Harrison Butker is Misogynistic Religion's MVP

His commencement address reminds us why the Church is rightly dying.

Recently, Kansas City Chiefs field goal kicker Harrison Butker gave a commencement address at Catholic Benedictine College. It has become a battleground for a nation already addled by political tribalism and exhausted at Conservative religion’s continual efforts to reach into the bathrooms, bedrooms, and boardrooms of America.

It’s also a stark reminder of why there is a mass exodus from the Church and why organized religion in America is dying.

Butker’s message was a textbook example of the antiquated, sexist, phobic Christianity that MAGA Republicans propagate daily: one centering whiteness, maleness, and heteronormativity.

He continually amplifies toxic masculinity’s dreams of rewinding this nation back to the days when women were silent and invisible, when diversity was inhibited, and when men like him held court unabated.

Throughout the kicker’s address, which reads and sounds like an incendiary Sunday morning sermon on the dangers of cultural progress, he takes jabs at President Biden, COVID restrictions, IVF, abortion, LGBTQ PRIDE, and evolving gender roles. He also suggests that intelligent, educated, and successful women in the room are more excited about marriage and motherhood than the careers they’ve spent years of their lives tirelessly preparing for. Some of them surely have aspirations of marriage and motherhood, but it’s insulting to assume that’s at all universal.

It’s hard to fathom why the college approved this wildly inappropriate diatribe, other than the reality that they found nothing wrong with it until they were met with the reality beyond their cloistered privilege. It’s yet another reminder that the power holders in this nation (mainly insecure white men) are dead set on squashing our collective evolution and willing to weaponize God in order to ensure they are successful.

Butker warned his audience: “If we are going to be men and women for this time in history, we need to stop pretending that the "Church of Nice" is a winning proposition. We must always speak and act in charity, but never mistake charity for cowardice.” Throughout his many references to God and religion and holiness, you don’t hear much about Jesus and that is by design. That is Conservative Christianity’s M.O.: a way to shroud everything in a thin, shiny veneer of religiosity while completely ignoring the fact that Jesus welcomed women in ministry, pushed for social change, and warmly welcomed diversity.

Harrison says to his male listeners, “As men, we set the tone of the culture, and when that is absent, disorder, dysfunction, and chaos set in.” He’s partly right. The disorder, dysfunction, and chaos we are immersed is the tone men like him have set. They are the result of insecure, similarly terrified males who recognize that the world is rapidly evolving out of their control and who are desperate to retain their iron-clad grip on leadership, opportunity, and options.

As a man raised in the Catholic faith who spent nearly twenty five years as a pastor, I’m grateful for Harrison Butker’s self-righteous hubris and his unapologetic sexism because the responses to them are revealing just how many men (and sadly women) here share his Make Catholicism Great Again aspirations and his theology born in subjugation, exclusion, and manipulation. (The kicker’s jersey sales have skyrocketed since the address, largely fueled by the same people previously outraged at a silent, kneeling black player protesting police brutality or Taylor Swift having the audacity to support her boyfriend in between the largest grossing tour in history). It’s also waking a sprawling multitude to the real and present danger of looming theocracy, who will not go quietly into the Handmaid’s Tale.

The more people like Butker double-down on these draconian doctrines, the greater the departure from the orthodox Church will be, and the sooner we will see an movement of spirituality that welcomes change, diversity, and joy; one that has no use for compulsion or control, but allows people to walk fully into the lives they want; an expression of faith that does no harm.`

Harrison Butker is the MVP of toxic masculine religion—and the diverse and massive population of this nation who want no part of it are winning because of it.