“Concussion” Makes a Christian Argument Against Football
Last January, after the Seattle Seahawks staged an improbable comeback to beat the Green Bay Packers in the N.F.C. Championship Game, the Seahawks’ quarterback Russell Wilson told the football writer Peter King, “That’s God setting it up, to make it so dramatic, so rewarding, so special.” Wilson’s statement was a next-level version of the “all thanks to God” quotes that players regularly give to sideline reporters in the afterglow of a big win—God had not merely given him the strength to do the things he had practiced all his life but, in Wilson’s telling, had arranged the events of the game to provide for the greatest amount of narrative satisfaction. A day later, the Packers’ quarterback Aaron Rodgers, during a radio interview, offered a competing view. “I don’t think God cares a whole lot about the outcome,” he said. “He cares about the people involved, but I don’t think he’s a big football fan.”
The Lord, of course, works in mysterious ways. Two weeks later, following the Seahawks’ stunning loss to the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl, Wilson said that God had spoken to him in the moment after he threw the interception that lost his team the game, and explained that he had ordered the misfortune as a test. (I suspect that the Patriots’ cornerback, Malcolm Butler, has a different take on the event’s authorship.) Then, this past September, after the Packers beat the Seahawks in a regular-season rematch, Rodgers smirked during his post-game press conference and said, clearly trolling Wilson, “I think God was a Packer fan tonight.”
.. Omalu thought that the N.F.L. would be grateful to be alerted about a potential health crisis facing its players and would be eager to collaborate on further study; instead, three doctors employed by the league, part of a committee that had commissioned studies finding no clear links between football and lasting brain damage, wrote a letter to the journal questioning Omalu’s methodology and findings, and demanding that the paper be retracted.
.. Omalu’s boss at the Allegheny County coroner’s office explains the stakes of his discovery by saying that Omalu has gone to war with a corporation that owns an entire day of the week, a day which, he adds, used to belong to the church. In this way, football is presented as America’s secular religion, one that has replaced traditional faith with hedonistic entertainment.
.. But as a polemic, this evangelical argument is interesting and novel, suggesting that football’s dangers are not merely physical, but spiritual as well. This might be the movie’s most subversive message: not that the N.F.L. stood in the way of scientific research about the health of its players but that it occupies a false place within the religious and patriotic beliefs of so many of its fans, whose Sabbath routines are timed perfectly so that Sunday service ends just in time for kickoff.