Gerald May: Addiction and Idolatry

Compulsive attachments are idols of desire.

Terry D. Cooper (pg. 59) points out that Augustine (pg. 378) argued that sin arises not from the flesh but from idolatry. And Cooper (pg. 70) believes that Gerald May's theory of addiction offers a "contemporary retelling of the Augustinian story of sin." In Addiction and Grace, May identified addiction with idolatry:

"I am not being flippant when I say that all of us suffer from addiction. Nor am I reducing the meaning of addiction. I mean in all truth that the psychological, neurological, and spiritual dynamics of full-fledged addiction are actively at work within every human being. The same processes that are responsible for addiction to alcohol and narcotics are also responsible for addiction to ideas, work, relationships, power, moods, fantasies, and an endless variety of other things. We are all addicts in every sense of the word. Moreover, our addictions are our own worst enemies. They enslave us with chains that are of our own making and yet that, paradoxically, are virtually beyond our control. Addiction also makes idolators of us all, because it forces us to worship these objects of attachment, thereby preventing us from truly, freely loving God and one another" (pp. 3-4).

"Spiritually, addiction is a deep-seated form of idolatry. The objects of our addictions become our false gods. These are what we worship, what we attend to, where we give our time and energy, instead of love. Addiction, then, displaces and supplants God's love as the source and object of our deepest true desire. It is, as one modern spiritual writer has called it, a 'counterfeit of religious presence'" (pg. 13).

"In the great spiritual traditions of the world, attachments are seen as any concerns that usurp our desire for love, anything that becomes more important to us than God. Paul Tillich said that whatever we are ultimately concerned with is God for us. At any given moment, that with which we are most concerned is most likely to be something other than the true God. No matter how religious we may think we are, our addictions are always capable of usurping our concern for God. If we are worried about our financial status, that will become our ultimate concern at the time. The drama of a special human relationship may completely preoccupy our attention. Even things as simple as finding the right brand name for a purchase or discovering a scratch on our new car can, for a while, become ultimate concerns. From a religious standpoint, then, this distortion of attention, which is the fifth characteristic of addiction, could be called 'the distortion of ultimate concern'. Another word for it is idolatry.

"Whether we are conscious of it or not, for however long a particular addiction controls our attention, it has become a god for us. The major religious traditions of the world proclaim in unison that such false gods must fall away from us. We are called to grow toward that point at which nothing other than God will be our god. However short-lived or minor our concern for something other than God may be, when we give it more priority than we give our concern for God and God's will, we commit idolatry. Thus we all commit idolatry countless times every day" (pp. 29-30).

Idols of the Types

St. Augustine (1952). The Confessions / The City of God / On Christian Doctrine (Great books of the Western World, 18). Trans., Marcus Dodds. Eds., Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica.

Terry D. Cooper (2003). Sin, Pride, and Self-Acceptance: The Problem of Identity in Theology and Psychology. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

Gerald May (1988). Addiction and Grace. San Francisco: Harper and Row.

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