Self Love Can be a Way to Love God (it Doesn't Have to be "Idolatry")

Sure, sometimes people love themselves waaaay too much. I get it. However, God is in you, and so sometimes when you love your Self, you're also loving God.

All week I’ve been pushing back on an idea taught by many evangelicals in general (and Becket Cook in particular) that it is a form of idolatry for gay people to be true to themselves. They believe that the Self is corrupted by sin, and that if a gay person lives out their orientation then they are serving the Self (aka, a slave to sin), and thereby elevating their own desires and their own Selves, which is essentially worshiping something other than God, aka, idolatry.

I’ve already addressed why I think it’s incorrect to view the Self as corrupted by sin.

And then I tried to get at the absurdity of picking on “fulfillment of sexual desire” for a gay person as being uniquely wrong/sinful/etc.

Today, I’ll wrap it up by saying this: Loving yourself is not idolatry.

Loving Your Self is Not the Same as Making Yourself Like God

In the opening article of this miniseries I gave a definition for idolatry:

Idolatry, plainly be put, is the worship of something that is not God as though it is God. And by “worship” here, we might say, “the valuation of something as being Ultimate.”

Therefore, for the sake of brevity, let’s say that idolatry is the act of making something (or someone) the most important thing in our life. We practice idolatry when we make something or someone a kind of “god” (aka, the Ultimate) and we “worship” it (aka, give all our energies to it).

According to Cook, when a gay person lives as a gay person they are essentially making themselves a kind of god by worshiping their own desires and serving their Self.

What’s less to clear to me is just how far this “love of self = idolatry” equation extends.

Similar to yesterday when I pushed on the whole, “it’s wrong to give in to your desires” idea (which desires? when? how do you know when it’s okay and when it’s sinful?), I also can’t quite grasp what in particular would fall under the category of “loving yourself” in the bad/wrong ways (at least, according to evangelicals like Cook).

If a person gets a massage, is that idolatry?
If they exercise?
If they eat a delicious meal, or call a loved one, or go to therapy?

All of those are ways to show love to your Self, but I’m assuming no one would make the claim that such activities rise to the level of worshiping yourself.

Fine. But let’s throw the pendulum to the other side and ask: Can we imagine someone putting so much time, energy, and attention on themselves that it would be reasonable to describe it as a kind of self-worship?

Yeah, actually, I do think that’s a legitimate scenario. I think we’ve seen examples of this kind of megalomania in history, on film, in pop culture, and so on. So I’m not making the claim that it’s ridiculous to ever accuse a person of this kind of idolatry (aka, making some thing/one like unto a god in your life).

But I am questioning the sanity, the logic, and the theology behind declaring that if a gay person chooses to live in alignment with their sexual orientation, then it is automatically placed in the “idolatry” bin.

Two more thoughts.