As much as I do not like it, football is (or has) replaced baseball as the American pass-time. It is understandable and I certainly see how it would. Americans love violence. Humans love violence. Football is violent. Comparatively, baseball is not violent. The fans for both football and baseball can get pretty out of control at times. When it comes to cultural issues, American citizens are much like the fans of football and baseball, we can get out control very quickly.
Harrison Butker recently gave a commencement speech at Benedictine College that caused a media and social media freak out. I encourage you to pause reading this blog and watch the full speech for context so that my comments below will make more sense. If you have watched it already, great! Watch it again!
Initially, I held off on making any comments or watching the speech because I knew I would want to respond. When this is the intention, it is my typical practice to not simply react but instead be thoughtful and prayerful beforehand. I did the same with my recent response to John MacArthur’s comments on mental illness. Holding off was for one big reason: when the hype dies, the real conversation can take place. This is because when we are amped up about an issue we can very easily let our emotions control the reactions rather than our heads (as it often does). When this happens, those who felt like they were on the receiving end of the initial “blow” tend to be the loudest voice and become the only ones that have a say.
This tendency comes from the culturally pervasive, standpoint epistemology. Sandra Harding, the philosopher that coined the term in her 1987 book, The Science Question in Feminism, drew from Marxist-Hegelian philosophy and the work done at the Frankfurt School as she developed the idea of standpoint epistemology. Essentially, the idea is this, those that occupy the oppressed class have the best access to truth because of their lived experience.[1] When we let this dominate how we handle points of social and political contention, we forfeit the search for truth giving way to a role reversal.
My point of contention here is merely the question, “what if you are wrong?” I do not mean to say that we should live our lives according to the what ifs in life but as a theory of knowledge, this is a question we need to ask. In order to answer the question, we need to incorporate as many lines of evidence as possible. This includes those that are part of the “oppressed” class. After doing so and really trying to find the truth, we may be forced to uphold the status quo because it indeed is true! There is nothing wrong with this way of doing things. If you do have an issue with this line of thinking, I would wager that we have left the scientific enterprise and we have entered a tyrannical enterprise. Hear me out! I do not wish to silence any voice. When we do so, we end up “oppressing” that voice we are silencing and by the standards of standpoint epistemology, we ought to bow down to that voice and therefore the status quo may be upheld. (Do you see the circle?)
30,000 Foot Remarks
Overall, I very much enjoyed his speech. It was well articulated and you could tell that he did not hire someone to put a professional flare on its wording. There were parts of it that I differed theologically with Butker, but that is to be expected seeing that I am a Protestant and he is a Roman Catholic. A big take away, however, is that regardless of what you end up doing, be proud to be a Christian and where God has placed you (even if it is not where you initially set your course heading). Every Christian should rally around this and say an emphatic, “Yes and amen!”
Regarding celebrities and the beliefs they hold, an important point needs to be addressed, namely of the publics’ stereotypes of them. It is generally accepted in the 21st century that if you are a celebrity, no matter the reason for your celebrity, you are to have a progressive take on social, political, and religious issues. Butker is a celebrity and he is subject to this stereotype. This simply is not the case for him. Harrison is a traditional Roman Catholic Christian. Knowing that will give you so much insight as to what he believes and how he will talk about issues. It is neither here nor there as to what the public expects because let’s face it, many of them do indeed fall into the stereotypical progressive thought. Because Butker does not fall into the stereotype and he made the comments he did, the progressive media and social media took it out of context and blew it way out of proportion.
If I, a lowly blogger and college minister, were to make those same remarks and literally give the same speech, no one would pay attention? Why? Because it is expected of me to do so. This is extremely telling and very scary for one reason: group-think. When we give in to the groupthink style of things, we cease to be individual thinkers made in God’s image and anyone outside that group is then silenced (ie. cancelled). Butker’s dissenters are seeking to silence him and get him fired from his position as the Chiefs kicker, a job he is well qualified to do! This type of reaction and trend does absolutely nothing to help progress the conversation as we seek a solution. Rather, it eliminates progression and any possibility of an altruistic solution.
A More Detailed Look…
First and foremost, after listening to the speech start to finish (taking notes the whole time), nothing stood out as out of character for a conservative Catholic (or Christian for that matter). Harsh in our cultural milieu, yes, but unless you force all celebrities into the stereotype, not unexpected. Butker is known in the NFL and media for being outspokenly conservative and this was no detour for him. Granted, the speech could have been worded better in various places, but it is just a product of him writing it himself. If he were to have had a professional speech writer write it for him, either it would not have been a part of his speech at all or it would have been phrased in such a way that it would leave little to be taken out of context.[2] Writing their own speeches is a thing of the past now and it is quite refreshing to see a little bit of an unpolished speech. As a result of the practice being a thing of the past, the loosening of values and embracing of a slippery slope becomes very easy to do for the sake of ease. Because Butker did not hire out for the speech, I praise him.
Second, Butker was speaking to fellow Catholics. He was not talking to the whole of America as the media and social media would have you believe. His audience, whom he has a sort of familial bond, though they may differ in degree, share his most basic beliefs. Divorcing this context from the content is ill advised and is the very source of the outrage. Those at Benedictine College should have rallied around the Chiefs kicker so as to be consistent with the “themes handed on to us [them] by the Benedictine family: peace… and the glorification of God in all undertakings.”[3] Granted, this assumes that they too are conservative, traditional Roman Catholics and share his opinions offered in the speech. If they do not, that is fine, but they should have preserved the peace for the glory of God and not the glory of inclusion.
When the Catholic context is stripped, as the media did, and sound bites are produced, the real meaning of the speech cannot be gleaned. I will be the first to admit that I had to force myself to listen to the whole thing before passing any positive or negative critique on the man or the speech he gave. But it is exactly this habit that has produced a sensitive culture that cancels anything conservative. When a conservative celebrity does speak up and out, exile is sought. The result is not a culture of tolerance but one of hate and group think. Rather than seeing Butker as a person with his own thoughts and beliefs that are up for debate, the cancel-culture and group think took over and tried to exile him. He is okay with that result and made that abundantly clear when he said that “the Catholic faith has always been counter cultural.”[4]
Third, if the Catholic faith is to be counter cultural, it needs to have “rightly ordered” officials. This is true for all of Christianity, and quite honestly, society. Butker did not pull any punches in criticizing the wat the priests and bishops have allowed culture to sway theology. This was by far my favorite part of his speech. Broadly speaking, Butker captured the trend in Christianity of doing exactly what Paul warns the church in Colossae of, being led astray into the philosophy based upon humanity’s own making rather than on Christ (Colossians 2:8). This trend is not so much mental as the verse may let on but an allowance of theological concessions for the sake of popularity, growth in numbers, and with both of those comes growth in finances. Butker is 100% correct in calling this out and I would like to expand it and make the argument that it happens because of a lack of apologetics training.
Let’s face it, if the church were to be doing what it out to be doing, this trend would not be as strong. What the church should be doing is teaching and training their congregations in apologetics. Doing so will equip the church, as a whole, to be able to wade through the waters of culture and come out better for it. This is because apologetics training is training in critical thinking. When we train ourselves or allow others to train us in this way, we will be able to see the faults in the cultural tendencies of group think and the claim of tolerance. Priests, bishops, pastors, and lay people alike are not exempt from this. 1 Peter 3:15 is a call to all Christians and so is Colossians 2:8, but in order to give a defense and not fall victim to worldly philosophy, you have to know how to think. That our officials, not all but many, are lacking in this ability/skill is a major factor to not being rightly ordered as Butker criticized. This is a trait that should not be unique to only a handful of Christians. We should all be rightly ordered and well educated so we can give a defense (1 Peter 3:15) for the hope we have in us (Hebrews 11:1).
Fourth, the most contentious point that Butker made was relating to traditional family structures and dynamics and the call to retrieve it. Remember, the most important piece of information to understand his point is that he is talking to fellow Christians. What he is not doing/saying is devaluing the degrees the female graduates received and worked hard for. They only way to get to that is to divorce the context from the content making it unfounded and worthy of being tossed in the trash. He was also not saying that a woman’s job is to be a homemaker. What he was saying is that a woman’s worth is not wrapped up in the next work promotion or letters behind your name. That in order to be equal with men is to be in the workforce with them, alongside them, over them, and have the same pedigree as them. This is the “diabolical lie” he referenced. Their worth is derived from God.
For some women, being in the workforce is a necessary thing for survival. Singleness, divorce, being a single parent, and other things require a job. That is the reality of the situation and Butker made no inference that it was not or that being a wife/homemaker is a woman’s true role. He was clear that he would have been totally fine with a wife that had a job and contributed to the finances of the family. In fact, he mentioned that it was part of her dream to do so! This just was not the situation they were placed in and he said that she does not regret being a homemaker one bit. She accepted her lane and stayed in it.
For other women, marriage is right around the corner. Traditionally, Catholics do not believe in using birth control or abortion as it tries to usurp the will and plan of God for our own so if some women are getting married, already pregnant, or already mothers, that is just a fact they are excited about. Wifehood and parenthood is something they would have been excited about but why does that mean they have to not be educated as well? Or why should they give up something they had started? He was congratulating them for staying and accepting their lane of being a student and finishing the race. He was also assuming a high view of marriage and family, as a good Catholic/Christian does.
In closing, what can be gleaned from the speech is that Butker, a traditional Catholic that attends Latin Mass, lobbied for traditional Christian values and ethics. What lessons can we learn from the whole media outrage? There are two main lessons: 1) Keep statements in context and try to understand them within it; and 2) Christianity is a counter cultural faith. I was only able to scratch the surface on the speech, but my hope and goal is not to solve or lay out a comprehensive treatment of the speech. Instead, my goal is to help create and encourage good dialogue where our emotions (which are fleeting) are in check and rationality and charity are exhibited.
[1] My social science friends are not going to like this characterization for the very reason that I may be considered to be representative of the privileged class holding to the status quo. Nonetheless, it does accurately capture the concept Harding developed.
[2] However, I do not put it past anyone in our culture to find something or create an alloy of a quote using an ellipsis (…).
[3] https://www.benedictine.edu/about/mission/index
[4] This can be said for all of Christianity as well.
Brewed Up Apologetics 