In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This morning I want to talk to you about idolatry. I am persuaded that the society in which we live and move and have our being is an idolatrous society. We do not all worship the same god. The question being raised recently, and answered wrongly, is whether or not Christians worship the same God as Muslims. I’m not persuaded that Christians worship the same God as other Christians! Not a bit of it. I’m not at all convinced on that point, that those who call themselves Christians are worshiping the same God that’s worshiped in this building.

The major idolatry, as I see it, at least—leave Islam out of it and just talk about America. The major false god has been described—and I do not know by whom at first; I think I got the expression from Rod Dreher, but I don’t know that Rod made it up, because I’ve seen it elsewhere—called moral therapeutic deism. Moral therapeutic deism. I don’t think I need to expand on what that is; I think the words themselves tell you that it’s moral and it has a supposed healing effect and that it essentially is deistic; in other words, it’s a religion that has something to do with Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and other Founding Fathers who were Deists. I know that they belonged to the official church; I’m aware of that, but that serves to illustrate my point.

This past week, I’ve been pondering: What are the sources of this idolatry, this moral therapeutic deism? There are several, but I must limit myself this morning to three, honoring thereby the holy Trinity. The first: the will to believe. “The Will to Believe” is the title to a famous essay by one of the most important writers, philosophical writers, of the 20th century, a man by the name of William James, who taught at Harvard, one of the most important educational institutions of the 20th century. I’ve spoken to you recently in several sermons where I’ve quoted one of my favorite novelists, Henry James. Williams James is the older brother of Henry James.

How important is Williams James? Well, one of the most important lights of Orthodox thought in the 20th century, I submit to you, was St. Nikolai Velimirovic. I think most Orthodox sort of know that: St. Nikolai Velimirovic, a man of massive intellect and enormous spirit, a holy man and a wise man. He wrote the first of his two doctoral dissertations at Oxford, and it was on the philosophy of William James. That a saint of our own Church considered William James important enough to devote several years of his life to the study of him suggests something, eh?

William James is the founder of what in the handbooks is called American pragmatic philosophy. Pragmatic, pragma in Greek, pragma; it means a deed, getting something done. Pragmatic philosophy, a distinctively American branch of philosophy, is a philosophy that wants to get things done; it’s not a speculative philosophy. It has the American “can do” about it.

Let me give you a quotation from William James that comes from that essay: “Truth is something that happens to an idea.” I kind of like that. It just depends on what you mean by it. “Truth is something that happens to an idea.” Let us pose, for example, is such-and-such an idea true? How would we know if it’s true? For example—and this is James’s example—if I’m wondering whether such-and-such a young woman might be opened to my expression of interest, I can wonder about that forever, but I’ll never know the truth of it unless I try it. I can speculate forever on whether or not my watch has the correct time—it may or may not. Let’s see if I miss my bus! [Laughter] Truth is something that happens to an idea. You won’t know unless you try it. So says James. Act on the idea, and see if it is true.

Now you should suspect there—and I think it’s pretty plain—that underneath there is an implied model, and that’s the model of the scientific hypothesis. He’s taking the model of the scientific hypothesis and raising it to the level of philosophy. If I want to know whether such-and-such an experiment works, I try it. That’s Thomas Alva Edison, isn’t it? What will burn, what will give light from an incandescent bulb? What sort of atmosphere do you need, what sort of filament? You try it. So we try ideas.

So does an idea work? Or, to you use the metaphor of William James, does it have cash value? Another good American expression. Does such-and-such an idea have cash value? Is it worth anything? James’s major example is God. Is the concept of God worth anything? Does the idea of God work? Does the idea of God have cash value? Everybody with me? You won’t know, says James, unless you act on that idea. Hence what he calls the will to believe. Does the idea of God have cash value? Well, act on it and see.

You see, if you drop the idea of God, you are simply an atheist. The one thing very clear about atheism is that it promises nothing and it delivers nothing. [Laughter] Atheism has no cash value. There’s not a thing you can do with it. If you doubt the existence of God, you are simply a skeptic. Once again, skepticism promises nothing and it delivers nothing. Skepticism has no cash value.

James goes on. Belief in God, however, does have cash value. Belief in God provides a solid foundation for life. It confers on the mind a basis for hope. Belief in God is a bulwark against despair. Belief in God, moreover, provides a framework for human existence. If I believe in God, then I know where I came from and where I’m going. So, says James, belief in God is the only reasonable thing, because belief in God works. It has cash value.

Now, is there anything wrong with William James’s theory? About a million things that I can see right away. I mean, it seems to me one of the most cock-eyed ideas I’ve ever heard in my life. In the immortal words of Psalm 2, “He who sits in heaven laughs.” I’m not going to mention all the things I find wrong with that idea. It would be worthwhile, however, to consider a few of them, because I think they are pertinent to our question is: Where did moral therapeutic deism come from? And this is one of the places.

You see, isn’t this idea of god just an extension of the tooth fairy? You see, if I believe in the tooth fairy, I keep getting a quarter for every one of my molars. Is that what the going price is? I don’t know. When I was a boy, it was a nickel, but there’s been inflation since then. I remember when my eldest grandson came to me, and he said, “You know, Jiddou, there really isn’t a tooth fairy.” I say, “How do you know?” He says, “Nanna told me.” I said, “Don’t believe Nanna. It’s a terrible thing when a child loses his faith.” You see, isn’t William James’s god just an extension of the tooth fairy? If you believe in it, it works?

Is an adult’s faith in God something different from a child’s belief in the Easter bunny? You see, beloved, what happens when God suddenly takes away the goodies? What happens when God no longer delivers? This god described by William James: is he likely to put us to the test? Can anyone imagine this American divinity dispatching Abraham and his son, Isaac, up to Mount Moriah? Would this god of cash value initiate the trial of Job? The God Moses met in the burning bush: is he a god of convenience? Is this the Lord Isaiah saw, high and lifted up, whose glory filled the Temple? I do not see the all-purpose, myself-affirming god as the God in the Bible. It’s a different god. It is a different god. It’s a different god altogether. It’s certainly different—this god with cash value is certainly different from the God of judgment and the election, the God whose wrath sends Israel into captivity in Babylon and whose love is put on trial on Calvary.

This modern god has no resemblance at all to the God of the Bible, and yet it appears to me that many Christians worship this god, or at least they mix him in with the true God. And the great sin that the Bible calls syncretism, where you mix the true God with some other god, when you build a golden calf and identify the golden calf with the true God—and that’s what the true god is. That god is simply a figment of man’s creative imagination and his really irrational optimism.

There, I submit, is a first source for this modern moral therapeutic deism. Let me suggest to you a second: the refusal to accept limitations. This is something that I don’t see and don’t have any remembrance of it in my time growing up, none whatsoever. This seems to me a very, very recent thing, this refusal to accept limitations. When I was a little boy, many centuries ago—well, many decades ago—when I was a little boy, there were several things people never told me. No one ever told me, “You can be anything you want to be.” No one ever told me that. No one ever told me that; nobody ever gave me those expectations, that I could be anything I wanted to be. What they said to me was, “You’d better shape up, or you’re never going to be anything.” [Laughter] That’s what they told me! That’s what they told everybody in my era. “Shape up!”

I remember my grandfather sometimes mentioning that if he didn’t see some severe improvement in me, that I was going to end up in the potter’s field. It took me a while to find out what the potter’s field was, and I wasn’t encouraged. [Laughter] The burial ground for derelicts!

Thank God, no one ever told me I can be anything I want to be. In fact, they started to notice my limitations as soon as I was born. I’m sure within ten seconds of my birth, someone looked down at me and said, “This baby is not going to be the prom queen.” [Laughter] “This little child is never going to be a mother.” In other words, the better half of human experience was excluded immediately. My possibilities became extremely narrowed. They might have said, “He looks like he might have the makings of a football player.” That turned out to be not true either. That was perfectly demonstrated when I was in high school.

You see, it’s really not true that you can be anything you want to be, and yet I see teenagers walking around with shirts that say that: You can be anything you want to be. No, you can’t. No, you can’t. Something I heard later on was: The sky’s the limit! Well, if the sky’s the limit, then there are no limits, which is what that means.

Let’s turn to a bit of classical philosophy. The concept, what the Greeks called morphe and the Latins called forma—if you look at them closely, you can see they’re essentially the same word; the letters are just twisted around: morphe, forma, which means form, the form of something. Now, essential to the very notion of form is that of limitation. If something has such and such a form, it doesn’t have another. That all form means limitation. According to the Bible, all created things have limits. There are no unlimited possibilities in life. We do a serious injustice to the young if we leave them with the impression that the possibilities are limitless, and I see that now in ways that are become enormously disturbing—enormously disturbing.

When the federal government tells you that you can even choose your sex… Of course, they won’t call it “sex”; they use a grammatical word called “gender.” Human beings don’t have gender; nouns and adjectives have gender. Human beings have sex, and that is determined. That is absolutely determined. Can’t change that; there’s no way to change that. You might mutilate the body, but you can’t change the sex. We do a serious injustice to the young if we leave them thinking the possibilities are limitless. The biblical God, the God portrayed in the book of Proverbs and the parables of Jesus, gives his gifts according to measure, kata metron, as the Gospel says: kata metron, according to measure. They’re measured out.

The gifts of God are measured out; they’re not unlimited. To some, he gives 50 talents, to some 20, to some 10. Each of us is summoned to stewardship over what he gives us, and we are the ones who must give account, not God. We are the ones who are on trial, not God. To try to seize what has not been given to us is the sin of Prometheus, isn’t it? Who doesn’t accept God’s gifts and doesn’t thank God for God’s gifts. He goes up to seize what he’s not supposed to have, and then must live with it, the Promethean sin. In the Bible, that’s the forbidden fruit. You know how deep the image of the forbidden fruit is in our experience, and we refuse to think that there are any fruits forbidden to us.

Let me read you the opening line of Henri Bergson’s great book on The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. “Le souvenir du fruit défendu—The memory of the forbidden fruit—est ce qu’il y a de plus ancien dans la mémoire de chacun de nous—is the deepest, most ancient thing, de plus ancien, in the memory of each one of us—comme dans celle de l’humanité—as in that of humanity.” It’s the deepest thing in us. The implicit recognition of limitation, that there are things out of bounds, off-limits. And that is absolutely essential to sanity and integrity and hope.

Let me give you a third one: the myth of automatic moral improvement. The myth of automatic moral improvement: this is the narrative that claims that the human race is progressing. The myth that the human race is progressing, in the sense that later generations, younger generations, enjoy a greater moral clarity. Sometimes very old people are infected with that idea. Back before I came to All Saints, I was pastoring a church somewhere else and I was faced with a disciplinary problem within the parish. A couple of the older members of the church, not married to one another, were nonetheless acting as though they were and living as though they were. And, being answerable for their souls—and will have to give an account for their souls—I said something to them about it. I didn’t share that with anybody else, but they did, about what a narrow-minded pastor they had.

Shortly after that, I was taking Communion to one of our shut-ins who was 93 years old. 93 years old, and she throws this up in my face, how narrow-minded I am, and here’s what this 93-year-old lady told me: “You must get with the times.” You must get with the times. I didn’t want to be uncharitable, but I tried to keep a straight face. [Laughter] In other words, we have made—we have attained greater moral clarity now; we don’t need to follow those old rules. Younger generations, according to this theory, later generations, because of the alleged progress of history, can look back on the past as less enlightened, which means it deprives the past of its traditional authority. Modern men, the posed beneficiaries of new moral insights, can cast their gaze, for example, on the era of Charlemagne and refer to it as the Dark Ages. How can anyone with the most minuscule knowledge of history ever refer to that period as the Dark Ages!?

The myth of automatic moral improvement imagines that no previous age was so enlightened as our own. It does not look to the past for moral guidance because, after all, what did the ancients know? The age of Charlemagne invented the horseshoe and devised the method of triple-field crop rotation, which fed Europe. They devised that. They knew enough about nutrition to devise that. Without any knowledge whatsoever of the structure of a cell or the ability to look through a microscope, they devised that. By the way, that’s one of the reasons why Germans are so much bigger than Italians. They had several centuries of that before the Italians found out about it. The Irish I think are still trying to find what it’s all about. [Laughter] The Irish are still eating potatoes; what am I to say?

But, see, that age knew nothing about electricity and the combustion engine, so why should we take their word for anything? We’re much further along than they were. Why should we modern people take our moral guidance from people like that, who were so benighted that they didn’t even know about the cell phone!?

The fallacy of this myth is the supposition that moral improvement is a necessary corollary of technical improvement. The opposite is true. Medical ethics is probably decades behind medical technology. This moral therapeutic deism declines to seek moral guidance from the past because it refuses a basic premise assumed by all generations prior to our own, namely, that the past speaks to us with authority, the same way a parent speaks to a child. The past speaks to us the same way a parent speaks to a child. The sentiment of parental authority is essential to the very notion of civilization. Once again, this is what we discern in that body of biblical literature we receive from the distant past: Ask your parents, wrote Moses, and they will tell you. He does not say: Ask your contemporaries. Ask your elders, and they will tell you.

The God of the Bible counsels us to seek guidance from those who have gone before us. All those things have already been tested. The books that are in the Bible, they are there in a selection process. They were chosen to be in the Bible, and others weren’t, because our ancestors, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, recognized truth. The God of the Bible counsels us to seek guidance from those who have gone before us. The refusal to do this is, I submit, a significant component of our contemporary idolatry: moral therapeutic deism.

The time of Lent, I further submit, beloved—the time of Lent is a time to recover our roots with the true God, to look at our lives and see: Is the God we’re actually worshiping, is that the God of the Bible, or is that the god—the benevolent, optimistic, political, socio-economic god—of contemporary American culture? You see, because the worship of the false god is worse than the worship of no god. Atheism is better than idolatry. Lent is our time of spring cleaning. We’ll figure out over the next 40 days and 40 nights what things need to be thrown out. Amen.