What happens when we compare Colin Kaepernick to Tim Tebow? Here we have two professional football players “taking a knee” not for a coach's huddle but to express personal convictions outside the boundaries of their sport.
I understand how much these cases differ, but they share more than a common physical gesture. Tebow's devout pose and Kaepernick's anthem protest both test the boundaries of football as civil religion. As John Stackhouse points out in a previous Sightings essay, “Americans don't want to mix politics with [civil] religion,” even though performing the national anthem at football games already does so. But the act of taking a knee in dissent suggests a different, critical form of civil religion.
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