Touchdown Jesus

What did the coach who prayed at high school football games actually want?

First Liberty Institute

This is Clusterhuck, my newsletter about faith, culture and a flourishing future for all! I’m glad you’re here. I can only do this through the support of my readers, and I’m grateful for every one I’ve got. If you’d like to join, just click here. You’ll get a free seven-day trial, including access to all the archives. 

---

Remember that Supreme Court case about the high school football coach in Washington who won his job back after he got fired for praying with football players? His name is Joe Kennedy, and this week he quit his hard-won job back after just one game. He wrote in his resignation letter that “It is apparent that the reinstatement ordered by the Supreme Court will not be fully followed after a series of actions meant to diminish my role and single me out in what I can only believe is retaliation by the school district.”

He didn’t go into details, but it’s not exactly a surprise. Kennedy hasn’t even lived in Washington for the last three years. Instead, he’s been in Florida with his family. Last month, he studiously refused to answer reporters’ questions about whether or not he’d stick around after the first game of the season. Bremerton’s team won that game, as it turns out, but their assistant head coach had already clinched his real victory. He’s become a big deal on the public speaking circuit, has a book out (Average Joe) and there’s even a movie in the works. High school football can’t compete with that. 

I’m only digging this footnote to the whole story up because it so perfectly encapsulates an excessively exhausting trait in American Christianity that I really think those of us who say we’re Christians need to be aware of. 

What’s interesting about the description of this case in that first sentence up there — “the high school football coach who won his job back after he got fired for praying with football players” — is that virtually none of it is true. That might be how most people who heard this case would describe it. It’s largely how this was reported in the media. And it’s even more or less how the Supreme Court judged it. But it’s not what happened. 

Here are the facts of the case. Way back in 2008, Kennedy started praying with players on the 50-yard line after Bremerton High football games. It was a practice he continued all the way up until 2015, when school officials got wind of it and told the coaching staff that they could not pray with players at school events, for fear of ostracizing non-Christian students and broader concerns about the separation of church and state at a public school. 

Kennedy dutifully obeyed. At first. But eventually, he got tired of playing by the rules and started testing the waters again — praying with players after games here and there, and slowly building a reputation. In the lead up to the homecoming game, he retained lawyers from the First Liberty Institute, who sent a letter to school officials saying their client had a right to pray at games and students had a right to join him. 

Kennedy hit the media circuit, finding tons of sympathy from conservative organizations who flocked to this “clear and present” threat to the free exercise of religion. All this culminated at the homecoming game, which the principal would later describe as a “zoo.” An enormous pro-prayer crowd showed up along with TV cameras from multiple news stations to capture the events. After the game was over, this crowd mobbed the field, overwhelming security and knocking over cheerleaders and band members in their rush to “pray” at the 50 yard line with the coach. The head coach actually broke down in a later deposition describing the harassment he faced from the crowd. "I was done coaching at that point because I feared for my life," he said. He almost quit. "This is not worth it; I have two children."

At this point, the Bremerton school board sought a compromise. They insisted they did not care if Kennedy prayed with players. They just asked that he not do so on duty at official school functions where it might be interpreted as an endorsement of his religion. But that wasn’t good enough for Kennedy or his lawyers. 

Finally, the school superintendent placed Kennedy on leave, citing the coach’s “failure to abide by the district's policy against encouraging or discouraging student religious expression.” Kennedy did not apply to renew his contract the next year. 

So, to recap: Joe Kennedy was not fired for praying with football students. He was not fired at all. It was made abundantly clear to him that when off the clock, he could pray with any football students who wanted to. He could even pray on the clock and on school grounds, provided he do so privately. What he could not do was publicly pray with players at school functions. When he continuously and publicly violated that rule, he was put on leave until the end of his contract and then chose not to apply for a new one the next year. Why re-apply for a lousy assistant coach job? He and his lawyers had already found a much better gig.

Kennedy got working on his newfound public speaking career while his lawyers went to work. The lower courts sided with Bremerton High, but Kennedy won on his appeal to the Supreme Court, where Justice Neal Gorsuch’s majority opinion argued Kennedy had the right to engage in “brief, quiet, personal” prayer at school football games. 

But “brief, quiet, personal” prayer was never the issue! Bremerton never disputed that Kennedy or anyone else couldn’t engage in “brief, quiet, personal” prayer. And if Kennedy’s prayers had stayed “brief, quiet” and “personal,” this whole business would have been avoided. Heck, his prayers could have been lengthy, loud and public for all anyone cared. All the school asked of Kennedy was that he not conduct them at the 50-year line of a public high school football game. Instead of abiding by what certainly seems to be a reasonable request, Kennedy made a media circus that eclipsed the game, its players, the school and, notably, the substance of prayers themselves. 

It’s not hard to see why this story picked up steam. A former Marine fighting against the evil public schools for his right to pray to Jesus at the 50-yard-line of a good old fashioned American football game sounds almost too good to be true for God’s Not Dead crew. In fact, it is too good to be true. It’s not what happened.

There’s a lot of angles one could take here. We could talk about how the Supreme Court bought the First Liberty Institute’s version of events despite obvious evidence to the contrary (Justice Sotomayor, in her dissent, included photos of the huge crowds around Kennedy’s prayers. Gorsuch never addressed them).

We could talk about a hypothetical situation in which a Muslim football coach brings a prayer rug to the 50-yard line, and see if the First Liberty Institute would go to bat for their right to do so.

We could talk about the players themselves, whose football season was regulated to the backdrop of an all-important culture war.

We could even talk about Jesus’ words in Matthew 6, where he tells the disciples: “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” Much to consider! 

But there are two things I really want to talk about here. The first is a subject that has gotten very lost in this whole story, despite being its ostensible headline: prayer. Prayer is a great mystery that I don’t claim to either understand or be particularly good at. But I do believe that prayer is something special, a direct interaction between God and humans that has the potential to transform us. Such an act is not to be taken lightly, though we take comfort in the fact that a gracious God knows that we approach in weakness. 

What exactly was Kennedy praying for on that football field? In this interview, he says he was praying to “give [God] the glory after every game, win or lose” and to “thank Him for the opportunity to be there with kids and be able to compete.” 

I don’t take any issue with those prayers or have any reason to doubt their sincerity. But if I could talk to Kennedy, I guess I’d ask him what about those particular prayers necessitated a football field. Surely, if you believe in prayer, then the really important thing is the prayer itself — not where you do it. Does Kennedy believe his prayers would be any less effective in the parking lot after the game? 

The other thing I want to talk about is the fact that Kennedy, for all his protestations, apparently didn’t even really want his job back. During the case itself, Bremerton’s lawyers had argued just this, telling the Supreme Court that the whole case was moot because Kennedy had moved to Florida with his wife, so what were they all even arguing about? 

In response, Kennedy’s lawyers fired back that Bremerton’s team was full of it and Kennedy, in his own words, was “chomping at the bit” to get back to “a job he loves.” “He remains ready, willing, and able to return to his job just as soon as his constitutional rights are vindicated. It is really that simple,” they wrote. “The relocation to Florida is not permanent, and Kennedy stands ready, willing, and able to move back to Bremerton as soon as humanly possible should he prevail in this litigation and be permitted to resume his coaching duties.” 

“I am ready and willing to resume my coaching duties in Bremerton, WA,” Kennedy himself said. “I can do so within 24 hours of reinstatement, if I am still temporarily residing in Florida.”

Ah, well. I guess, technically, he didn’t say anything about staying at the job he loves after resuming it. Fair enough.

Even if you sympathize with Kennedy here — even if you take him at his word that the school has made his coaching job difficult and the man who’s spent the last few years devoting his life to getting this job back is now willing to throw in the towel after a single game — you have to admit how this all looks. An objective observer could hardly be blamed for writing the whole thing off as a cynical ploy for attention and another legal stunt to remake America into a fundamentally Christian Nation where all the non-Christians just have to deal with it.

Because what was really accomplished here? Are Christians meaningfully freer to pray than they were before this case? Only if you associate prayer with a TV news spectacle. Was the cause of Jesus meaningfully advanced on any front? I leave that to you.

As far as I can see, whatever the good intentions Kennedy and his legal team may have had, the actual impact has been to turn public prayer into a giant middle finger to the rest of America. This is prayer as political prop, culture war ammo, social leverage. This is prayer as a cudgel, in which spiritual transformation and divine communion is practically irrelevant. The important thing is to be seen praying. We win. You lose. Mission accomplished. We have received our reward in full. 

---

Listening: If you want to know where culture is going to be in ten years, check out where teen girls are now. Teen girls discovered Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones, Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake, Beyonce, Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish, and they did it with the whole world rolling their eyes at them. Now, teen girls are listening to Olivia Rodrigo. I, for one, can see why, and I expect the rest of us will be joining them in a few years here. 

There are two types of Olivia Rodrigo songs, and GUTS opens with both of them. “all-american bitch” skips back and forth between pretty acoustic ballad and snot-nosed pop-punk, giving both of her modes a turn at the wheel. The success of “driver’s license” suggests the pretty ballad stuff probably has more commercial appeal, but the pop-punk stuff is sharper, more fun and more interesting. On “get him back!” she has a lot of fun with the title’s double meaning (“I want sweet revenge / I want him again”). I think we’ll be hearing a lot of Olivia in the future. Teen girl music taste stays winning.

Reading: John Wray’s Gone to the Wolves follows three Florida teens’ coming of age against the backdrop of the late ‘80s heavy metal scene. Wray does a great job of capturing the bleak angst of adolescence, the allure of fringe subcultures and, eventually, the eerie morbidity this specific subculture infamously succumbed to in Norway. 

Watching: Finally getting around to Justified: City Primeval. It’s good to have Olyphant back in the Stetson, and the writers do a mostly good job of picking up right where Justified left off; telegraphing an awareness of the ACABification of cops without forcing the issue.