George Clooney’s taut political thriller “The Ides of March” commences with a beautiful depiction of the act of idolatry, and everything else in the film flows, by a strict logic, from that act. At the prompting of his gifted and hyper-focused press aid Stephen Myers (played by Ryan Gosling), Governor Mike Morris (played by Clooney himself), a Democratic candidate for President, responds at a televised debate to a question dealing with his religion. “I was raised a Catholic,” he calmly explains, “but I’m no longer a practicing Catholic. I’m not a Protestant, a Jew, a Muslim, or an atheist. My religion, what I believe in, is the Constitution of the United States.” At this point, his audience enthusiastically applauds. Now one can love the Constitution; one can defend it and admire it. But to believe in it is to commit what the Bible calls idolatry, for it is to make something less than God into God, which is to say, into one’s ultimate concern, one’s central preoccupation. The wager of the Scriptures is that right worship, which is to say, the worship of God alone, conduces toward the right ordering of the worshipper. Once a person’s central focus is clear, then all of the secondary desires and longings of his soul will find their proper orientation and integration. Concomitantly, when a person’s worship is misguided, when it is centered on anything other than the true God, that person falls apart; he disintegrates, his secondary desires devolving into a jumble of warring impulses. More to the point, the Bible shows over and again that a community marked by idolatry crumbles apart and tumbles into violence.