Worshipping idols instead of God is an old sin – after Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, camped at the foot of Mount Sinai, the Israelites built a Golden Calf, worshipped it not God.  Even Solomon, after he married pagan wives, built altars to pagan idols.

These days ideologies – creeds – have taken the place of stone or wooden statues. Vladimir Lenin worshipped Marxism. Many people now put their faith in political movements.  After he gets elected a politician thinks, I did that. It was me. I won that election. But a politician believing he had the power to elect himself is vanity – a step down the road to idolatry.

And, at the end of the day, idols come with the downside. When an idol loses an election his followers see their world collapsing – that breeds fear and, in the next breath, breeds anger.  Followers see their enemy not as wrong, or flawed, or as lost souls, but as evil. And that sounds a lot like politics today too.