Opinion: Take-a-knee and U.S. civil religion

As fall Sundays fade toward winter ones, the NFL players’ anthem protests have largely disappeared from today’s news cycle. That’s a shame.

The protests do resurface occasionally on Opinion pages (“Time for Vermont to take a knee,” Nov. 12), which I consider a good thing. The truth is, the players’ actions continue and have even expanded to other sports, such as basketball, and to other levels, such as intercollegiate athletics.

Equally important is that the anthem protests possess a larger context. They are part of an ongoing struggle over the heart and soul of American civil religion.

Half a century ago, in 1967, sociologist Robert Bellah posited the existence of a civil creed that provides “an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality.” This American civil creed exists alongside traditional religions. It is compatible with each, or with none at all.

Suffused by the flag and anthem, football has long been one of its rituals. More than other popular sports, it has the potential to test the principles that will inform American civil religion. That is because the game so vividly conveys individual self-sacrifice for the collectivity. Its mimicry of warfare, as a battle for real estate, and of traditional hand-to-hand combat, is unique.

Tellingly, yesteryear’s jargon described those “in the trenches” as protecting their “field general.” As part of the country’s civil religious calendar, American football has its high holy day, Super Bowl Sunday. Over far more minutes of non-playing time than when the ball is snapped and in play, the extravaganza summarizes a variety of quintessentially American themes such as technology, specialization and, especially, commercialism and capitalism.

Who gets to define American civil religion? Donald Trump may be the president and thereby commands a bully pulpit, but he has no monopoly on the contents of our nation’s civic creed. All Americans, including NFL athletes as well as St. Michael’s men’s basketball players, can participate in shaping its core values.

It’s worth remembering that anthems need not precede a sporting event (They don’t in Europe or elsewhere). Once they do, however, the event becomes a politicized vehicle for promoting selected values. Which particular values has always been a matter for debate.

For sure, America’s civil religion has always been hotly contested, featuring competing versions. So it is today. As Bellah wrote 50 years ago, “An American-Legion type of ideology ... fuses God, country, and flag [and] has been used to attack nonconformist and liberal ideas and groups of all kinds.” That version, for which President Trump is the cheerleader, runs the risk of national self-idolization.

NFL and other protesters, on the other hand, are reforming American civil religion by infusing it with equally American values of racial justice, equality and redress of grievances. They know, even without articulating it, that American civil religion, following Bellah, is “not…a form of national self-worship.” Rather, it is “the subordination of the nation to ethical principles that transcend it [and] in terms of which it should be judged.” The stakes, therefore, are high and the ongoing controversy deserves the attention even of those who are not sports enthusiasts.

Daniel Regan, of Hyde Park, is a sociologist and former dean of academic affairs at Johnson State College.