Image Courtesy of Christy Thomas
Special to United Methodist Insight | Aug. 17, 2026
I saw the t-shirt pictured here at a kiosk at a nearby mall where my husband and I, along with the rest of the geriatric crowd, take our morning walks to avoid the extreme summer heat.
It slapped me in the face. Why? Because it perfectly sums up the worst of the human condition.
A number of years ago, I heard a series of lectures by Barbara Brown Taylor. I went because I wanted to hear and learn techniques from a woman proclaimed one of the most effective preachers in the English-speaking world. I went away very uncomfortable with the state of my own soul.
In one of the first lectures, she reminded us that while Christians use the Genesis 3 passage as the template for life patterns that rebel against God, Jews use the story in Exodus 32. There we read of the Israelites on Mount Sinai as they wait for Moses’ return from his forty days and forty nights in the presence of the Lord.
According to the Exodus narrative, this beleaguered group of slaves has just experienced great deliverance—they were free for the first time in their lives.
None of them has ever lived one minute in freedom before. Suddenly, no one tells them what to do, where to go or how to use their time.
They are alone in the wilderness, in the dry place, following a man called Moses who has proclaimed an unseen and mighty God over whom they had no power and no influence. Everything is strange and different. Worse, this man, Moses, then disappears somewhere in the clefts of the mountain.
No one hears from him for days. Fear takes over. They have no structure, no grounding in the ways of freedom. This God that Moses demands they follow was very much NOT their “god.”
So what shall they do? They turn to a second-fiddle man, Moses’s brother Aaron, elevate him to leadership where he’s unaccountable to that mighty unseen God, and prepare to do unthinkingly whatever he asks. Freedom is too hard—best to find a person to take charge, give orders, tell them what to do... as a friend of mine put it once, “we all want to return to Egypt.”
Aaron happily steps into leadership, tells his eager followers to strip their wives and children of their gold earrings, mostly, as the narrative explains, taken from the Egyptians upon their escape, and offer these treasures to him.
The gold quickly gathered; Aaron has it all melted down. Voila! The golden calf emerges!
Now they have their god, made in a familiar, friendly image, and everyone proclaims that this is the god that brought them out of Israel.
As Rev. Taylor pegged it, “A shiny little metal god that will give us what we want.”
And so, the worst of the human condition demands, “If You really love me, You will prove Your love by becoming a shiny little metal God whom I control and who gives me whatever I want, especially comfort, with no need to change, to mature, to look carefully at myself and what I am doing.”
In other words, God has now become “my god,” one we can boldly claim ownership over by a slogan slapped on our backs.
In even better words, we prefer to become idolators—it is so much easier, far more comfortable.
Yes, idolatry is an old-fashioned word. None of us think we worship idols, of course. That’s for a primitive society.
But we do indeed worship idols. How?
Any time we work to reduce God to some controllable idea or act or phenomenon, we’ve worshipped an idol.
Any time we ask God to prove God’s love by demanding that we get what we want, we have succumbed to idol worship.
Any time we reduce God to being “my god,” our presumed ownership of the Holy One turns us into idolators.
Any time we think we can define God by insisting we know exactly what the Bible says and means about the nature of the Holy One, we have become idolators.
Let’s face it: at heart, most of us do want a shiny metal “god” whom we can cage and control. And thus people buy those t-shirts, proudly proclaiming their ownership of the caged “god.”
How’s your idol worship shaping up these days?
Image Courtesy of Christy Thomas
Christy Thomas
Courtesy Photo
Author and columnist the Rev. Dr. Christy Thomas is a retired clergy member of the Horizon Texas Conference (formerly North Texas) of The United Methodist Church, This article is republished with permission from her Substack blog, "Christy Thomas: Quiet Resistance for a Noisy Age."