Seven Anathemas on Super Bowl Sunday: 7QT XII Seriatim

Last updated on: March 9, 2017 at 4:04 pm by Scott Eric Alt

Seven Anathemas on Super Bowl Sunday: 7QT XII Seriatim 2017-03-09T16:04:46-04:00 Scott Eric Alt

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At least someone here is waving a Terrible Towel (US Air Force, public domain)

In this post I am going to try a little blasphemy. I wonder greatly how that will work out for me, in light of the religious hysteria that takes place every year on what is known as “Super Bowl Sunday.” It is the only Sunday in Extraordinary Time. It is our nation’s holiest day of the year—the Easter of sports secularism, when we gather round the altar (i.e., the television); consecrate the elements (beer and potato chips, or whatever our snack and drink of choice); and watch our priests beat each other up for an hour (plus time out for time out and commercials). And this we cheer and use as an excuse to get loud and smashed.

II.

I have always hated football; there, I said it, let the jihad begin. You can find me on Twitter. I do not know why it has so seized this nation’s need for religion. (We have rejected all the others.) It does not have the classical balance of baseball, nor the aggressive balance of hockey, nor even the rhapsodic poise of bowling. I can understand turning Babe Ruth into a god. But football is brutality pure and loud. It is the kind of sport that could only suit a nation of murderers.

III.

When I was a Protestant, during a four-year stint with the United Church of Christ, I witnessed an amazing act. I was on the church council—I don’t name any names here—and our pastor could not wait to hurry the meeting along so he could get out of there and get back home so he would not miss kickoff. (Kickoff is the introit and entrance antiphon of our secular religion.) And this was for college football!—a mere Protestant singalong compared to the Super Bowl, which is the Catholic Mass of sport, complete with unimmaculate Marys prancing around and showing off their flesh.

IV.

The only possible reason to actually watch football is the Pittsburgh Steelers. (Or Penn State.) But Pittsburgh is out of it, so any other team in that Apollyon of sports is dark, dark, dark and waste and void. Who cares about a battle between Satan and Mephistopheles? I will concede that much to the false gods of the age.

V.

But why so much madness and hysteria over what is, in the end, nothing more than a game? Is there a rational reason (I am not looking for a defense of the virtue of sport itself, which I concede) why this game, of all games in the long calendar of the year, should create such zeal and rage? Why is it an excuse for advertisers to go nuts to compete for spots so that they can prick our lust for things? (Didn’t the pope warn of this?) But they do so because our nation’s unholy delerium over a game lets them know they have the whole nation bound and captive and possibly drugged on—beer, if we’re lucky. If the commercials have a reputation for being funny and clever, we will stay and watch rather than go and pee. Thus are the sponsors of our faith able to seduce our material lust—because we have deified a game, and not our Lord. The secular religion is brought to us by Doritos.

VI.

Sometimes I imagine I would rather have lived in a time when baseball meant more than football and everything else stopped for the World Series. But then I think: I am glad for baseball’s decline in popularity when compared with football. Football is our national pasttime now, and has been for a long time, and that does this baseball fan’s heart good: because I love a game, and not an obsession.

VII.

Sport is a good, but it is not a god.

Read more of this week’s quick takes at Conversion Diary.

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