"Christians Make Idols Too"

“An idol is something within creation that is inflated to function as a substitute for God. All sorts of things are potential idols, depending only on our attitudes and actions toward them. If this is so, how do we determine when something is becoming or has become an idol?

Idolatry may not involve explicit denials of God’s existence or character. It may well come in the form of an overattachment to something that is, in itself, perfectly good. The crucial warning is this: As soon as out loyalty to anything leads us to disobey God, we are in danger of making it an idol.

By this definition, all the obvious candidates are potentially idolatrous – wealth, fame, pleasure, power, and so on. We can recognize ways in which we disobey God out of loyalty to them. But many nonobvious things can work as idols as well, causing us to ignore or distort God’s commands to us. For example, work, a commandment of God, can become an idol if it is pursued so exclusively that responsibilities to one’s family are ignored. Family, an institution of God Himself, can become an idol if one is so preoccupied with the family that no one outside of one’s own family is cared for. Being well-liked, a perfectly legitimate hope, becomes an idol if the attachment to it means that one never risks disapproval. Even evangelism, carrying out the Great Commission, can become an idol if people are misused – Christian or not Christian – in the zeal to do it”

Richard Keyes, No God But God, “The Idol Factory” p. 32-33