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Secondary literature 2013

The Idolatry of God: Breaking Our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction

Peter Rollins

by Rollins, Peter (2013)

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Synopsis

Peter Rollins' The Idolatry of God (2013) argues that both secular consumer culture and mainstream Christianity operate within the same structural trap: they posit an object — the "Idol" — that promises to fill the constitutive lack at the heart of subjectivity, and in doing so perpetuate rather than relieve the very dissatisfaction they claim to cure. Drawing heavily on Lacanian psychoanalysis (especially the concepts of constitutive lack, objet petit a, fantasy, jouissance, and fetishistic disavowal) alongside Pauline theology and Žižekian ideology critique, Rollins argues that "Original Sin" and "Idolatry" are theological names for the structural gap opened at the birth of selfhood — a gap that was never a real loss because there was no self prior to separation. The book is organized around three movements: diagnosing the "Old Creation" (the structural logic of lack and ideology), announcing the "New Creation" inaugurated by the Crucifixion (understood not as satisfaction of lack but as the sacrifice of sacrifice itself, abolishing the entire Idol-framework), and sketching a "New Collective" (experimental liturgical communities that institutionalize unknowing and encounter with the Other). Rollins contends that the Crucifixion is the event that reveals there is nothing behind the curtain — the Idol was never real — and that genuine faith must therefore be constituted not by certainty but by perpetual unraveling, doubt, and the embrace of dissatisfaction. The book's practical culmination is a series of "Dis-courses" (the Last Supper, the Evangelism Project, Atheism for Lent, the Omega Course) and ikon performance-liturgies designed to enact, rather than merely describe, this structural transformation.

Distinctive contribution

What distinguishes The Idolatry of God within the broader Lacanian-inflected corpus is its sustained attempt to translate the entire architecture of Lacanian desire theory — lack, objet petit a, fantasy, jouissance, fetishistic disavowal, the big Other, ideology — into the register of popular Christian theology and practical ecclesiology without domesticating or simplifying the theory. Where Žižek uses Christianity to illustrate Lacan, and where most theologians either ignore or resist psychoanalytic categories, Rollins deploys them as the primary diagnostic grammar for what has gone wrong with contemporary religious practice. The result is a rare book that operates simultaneously as Lacanian theory, theological argument, and liturgical manifesto — a combination not found in Žižek's more purely philosophical output or in academic Lacanian theology.

A second distinctive move is the book's treatment of the Crucifixion not as a new master narrative or symbolic resolution of lack, but as a structural event that abolishes the very logic of the master signifier — what Rollins calls "the sacrifice of sacrifice itself." This goes beyond the standard theological appropriation of psychoanalysis (which tends to find in religious symbolism a healthier management of anxiety) to argue that the Christian event, properly understood, dismantles the very framework within which religion normally functions. This is close to Žižek's reading of Christianity in The Puppet and the Dwarf, but Rollins roots it more concretely in Pauline universalism and develops it through practical community experiments rather than through philosophical-historical analysis. The book's sustained engagement with fetishistic disavowal as the primary structure of both religious "belief" and secular consumerism — and its insistence that intellectual critique cannot undo what is sustained at the level of being — gives it a specificity and practical urgency that distinguishes it from more purely theoretical neighbors in the corpus.

Main themes

  • Constitutive lack as the structural homologue of Original Sin
  • The Idol as objet petit a: the fantasy-object that promises to fill the gap
  • Fetishistic disavowal and the three strategies of avoidance (deferral, repression, disavowal)
  • The Crucifixion as the abolition of the Idol-framework rather than its satisfaction
  • Pauline universalism as a cut within every identity rather than between identities
  • Ideology as the command to enjoy and the oppressiveness of freedom-to-pursue-satisfaction
  • The split subject and the gap between ego-image and operative unconscious belief
  • Contemplative practice and experimental liturgy as immanent collapse of idolatrous structures
  • Love as existential refusal of nihilism: living 'as if' in the face of meaninglessness
  • Faith constituted through unraveling, doubt, and the embrace of divine absence

Chapter outline

  • Introduction: The Apocalypse Isn't Coming, It Has Already Arrived
  • Part One: The Old Creation — Ch. 1: The Church Shouldn't Do Worship Music, the Charts Have It Covered
  • Part One: The Old Creation — Ch. 2: On Not Getting What You Want, and Liking It
  • Part One: The Old Creation — Ch. 3: Hiding Behind the Mask That We Are
  • Part Two: The New Creation — Ch. 4: Be Part of the Problem, Not the Solution
  • Part Two: The New Creation — Ch. 5: Trash of the World
  • Part Two: The New Creation — Ch. 6: The Fool Says in His Heart, 'There Is Knowing God'
  • Part Three: The New Collective — Ch. 7: I Need Your Eyes in Order to See Myself
  • Part Three: The New Collective — Ch. 8: Destroying Christianity and Other Christian Acts
  • Part Three: The New Collective — Ch. 9: Want to Lose Belief? Join the Church
  • Conclusion: A Faith Full of Signs and Wonders

Chapter summaries

Introduction: The Apocalypse Isn't Coming, It Has Already Arrived

Rollins opens by challenging the popular religious fascination with a coming apocalypse, arguing that the truly radical apocalyptic event — the transformation of the very structure of desire — has already occurred in the Christ event. He invokes the Lacanian Mirror Stage to theorize how a constitutive lack arises at the birth of selfhood: the formation of an 'I' necessarily produces a sense of separation from an outside, generating the illusion of a prior union that has been lost. This primordial sense of loss, Rollins insists, is not the loss of something real but a structural effect — there was no self before separation to have enjoyed any union. The introduction thus establishes the book's central psychoanalytic-theological wager: that what theology calls 'Original Sin' is this structural gap, and that the dominant tendency of both consumer culture and institutional Christianity has been to misread it as a lack-of-something rather than a constitutive nothing, thereby generating the perpetual but doomed search for an Idol that will fill it. The conservative apocalyptic imagination, Rollins implies, is itself a symptom of this misreading — it remains captive to the logic of satisfaction it promises to transcend.

Key concepts: Lack, Mirror Stage, Splitting of the Subject, Lost Object, Objet petit a, Original Sin Notable examples: Mirror Stage (Lacan)

Part One: The Old Creation — Ch. 1: The Church Shouldn't Do Worship Music, the Charts Have It Covered

Chapter One argues that the contemporary church has simply inserted 'God' or 'Jesus' as one more product in the marketplace of objects promising to fill existential lack, thereby reproducing rather than challenging consumer ideology. Drawing on the Lacanian account of how the vague anxiety of structural separation gets coupled with a concrete object that seems to promise its resolution, Rollins demonstrates that the Idol is not defined by any intrinsic property of the object but by the absolute value projected onto it. Whether the Idol is wealth, fame, a romantic partner, or Jesus Christ, the logic is identical: the subject acts as if this object would make them whole and complete. Rollins introduces the key structural claim that will organize the entire book — that 'Original Sin' and 'Idolatry' are internally related concepts naming the gap and the fantasy-response to the gap respectively. The chapter concludes by noting that this insatiable drive cannot be satisfied by any object, because the gap it responds to is not caused by any real loss but is constitutive of subjectivity itself.

Key concepts: Lack, Objet petit a, Fantasy, Idolatry, Jouissance, Das Ding

Part One: The Old Creation — Ch. 2: On Not Getting What You Want, and Liking It

This chapter examines the dynamics of the Idol in more detail, focusing on the structural impossibility of its satisfaction and the strategies subjects employ to sustain the fantasy in the face of repeated disappointment. Rollins argues, following Lacan's account of desire, that the Idol is necessarily ungraspable — the moment it is reached, the surplus jouissance that animated pursuit disappears, as illustrated by the Austin Powers scene where villains' ecstatic laughter at securing a billion dollars deflates into embarrassment. Hollywood romance narratives are similarly analyzed as fantasy-machines that provide vicarious satisfaction by cutting the film at the moment of the 'kiss,' never showing what happens next. The Bridges of Madison County is read as the rare film that acknowledges this logic: Francesca's decision to stay with her husband preserves the Idol-status of the affair precisely by keeping it unattained, ensuring the fantasy of perfect satisfaction survives intact.

The chapter then introduces three strategies subjects use to avoid confronting the structural failure of the Idol: deferral (believing the Idol will eventually satisfy if pursued correctly), repression (pretending to oneself that satisfaction has been achieved), and disavowal (refusing to accept the evidence of failure altogether). Rollins illustrates repression through Žižek's reading of WikiLeaks — its power lies not in revealing unknown information but in forcing acknowledgment of what was already known but refused — and disavowal through the analogy of a partner ignoring obvious infidelity. The chapter also introduces the structural claim that the Law/prohibition is not the obstacle to jouissance but its very generator, mirroring Lacan's reading of Paul in Seminar VII: it is the command 'do not covet' that produces the covetous desire.

Key concepts: Jouissance, Fantasy, Fetishistic Disavowal, Repression, Lost Object, Point de capiton Notable examples: Austin Powers; The Bridges of Madison County; WikiLeaks / Žižek on repression

Part One: The Old Creation — Ch. 3: Hiding Behind the Mask That We Are

Chapter Three turns from the structural dynamics of the Idol to the structure of the subject who pursues it, arguing that the ego-image — the self-narrative through which we understand ourselves — functions as a defensive mask covering over unconscious 'real' beliefs (what Rollins calls 'Unbelief'). The anecdote of a theologian who attends a masked orgy without a mask, explaining that 'what you see is my mask,' crystallizes the argument: the face we present to the world is already a disguise, not for some deeper authentic self, but for the operative system of values and behaviors that actually drives us. Real beliefs are not found at the level of the ego but are more like the operating system of a computer — they manifest in what we actually do, not what we say we believe. This leads to a Lacanian account of interpellation: before we have a sense of individuality, we are already being called by name and immersed in a story about ourselves, and we identify with this story because it covers over the reality of our helplessness and weakness.

The chapter develops the concept of 'Unbelief' as a specific form of fetishistic disavowal applied to moral and religious identity: our stated beliefs ('I love animals,' 'I care about children') function precisely to protect us from confronting the evidence of our actual commitments (buying factory-farmed products, wearing sweatshop clothing). Rollins also analyzes the four typical responses to the Other whose worldview threatens our own — consumption (integrating the other into our framework), exclusion (rejecting them), toleration (acknowledging difference while protecting one's own position), and agreement (a pseudo-openness that nevertheless keeps one's own foundations intact) — before proposing a fifth, 'literalistic listening,' which allows the Other's discourse to genuinely rupture one's own presuppositions. The chapter closes with the figure of the zombie from The Walking Dead as a figure for drive beyond the pleasure principle: the virus is already within us, not a foreign agent.

Key concepts: Splitting of the Subject, Fetishistic Disavowal, Ideology, Identification, Repression, Unconscious Notable examples: The Walking Dead (comic); Theologian-at-the-orgy anecdote

Part Two: The New Creation — Ch. 4: Be Part of the Problem, Not the Solution

The first chapter of Part Two addresses the ideological dimension of political freedom, arguing — drawing on Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle and the figure of the drive-as-zombie — that a system that offers the freedom to pursue satisfaction is a more insidious form of oppression than overt prohibition, because it forecloses any position of inner protest and installs the superego command to enjoy. True freedom, Rollins argues, is not freedom to pursue satisfaction but freedom from the very pursuit of satisfaction — a formulation he re-reads as the genuine 'Good News' of the Gospel. The chapter introduces the theological figure of Christ as one 'without the lack' — lacking the constitutive gap that drives the Idol-seeking structure — and uses the analogy of money (which has no intrinsic value and yet represents all value) to explain how Christ on the Cross could be 'without sin' and yet take on all sin: just as money represents value without possessing it, Christ represents the universal lack without being constituted by it.

This provides the christological pivot for the book's central theological argument: the Crucifixion is not a sacrifice that satisfies a debt or fills the gap, but rather the event in which one who lacked the lack takes on the lack in its most acute form (as witnessed in the cry of dereliction: 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'). In this way, the Cross is not a solution to alienation within the existing framework but a rupture of the framework itself. The chapter also introduces the concept of debt as structuring both monetary and religious systems, anticipating the later argument that the Crucifixion cancels the debt-logic rather than repaying it.

Key concepts: Jouissance, Drive, Surplus-jouissance, Lack, Anxiety, Sublimation Notable examples: Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Bonhoeffer, Selected Writings

Part Two: The New Creation — Ch. 5: Trash of the World

Chapter Five extends the christological argument to the question of meaning and symbolic identity, reading the Crucifixion as a structural 'splinter' that disrupts all master narratives rather than establishing a new one. Rollins emphasizes the original sociopolitical meaning of crucifixion in Roman culture as the ultimate sign of exclusion from all divinely sanctioned social, political, and religious orders — the crucified person was cast outside every system of meaning. The bitter irony of Christendom, following Kierkegaard, is that this symbol of absolute exclusion has been integrated into a new system of meaning that uses it to justify inclusion/exclusion on different terms. The genuinely radical act would be to recover the Cross's original function as a sign that stands outside all tribal meaning-systems.

This sets up the chapter's central argument about Pauline universalism, developed in dialogue with Badiou's Saint Paul. Rollins argues that Paul's 'neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female' does not erase concrete differences but introduces a cut within every identity group — separating those who hold their identity lightly from those who cling to it as absolute. The new community formed around the Crucifixion is defined not by positive shared characteristics but by the shared impotence of all concrete identities. The biblical stories of the Canaanite woman (Matthew 15:21–28) and the Wedding Banquet parable (Matthew 22:2–13) are read as enactments of this Paulinian cut: in each, the expected identity-based distinction is overturned by a new division that runs through every group, inviting those who can hold identity lightly to a place at the table regardless of tribal origin.

Key concepts: Universality, Master Signifier, Point de capiton, Ideology, Identification, Sublime Notable examples: Matthew 15:21–28 (Canaanite woman); Matthew 22:2–13 (Wedding Banquet parable); Badiou, Saint Paul; Kierkegaard, Attack upon Christendom

Part Two: The New Creation — Ch. 6: The Fool Says in His Heart, 'There Is Knowing God'

Chapter Six addresses the mechanics of ideological captivity and the conditions of genuine transformation. Rollins argues that intellectual understanding of one's oppression is insufficient for liberation because the subject did not enter the ideological system through intellectual consent — it is constitutive of the texture of being itself. Transformation therefore requires a change at the level of being, which Paul calls becoming 'a new creation.' The chapter traces what this looks like through the fictional figure of Finn, a recent Christian convert who initially embraces Christ as the ultimate Idol (the supreme object that will make him whole and provide certainty), illustrating how the first stage of Christian faith typically reproduces the Idol-structure rather than dismantling it. The crisis comes when the Idol-Christ fails to deliver — when the believer realizes that converting to Christianity has not resolved the underlying gap — and the question becomes whether this crisis is met with disavowal, repression, or genuine acceptance.

Rollins uses the BBC series The Office and the character of David Brent as a sustained analogy: Brent, like the ideological subject, represses and disavows his tragic situation (a lonely, self-deceiving man) by clinging to an unrealistic self-image. Genuine transformation begins only when Brent accepts his comic-tragic situation — gets 'the cosmic joke' — rather than defending against it. This acceptance of the 'crucifixion experience' (confronting the fiction that has ruled one's life) is described as the condition for entering the 'New Creation.' The chapter also engages Ecclesiastes as a proto-crucifixion text: Solomon's despairing cry 'Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless' is read as structurally parallel to Christ's cry of dereliction, and the book's scattered affirmations of simple pleasures (eating, drinking, work) are read as anticipations of the Resurrection-logic of finding joy within brokenness rather than beyond it. The chapter closes with love, developed through Badiou and Paul, as an existential refusal of nihilism: the 'as if' gesture of investing the world with meaning and beauty not because the evidence demands it but as a protest against living in accordance with the wisdom that nothing matters.

Key concepts: Ideology, Fetishistic Disavowal, Repression, Fantasy, Das Ding, Sublimation Notable examples: The Office (BBC, David Brent); Ecclesiastes; 1 Corinthians (Paul); Matthew 10:34–39

Part Three: The New Collective — Ch. 7: I Need Your Eyes in Order to See Myself

Part Three shifts from the individual to the collective, asking what kinds of communities and practices can institutionalize the transformation described in Part Two. Chapter Seven focuses on the problem of genuine encounter with the Other — that is, encounters that actually rupture the subject's fantasy of self-transparency rather than being domesticated into pseudo-openness. Rollins critiques the common evangelical practice of 'apologetic booths' at which Christians apologize for the church's historical failures, arguing that this gesture allows the community to experience a managed sense of openness while protecting the tribal identity it claims to be questioning. The practical test is simple: do we actually read books, befriend people, and seek out voices that genuinely challenge our foundational beliefs, or do we only engage with 'the other' in highly regulated, safe environments that ensure our core commitments remain untouched?

Against this, Rollins proposes a set of 'Dis-courses' — contemplative practices designed to create genuine decentering encounters. The Last Supper and the Evangelism Project are described as events that function as Lacanian-style ruptures of the subject's fantasy of self-transparency, forcing participants to confront an internal gap between self-image and actual commitments. Rollins frames these not as threats to faith but as expressions of it: accepting unknowing and finitude, he argues following the logic of the Incarnation, is what it means to 'become like God,' since what the Incarnation reveals is that divinity embraces limitation. Doubt and self-critique are re-described as intrinsic to faith rather than its negation.

Key concepts: Fantasy, The big Other, Identification, Anxiety, Gap, Objet petit a Notable examples: The Last Supper (Dis-course); Evangelism Project; Stacy Title, The Last Supper (film)

Part Three: The New Collective — Ch. 8: Destroying Christianity and Other Christian Acts

Chapter Eight develops the argument that the church, rather than dissolving the Idol-structure, typically perpetuates it — either by disavowing the collapse of the Idol (offering ever-renewed promises of certainty and satisfaction) or by repressing it (pushing the crisis of faith underground). Rollins argues that genuine liberation cannot come from an external critique of the system but only through an immanent collapse from within — a logic he identifies with the structure of the Crucifixion itself. The church that proclaims the Cross while reconstituting the Idol-framework through its own institutional identity is engaged in a structural contradiction that can only be resolved by allowing the Idol to collapse from within. This is what Rollins calls 'destroying Christianity as a Christian act': not attacking the faith from the outside but enacting its own deepest logic.

The chapter also introduces the theme of divine absence as a constitutive feature of faith. Christ's cry of dereliction — 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' — is read not as an exceptional moment of crisis but as the paradigmatic form of Christian existence: the absence of God as object is brought into the very heart of the faith, not as something to be overcome but as something to be inhabited. This re-frames atheism and the critique of religion not as enemies of faith but as its internal voices, setting up the Atheism for Lent practice described in the following chapter.

Key concepts: Ideology, Fetishistic Disavowal, Point de capiton, The big Other, Sublimation, Das Ding Notable examples: Atheism for Lent; Omega Course; Westphal, Suspicion and Faith; Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion

Part Three: The New Collective — Ch. 9: Want to Lose Belief? Join the Church

The final chapter presents the most fully developed ikon performance-liturgies as enactments of the book's argument. Three case studies — 'Fundamentalism,' 'The God Delusion,' and 'Pyro-theology' — are described in detail. 'Fundamentalism' stages a worship service that gradually reveals the authoritarian-violent content latent in the language of Christian exclusivism (phrases like 'I am the way, I am the truth' are accompanied by words projected over the worship song lyrics: 'It is my way or no way / I will crush my enemies beneath my feet / Love me or I will hate you'). The event then dramatizes the experience of being cast out of the community through the testimony of a former worship leader who lost his faith, followed by a silent woman who attempts to speak and cannot — a staging of the Pauline injunction that women remain silent in churches. Together, these performances expose how doctrinal certainty and religious identity function as ideological substitutes for genuine encounter, making visible the violence that idolatrous certainty always already contains.

The 'Pyro-theology' event stages the burning away of religious narratives through call-and-response liturgy, poetry, and the actual burning of Bible pages, enacting the argument that all religious narratives are 'but ash before the all-consuming fire of divine mystery.' The chapter's closing liturgical performance — the 'raveling' monologue — is particularly notable: a woman describes how a thread of doubt, once pulled, unraveled her entire belief structure, only to discover that 'unraveling and raveling' mean the same thing, and that faith's form is precisely this perpetual disentanglement rather than any stable doctrinal content. Rollins frames this conclusion as a structural reflection of the Lacanian insight that the subject is produced through lack and the endless deferral of the lost object: faith, like subjectivity itself, exists only in and through its own constitutive incompleteness.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Ideology, Point de capiton, Splitting of the Subject, Anxiety, Master Signifier Notable examples: ikon: Fundamentalism performance; ikon: The God Delusion performance; ikon: Pyro-theology performance; 1 Corinthians 14 (women silent in churches); Saint Cosmas quotation

Conclusion: A Faith Full of Signs and Wonders

The conclusion and closing liturgical materials perform rather than merely summarize the book's thesis. The closing performance script enacts the argument that faith is constituted through perpetual unraveling and doubt rather than through secure certainty — 'raveling' is reframed as the very form faith takes rather than its collapse. The acknowledgements confirm the book's theoretical debts to Lacan, Žižek, and others, and the author interview reiterates the central argument: the book's concern is not to change what people believe but to prompt reflection on why they believe what they believe, and whether their beliefs are functioning as protections against the embrace of unknowing and suffering. Rollins acknowledges that the practical path — seeking out communities that institutionalize mystery and dissatisfaction, practicing the Dis-courses — is genuinely difficult and has few models or financial support structures. The dedication ('amour courtois') signals that the book's account of love as courtly, asymptotic, never-fully-realized desire is not merely theoretical but existentially enacted.

Key concepts: Lack, Fantasy, Anxiety, Objet petit a, Desire, Gap Notable examples: ikon (Belfast faith community); Atheism for Lent; Omega Course

Main interlocutors

  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII
  • Slavoj Žižek
  • Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies
  • Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
  • Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
  • Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
  • Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism
  • Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
  • Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
  • Søren Kierkegaard, Attack upon Christendom
  • Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith
  • Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion
  • Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason
  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Selected Writings
  • Paul, Epistles (1 Corinthians, Galatians)
  • Ecclesiastes
  • Peter Rollins, Insurrection
  • Peter Rollins, The Orthodox Heretic

Position in the corpus

The Idolatry of God occupies a distinctive position in the Lacanian secondary corpus as a text that deliberately mediates between technical psychoanalytic theory and popular Christian theology and practice. Its closest theoretical neighbors are Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology and The Puppet and the Dwarf, from which it borrows the basic framework of ideology-as-fantasy and the reading of Christianity as the religion that stages its own critique; and Badiou's Saint Paul, from which it takes the concept of universalism as a cut within identities. Readers who have worked through these texts will recognize the theoretical architecture immediately, though Rollins deploys it with greater pastoral directness and liturgical concreteness than either Žižek or Badiou. The book also shares significant ground with Rollins' own Insurrection, which it both builds on and condenses. Within the Lacan primary corpus, the key background texts are Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) — particularly its account of das Ding, the Law's production of transgression, and sublimation — and the Mirror Stage essay. Readers new to Lacanian concepts would benefit from reading an introductory Žižek text (e.g., How to Read Lacan) before approaching this book, as Rollins assumes familiarity with the basic vocabulary without always defining it explicitly.

For readers coming from theology or religious studies, The Idolatry of God functions as an accessible entry point into the Lacanian analysis of religious ideology, and it is best read alongside Žižek's The Fragile Absolute and Marcus Pound's Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma for the broader context of psychoanalytic theology. Its practical-liturgical dimension — the ikon performance pieces and Dis-courses — sets it apart from every other text in the corpus and makes it uniquely relevant for readers interested in the application of Lacanian theory to community formation and aesthetic-political practice. It should be read after Insurrection (Rollins, 2011) for the full arc of his theological-psychoanalytic project.

Canonical concepts deployed