Our National Religion

           Playing football increases your risk of brain damage.  Coaches around the country routinely and reprehensibly encourage dangerous obesity in their players.  A culture of steroid abuse affects tens of thousands of Americans and prevents clean players from having any shot at participating at the highest levels.  Obviously, football is bad for the physical well-being of our nation.

            However, football impacts the nation’s psyche is ways that are just as, if not more, harmful.  This chapter explores the ways in which football weakens us spiritually; paying special attention to how it weakens our notions of manhood and masculinity.

            It’s only fair to begin this chapter with a caveat: I, like most Americans, am a Christian.  When I say that “God Hates Football”, I’m not merely stating in a strong fashion that I hate football.  I actually believe there is a God, that He wants us to take care of our minds, bodies, and spirits, and that participating in football contradicts His will. 

            My religious beliefs define my perspective on how we ought to live our lives.  Whether something is physically healthy or not is primarily a scientific matter; there is very little room for debate.  However, whether something is spiritually healthy is, I recognize, a matter of considerable debate.  I hope to make this book persuasive to individuals from all religious backgrounds, and so I will try to make my arguments as broadly compelling as possible.  However, fellow Christians ought sometimes to find my reasoning more persuasive than non-Christians. 

            However, this may not be the case, for reasons that greatly disappoint me.  I find it particularly galling that in many areas of America, the two dominant cultural forces are Christianity and football; they breed a sort of syncretistic, bastardized religion. In this new church, Sunday services and drunken tailgating go hand-in-hand; bounty systems are praised in casual conversation by the same preachers who extols from the pulpit the virtues of loving thy neighbor; and the fruits of the spirit are praised for an hour and denigrated for a hundred and sixty seven.

            Religious convictions are, definitionally, your beliefs about the deepest and most important questions that confront human beings.  Is there a God or gods?  If so, what are he/she/it/they like?  Is there life after death?  What is the meaning of life? 

            Deeply held convictions about the answers to these questions ought to shape in a foundational, fundamental way our answers to other, less essential questions.  In this case, whether or not a particular form of entertainment ought to be pursued becomes not, primarily, a question of whether we find it to be entertaining.  Rather, we ought to ask whether it conforms to our vision of what life ought to be like, and what type of world we ought to live in.

            You might have noticed that there is a religion or a religion-like perspective that would disagree that questions of obligation ought to shape our opinions of entertainment.  Pure hedonists—individuals who believe that our purpose in life is the simple maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain—could draw the perfectly sound conclusion that the most pleasureful entertainment is the best entertainment.

            I find hedonism to be an extremely repugnant way of answering life’s big questions.  However, a hedonist could very reasonably and consistently sit down to eat fatty foods, drink beer, watch cheerleaders jiggle, and have a grand old time screaming at the television. 

            The problem is that only a very slim minority of Americans actually believe in pure hedonism.  Most of us believe that there are moral obligations that go beyond our own pleasure.  Most Americans profess to believe that we ought to take care of our minds and bodies, that we ought to make use of our gifts to make the world a better place, and that it is better to help others than to hurt them.

            The problem is that our cultural fixation with football belies these professions.  Instead of taking care of our minds and bodies, we glorify their abuse.  Instead of making the most of our gifts, we—at best—squander them on a child’s game, and at worse allow them to be battered and destroyed.  Instead of promoting noble collaborative efforts, we incentivize the coarsest forms of violent competition.

            In short, football shows that America is not a Christian nation—not really.

            At heart, we are hedonists.

A Short Anecdote

           The gym is small and badly-lit.  All day, a gaggle of middle school basketball players has shuffled, jumped, and strutted over its court.  The sound of dribbling basketballs echoes off the walls, and the pools of dribble sweat are, sometimes, wiped off with an old white dirty towel.  Some of these players practice good personal hygiene; many do not, and the gym smells.

            Parents crowd onto the three rows of uncomfortable bleachers.  Some are red-faced and angry; others are sweaty and nervous; others are just plain hot.  The shrill twill of the referee’s whistle brings a groan.  The offending player looks confused.  We have reached the end of the tournament, and this is the Championship Game.

            Even so, the players are gangly and ungainly.  Their jump shots and bounce passes are larval—one day, they might grow into real jump shots and real bounce passes, but not yet.  One of the ungainly young men, however, is dominantly gangly.  He stands a head taller than the rest, and consequently blocks shots and scores with relative ease.  His team would be far in the lead if it weren’t for the other team’s star, a short, lithe, graceful young man for whom the ball is a natural extension of his hand.

            This player, the only real athlete on the floor, has two tan band-aids plastered to his sweating skin.  Now, with only minutes remaining in the game, he drives the lane and is fouled.

            It is a hard foul but does not appear particularly dirty.  The tallest player on the court, the other team’s star, swatted at the ball and raked his hand down the back of the shooter’s shoulder.  However, it opens up yet another cut. 

            The graceful athlete, in accordance with the rules, has to leave the game to get a third band-aid; they cut is so long that they actually need a fourth and a fifth.  When he reenters the game, he is so sweaty and bloodied that one of his band-aids falls off.  He re-exits the game and reenters moments later, only to have the same thing happen.  Over the last four minutes of the game, he has to leave four times.  His team does not score without him on the court, and the taller player’s team pulls away to win. 

            In the midst of the celebration, standing high above his team, the taller player looks ecstatically joyful.  Actually, that’s not quite accurate.  Given the context, you can tell that he’s ecstatically joyful.  Without context, if you simply looked at his face, he would just look angry.

            If you would have seen him before the tournament, he would have looked calm and focused, his face concentrating on a particularly important bit of minutia.  He was in the hotel bathroom, standing over the sink with a pair of clippers, trimming his fingernails so that each of them had three distinct, sharp, jagged points.

            Each of the five crucial band-aids was the result of those sharpened fingernails.  The cuts were made deliberately.

            These are not sour grapes.  My son was not the graceful athlete diabolically sliced up by some borderline psychopath. 

Quite the opposite: I was that taller player.  That borderline psychopath grew up to be me.

Competition

I understand competition because I am a competitor.  I played basketball and baseball at a fairly high level in high school and competed collegiately.  However, that’s not what makes me a competitor.

I am a competitor because if you give me a task in which I can beat someone, I will do everything in my power to beat him.  If there is a pick-up basketball game in someone’s driveway, I’m the one maniac diving for loose balls on the asphalt.  If I’m sitting in a class and the professor gives us a challenge, I’m the one who cheers if he wins, and spends the next half hour stewing—oblivious to the lecture—if he loses.  You may know other competitors, but you don’t know anybody more competitive than I am.

(A small subset of you finished that last paragraph and thought, “Oh yeah?  Says who?  I bet I’m more competitive than you.  Bring it on.”  If that was your response, please remember that I would have responded similarly—only moreso.)

The world is full of people who are, to greater or lesser degrees, competitors.  American capitalist society is built on our backs.  Competition drives us toward greater and greater excellence and excellence, generally speaking, makes the world better.

Of course, the assertion that competition always makes the world a better place is absurd on its face.  Gang rivalries leave hundreds of people dead every year.  Competitive investment banking just about ran the world economy off a cliff at the start of the Great Recession. 

More personally, sharpening fingernails is an ignoble method of achieving victory.  In fact, you could say that I won the smaller victory of taking home the championship trophy, but lost the larger contest of acting the most ethically and nobly.  As I grew up and reflected on things, I came gradually to realize that the greater victories are achieved by striving toward excellence in the greater and more important arenas.

Reflect on your own priorities, especially as they connect to life’s most important questions.  Do you work harder toward excellence in less important areas than you do in the most important areas?  Are you acting in accordance with what you really believe? 

In our competitive culture, we quite often associate competitive success with success in the arenas that are most distinctly competitive, rather than the arenas that are most weighty.  It is easy for us to glorify the person who crossed the finish line first, because it is easy for us to identify her.  It is harder to glorify the person who showed the most love toward her neighbor, because it is harder for us to quantify.  But, according to your beliefs, which of them should really be thought of as the greater victor?

Real Good Men

I read this last paragraph to a trusted advisor who suggested that I replace “love toward her neighbor” because it might not elicit the response I had intended. 

“I think a lot of people will feel like it’s kind of namby-pamby,” he said.  “Even if they might not admit it, it’ll make them kind of feel like the racer is the real winner.  I think it might make the example lose some of its impact.”

“Perfect,” I replied.

*                      *                      *                      *

Was that you?  Did it seem a little strange to you—a little “namby-pamby”—to talk about loving thy neighbor?  Perfect.  This response is not at all uncommon, and very nicely highlights one of the most powerful reasons why football has been able to entrance our population, and why it’s so incredibly spiritually damaging to so many millions of people: football presents to Americans—particularly American males—a warped perspective on masculinity.  It preaches an insecure and compensatory masculinity, and it presents it to a population in which the real men are fast becoming extinct.

*                      *                      *                      *

I once read a study on perceptions of masculinity.  They presented subjects with a host of adjectives and asked them to identify them as them as masculine or feminine.  Adjectives like “nurturing”, not surprisingly, were classified as more feminine; although men can certainly be nurturing, it is an attribute our culture more typically associates with femininity.  Conversely, “brawny” would be an example of something more typically associated with masculinity.  These adjectives included a great range of concepts, some of which were difficult to classify. 

The most interesting part of the experiment was a list of adjectives that were all classified as quite strongly feminine: loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled.

Those of you familiar with Christian doctrine might recognize this list: they are called “the fruits of the spirit”; they are ways in which the Holy Spirit is supposed to manifest itself in the lives of believers.  To the Christian, they come awfully close to defining “good” behavior.

And today in America, what our Christian heritage has historically defined as “good” has also been redefined as “un-masculine”.

Come, Let us Rationalize Together

At some Christian school in America, the football coach has started a game by counseling his players to be peaceful, patient, and gentle.  However, it is far more common for a coach to try to instill a “warrior” mentality, to encourage his players to be aggressive, and to promote greater and harder violence.  These spiritual—or, if you will, psychological—characteristics are useful on the football field because they are positively correlated with the number of points your team scores, and negatively correlated with the number of points the other team scores. 

Within the context of a football game, aggression, warlike behavior, and violence promote victory.  However, within the larger and more important context of life, they are ignoble.  To practice these behaviors in a football game is to get caught up in the pursuit of the smaller victory, and to lose sight of the greater victory.

*                      *                      *                      *

“But”, you might protest, “isn’t there a time for everything?  Isn’t there a time for war and warlike behavior?  Isn’t there a time for aggression and violence?”

Certainly.

Christian doctrine—and the doctrine of most major religions—has always recognized the possibility of something like a “just war”.  Under certain circumstances, when conflict is unavoidable or greater harm would be done by pacifistic non-resistance, it is better to actively resist.  In the face of great evil, those on the side of the good ought always to be ready, willing, and able to defend the right.

It is absolutely, breathtakingly stupid to use this idea to justify participation in football. 

What great evil is Central High fighting against when it lines up against Western High?  Western High wants to hold the same inflated bladder on a different colorful patch of grass.  That’s it. 

If you think that’s justification for aggression, you’re rationalizing. 

And For What?

In September of 2012, Parade Magazine published an article about Christians in football.  The article discusses a collision between Sylvester Stamps, a running back for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Mike Singletary, a notoriously hard hitting linebacker for the Chicago Bears.

The hit left Stamps crumpled on the field, and Singletary searching his soul.  “What I am doing?” the article quotes him as thinking.  “There’s something wrong with this.”

“Lord, I love you so much,” Singletary prays, “and I’m out here hurting people.” 

However, after wrestling with whether he wanted to leave the game, Singletary decides in a breathtaking display of illogicality that he ought to continue to play football because God gave him a gift to play the game.  Consequently, he would try to “play as hard as [he] could to honor the Lord.”

Mike.

If there is something wrong with football, the solution isn’t to play football harder.  If a murderer realizes that murder is wrong, he shouldn’t decide to continue murdering because God made him awfully sharp with a knife. 

This sort of breathtaking, perfectly illogical rationalization allows Christians throughout the country to continue a sinful, injurious pursuit.  Some of them have left competitors with serious, lifelong injuries.  Some have shortened someone’s life by years.  Some have killed. 

And for what?

*                      *                      *                      *

Let’s be honest: the real reason so many men participate in football is to remind themselves that they’re men.  In an increasingly egalitarian world, there are fewer and fewer spheres which belong exclusively to men.

To a certain type of man, this causes great consternation, and this consternation begets overcompensation.  These men will start to find amusingly deep, gravelly voices on pick-up truck commercials particularly persuasive, and will more strongly support just about any war you’d like to wage, just to prove that they’re men.  This isn’t a joke: it was confirmed by a study at Cornell University about male responses to perceived threats to their masculinity.

To another type of man, one who doesn’t need to be reminded of his masculinity despite living in a coed world, the typical response to egalitarianism is more apathetic.  They shrug.  These men don’t need ostentatious displays of maleness; if they want to be reminded of their gender, they look in the mirror after getting out of the shower.

As formerly all-male spheres become less and less segregated, however, all those unconfident and overcompensating males gravitate away from normal sports like baseball, basketball, and track and field, toward Ultimate Fighting Championships, demolition derbies, and, yes, football.

Now, it’s not incidental that all these “hypermasculine” sports are moronic.  The competitive drive, in many circumstances, can be edifying both for the individual and for society.  Our market economy, despite whatever critiques you may have of it, has driven a rapidly-improving standard of living for decades.  Striving for and reaching a difficult competitive goal can be incredibly memorably rewarding.  But if you exaggerate anything hard enough, it becomes ridiculous.  Football is a perfect example of this ridiculous exaggeration.

Idiocracy

            It is unfortunate that overcompensatory masculinity has become so pervasive that it’s set the standard for many people’s perceptions of masculinity.  Idiotic sports – and, more broadly, idiocy – are considered masculine.

            Men used to be perfectly acceptable for a man to be both good and intelligent; now, many males find these characteristics weak and effeminate. 

            Not only is the choice to watch or play football a stupid decision, football itself thrives on this very anti-intellectualism.  Witness the derision directed toward “eggheads” or computer formulas in Bowl Championship Series determinations.  Or, the disdain heaped on David Romer for suggesting – after carefully analyzing the evidence of thousands and thousands of plays – that teams ought to “go for it” on fourth down more frequently than they do.

            “If we all listened to the professor, we may all be looking for professor jobs,” professional coach Bill Cowher pontificated.

            If you get a chance, read the paper – entitled “Do Firms Maximize?  Evidence from Professional Football” – and draw your own conclusions.  The evidence is strong and fairly cut-and-dried: football coaches almost certainly adhere to conventional wisdom at the expense of their probability of winning the game. 

            Why didn’t a single team contact Romer, despite the significant media attention paid to his paper?  Why would they willingly ignore beneficial advice?

            Short answer: because they’re stupid.

            Slightly longer answer: because they’re anti-intellectual.  Intelligence (or, anything other than “football intelligence”, or the ability to make decisions in keeping with prevailing football mythology or sentiment) can actually impede your chances of rising to the top.

            Case in point: the “Wonderlic” test is a 50-question assessment administered to potential NFL draftees.  Sample questions include:

• If pads of paper are 21 cents each, how much would four pads cost?
• A train travels 20 feet in  of a second.  How far will it travel in three seconds?
• Which of these represents the smallest amount?
• 7
• .8
• 31
• .33
• 2

            Of the fifteen sample questions online at http://espn.go.com/page2/s/closer/020228test.html , I got fifteen correct in about five minutes.  This is not the world’s most difficult assessment. – I would expect second graders to get many of the questions correct.

Some teams pay close attention to all results.  All teams pay attention to some of the results: the ones at either extreme.  If players cannot score above ten out of fifty, most teams regard it as a red flag.  However, it is also a red flag if players score too high.  

            Apparently, even team executives know you’ve got to be stupid to play football.

Easy Way Out

Ironically, while many men play and watch football to compensate for a perceived lack of masculinity or virility, they are deemphasizing the very traits that historically and psychologically define being a man.

In western, or Judeo-Christian, civilization, self-control has been considered a hallmark of masculinity.  Every weekend, football players dance and strut and beat their chests like a group of deranged baboons.  Hyper-emotionality and drama queen behavior become the masculine norm.

Moral integrity is a cornerstone of true masculine identity.  Every week, we glorify steroid-riddled wife-beaters.  Moral laxity reins.

Real men have intelligence and wisdom.  In football, intelligence has become a liability.  Wisdom, the ability to reflectively determine prudent courses of action, has been replaced by impulse and instinct. 

Even perseverance has been denigrated.  Football is an incredibly inactive sport; for over two hundred minutes of telecast, the game is only actually played for only eleven minutes.  Each individual will play less than half of that.  For all their talk about toughness, football players actually DO almost nothing.  They get all dressed up, shout a lot, set their hair on fire, and sit on the bench.

Essentially, football is a triumph in modern America because it gives males the ability to FEEL like men without actually having to BE men. 

I’ll repeat this because it’s such an essential component to understanding – and eventually undermining – football’s preeminence as an American pastime.  If you’re a woman, or if you’re a man secure in his masculinity, this might seem foreign or difficult to intuit:

Football gives males the ability to feel like men without actually having to be men.

What Women Want

Speaking of women, if you want proof that the Christian Fruits of the Spirit are great templates for masculinity, look no further than the female sex.

Female attraction is a diverse patina.  Freud, of course, was famously puzzled by it.  However, clear trends exist; there are certain things that most women want – and these things are quite a bit different than what most of modern media – and the football culture – will tell you.

.For example, in a recent survey of 1,000 women, the top five most sexually attractive characteristics were faithfulness, dependability, kindness, moral integrity, and fatherliness.

The top five personality traits were humorousness, intelligence, passion, confidence, and generosity. 

            Listening was identified by over twice as many women as earning potential as a very desirable characteristic.  A muscular build was identified by less than a fifth as many women as moral integrity. 

Again, this might come as a shock to some of you, if you’ve gotten your information from people telling you what women want, instead of asking them.  Most women aren’t looking primarily for money, a great body, aggression, dominance, or achievement.  They’re looking for the fruits of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. 

Anecdotally, I’ve found this very true.  The young men in my church who really get how to be men, who are patient and kind and self-controlled, always seem to end up with intelligent, funny, incredibly good-looking young women.  The intelligent, funny, incredibly good-looking young women in my church always seem to end up with patient, kind, and self-controlled young men. 

When I was younger, this came as a surprise.  Raised in the prevailing culture, I somehow got the impression that young men of character didn’t stand a chance.  As I’ve grown older and seen it happen again and again, I’ve come to realize that this is exactly what women want: a good man.  If a young woman in search of a man ends up with someone who doesn’t display the much-denigrated fruits of the spirit, then she won’t be happy.  Not really.

From my Christian perspective, this is the way God designed us.  If you’re inclined toward evolutionary biology, you can consider how natural selection favors males who contribute positively to the lives of their partners, families, and communities.

Whatever your explanation, the simple fact remains that most women get turned on more by the traits civilization has always considered the be masculine – not by the perverted masculinity emphasized in the football culture.

All the May Become a Man

            “I dare do all that may become a man,” declared Shakespeare’s Macbeth.  “Who dares do more is none.”

            I love this quote, and find it particularly relevant to this chapter.  However, in order to see why you might need to read a little more deeply.

            Most people, when first reading Macbeth’s speech, interpret “Who dares do more is none,” to mean “No one dares do more than I,” or “I am the bravest of them all.”

            However, in context you realize that when he says this, he’s responding to Lady Macbeth’s goading.  She is trying to get him to kill Duncan, kind of Scotland, and to take his place.  She is pitching the evil deed to him as a test of his masculinity. 

            When Macbeth says, “Who dares do more is none,” it’s more interesting to read it as a moral commentary:  “I dare do all that may become a man.  Anyone who dares to do more than I is no longer a man.”  Macbeth is telling his wife that exaggerated masculinity is not actually masculinity at all – in fact, it makes you less of a man.

            Macbeth and Shakespeare are right.  Trying to be too much the man makes you no man at all.  Football suffers from exactly this hyper-masculine denigration of true masculinity.

            However, it is worth noting that in the end, Macbeth murders Duncan.  Lies and deception are strong and have their own gravity; they pull us toward them.  Be a man of character: drop football.  Stop playing, stop watching, and be a man.