The Dangers of Icon Deficiency

It's arguably the single most shameful episode in American Evangelicalism's brief (less than 100 years), unedifying, and hypocrisy-filled history: its disgraceful (not to mention idolatrous) besotment with a lying demagogue that critics have called their “Orange Jesus”.

In these waning days of the 2024 election, it's well worth asking: where does it come from?

It's part of a larger question: why are aniconic religions—Protestant Christianity, Islam, even Judaism, to some extent—so prone to personality cults?

You may be old enough to remember the cult of the Televangelists in the 1980s. (One could, of course, contend that Christianity itself is, in essence, a personality cult writ large, but let's leave that aside for now.) We've all seen footage of Muslim crowds carrying pictures of frowning mullahs. Hassidic Judaism has, since its inception, been organized around charismatic rebbes.

Here's my theory: they're suffering from icon deficiency.

Humans are, by nature, social animals. That's why human religion in its natural state abounds with what aniconists, in their spiritual poverty, opprobriously refer to as “idols.”

The icon serves as a focus, a zone of interaction between the human mind and spirit, and the Great Out There. Those to whom icons are forbidden automatically seek out some other focus. That's why, throughout history, they have repeatedly fallen prey to one charismatic and unscrupulous Fearless Leader after another.

For continued long-term good health, the human spirit requires a certain amount of Vitamin I.

Deficiency in this necessary nutrient, as we've seen all too well over the course of the last American decade, can be deadly.