The NFL’s Thanksgiving games are a spectacular display of America’s ‘God and country’ obsession
By James K.A. Smith November
23 at 6:00 AM
Its rituals are surprisingly widespread — pilgrimages
home through packed airports; gatherings of family and friends (and attendant
tensions that are the stuff of Hollywood rom-coms); the dining room altar on
which the turkey is supped, then a long day of drifting in and out of
consciousness while hours and hours of football flicker in our darkening dens.
Our Thanksgiving traditions reflect the country’s mix of
secularization and religious fervor — what theologian William Cavanaugh calls
“migrations of the holy.”
In a secular age, our religious impulses aren’t
diminished; they just find new devotions: consumption, the self, the nation.
Now, the NFL — in all its popularity and current controversy — sets the script
for our Thanksgiving Day litany. It gives us something to worship.
Of course, the typical symbols and traditions of
Thanksgiving have their own vague history, which has become both assumed and
contested. Those who observe the holiday maintain a baseline spirit of
gratitude and pause to “give thanks.” But to whom?
Historically, this gratitude was expressed to God, to the
Creator, the Lord of the Harvest, the one in whom we live and move and have our
being. Establishing our national observance, Abraham Lincoln commended the
nation to “set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a Day of
Thanksgiving and Prayer to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.”
But in a secularized, naturalized world where we are at
least officially agnostic about such a being, to whom shall we give thanks?
Here’s where the liturgies of football on Thanksgiving provide an alternative.
Read more at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/11/23/the-nfls-thanksgiving-games-are-a-spectacular-display-of-americas-god-and-country-obsession/?utm_term=.1baba686f7f6
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