Note: From, Baal and the Gods of More (Baker Academic, 2026). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
Before we got to Rome and Vatican City, we spent three days in Istanbul, the great city surrounded by water, balanced between Asia and Europe. Our tour guide in Istanbul seemed more addicted to thick Turkish coffee than cigarettes. She was elegant and learned. She met us wearing a stylish, fitted tweed coat with her neck delicately wrapped in a colorful, flowing scarf, the reds in her scarf highlighting the emerald in her jacket. After being taken into Hagia Sophia and shown the 1,600-year-old mosaic icons, we headed off to the Grand Bazaar. The Grand Bazaar is one of the largest and oldest covered markets in the world. There are stands and shops everywhere (over four thousand in total), selling everything.
I’m looking for some specific things. I’m hunting for cheap football (soccer) jerseys and hoodies (I leave with an Erling Haaland Manchester City jersey and a Paris Saint-Germain hoodie). I also need to procure a few large bags of Turkish delight. I’ve become addicted in a few short days to the gummy candy covered in powdered sugar. With the Turkish delight in my possession, our time in the bazaar is about finished.
After our time at Hagia Sophia, I ask our guide if she knows any shops selling icons. Her eyes light up and she takes us through a few back hallways and past some empty stands to two small shops. They are far off the beaten track. They have stacks of icons hundreds of years old, of all sizes, most going back to the nineteenth century. Almost all (except two small travel icons) are far outside our budget. There are so many of Mary and the child. But I’m particularly drawn to the ones with stunning depictions of the crucifixion.
They are so beautiful in a backward way. Fully captivating. They jump at me in this electric market of stalls of resources and wares. They convict me of my infatuation with the decadent and delicious. These icons of the crucifixion – the dead body of this child who was once in Mary’s arms, now nailed to wood – stand in such direct opposition to the scene where we’ve found them. The bazaar and its buzz of sales and sugar, its hum of resource obsession and market share, operates on a different logic. The bazaar is a place befitting Baal more than Yahweh, capital more than contemplation. The event of the cross in these icons communicates that it is no bazaar of goodies. Yet how bizarre that the cross proclaims that inside desolation and destruction comes the union of salvation. The cross reveals that, indeed, we find what saves us, not in getting the desserts we want but in confessing our deepest desert needs.
Christianity has struggled to heed the prophetic warnings of weird old Elijah. We have found it difficult to disentangle fertility from Yahweh, to separate the crucified child of Mary from the drives for resource growth and expanse (we’ve confused bizarre and broken for bazaar and lavish). It shouldn’t be so hard. The cross resists all signs and symbols of fertility. It is a shocking sign of execution, failure. The crucifixion (and the life that springs from it in the resurrection) opposes all drives for the security of resource gain. To put our hearts and minds on Jesus Christ and him crucified (1 Cor.2) is to place our imaginations and visions on something much different than the instruments of growth. Standing in the bazaar, the icons I’m holding remind me of the Isenheim Altarpiece painted by Matthias Grünewald. It would be nearly impossible to see this as a scene of fertility.
The cross will not allow us to hold resource fertility as the highest good of the church and truest measure of human life. To draw from Elijah’s imagery, the cross puts the desert into the body of Jesus himself. Jesus’s body becomes the very place where we meet the Father who ministers life out of all deserts of impossibility, making us all, by the Spirit, children of God (1 John 3:1). The cross is the impossible blooming of life out of death, newness out of the desert. It is so impossible that only the true God, not any human action, can do it. The cross brings forth a reality that comes not from the sweaty effort of fertility but from the consoling embrace of love and union – a relationality represented by Our Lady of Vladimir. The cross brings the Spirit who births again, out of impossibility, what cannot be born from a womb (John 3).
The cross judges all forms of human effort to produce fertility, trans-forming barrenness into life. Jesus is born breaking the familiar pattern of fertility and production (Luke 1). Mary’s virginity is not necessarily about her sexual purity but her location outside the drives and demands of the powers of fertility. Mary’s is a womb of impossibility, a result of the act of God, like Sarah and Hannah before her (Gen. 21; 1 Sam. 1). Their children are the fulfillment of promises, not resources. Mary is God’s chosen, the one God favors (Luke 1), for she is elect to bear a child impossibly, upending the vicious cycles of fertility, where children are but resources and women just the value of their productive wombs.
The cross communicates that we cannot save the church, just as the kings could not save Israel. But oh, how we’ve tried, like those kings, by our own efforts! As Jürgen Moltmann has said, “The theology of the cross cannot be much loved.” It is hard to love the desert. It’s hard to trust that all you need is found in the harsh aridness of the wilderness. Baal and fertility – and the excess of the bazaar – are far easier to desire than Christ and him crucified. Baal seems much more responsible and realistic when you find your-self in decline, when you can still remember the fading golden era. Baal promises to get you gains, to get you back. Thus, the chasing of Baals (now by other names) has migrated from Israel to the church. We continue to confuse Yahweh and the Baals of fertility. Christian civilizations have made Yahweh into a Baal on repeat. I’ve already mentioned transatlantic American chattel slavery. The worship of fertility and the imagining of Yahweh as a fertility god is the core of the justification for slavery. The temptation toward a fertility god comes in many different shapes – like the Crusades in the High Middle Ages and colonial expansion into the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Now, in late modernity, in the era of decline, Protestantism – even with the best of intentions – has again allowed its pastoral practice and visions for congregational life to be possessed by the worship of Baal. Inside this decline, we have gone after the Baal of fertility instead of the God of the desert made known in the cross. We have become resource obsessed.
We think fertility will save us, forgetting that the gods of fertility are insatiable Baals demanding more and more of our energy. We become mere tools for procuring more gains. We tell ourselves that innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship – not consolation and prayer – will produce where we’re missing. We keep thinking we can use the practices of Baal to worship Yahweh. We forget that Elijah told us long ago that this is impossible.
Yet we’ve allowed the “best” of our pastoral practices to be measured by their ability to bring resource growth. The “best” pastors and congregations are growing, producing. But following such logic – considering the growth of resources to be our highest good – leads us to take on the yoke of Baal, turning us into slaves. In this era, we’ve become prisoners of a late-form capitalist idea which asserts that stability is dependent on continual growth and prisoners of the pressures of our multiple industrial revolutions that demand the competition of identities. We chase Baal to find fertility in markets and receive recognition for our uniquely singular selves. Like the kings of the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah, we serve fertility gods to escape the threat of famine of resources to our institutions and ourselves. We fear poverty in all its forms because we cannot accept the desert. We’ve forgotten that the God of the cross, who reveals God’s name in the desert, is efficacious in scarcity. Yahweh makes the poor God’s children (Luke 6; Isa. 58).
The cross delivers not resources but a communion so deep that it can do the impossible. It can make our deaths – our desert experiences – the very locale in which God elects us as children, inviting us into the fullness of God’s life, to be found in the embrace of the child and the mother. We are invited to participate in this relationality. The cross and fertility cannot be combined – though we’ve tried again and again over the centuries. But the bazaar cannot hold the bizarre. Jesus overthrows the tables of the market (Matt. 21). His Father’s house is not a bazaar of sold resources but a house of children who pray, a place to cry out “Abba” (Mark 14). The cross saves us from being tools of production. The cross and resurrection call us to herald to the world that God saves us by consoling us as children. We are embraced through the child who Mary holds to her cheek.
We struggle to avoid the temptation of fertility gods because the church, like Israel in the divided kingdom, seems so fragile. We believe fertility, as the excess of resources, will secure the church, promising flourishing. We want the church to be as rich as a bazaar, instead of receiving its life in the bizarre event of the cross. But our pursuits of fertility cannot save the church. Nothing we do – and Baal demands we do much – can secure the church’s future. To assume that we can do this saving in our actions is to concede to the syncretism that Elijah opposes and that the cross – and the child with his mother – rejects.
Yet I fear that our late-modern Protestant interventions to reverse church decline and denominational fragility are equal to turning the Crucified One into a Baal. We no longer seek the consoling of a child cheek-to-cheek with the Madonna. We seek Artemis’s many impersonal breasts. We want the resources without the confession of the desert. We deny the invitation to be children. We refuse to cede control and our grasp on producing, refuse to enter a state of receiving a gift of consolation and being embraced by a mercy that changes death into life.
Excerpted with permission from Baal and the Gods of More: Rescuing Church Growth from Idolatry by Andrew Root. Copyright 2026, Baker Academic.
Andrew Root, professor of youth and family ministry, Luther Seminary
