Opinion

Which Idols Should Our Kids Smash?

Worship: Images, Idols, and Teaching Children

Responding to x.com

A video making the rounds this week shows a Protestant pastor handing children hammers and letting them smash small statues of Mary, angels, and similar figures. The kids swing, the plaster breaks, and the lesson is supposed to be that God hates idols. A well-known Catholic activist shared it and called it heartbreaking:

We will not take up her framing. A Reformed Christian does not pray to Mary, and no amount of hurt feelings changes what Scripture teaches about worship. But a fair question still sits underneath the video. Was the pastor right to do it? Not whether he meant well, which he probably did, but whether the lesson matched the Word.

The plaster is nothing

Start with what is not wrong. Paul tells the Corinthians plainly that idols are not real gods at all, and that only one God exists (1 Corinthians 8:4). A statue that no one in the room has ever prayed to is just plaster. Breaking it is not a sin in itself, any more than breaking a dinner plate.

Images as such are not the problem either. God Himself commanded Moses to make golden cherubim for the mercy seat (Exodus 25:18). Pictures of angels are not forbidden simply for existing. And the Reformers honored Mary as a woman of remarkable faith whom God greatly favored (Luke 1:28, 48). Catholics are not alone in holding her in high esteem, either. The Eastern Orthodox, many Anglicans and Lutherans, and plenty of other Christians honor her to varying degrees. Respecting her has never been the issue. Praying to her is.

So nobody should say the pastor committed a sin by swinging a hammer at a statue. The Bible does not address this act directly, and we will not bind a man’s conscience where God has not.

Scripture broke idols that were being worshipped

But “not a sin” is not the same as “wise.” Look at when God’s people actually destroyed images.

Hezekiah is the clearest case. The bronze serpent Moses made in the wilderness sat in Israel for centuries. Hezekiah broke it into pieces only because the people had started burning incense to it (2 Kings 18:4). The object was not the problem until worship made it one.

The commands in Deuteronomy to tear down altars and burn carved images were given to Israel about the idols of the nations in its own land (Deuteronomy 7:5). They were not a license to walk into other people’s property and stage a demolition, and they were certainly not a classroom exercise.

The New Testament goes further the other way. When a riot broke out in Ephesus over the goddess Artemis, the town clerk told the mob that Paul’s companions had neither robbed temples nor blasphemed their goddess (Acts 19:37). In Athens, Paul was deeply troubled to see the whole city given over to idols (Acts 17:16), and his response was to reason with them, even starting from their own altar to an unknown god (Acts 17:22-23). When Ephesian converts did burn something, they burned their own books of magic (Acts 19:19). Nobody smashed someone else’s shrine.

That is the pattern. Real idols, actually worshipped, were removed by the people who owned them or ruled over them. In public, among unbelievers, the apostles argued.

Offense we earn and offense we don’t

Some will say the offense to Catholics is the point. It isn’t, or it shouldn’t be.

Paul tells the church not to trip up anyone needlessly, whether Jew, Gentile, or fellow believer (1 Corinthians 10:32). Peter says to be prepared to explain why you trust Christ, and to do it kindly and respectfully (1 Peter 3:15). Neither of those men was soft on idolatry. They simply knew the gospel offends enough on its own. A Messiah who died on a cross offended Jews and sounded absurd to Gentiles (1 Corinthians 1:23). That offense we can’t avoid and shouldn’t try to.

But we can avoid adding our own. When a Catholic watches that video, what does he learn? Not that Christ alone saves. He learns that Protestants enjoy breaking things his mother loved. We handed him a reason to stop listening before the gospel ever came up.

The idols those kids will actually face

Here is the bigger problem. The props taught the wrong lesson.

Children at a Protestant church meeting already know not to pray to Mary. That temptation is not coming for most of them. What is coming is far harder to spot and far harder to break with a hammer.

Paul says greed is idolatry (Colossians 3:5). He says the covetous man is an idolater too, and that he will have no share in Christ’s kingdom (Ephesians 5:5). John ends a whole letter by telling the believers he loves to guard against idols (1 John 5:21), and the rest of that letter is about loving the world, hating your brother, and walking in darkness, not about statues.

Those kids will grow up into a world that offers them money, attention, power, and sometimes another person to put at the center of their lives. A boyfriend. A wife. Their own child. A follower count. A paycheck. Those are the idols that will actually tempt them, and none of them shatters so easily.

A better object lesson would be harder to stage, but it would be truer. Hold up a phone, a wallet, a trophy, a picture of someone you love, and ask which of them you would hate to lose more than God. That is where the hammer needs to land, and only the Spirit can swing it.

What the Reformed conviction still says

None of this softens the conviction itself. The 1689 Confession teaches that God has set the acceptable way of worshipping Him by His own revealed will, and that He is not to be worshipped through men’s inventions or any visible representation (1689 LBC 22.1). Images of Mary used in devotion are wrong. Praying to her is wrong. A Catholic’s hurt does not make veneration right, and we will not pretend otherwise to keep the peace.

So we hold the conviction and regret the method. The pastor was most likely trying to teach something true. He just picked an idol his kids weren’t going to worship and skipped the ones they will.

For the man who must weigh it

You do not have to call this pastor a sinner. Scripture doesn’t, and neither should you. But you can say it was unwise, that it caused offense the gospel didn’t require, and that it taught children to look for idols in the wrong place.

If you teach kids, teach them that the idol worth fearing is the one they would never think to call an idol. If you talk with Catholics, talk with them. Don’t hand them a reason not to listen.

As you pray, ask God to show you the idols you have been comfortable with. Ask Him to make you clear about worship and gentle in how you say it. And ask Him to keep the children in your care from the idols no hammer can reach.

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