[PHOTO: JAMIE SQUIRE/GETTY]

There has been more than enough “discourse” over Harrison Butker’s commencement speech at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas (a school of which I’d never heard before this, nor, I would bet, had the vast majority of those commenting or writing, aghast, that anyone still holds such views IN 2024!). But grist for the rage mill must be produced, lest it grind to a halt.

What is a little strange is that I read and hear and see things every single day that are “offensive” to me and the convictions I hold. There may have been a time when I would have written caustically about those offenses (even, erstwhile, on this blog). Now, most of the time, I shrug. Far better to carry out my vocations and work in the space that I have been given, than to constantly comment on people I have never met and things that have a marginal, if any, relationship to my daily life. It is the Facebook/Twitter(X)/TikTok effect that everything must have an immediate response, everything is significant, everything hurts or helps me, so I’m going to tap out a half-informed answer from my smart phone screen. The 24-hour, social-media “news” cycle has caused us to think, falsely, that billions of events around the world, over which I have zero control, somehow affect me. At the same time, the things that actually do affect me–local politics and school boards, the wellbeing of myself and my family, my neighbors–get short shrift, and, in a strange reversal, I am inclined to think I have no control over any of that either. Thus, for the vast majority of people, endlessly scrolling through the destruction and identity echo chambers, it is not social action that abounds, but an increasing and overwhelming feeling of anxious helplessness. The only thing left to do is burn it all down and start over–though the “start over” part is always much blurrier than the burn-it-down part.

Even so, the (manufactured) controversy over Butker’s remarks can teach Christians something: not about what to say or not to say, but about how we navigate clashes of loyalties in the world. Obviously, we’re not all players for professional sports teams, nor are we all giving commencement speeches at colleges and universities. But strip it back to the basics of Butker’s situation, and we see something that does apply to Christians in every vocation. Consider how many loyalties bind Harrison Butker: husband, father, Roman Catholic, NFL kicker, commencement speaker, public figure, etc. You and I do not have those specific loyalties, perhaps, but we do have multiple loyalties, and we are navigating them whenever we decide to do one thing rather than another. Instead of “loyalties,” we might say “relationships.” Whatever responsibilities you have in your own specific life comprise your vocation. In Roman Catholic terms, that usually refers to priests, monks, and nuns. But in Lutheran terms, your vocation consists of all of the relationships you have in which something is required of you. And those responsibilities may and do sometimes overlap or conflict. In my own case, I am a husband and father, but I am also a pastor. Because I have limited time, I am required by those relationships to choose sometimes between giving time to my family and giving time to my parishioners. Sometimes a family need or emergency may keep me from dealing with a congregational matter. Sometimes an emergency with a parishioner may require me to leave a family gathering.

When it came to his commencement speech, Butker chose his loyalty to his understanding of husbands, wives, family, politics (how dare he criticize a sitting president?!), and cultural issues, in a specific context which gives meaning to his words, over loyalty to the Kansas City Chiefs, the NFL, and even to a different version of female vocation within the Roman Catholic Church (see the response of the nuns). While I would put things differently, and prefer less overt nods to culture-war buzzwords, that’s not really the point I want to make. By getting stuck on the content (which is not, of course, unimportant) of a speech for which we were not present, and which has no direct effect on our actual lives (not being graduates of that institution in 2024), Christians may make the mistake of thinking that we can avoid similar clashes of loyalty within our vocations–which always take place at various intersections of the “religious” and “secular.” It’s always much easier to use a controversy as a proxy war against “them,” whomever “they” might be.

Perhaps the most public clash of loyalties is built into the very fabric of the United States and its version of Enlightenment liberalism: the implications of freedom for each individual when there is a wide divergence of opinion and ways of living. Freedom for Christians in the public square will necessarily come into conflict with freedom for people who hold contradictory views, and vice-versa. We like to think that everyone can be fully free in their own persons and that as long as we do not “harm” (vaguely defined) others, we all somehow can live in peace. But this is proving, and will continue to prove, as illusory as the “American dream.”

The most obvious possibility for where this conflict will be joined is on the property of churches themselves. When “harm” is defined as “anything said by someone publicly that I take to be an attack on my psychological self-identity,” how long until “freedom of speech” and “free exercise of religion” are turned against each other? There has already been a lot of discussion about the “limits of free speech” (an oxymoron if ever there was one). While I am not a prophet nor the son of a prophet, I expect the tax-exempt status of churches as 501(c) (3) organizations to be the first piece to be attacked and undone, in the name of freedom and inclusion. (The NFL gave away the plot when they distanced themselves from Butker, because they are, ironically, an “inclusive” organization. At least it would have made logical sense if they had said instead, “We don’t like what he said, but we are an inclusive organization, so he is free to say it.”)

Pastors preach the Law of God, as well as the Gospel, and the Law is “harmful” and “damaging” to the sinful flesh, aiming at the final death of that sinful nature itself so that the Gospel of Jesus can make alive the person unto the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Courts in the United States have not, so far, ventured into churches to determine how far sermons fall under both the free speech and free exercise clauses, but they might well be inclined to cut off church property from any kind of tax accommodation, essentially closing the majority of churches in areas where the property taxes would make their existence unsustainable.

Those situations are on the most public end of the clash of loyalties in the United States, but because the vocations of Christians cross those lines nearly every day, every Christian is going to have to decide how to act and what to say when those multiple relationships come into conflict. Harrison Butker chose one way and angered the representatives of his other loyalties, as well as those who themselves hold other loyalties. But whatever one’s individual loyalties, and whatever the consequences, no Christian can avoid the choice altogether.