Only a few decades ago a wall, an insurmountable dividing and invisible line was drawn between believers on one side and atheists and agnostics on the other. This schematic vision, which identified non-believers as the inhabitants of the idolatrous city and Christians as the inhabitants of  God’s city, has now been completely removed and, indeed, it appears meaningless, not only because unbelief also passes through the hearts of believers, but above all because idolatry is present on both sides.

Yes, Christians and non-Christians live in the same city where idolatry is manifestly an effective dominant and a powerful temptation. It is true that being a Christian should imply a repudiation of idols and false gods, through a concrete change of life from worldliness, but in reality, falling and alienation towards idols mark the believers’ path. The believer and the non-believer find themselves side by side in the continuous confrontation with the idolatrous dominants: the fight against idolatry should therefore be a commitment of both.

The idol, in fact, before being a theological falsehood (that is, concerning the Christian faith) is an anthropological falsehood it is a force that perverts a person, makes her take and travel in a path of death where, knowing it or not, she gets lost. The idol is born when the person does not give to herself any prohibition, when she does not accept and does not set any limit: then she wants everything, she wants it immediately, within her reach, without taking into account the others.

A constitutive aspect of idolatry present in our social life is certainly the cult of narcissism. However, what does it mean that the culture and society we live in are narcissistic? At the level of individual pathology, narcissism is characterized by an exaggerated investment in one's own image at the expense of the "real self", by the denial of the body and feelings in order to be able to exhibit and maintain a self-image that allows someone to be seductive, to obtain recognized power and control over others.

On a social and cultural level, narcissism is essentially a loss of human values.

"When there is no interest in the environment and in one's fellowmen. When the proliferation of material things becomes the measure of progress in living, when wealth occupies a higher position than wisdom, when notoriety is more admired than dignity and when success is more important than self-respect, it means that a culture overestimates the 'image' and has to be considered narcissistic" (A. Lowen).

Yes, by now our cities have become “a labyrinth of images” (Michel De Certeau) and we live in a society bewitched by images, which bring a loss of the symbols meaning. More than ever today, l'esse est percipi (to exist is to be seen) seems to come true, where even the image of reality is superimposed on reality itself. The images multiplicity becomes the possible multiplicity of "lifestyles", of "self-realization" in a universe of neo-polytheism, of radical relativism and undifferentiating, the result of an et-et culture that removes rules and denies limits which are indeed essential both for the person’s humanization and her personal edification as well as for civil coexistence.

Narcissism, and the related phenomena of symbols loss and of the interiority expropriation carried out by the images civilization, condemn to fragmentation, to isolation. Today fragmentation and disintegration afflict time, body, and society.

A question arises: the persons’ disintegration experienced is the modern (better, postmodern) era both at the level of building up the personal self and structuring collective life could it be the modern (better, postmodern) version of the ancient divide et impera? That is, the disintegration and fraying that afflict both the individual and society (think, for example, of the family institution’s crisis), are perhaps not the most appropriate ground for a "strong" response offered to reunite "values" and shattered institutions, or at least presenting itself as such?

This leads us to mention the political aspect of idolatry.

In the midst of transition from one socio-political order to another; of instability of the social structure and of the economic situation; of crisis of the principle of authority; of ethical uncertainty and also of the crises of historical religions leaving room for the savage and syncretistic religious spread, the need arises to find an image that finds and strengthens the collective and personal identity. The idol performs precisely such a reassuring function.  

In the idol, the divine is identified with a familiar face, with a human artifact. The idol abolishes the distance with God and denies his otherness: it is a divine depersonalized and rendered harmless, it is a human construction, it is a "god in the image of man" protecting the city, reassuring the community that in it receives identity, in it is freed from fear and destined for happiness.

But fear and sadness are precisely the two fundamental emotions that the narcissist removes by presenting an image perpetually confident and always smiling because he/she pretends to participate, indeed to holder the happiness he/she promises to others in he/she work of seduction to obtain power!

For this reason, politics comes often to arouse idols: "The Big brother, the Great helmsman, the Führer or 'the man who is needed' must be deified: made gods, they avert the divine, or more vulgarly, destiny. Idolatry gives its true dignity to the cult of personality who becomes insofar a familiar and domestic form of the divine "(J. L. Marion).

From the fragmentation of time in the countless juxtaposed and pressing times imposed by the frenetic social rhythms, from the analytical decomposition of the body to its reduction to a fetish body operated by the advertising language of the consumer society, from the society atomization a need for unity arises. The risk is the Babel idolatrous one, totalitarianism.

In the fragmentation and depersonalization of relationships, the distance from power can be abolished by a familiar face, which enters everyone's homes thanks to those powerful distributors of images that are the mass media and the network. But above, all it is the abolition of distance operated by these means that can trigger an idolatrous exploitation in order to gain consensus and power.

The end of ideologies, which have often risen to idolatrous systems, has not canceled out the needs and problems they sought to respond to. The risk now is to give equally idolatrous answers, albeit of another sign and in another form.

See Idolatria e società