The Idol in Your Mirror

To me, the most terrifying kind of bad-guy in science fiction stories is the shape-shifter. This is a creature that can change its form to look like anything or anyone, so you can never know if what you’re looking at might be the enemy in disguise. Well, with one major exception. It seems like every time a story uses that trope, there comes a climactic scene where the hero comes face to face with… their own face! At that moment, they know that what they’re seeing is a sham: “Oh, this is the one I should be fighting.”

We think we’re more sophisticated than the ancient pagans who crafted gods from wood and metal, but what if it’s the gods who have become more sophisticated? As the French poet Charles Baudelaire observed, "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." Individualism is a subtle god in the streets of Suburbia because we tend to think of ourselves as family-and-community-oriented people. How could the charge of individualism possibly stand? Narcissism, we might assume, is more of a problem for self-expressive urbanites, or the rugged individualist-type rural folk. And that’s exactly what the Idol of Individualism wants us to think.

We’ve come to a point in our series on SUBURBAN gODS where the idol we’re battling is a bit of a shape-shifter, and yet the secret to identifying the enemy really is as simple as looking in the mirror. This week, we’ll talk about the unique ways that individualism hides in plain sight in the midst of our community-minded context, and we’ll also receive more than enough from Jesus to smash that idol to bits.- Josh