian, Cavanaugh does not find this shift toward misenchantment to be a positive development. Over the course of the book, much of his energy is spent on rereading key authors, providing not a critical genealogy of secularism—a task already done deftly by Talal Asad over 20 years ago—but rather something like a selective intellectual history of the conceptual binaries that have resulted in our misrecognition of misenchantment for disenchantment. Cavanaugh does so by drawing from the social scientific study of religion as well as theology.

It would be unfair to understand Cavanaugh’s book as simply a response to Taylor. In fact, the book’s other key contribution is his attempt at a theory of idolatry. He also does this through a conceptual intellectual history, drawing on Augustine but also Marion, whose work on iconicity and idolatry is heavily utilized in Cavanaugh’s analysis of nationalism as a form of “splendid idolatry.” In that chapter, he offers an interesting phenomenological analysis of the nation as a sacred or artistic object, bringing together perspectives from Durkheimian sociology of religion as well as the vast amount of work done on “civil religion.” In foregrounding myth and sacrifice in the construction of nation-worship, Cavanaugh convincingly argues the usefulness of idolatry as a lens to view contemporary nationalism. The theoretical argument in this section regarding “collective narcissism” (p. 271) is especially insightful and demonstrates Cavanaugh’s analytic prowess in service to a social scientific audience who most likely will not have read much Marion, but would be familiar with Durkheim and certainly Robert Bellah.

The subsequent analysis of “consumer capitalism” as idolatry, however, shows the limits of Cavanaugh’s grasp of critical social theory. Cavanaugh is right to focus on the commodity form. Marx famously described it as “very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” in Capital: Volume 1 (2004, p. 81). Yet he proceeds without acknowledging the long history of Marxist thought that has engaged similar approaches to contemporary capitalism. For instance, there is no mention of Walter Benjamin’s “Capitalism as Religion” (1921) or Michael Löwy’s 2009 follow-up “Capitalism as Religion: Walter Benjamin and Max Weber.” There hardly seems to be an acknowledgement of György Lukács or Guy Debord. One could explain this away by suggesting that those texts are rather dated. But there is also no engagement with even more contemporary Marxist theory from Italy called autonomia, where figures like Antonio Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Paolo Virno have all theorized what could be called the metaphysical nature of contemporary capitalism. There is also the obvious text from Giorgia Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (2011). This is not to mention non-Marxist but adjacent approaches to value theory found in the works of Lisa Adkins and Melinda Cooper.

The point here isn’t simply to complain that Cavanaugh is insufficiently Marxist. But rather to point out that Cavanaugh seems to demonstrate a lukewarm engagement with Marxist theory while effectively making an argument about capitalist idolatry that bears striking similarities with a certain Marxist concept. One would not be at fault for thinking that they are misrecognizing the word “idolatry” for another word that begins with an I—ideology. Idolatry is not “false consciousness” but “false worship.” And by engaging in Götzendienstkritik, Cavanaugh wishes to direct human sacramentality toward something truer than the replacement religions offered by nationalism and consumer capitalism. This, for Cavanaugh, is God.

This is not necessarily a criticism. In fact, for social scientists, The Uses of Idolatry contains many relevant lines of inquiry and will undoubtedly offer a good deal to mull over. It stands as an example of the sort of theology that should be more familiar to social science. It is certainly a major work by a major theologian and one that will help break the barrier between theology and the social sciences, work that seems especially urgent at a moment in which both exclusionary nationalisms and capitalist overconsumption have become central problems confronting our planet.