Who is your real god?

One way to define a god is as the ultimate source of meaning and security in your life. But if you want to know someone’s true god, you can’t just ask him. People are notoriously ignorant of their own heart-motivations. So, the more reliable method is to look at his behavior.

Unfortunately, when things are going well, people with very different real devotions can all behave quite similarly. That’s why adversity has such a clarifying effect. If you want to decipher someone’s true religion, watch how he reacts to tragedy. First, he’ll try to ascribe meaning to the events. Then he’ll propose solutions to prevent the same thing from happening again in the future. Both of these will reveal his true god.

So, when the shootings in Tucson happened last week, lots of people inadvertently revealed their true god to be politics. While others were simply mourning, these politicalists immediately interpreted the calamity as the result of political factors and started calling for political changes. This was not a calculated strategy, as some have mistakenly thought. It was just the instinctive behavior of people under stress kneeling before their real deity.