It seems somewhat ironic that as many people in our culture become more spiritually aware of themselves and their surroundings, many, many others are being held back by their infatuations with sports heroes, sports teams, singers, movie stars, race-car drivers, television stars, authors, wrestlers, and many other types of people who are being marketed as something more than human, and people are buying into it.  It's a sad fact about modern culture that the day after a loss by a football or baseball team in any given city, particularly in an important game, productivity at work decreases as instances of violence and depression and suicide increase.

Why are we putting so much of ourselves into these people and teams?  They're just people, and most of them aren't all that great--they just happen to have a particular talent that other people can make money from, so they've been elevated into the public eye so that they can start bringing in the cash.  I've heard singers in church choirs who beat any singers I hear on the radio, but nobody's idolizing them.  But millions are idolizing the people in the public eye, treating them as if they're something more than human, somebody somehow superior to the rest of us.  But is it necessarily bad that we idolize them?

I don't believe that the writers of the Bible were concerned only with God getting angry with us if we were to worship false gods.  It seems pretty clear that they were also looking at the effect of the idolizing on those who were doing it.  When we idolize another person (or a team, or a cast of a TV show), we're giving that person or team power over us.  They become somehow more than human, and much of our own identity becomes wrapped up in who they are--or more accurately, who they want you to think they are.  And what happens to our self-image when we look to others to provide us with identity?  It diminishes, it lessens, and it grows very weak.  Watch the actions sometime of a person who consistently wears t-shirts of a particular pro wrestler, and see how much of that person's identity consists of posturing and acting just as he thinks the wrestler would.  That person isn't living a genuine life, but is basing his actions on what he thinks his idol would do.  It's hard to trust such a person's reactions or emotions, for we don't know if they're genuine or if they're based on his perception of what someone else would do.

It's important to keep in mind that these people are in the public spotlight because other people can make money off of them.  They want you to idolize them, for that will keep the ratings up, the sales up, the crowds large.  So they spend huge amounts of money trying to make you believe that these people are more than just people--they're somehow different than the rest of us.  But the only real difference between us and them is that they have a team of people behind them who are carefully crafting a public image (and who are very well paid to do so).  This public image is what we base our idolatry on, and it's rarely an accurate image.  But they know what sells, and they manipulate their audiences into believing that what they present is the "truth," that this image is the true character of the person.

Children are especially vulnerable to this type of marketing, but the marketers have learned that adults, too, are very vulnerable.  In fact, the vulnerable adults are more than happy to do their best to drag their kids into the idolatry, especially of sports teams, and the obsession becomes a family thing.

Of course, liking a football team isn't at all a bad thing.  Watching a game or two on Sunday can be a lot of fun.  But if my happiness depends on how "my" team does, then I have a problem.  If I spend my entire week just waiting for the big game to come, then I've spent an entire week out of touch with the present, focusing on a future event.  If I base my actions on what I think one of the WWF geeks would do, then I'm making a huge mistake, because I'm not practicing being myself, something that we all should practice all the time.  If I think that life is beautiful just because I happened to score a couple of tickets to a concert or a game, I need to look around and find out why I don't think life is beautiful all the time.

Idolatry takes away our focus on ourselves and our own lives, and it hurts us greatly when we shift our focus away from being the people we were created to be.  We need to recognize when we're living through others, living vicariously, or when our happiness depends on the actions or success of other people whom we will never meet.  We were made to be great people, too--it's just that most of us weren't made to spend our lives in the public eye.  For that, we can be thankful.

Center of Concern, The Road to Damascus:
A Challenge to the Churches of the World