#468: The NFL’s Loyalty Test

  The controversy swirling around the bended knees by NFL players raises issues about our national identity and our commitment to it. 

On Thursday, the Supreme Court Justice picked by Donald Trump spoke to a select audience about defending the First Amendment. Here is what Neil Gorsuch said:

To be worthy of the First Amendment freedoms, we have to all adopt certain civil habits that enable others to enjoy them as well. When it comes to the First Amendment, that means tolerating those who don’t agree with us or those whose ideas upset us, giving others the benefit of the doubt about their motives.

Also Thursday, Tennessee Titans tight end Delanie walker revealed that he and his family had been receiving death threats.  These were apparently how fans responded after he suggested that fans should not come to NFL games if they felt disrespected by player protests.  

These two events reveal the opposite extremes the controversy has surfaced.

It’s tempting to think that the upset over the NFL protests is a mere distraction from the more serious problems facing America.  Certainly, for Trump himself, it is convenient if the public and media fight among themselves over the NFL players rather than focusing their attention on his handling of affairs with North Korea, or his slow response to the crisis in Puerto Rico, or his tax plans.

But in 21^st century America, matters of race are never a “mere distraction.” And this case is above all about race.  But the real and unfortunate distraction has been to pretend that is about something else. So perhaps it is helpful to reflect and clarify on how the controversy about the NFL is a test of loyalty both for Americans and for Christians.

The clarification requires stating some basic facts to clear the air:

First: the NFL players did not introduce politics onto the playing field.  This was done in 2009 when the U.S. government began paying the NFL millions to stage “patriotic” events before each game: color guards, gun salutes, fly-overs—all designed to boost recruiting efforts by whipping up patriotic fervor.  In short, this is government-paid advertizing for the military, and it had the effect of bringing politics onto the NFL’s playing fields.

It’s just silly to complain if the players, understanding that politics is already at work here, decide to take advantage of the situation someone else has created.

Second: the players are not protesting the flag or the anthem.  Colin Kaepernick explicitly said that he meant no disrespect to either, but was in fact protesting the bad treatment of African Americans by police.  One may agree or disagree about the issue of police brutality, but it has nothing to do with either our flag or national anthem.

Third, this is not a protest about soldiers or veterans.  The original protest about police brutality has been transformed, in response to Trump’s “Sons of bitches” attack, into a protest about the First Amendment itself.  In neither instance are the players attacking, objecting to, or showing any disrespect for members of the military.  In fact many protesters are themselves veterans, and many other veterans support them. 

The players did not make the decision to have soldiers on the field, and they should not have to take any responsibility for it.  The players need to be on the field to play the game, but football could continue even if no soldier ever set foot on the gridiron.

Fourth: player salaries have nothing to do with the protests.  Yes, these players are millionaires - -but they are responding in protest to the attacks of someone who is even richer than they are. To allow a billionaire president to make such attacks, and then to claim that his target audience cannot protest because they are rich, is completely inconsistent. 

Some fans are even arguing that the players are “ungrateful” because they want to protest despite being well paid.  But First Amendment rights cannot be bought off; players do not lose those rights when they accept a paycheck, no matter how large.  And since most of them are African-Americans, calling them ungrateful sounds like a new way of calling Black Americans “uppity.”

Bill Russell takes a knee with his Medal of Freedom

Fifth:  Kneeling is not disrespectful.  The simple fact is, kneeling has been a gesture of respect, loyalty, even fealty, for centuries.  Many of us kneel when we pray, as a sign of respect.  And many players kept their hands over their hearts to reinforce that sign of respect.  This protest does not use kneeling as a sign of disrespect, but simply as a sign of protest--first, a protest against racialized police brutality, and second as a protest in favor of First Amendment rights.

Sixth:  Thus the real issues are (1) racialized police violence and (2) the right to protest itself--that is, free speech.

Once we accept the facts of the case, we can look at the underlying question of loyalty.

Loyalty here can mean many things.  It can mean loyalty to a flag, or to a song, or to a team, or to the Constitution, or even to a higher law.

Many Americans of course have strong emotional feelings about the flag, and we’re even in the habit of pledging our allegiance to it.  But while the actions that surround the flag often suggest that people regard it as something sacred, this cannot really be true. 

First, the U.S. Supreme Court has long determined that in the name of protest people may even burn the flag.  It also ruled that people have the right not to salute the flag. What this demonstrates, no matter how you feel about it, is that the right to protest is more important than this piece of cloth.  We cannot defend the flag by preventing protest.  Instead, we must protect protest even if it harms the flag.

Many Americans also have strong emotional attachment to the national anthem.  And the singing of the anthem at sports events became popular and routine during the 20^th century, and especially during and after World War II.  But most people only know the first verse, and except for the final line “The land of the free and the home of the brave,” the rest of the song is simply a celebration, not of American values or institutions, but of a battle victory over the British in 1812. 

The song has been linked to sports, but we do not sing it in a theater before a movie, or a play, or in church before each ceremony.  We are perfectly capable of being Americans and celebrating American values and institutions whether we sing this song or not.

These things symbolize our nation and our people, but they are only that: symbols. If we treat them as though we must love them to love the country, we make them fetishes, as if they are the whole of us. It’s like loving someone’s big toe, instead of the whole person. This is not patriotism, it’s pathology.

And worse, to turn this song or this flag into something sacred—something, for example, higher than protest itself--is to fail the loyalty test that Americans, and especially American Christians, should be passing.

For Americans, the values enshrined in our Constitution are the highest standards we possess as a people.  The right to protest is the First Right among these, and nothing else in our social life is higher or more important.  Any attempt to prevent rightful protest as “disrespectful” to the flag or the anthem--or even to the military--is actually an act of profound disrespect for the Constitution itself, the very foundation of our nation, which those other things represent..

And for Christians, the lesson should be even more obvious.  Treating any object--a song, a flag, even a veteran or soldier--as something sacred fails the test of loyalty to the First Commandment: “Thou shall not have false gods.” Christians believe that only God is sacred, and that God’s will creates a higher law than any other law.

That law includes, especially for Catholics, the idea that we are one human family, all children of God, all brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ, and that therefore any division among us is a scandal to our faith.

 The very notion that Blacks in our country have been mistreated for centuries must be a source of shame to all of us.  That shame reflects the fact that America has failed to do God’s will for centuries, that slavery really is our original sin, and that we have not finished our penance and amendment for that sin. Using the flag and the anthem as camouflage to hide that makes the sin worse. Using our soldiers as human shields to hide our sin is worst of all.

So while loyalty to team, to flag, to a song, to the military may all be good things, the real test of our loyalties this: is our first loyalty as Americans to the Constitution?  Is our first loyalty as people of faith to the will of God and God’s higher law?

Viewed this way, the controversy is hardly a “mere distraction.” As serious as the other problems facing us are, this challenge of loyalty to God and Constitution cannot be ignored, cannot be forgotten, cannot be avoided.  It is a test of loyalty that, sooner or later, this nation must pass—or the nation will fail.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2017

#446: Do Muslims and Christians Worship The Same God?

 As Christians attempt to celebrate the sacred season of Christmas amid a sea of consumer excess, the last thing we need to see is conflict among ourselves.  So it was sad last week to see a Christian college punish a professor for quoting Pope Francis. 

Administrators at Wheaton College in Illinois, a leading evangelical college, placed Larycia Hawkins, an associate professor of political science, on administrative leave last Tuesday after she suggested that Christians and Muslims follow the same God. Her December 10 Facebook posting read: “And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.” The college offered this rationale:

"Dr. Hawkins’ administrative leave resulted from theological statements that seemed inconsistent with Wheaton College’s doctrinal convictions, and is in no way related to her race, gender or commitment to wear a hijab during Advent."

The Internet predictably exploded with sites asking “Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?” (google it!) The result is a flood of pseudo-academic gobbledygook detailing supposed differences between the “Christian God” and the “Muslim God.”

Many arrive at the same conclusion as Bryan Fischer, columnist for the American Family Association:

Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God? The answer is an unequivocal and unambiguous "No." Muslims themselves will confirm this to you if you know the questions to ask.

  Some of these commentaries argue about words: the origin of “Allah” and “Yahweh” and “Jehovah,” for example.  Some argue about whether Abraham sacrificed Isaac or Ishmael.  Some argue that Allah is not a loving father, or that Allah has no son.  Some finally, detail many differences in Christian and Islamic beliefs. 

All of which provides ample evidence that Christianity and Islam are not the same religion.  We do not share the same faith, which is why interactions between us are called “inter-faith” events.  But all these things are beside the point. 

All these arguments, however distinct, make the same basic error.  It is called a “category mistake”:

A category mistake is an error in logic in which one category of something thing is presented as belonging to another category. For example, to say "the rock is alive" assigns the category of life to that which is not alive. Another example would be to say that an idea is the color blue. It mistakenly applies the category of color to a concept in the mind.

https://carm.org/dictionary-category-mistake  

In short, the arguments above all waste our time by making the points that do not even apply to the question about the “same God.”

The category mistake here lies in thinking that talking about “the same God” is equivalent to talking about “the same concept of God” or “the same ideas of God”  or “beliefs about God” or even “names of God.”

These are all mistakes, because the question is not if we all believe the same things.  In fact the question is not about us (our ideas, concepts, beliefs, words) at all.  It is about God. It is not about our beliefs, but about the object of our beliefs. And as Saint Thomas wrote, the object of our faith is not an idea--it is a being, or even Being itself. 

Let me take an everyday example. I have three children.  Do they all acknowledge the same father?  Perhaps one thinks I am generous, another thinks I am wasteful, and a third thinks I am stingy.  They have very different ideas of me--but their ideas do not change me. I am still father to all three.  Do they all love the same father?  Perhaps one thinks she is my favorite child, another believes I have no favorites, and the third thinks I’m the best father in the world.  None of those things alters the main fact--I am still their father, and if they love their father then they all love me. 

My kids’ ideas may be right or wrong, of course.  But those ideas do not change who I am.  Different people’s ideas about God may also be right or wrong.  But they do not change God. 

So Muslims do not believe Allah has a son.  But then, Jews do not believe in the Son of God either.  Nor do Unitarians.  Nor did the 4th century Arians, who believed Jesus was only human.  Then there were the Docetists, who did not believe that God’s Son became human.  And the Jansenists, who believed that God’s grace destroyed our free will.  And the Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians, who do not believe, as we do, that “the Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son.”

Are we to conclude that Jews, Unitarians, Arians, Docetists, Jansenists, and Othodox Christians all worship a different God?  Of course not.  That would make a mockery of Western monotheism, which began with the notion that the God of Abraham is the only God, that all others are frauds.  We may disagree with those others, or believe they are wrong in their beliefs.  We may even judge, as history does, that Arianism, Docetism, and Jansenism are heretical beliefs incompatible with true Christian faith.  But we cannot say they worship a different God.  We all share the same monotheism. 

By definition, monotheists acknowledge only one God.  If Jews worship a different God from Christians, then the God of Abraham cannot be God at all.  So why do we use their scriptures?  Why don’t we reject their God?  But of course, we do not--any more than Muslims reject our God. 

To repeat: the question is not whether we all believe all the same things about God.  The question is not about us at all.  The question is about God.  In short, the focus is not on our beliefs but on the object of our beliefs—and God is and remains the same God whether our beliefs are right or wrong. 

So how do we know we all worship the same God if our beliefs are so different?  The obvious way to consult our traditions. Here is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.

--CCC 841, quoting the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium 16, from Vatican Council II.

Vatican II's Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate, 3, makes the teaching of the Council perhaps even clearer:

The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even his inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God.

And here is what the Quran says:

We believe in God and what has been sent down to us, and what had been revealed to Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and their progeny, and that which was given to Moses and Jesus, and to all other prophets by the Lord. We make no distinction among them, and we submit to Him.-- Quran 136:2

If we compare these statements, it is clear beyond doubt that both Catholicism and Islam claim to worship the same God--the God of Abraham.  So we share the same God, but we do not share the same beliefs about God--which should be obvious, since we belong to different religions. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all live by different belief systems, including different beliefs about God.  But we all claim the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as the one true God.  “Yahweh,” “Allah,” “Trinity”--all these are different names for the same creator. 

This truth may threaten some Christians. Stating this truth may cost Larycia Hawkins her job.  But the reasons people use to deny this truth inevitably fall into that “category mistake” I explained above.  In fact, what they are really giving us are the reasons why Muslims are not Christians. 

Did anyone think they were?

   © Bernard F. Swain PhD 2015