The NFL struggle to boost ratings continued with the Super Bowl, and like many on the Right I’m not particularly heartbroken. There are plenty of reasons to despise the NFL, which has degenerated into a cesspool of violent thugs whose criminal tendencies are a constant embarrassment to the league. The recent NFL trend to kneel for the national anthem is driving away many fans who are understandably nonplussed by rich black athletes complaining about oppression. The victim narrative that is pimped by so many NFL players esteems all black criminals killed by police as victims of omnipresent “racism” no matter how obviously guilty the black perpetrators happen to be. To those on the Right the NFL represents what is wrong with postmodern America: worship of black athletes accompanied by religious devotion to a sportsball team as opposed to faith, folk, and family.
Those who remain loyal to the NFL demonstrate the corrosive effects of NFL culture. The degeneracy of the NFL was on full display as Eagles fans celebrated their win the Super Bowl by committing acts of vandalism and in one instance eating horse manure. Nevertheless the NFL remains immensely popular and is still a major foundation of American popular culture, which has not been innocent or wholesome for some time. Conservative Christians should have no problem seeing the general NFL culture as the world that Jesus told his disciples to reject.
This leads us to the recent Super Bowl and the advertising behind it. The Super Bowl remains popular even with casual fans or even those who are disinterested in football. Advertising during the Super Bowl is notoriously expensive due to the fact that so many people will be watching. Therefore Super Bowl advertising is an excellent indicator of what corporate America wants to market to consumers and what these businesses believe will help sell their product. What did businesses market to Super Bowl viewers? What do businesses believe that Americans care about? The answer on display during this past Super Bowl was…equality and diversity.
I decided to peruse Super Bowl ads because I was confident that the idolatry of equality and diversity would be on full display. I was not disappointed. The most notorious example was this commercial called “Little Ones” from T-Mobile. The commercial doesn’t mention phone service at all, but instead praises equality because we are all the same. Coca-Cola also praised diversity for the sake of diversity, because everyone should drink Coke. Toyota’s ad featured a Catholic priest, Jewish rabbi, Muslim imam, and Buddhist monk joining a couple of nuns for a football game, because religious differences are meaningless as long you can come together and cheer on the home team. These ads are all mindless sentimentality without any substance. The underlying messages being that we’re all the same and diversity is strength, so call all your non-white friends with T-Mobile and drive your Toyota to go out for a Coke.
I’ve written before about the worldliness of the worship of equality and diversity. These ads during the Super Bowl serve only to reiterate what everyone should already know. The modern constructs of equality and diversity defined by open borders, absolute political equality, and miscegenation are all promoted by the world for mass consumption. Christians are to reject the things of the world (Rom. 12:2; 1 Jn. 2:15), and equality and diversity are the pillars of modern anti-Christian humanism. The hypocrisy of humanist morality is that diversity is supposed to bury distinctively white culture amidst of sea of non-white “vibrancy” while non-whites are celebrated. This was also on display during the Super Bowl during an ad that promoted black culture or “blacture.” Does this offend modern Christians who promote humanist equality and diversity as unjust or hypocritical? Absolutely not.
John Piper goes out of his way to signal his support for “Christian rapper” Lecrae, even as Lecrae is leaving Christian orthodoxy in favor of black liberation theology in order to support and express solidarity with black people. The sheer hypocrisy is lost on Piper who never misses an opportunity to denounce “white supremacy.” Piper recently described the evangelical MLK50 conference on “racial reconciliation” as “risky and righteous.” Piper is kidding himself if he thinks that a celebration of King and his radical agenda is “risky,” as it would never be denounced by unbelieving secularists. Celebrating King as about the safest thing to do in post-Christian America, and Piper knows this. John Piper and the whole litany of evangelical leaders who participate in the adulation of a known degenerate like King are hypocrites and cowards who seek to curry the world’s favor. King was invoked by Dodge during its Super Bowl commercial precisely because King is a popular figure among post-Christian Americans. (This didn’t prevent them from being denounced for daring to appropriate the sacred words of King to promote their product.)
American Christianity has become thoroughly conformed to the image of the world. Christian leaders speak the moral language of anti-Christian leftist radicals. When leftist “freedom” turns against Christian morality, as it always will, the only protest that these worldly Christians can muster is that leftists are being bigoted against Christians by not affording them the same equal protections of the law – that Jesus is being denied his rightful seat at the table of democracy. This argument has utterly failed. The left doesn’t believe that Christians have rights, because Christian morality is summarily hateful, intolerant, and bigoted. If you want to understand why modern Christianity has failed to stem the tide of liberal progress, look no further than the ads of this year’s Super Bowl to see what the world believes about equality and diversity, and ask yourself if this can be distinguished from what American pastors are teaching. To embrace the moral categories and beliefs of the Left is to surrender and accept inevitable defeat. Kinism as an extension of true Christian orthodoxy is the only tenable way to conquer secular humanism and restore Christian morality in our society.
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