"We all worship something, the important thing is what we choose to worship."

A church that I often pass by on the way to and from work has, as churches often do, a sign upon which someone writes pithy and pseudo-profound statements about faith—the religious version of by-lines for the week’s sermon or something. (Can you tell that I’m not really impressed with what tends to get written there? I may appreciate the fact that church is a place where people openly try to discuss some of the more important things about human life, but the mere fact of that attempt doesn’t make up for the fact that the framework within which that discussion takes place is, to put it charitably, outmoded and incoherent given what we know about the world.)

Diatribe aside, for several weeks the sign outside the church said the following: “We all worship something, the important thing is what we choose to worship.” I am trying hard to be as accurate as possible but I can’t guarantee I have the wording exactly right, but I think this captures the spirit of it, Now, if I want to cut it some slack, it seems that the most charitable (but the least philosophically interesting) interpretation is simply that we need to evaluate our priorities and make sure that they are good. In this form its bland but inoffensive, but in the form posted on the sign itself, there are some problematic things suggested by its phrasing.

The first problem, then, has to do with the idea that “We all worship something.” Well, I’m not sure if this is true. After all, worshipping is not just a generic human activity, but a very specific and very historically inflected complex of beliefs, emotions, and practices, and I’m not so sure everyone—or maybe even very many people—actually “worship” in this strict sense. In particular, the religious and indeed, ritualistic, connotations of worship, especially of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic sort, means that it is already dubious that everyone worships something. Do Buddhists or atheists do anything comparable to worshipping? Can relatively irreligious people who might only go to church on Christmas, but still vaguely identify as Christian, be said to worship God?

While I think that the answer to the above questions is probably “no,” or at least a very qualified “yes” in which the differences involved are pretty sizeable, maybe I am just being too strict about what is meant by “worship” here. Maybe all the sign means by “worship” is to “value highly, or to actively recognize as an authoritative value or set of values.” After all, the point of the sign does seem to be a matter of identifying what our priorities are. But this doesn’t really save the sign from incoherence because it still runs into the second problem concerning the idea that we can choose what we value, much less worship. Now, I am not saying that worshipping is something done involuntarily, since one element of worshipping is an intentional commitment to what is being worshipped (and to worshipping itself). As a rule it doesn’t make sense to worship against one’s will: you wouldn’t worship something you didn’t admire or revere (and therefore want to worship) because those feelings are integral to the motivation of worship and are part of what give it its meaning.


But at the same time, this doesn’t mean that worshipping is the result of an intentional choice, or is something that we can just will to do. Like so many aspects of our lives, the truth of such a choice lies somewhere in the middle. And its here that we get into the difficult territory, where it is not clear-cut at just what point the will—where what we can said to be responsible for—begins and ends. Now, we often think it would be nice to be able to say that every decision that we make is the result of a process that was absolutely under our conscious control. However, not only is that not the case, but that is probably a good thing since that would likely make everyday living quite overwhelming. But everyday things aside, we would still like to think that the big things like what kind of people we are to become, and what we value, are in some way up to us. And I wouldn’t deny that they are in a large part up to us, but they are not so in the sense that we can just sit down, deliberate about them for awhile, and then simply choose and be done with it.

To use worship as the example, consider how you can decide to adopt all of the outward forms of worship—perform all of the rituals, say all the words—while remaining inwardly unconvinced or unmoved, just as you can do all the things to try to get your mind into a “worshipful zone,” but still fall short of feeling it. One reason why a choice like that doesn’t stick, I think, is that it gets the role that such a belief plays backwards: it is against the background of such a belief and on its authority that we make decisions. If you choose to worship something it is not the choice as such that makes the difference, but whatever it is about the thing that made it worth worshipping. Think about it this way: it makes no sense to say that people who become born again Christians accept Jesus as their personal savior because they choose to (that’s just a tautology that really doesn’t explain the choice itself), no, they choose to accept him because (and here I’m worried about not getting the language right) the Holy Spirit enters their hearts and lifts them up to Jesus. There are undoubtedly lots of preconditions for being able to have such an experience, and some of those are under our direct control, but that’s pretty murky territory in terms of conscious and unconscious decisions, motivations, etc. (And that’s coming to worship something else as an adult in full command of one’s rational capacities, things are even more complicated when it comes to the determination of what we have grown up worshipping since so much of the determination of that lies hidden in the mists of childhood prehistory.)

But to return to the slogan that instigated all of this: “We all worship something, the important thing is what we choose to worship,” I think what I’ve said does confirm one element of this, namely, just how important it is what we choose to worship. But even if we treat this charitably as a call for self-reflection about our values (and ignore the misunderstandings about the relationship between choice and worship that it seems to flirt with) I still think the sign is far too optimistic about our ability to intentionally effect self-change. The point may seem pedantic, but that misguided way of thinking about the will and choice is longstanding in the Western philosophical tradition. Plus, this discussion sets up the next song I wish to examine.