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
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
At heart, we are
hedonists.
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