Rod Dreher carves up Bill Maher, the clown prince of anti-religion propaganda, in a March 4 Jewish World Review column.

Dreher’s column, titled “Our silly gods and American idols,” was occasioned by Maher’s disparagement of religion at last month’s Academy Award ceremony.

Said Maher, “I know, it’s a touchy subject. But someday, we all have to confront the notion that our silly gods cost the world too greatly.”

Good point, Bill, Dreher responds. And why don’t we start by confronting the costs exacted in contemporary America by a trinity of “silly gods” that Maher himself often appears to worship: the god of money; the god of hedonism (“in whose service the priapic Maher qualifies as a snake-handling holy roller,” Dreher comments); and the god of “progress.”

Dreher itemizes some of the evil consequences of worshiping at the altars of these three “American idols,” such as the collapsing economy, the disintegration of American families, the erosion of virtues like thrift and self-denial and the loss of a sound understanding of the lessons of history.

“But what happens to the progressive society when a storm blows up and strains at its foundations?” Dreher asks. “That society may find that it’s ‘like a fool who built his house on sand.’”

Notes Dreher, “One of the ‘silly gods’ denounced by Maher said that, and his words were recorded in a silly book upon which Western civilization was built. That book has a lot to say about the god of money, none of it good. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul? And: You cannot serve both G-d and Money.

“Nor will you find in the Bible’s pages a brief for the god of hedonism. ‘I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure,’ mourned the writer of Ecclesiastes, ‘and behold all was vanity and striving after wind.’ In the Christian bible, St. James warns rather more darkly, ‘You have lived luxuriously on the earth and led a life of wanton pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter.’

“So, yes, let’s confront our silly gods, the golden calves whose worship has brought us to this day of reckoning. It was the G-d of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who said, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me,’” Dreher concludes. “Sound advice. We should try that sometime.”