Evangelicalism is home to many logical fallacies, contradictions, and Biblical heresies, and a rationalistic observer might find new ones even years after starting to thoroughly examine the sheer illogicality and unbiblicality of most evangelical tenets. One popular evangelical idea that one would probably encounter far sooner is the belief that everyone worships something. Of course it is true that practically everyone has at least something that they orient their life around, even if only an ever-changing set of personal preferences, as it would be impossible to have a genuine desire to live at all if it wasn't for some desire or goal. Evangelicals do not stop at acknowledging this philosophical truth. They go further to the point of conflating having a high priority that gets more attention than others with revering something in a more religious sense.
There is an enormous difference between love of something--an idea, an emotion, a person, or something else--and literal worship. The latter involves a more explicitly focused, deliberate form of reverence that is usually associated with some sort of religious deity. Even a very passionate, deep, relentless affection for something does not have to have the same psychological substance as actual worship. There is a spectrum of affection and devotion which has worship at one end and other manifestations which have a lesser type of existential motivation at the other, and many people who are not Christians will fall at different places on this spectrum. In fact, someone could even be a theist and not worship the uncaused cause/divine figure they hold to. Worship is not inescapable.
It is not that it is logically impossible to worship something other than a deity. After all, there is literally nothing a person could feel or do in the name of a real or false god that they could not also do with regard to something else. It just does not follow from this that everyone, including atheists, inevitably worships something. However, what is true is that anyone who wants to continue living has some sort of goal or priorities, even if their immediate goal is to merely distract their own thoughts from matters of grand truth or to figure out what they want to live for in the first place. If this is what the evangelical kind of irrationalistic Christian means by saying that "Everyone worships something," they have done a terrible job at communicating the idea using common linguistic norms.
This is because what they would mean by this phrase is not necessarily associated with a religious kind of devotion, which is what many people refer to when they speak of worship. The latter group often reserves the word worship for beliefs, actions, and words that regard something as literally divine or that treats it as divine even if it is not regarded as such in the purest sense. Of course, this concept is consistent with an atheist or agnostic treating nature, society, or himself or herself in a manner that could be genuinely equated with worship in some very specific cases, but this does not mean what evangelicals like to say it does. In other words, the mere possibility of a non-theist ironically revering something else like a deity does not mean that everyone is fated to do so just because they have ideological or personal priorities.
A deity with a moral nature would deserve worship by virtue of being the only being that has any sort of moral authority, and this is one component of true Christianity. The Biblical deity demands worship because its nature makes it the only entity in the book to which other beings have to be compared in order to be morally judged in the first place. Still, even the Bible does not say that everyone actively worships something other than God if they do not worship him instead. What it does say is that God deserves worship and that to worship a false deity, fellow humans, other animals, or an aspect of the natural world is idolatrous (Deuteronomy 4:15-19). This is far from affirming the asinine and objectively untrue notion that vocal evangelicals add.
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