Shadrach, Mechach, Abednego, and the NFL
May 30, 2018 by Alex Camire in Current Events
We will soon be entering our third NFL season where the attention, for many, will not be solely on the game, but also on the conversation about racial inequality and police brutality against persons of color.
This conversation (started by Colin Kaepernick in August 2016) is still ongoing but has taken an unfortunate turn. For this upcoming season, the NFL owners have chosen to create an internal policy requiring players to stand for the National Anthem when on the field, with the intent to prevent protests and suppress the voices of those who were calling attention to the issues caused by systemic racism.
Today, as I write, it is with the specific frustration…show more content… Opting to turn a blind eye or ignore a problem simply because it is exhausting is a luxury that isn’t afforded to everyone. These conversations matter as they affect the very lives of people of color; and they don’t have the benefit of looking away when they get tired.
What’s become the most frustrating thing about this topic is the way that it is regularly framed: as a protest against our actual anthem and flag, and, by extension, the government, specifically military service-members and veterans. Rather than waste time explaining why I believe this logic is false and flawed, I feel it is prudent to point out the idolatry in it, particularly when the argument gets perpetuated by my fellow white, male, Christians (emphasis on the Christians).
There is a story in the Bible in chapter three of the Book of Daniel. This story concerns three young men, Shadrach, Mechach, and Abednego. If you’ve ever been to Sunday School, it’s a story you are most likely familiar with. The “TL;DR” version, for those unfamiliar, is that the King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, created a large golden idol, set it on a plain in Babylon, and commanded everyone to fall down and worship the idol whenever they heard a specific piece of music (starting to sound familiar?). Our three protagonists were turned in because they didn’t worship the idol as commanded and thus faced the punishment, which in this story was death. However — spoiler…show more content… A story that somehow gets lost in translation when compared to modern society. Shadrach, Mechach, and Abednego were Hebrews living in exile, in a foreign land and given foreign names. They were commanded to worship an idol representing a king and an empire that essentially sought to rob them of their Jewish heritage, identity, and beliefs. So, instead of conforming to the imperialistic status quo, they literally and metaphorically stood in protest against the injustices they had experienced as Hebrews at the hands of the Babylonian autocracy. For Christians, this is a story of courage, bravery, and standing in faith for what one believes in, but, when it comes to these practices during the national anthem prior to a football game, most Christians no longer seem to value these
