Idolatry and Religion Theme Analysis

In The Adoration of Jenna Fox, idolatry—worshipping someone or something that is not God—is framed as a mistake, while worshipping God through religion is portrayed as something that can provide lives with additional meaning. At various points, the novel implies that Jenna Fox’s parents, Claire and Matthew Fox, worship their daughter in a problematically idolatrous way: Claire calls her a “miracle,” Matthew calls her “Angel,” and the novel refers to their love of her as “adoration,” a term that can simply refer to intense love but can also refer to specific kinds of praise-based religious worship in a Christian context. Ironically, for much of the novel, Claire and Matthew’s adoration of Jenna leads them to engage in suspect behaviors: for example, due to their overwhelming need to protect her, they lie to her, plant subliminal messages in her mind to control her behavior, and keep the minds of her dead friends Kara and Locke in a torturous suspended animation so that they can serve as witnesses that Jenna’s reckless driving didn’t cause their deaths in a car accident. In this way, the novel clearly casts Claire and Matthew’s “idolatry” of Jenna in a negative light.

Yet at the same time, the novel casts the Catholicism of Jenna’s grandmother Lily in a largely positive light: Lily’s belief in an afterlife helped her healthily grieve Jenna when it appeared Jenna was going to die in a way that Claire and Matthew were not able to do, while Lily’s re-baptism of post-accident cyborg Jenna at the end of the novel represents her belief and affirmation that Jenna is a real, valuable human being despite her largely prosthetic body. Thus, the novel distinguishes between idolatry and religion, suggesting that the former is destructive while the latter can be productive.