Photography by Barbara Johnston
I meet William Cavanaugh ’84 one summer morning in his DePaul University office in Chicago. Knowing the theology professor’s research interest in contemporary idolatries, I nonetheless have worn mine on my sleeve, so to speak: a Notre Dame monogrammed button-down concealing the Bruce Springsteen T-shirt I will wear to a concert at Wrigley Field. Small talk about the Fighting Irish and the Boss, as well as Cavanaugh’s own casual attire, a T-shirt and shorts, ease my apprehension about his assessment of my idolatries. I still try to watch my words.
Forty years after his Notre Dame graduation, Cavanaugh has authored or edited 16 books, written more than 120 articles and made some 300 presentations around the world. After more than a decade at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, he has taught at DePaul since 2010 and is director of its Center for World Catholicism & Intercultural Theology. Bringing his faith to bear on “the Church’s encounter with social, political and economic realities,” he has dissected the free market and the irony that so many participants in it feel unfree and coerced. He has dismantled arguments that mass violence is driven primarily by religion. And he has identified in secular society many idolatrous substitutes for the religions it seeks to displace.
Colleagues readily express admiration. In his “expansive critiques of the ‘water’ in which we swim,” says Sheryl Overmyer ’01, associate professor of Catholic studies at DePaul, “Bill is constantly drawing attention to the vibrant witness of others. I can’t think of another contemporary Catholic theologian who is so grand in their modest approach.” Michael Baxter ’83M.Div., a visiting associate professor at Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life and friend from their shared graduate student days at Duke University, says Cavanaugh’s work has been “field-shaping.”
“Bill has got a place that is securely his own,” says Michael Hollerich ’69, a professor emeritus of theology at St. Thomas. “He’d hate for me to say this, but he’s got a brand.”
Sidestepping that marketing term, Cavanaugh might distill what he’s about as Christian resistance to idolatrous systems.
Much of his work emerges from his fundamental understanding of God’s love. “It’s a weird story,” he tells me, speaking of Jesus with palpable awe. “This guy is God incarnate. There’s a God who loves us and wants to be with us,” who “wants to be among material things like the human body.”
Then he adds, almost breathlessly, “And God likes it!”
I’ve never come close to feeling such an enviably transcendent gut reaction to the Incarnation. Cavanaugh’s mission seems to be to challenge people with one powerful question: “What difference would it make if we actually believe it is all true?”
Awaiting the 2023-24 academic year, Cavanaugh looked forward to the publication of his latest book, The Uses of Idolatry. Much of his work has pointed in its direction, starting with his first book, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (1998). While he sees numerous examples of idolatry, “an inordinate devotion to what is not God,” in contemporary life, he offers an antidote that is both ancient and current.
His new book characteristically draws on disparate sources from St. Augustine, Karl Marx and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor to recent popes, but it opens with novelist David Foster Wallace’s 2005 college commencement admonition: “In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship . . . is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”
Or, in a Cavanaugh distillation: “Worship money and you’ll never have enough. Worship your body and you will always feel ugly.” And so on, a litany of ailments that call not just for diagnosis but also a cure.
While he acknowledges it’s impossible to withdraw from the economy, he encourages ‘overcoming our detachment’ by producing more of what we need, by baking bread and cooking scratch meals, for instance, rather than eating by Uber.
In the late 19th century, Cavanaugh’s ancestors on his mother’s side fled Germany during the Kulturkampf, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s attempt to exert state authority over the Catholic Church and suppress Catholicism’s public presence and influence. Their experience may have impacted Cavanaugh more than he realized.
While his parents grew up in a “thick” immigrant culture surrounded by other Catholic families, practices and symbols, Cavanaugh feels that his own upbringing in an assimilating American Church revealed a “thinned” bond. One might hear his future mentor Stanley Hauerwas’ judgment in this appraisal: The Church went out to convert America, but America converted the Church. Devotional objects adorned the Cavanaughs’ suburban Chicago home (until, as teens, William and his sister secretly discarded many of them), but his family’s “practice of the faith was primarily going to church on Sunday.”
Still, he felt Catholicism held out the hope of something “less banal than suburban life filled with Wonder Bread and Gilligan’s Island.” It captured his interest, he says, “precisely for the way in which it was indigestible to mainstream American culture. So, it became my little way of being outside of the mainstream.”
Going to Notre Dame seemed inevitable. His “diehard” Polish-Irish father took him to his first Fighting Irish football game when Cavanaugh was in middle school. “When I got into Cornell, Dad was interested,” he says, “but when I got into Notre Dame, it was a celebration. My sister made a cake.”
He considered an engineering major, but his patriotic middle-class perspective soon met challenges. An introductory class in international relations, he says, “spun my head around” regarding America’s ostensibly benign contributions in world affairs. His first theology class was so intriguing that he switched majors.
It may not, however, have prepared him for Hauerwas, a force in Notre Dame’s theology department from 1970 to 1984.
In London for a semester, Cavanaugh took Hauerwas’ class. “Stanley was a foul-mouthed Texan, famous for saying outrageous things and cussing in class,” Cavanaugh says. His message was “a radical gospel, where the Church is not meant to assimilate to the common culture but to show the kind of world God wants.” Hauerwas, he says, “rocked my world.”
After graduating, Cavanaugh did a stint with the Holy Cross Associates in Colorado. He taught religion in a Catholic high school and worked in a soup kitchen. “Being exposed to a much more activist faith, and one in which social justice was in the forefront, was a really powerful experience,” he says. He also developed a lifelong friendship with John Kellenberg ’84, and they discovered a shared passion for hiking.
Departing Colorado, Cavanaugh studied theology at Cambridge, working with the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Next, rejoining the Holy Cross Associates, he went to Chile, thinking “Latin America was where the Church was most alive” — that maybe it was the one Hauerwas talked about, a Church “that would help us live differently and resist the evils of the age.” (Looking back, he acknowledges that the Latin American Church was changing — plagued, like most of the global Church, with what would later be exposed as corruption and scandal.)
The Chile that Cavanaugh encountered was governed by Augusto Pinochet, a military dictator who had seized power in a 1973 coup that removed a democratically elected government. Pinochet’s administration killed or “disappeared” thousands of people and arrested and tortured tens of thousands more. “Our next-door neighbor’s husband had been arrested when their son was very young,” Cavanaugh says. “He was never seen again.”
Yet all was not tragic. The associates “got a real experience of community,” he says. “Chileans are really sociable and friendly. . . . It was great and joyful in that way.”
In a 1988 Holy Cross Associates newsletter, Cavanaugh pondered what a friend had told him before he left for South America: He’d do well in Chile, but it might be better if he failed. He wrote, “What my friend was talking about was the sense of powerlessness and interdependence which must be present before any real giving and receiving . . . of God can take place.”
Today, he reflects, “You think you’re going to help people, and you discover that you’re just there to be with people and witness what’s going on and accompany people and be accompanied by people. That, I think, was the most concrete experience of chaos and mercy that I’ve had.”
Recognizing life’s “unmanageability” became key to understanding the Christian’s relationship with God. Cavanaugh befriended the addicts who hung out in front of his house in Santiago, and they invited him to a speakeasy. Inside, he learned, the bar doubled as a brothel. Its gun-toting owner was suspicious of the gringo, and Cavanaugh thought he was going to die “in a house of prostitution.” But when the owner learned he worked at the nearby church, his tone changed. He and his fiancée wanted to get married there, he said, and he hoped the young man would put in a good word.
Through it all, the Chilean Church organized, protested and collected victims’ stories, the last through the Vicariate of Solidarity, an archdiocesan agency established to aid the regime’s victims. Notre Dame’s Center for Civil and Human Rights obtained the vicariate’s archives and hired Cavanaugh to compile it into a database. While reading and inputting reports of torture “all day, every day” caused him nightmares, he says, it also became a “catalyst for much of my future work.”
Social justice remained central to Cavanaugh’s interests at Duke, where he pursued his doctorate in theology. During graduate school, he met Tracy Rowan, his future wife, who had been living in a Catholic Worker house and earned a master’s degree in social work at the University of North Carolina. Later they would help start a Catholic Worker house in St. Paul, Minnesota, and get involved in their Chicago parish’s homeless and migrant ministries.
They would also raise three sons: Finnian, Declan and Eamon. At Notre Dame, Finnian Cavanaugh ’20 would complete the engineering career path his father had left behind.
At Duke, the young William Cavanaugh reconnected with Hauerwas. He initially resisted writing his dissertation on his Chilean experiences, but Hauerwas pressed him, saying, “Oh, hell, Bill. Write where your passion is.” That work resulted in Torture and Eucharist.
The vicariate accounts “made it clear the torture victims rarely had information the police wanted,” Cavanaugh says. Instead, torture “was really a kind of liturgy or theater meant to sow fear in the people.” Accompanying the oppression, Pinochet imposed severe neoliberal economic reforms that enriched a few and created steep inequalities. Cavanaugh often repeats the Nobel Prize-winning American economist and Pinochet lodestar Milton Friedman’s macabre metaphor that Chile’s economy needed “shock treatment,” which was what the regime’s torture victims were physically experiencing.
In Chile, the Church became a locus for resistance and hope, which Cavanaugh saw represented in the Eucharist. In the book, he asserts that if “the Eucharist produces a communion stronger than that of any nation-state, then my identity as a member of the body of Christ is ultimately more important than my country of birth.” Summarizing his argument today, he explains: “Torture atomizes the body politic, and the Eucharist is the alternative liturgy that brings people back together in the body politic of Christ.”
Often described as a political theologian, Cavanaugh resists sub-labels, preferring the medieval sense of theology as the “queen of sciences”: “Since it was about God,” he explains, “it was about everything.” Broadly, he says, he aims to break down boundaries between believers and nonbelievers. “We all believe in something,” he asserts. “Let’s have a conversation.”
Cavanaugh soon turned his attention to consumer culture, but belief, acknowledged by the believer or not, remained a focus. Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (2008) scrutinizes certain commonly held economic beliefs such as faith in the invisible hand of the market.
“A central question of the book is, what’s a free market?” Cavanaugh says. “It’s not, are you for or against the free market? It’s, when is a market free? We need a more holistic idea of when a market is free and need theological criteria for that.” Beyond simply seeking corporations’ freedom from state interference, leaders in the public and private sectors, as well as philosophers and economists, should consider other factors, such as when a company’s freedom impinges upon that of its employees and customers. Markets might also foster our freedom to pursue an ultimate good, such as human flourishing — about which the classic free market is agnostic, maybe even antagonistic.
As for consumers, some of our lack of freedom stems from the economy’s removal from the material world, Cavanaugh argues. “It seems magic: Order, and it appears, abracadabra, on your doorstep.” Disincarnated, “the economy detaches us from product, production and producers.” How products are made, and who makes them, is obscured, and we are sold brands on purportedly transcendent attributes such as social status, self-expression and a branded sense of belonging, not to mention beauty, sex and power.
While he acknowledges it’s impossible to withdraw from the economy, he encourages “overcoming our detachment” by producing more of what we need, by baking bread and cooking scratch meals, for instance, rather than eating by Uber. Buying locally offers prospects for human relationships with producers, such as the Minnesota farmer from whom Cavanaugh bought grass-fed beef, an interaction that also gleaned news from the farm. A preponderance of such choices would contribute to a sane economy that “enacts the Gospel in everyday life” and “reconnects with the material world”: both the humans who produce what we consume and the created world from which it all comes.
Ultimately, Cavanaugh sees the path to detachment in that ancient understanding from which his book takes its title. “In consuming the body of Christ, we are transformed into the body of Christ, drawn into the divine life in communion with other people,” he writes, drawing on Scripture and Augustine. We consume the Eucharist, “but we are thereby consumed by God.”
Cavanaugh brews his own beer, an avocation born long before his critique of consumerism. Michael Budde, a political scientist in DePaul’s Catholic studies program, says that while Cavanaugh deflects praise for his scholarly accomplishments, “he is genuinely pleased when someone says they like his home-brewed beer.” Finn Cavanaugh chuckles about his father’s “nerdy passion,” remembering the detailed explanation he once got on the chemistry of “fixing Chicago water” for brewing.
Alongside her husband’s “exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting, knowledge of beer and beer making,” Tracy Cavanaugh sets his encyclopedic knowledge of 1970s and ’80s pop music. “Give him a word or short phrase that happens to appear in a song from those eras, and you’ll be ‘treated’ to three verses of that song, a cross reference to two other songs that use a similar rhyme scheme, and maybe an explanation of why that key change is either genius or not.”
“Bill is deep like the ocean,” his friend John Kellenberg observes. “But at the same time, he doesn’t take himself overly seriously. And so, he can have remarkable moments of clarity in thought, but another time he’s walking down a trail singing ‘Billy, Don’t Be a Hero’ and quoting Monty Python.”
Before long, Cavanaugh got back to thinking about politics. Since the late Middle Ages, political theorists from Hobbes and Locke to John Rawls and Francis Fukuyama, not to mention New Atheists like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, have perpetuated the argument that religious belief leads to violence, that only the emergence of the modern secular state could have controlled such passions. The theologian confronted this notion in The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (2009).
Inauspiciously perhaps, he began his research while he was a visiting fellow at Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies in 2001. “Someone came to tell me planes had hit the Twin Towers,” he says. “All of a sudden, there was a lot of work on religion causing violence,” with little attention paid to other potential causes.
A book-length argument called for deep historical research and the need to ask what religion even is. He found historians’ opinions on sectarian responsibility for wars hardly unanimous. Wars haven’t neatly reflected credal lines — Catholics have often fought Catholics, for instance, or aligned with Protestants for exclusively secular purposes. Further, prior to the late Middle Ages, the distinction between the religious and the secular, between faith and politics as we know them, didn’t exist; the motivations of church and state were unified.
As nation-states emerged, they needed power independent of the Church. Civil authorities, Cavanaugh argues, scapegoated religion by claiming it tended toward violence, even as they pushed belief into a private sphere. Many customary functions of the Church began moving over to the state. Cavanaugh’s forebears’ flight from Bismarck’s Kulturkampf suggests this shift was a long process that provoked violence on both sides of the secular-religious divide. War, meanwhile, grew more frequent and more lethal.
Critics of religion have also moved the goal posts of the argument by defining “religion” to include communism, capitalism, nationalism and other absolutist ideologies because of the “transcendent” experiences they evoke. Ultimately, Cavanaugh asserts, citing the carnage of 20th-century wars fought largely by secular and atheist nation-states, “religion” becomes so malleable in these viewpoints as to have no analytical utility, and the presumption that religion is uniquely violent becomes insupportable.
‘What sank in was the weird cannibalistic idea of eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ. It’s oddly gothic, but it can resist the disincarnation of our culture’ because it’s incarnational — and communal.
As he pursued groundbreaking work, Cavanaugh continued teaching. Three weeks after we met, his school year started with Immersion Week and a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday-through-Friday class on immigrant Catholicism with first-year students. They visited Chicago neighborhoods and Catholic churches. At St. Sabina, they saw an outdoor display of pictures of neighborhood residents killed by gun violence. The project director pointed to her own son’s photo. At Mary, Mother of God, a parishioner took them to encampments where they had “good encounters with homeless folks.” For Cavanaugh, such experiences drive home how learning is embodied by introducing students to people in the places where they live, work and move.
His teaching extends beyond campus. “Bill has always been the spiritual compass of our family,” Tracy says. “His message to his children, and to all of us, is that we do not earn God’s love. We have God’s love. When we fully realize that, accept that, we are freed to be the people we want to be. We are freed to love others.”
Consequently, service and justice have been part of family life. Even walks in the wilderness are enlightening. “We talked about all sorts of stuff, about God and about faith and about a whole host of things,” Kellenberg says, recalling 40 years of hikes with his friend. “Bill is not a preachy guy in terms of trying . . . to change somebody’s views, but he’s a font of knowledge. . . . Coming from a very churchy family like I do, I never want to go to my aunt and say, ‘I’ve got some real issues here,’ but with Bill I’m able to do that.”
And then there’s this conversation with his summer visitor. Trying to explain to me the transcendent lure of consumer products, the professor says, “It’s worth exploring this idea that there actually is something out there — that the reason there’s a God-shaped hole in our hearts is that there’s an actual God out there.”
He smiles. “As Bruce would say, ‘Everybody’s got a hungry heart.’”
Unfortunately, the heart often looks for transcendence in all the wrong places. Which brings us back to The Uses of Idolatry. Disputing the German sociologist Max Weber’s argument that the world became “disenchanted” as secularization forced gods and magic to retreat, Cavanaugh argues that enchantment instead relocated to other realms, creating what the historian Eugene McCarraher calls “misenchantment” — and fertile ground for misdirected worship.
So, the new book conducts an interdisciplinary investigation into the evolution of modern idolatries such as nationalism and consumerism.
Many describe nationalism, which promotes faith in a “divinized we” and evokes a mythologized past, as a kind of civil religion. Given recent concerns about Christian nationalism, Cavanaugh questions the possibility of fidelity to more than one creed, echoing Jesus’ admonition about serving both God and mammon.
Conversely, he says, consumerism is essentially self-worship that seeks transcendence in the purchase of products. While no one admits their own susceptibility to marketing manipulations, corporations place large bets on their extraordinary data about our habits and interests. As Cavanaugh notes elsewere, it’s not what you say you believe that matters, it’s what you do — and we “just do it.”
Uses concludes with “tools to resist idolatry.” Recalling his first book’s focus on the unifying benefits of receiving the body of Christ, Cavanaugh locates these tools in the Incarnation, sacramentality and a reacquaintance with the material world as created gift. He acknowledges, however, that the Eucharist doesn’t automatically do things. “It depends on how we enact it.”
The “unmanageability” of our encounter with God rescues us from idolatry, which he understands as an attempt to bring the divine under our control. “We always make gods in our own image. So the antidote to idolatry, then, has got to be a God who is beyond our grasp and control,” he says. “We really want to worship the God we want to worship, rather than the God we actually have. So we want to make a God that’s manageable and will make us feel secure, and that’s not always the God we have. I think that’s the message of Jesus and the prophets.”
What should the average Christian take from Cavanaugh’s analysis?
“Encouragement,” he hopes. “We Catholics are not the weirdos who still worship in an age in which worship has been eclipsed.” If all humans worship one thing or another as Cavanaugh believes we do, “then the gap between ‘believers’ and ‘nonbelievers’ is not what we think.” Much depends on our capacity for self-critique: “We should look at the way we live and ask to what extent we are idolaters.”
In the Old Testament, he notes, idolatry critiques were mostly directed at Israel by its own prophets. And despite the professor’s clean-shaven, well-kempt, humorous demeanor — traits that don’t shout “Ezekiel” or “Jeremiah” — there’s still something of the prophet about him.
He recalls Acts 17 when, despite being “exasperated” by Athens, the “city full of idols,” St. Paul recognized in its idolatries the people’s desire to believe — as well as a chance to redirect that belief toward the true God. Cavanaugh shares Paul’s affectionate sympathy, seeing in modern idolatries a desire for transcendence that might be turned toward God.
That night at Wrigley, I belt out Springsteen’s songs a little more self-consciously, but also with more gusto than I ever feel when singing hymns in church. I won’t call it a religious experience, but it is deeply felt — transcendent, maybe — and I pray that, like Paul’s Athenians, there might be hope for me.
“If I have a main focus in my career,” Cavanaugh had said, “it’s trying to make the connections between the faith I was brought up in and the regular practice of the sacraments and whatever virtues go along with that — making the connection between that and what you might call the real world or social justice.” In this vein, he sees the Eucharist, saints and works of mercy as both central aspects of Catholic faith and forms of resistance to the worst aspects of the dominant culture.
Central for him is the Eucharist and, more precisely, Jesus. “What sank in was the weird cannibalistic idea of eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ,” he said. “It’s oddly gothic, but it can resist the disincarnation of our culture” because it’s incarnational — and communal. “The body of Christ is both the bread and wine,” he continued, “and also the people in the church with you, and the homeless guy on the corner.
“And it’s God, it’s Jesus.
“If we actually believe all that, what does it mean for how we live and how we treat the material world and people marginalized by the economy? How do we deal with violence and wars? Who are our loyalties to?”
It’s a prophet’s question.
Patrick Gallagher lives and writes in Aberdeen, South Dakota.