Are crunchy Christians making health an idol?

I got this question yesterday from a good friend: "I want to keep making better health choices for my family, but how do I make sure I'm not making health an idol??" Christians are warned about idolatry all the time: don't make music an idol, don't make food an idol, don't make health an idol, don't make your family an idol, or a terrible blog post I saw recently titled, "Have We Made the Bible Into an Idol?"... Wait, what? where does this stop?

Someone recently wrote me on social media: "I've been told [that I was an idolater] for refusing to eat a bag of Frito's".

The reality is that Chrsitians can be too quick to declare passion and intentionality "idolatry".

As a Christian, you should care for, love, and invest heavily in your family. You should pursue excellence in the work God has given you do. And you should be a good steward of the temple that is your body.

In fact, Christians should be doing these things better than anyone else. We have truth, wisdom, and the power of the Holy Spirit. We have a world that we have been charged with taking dominon of. Food, music, health, marriage, parenting, and discipline are not spiritually netural topics. If we are not formulating our approach to these things with our Christian worldview, we very likely are being influenced by false religious, humanistic, and evolutionaty worldviews.

So what makes a pursuit idolatry? It's a serious sin the Bible warns about, not one to be taken lightly.

Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. -Colossians 3:5

A helpful defintion of an idol may be something that we elevate above God and that dictates our values, priorities, and even identity. A helfpul metric may be asking, would we sin for its sake?

So health and wellness should not define our identity. Our identity is children of God. We should not judge others, or isolate ourseves from community, or allow ourselves to become anxious because of our pursuit of health.

But caring about your health, delving into research about nutrition, reading ingredient labels at the store, and spending more money to source high-quality food is not automatically idolatry.

The way that many Christians let culture dictate their values and then try to make the Bible fit what they already believe begs us to ask, "What is the real concern with idolatry here?"

If the only things Christians are willing to condemn as damaging to God's temple are smoking and drugs- because it's culturally acceptable to condemn these things- but never low-quality foods like French fries deep fried in vegetable oil which may be just as harmful if not more so, then is culture dictating our values over truth? Is that idolatry?

It's possible that the overzealous attempts to call any pursuit of excellence idolatry may just be Christians falling into the temptation to tear down people who are building something or achieving something instead of building something or achieving something themselves. It may be Christians falling into the ancient heresy of gnosticism, which says that anything material is evil, and which the New Testament writers warned about. And other Christians fall in line doing the same thing unaware, inlcuding becoming particularly concerned about their own idols, because it's what's modeled by church leaders.