The lesson of Harrison Butker: Take words seriously, not kickers

I’m sure I should be more upset about Harrison Butker, but he’s just a kicker. He’s not even a very influential member of his own team.

He deserves a merely proportional response. The best reply to Butker is to make fun of him; kickers hate that. Turn his name into a verb. When you “butker” something, it means to botch an intellectual argument with clumsy hyperbole to the point of obnoxiousness. To get “butkered” means to be preached to by a dude with a zealot’s beard that looks like it was combed with a harrow.

A change.org petition is demanding the Kansas City Chiefs “dismiss Harrison Butker for discriminatory remarks” that he made at the Benedictine College commencement. It had garnered 126,000 signatures by Thursday. That’s exactly the wrong response — again, he’s just a kicker. It’s not like he’s the Bishop of Kansas City, he’s just a Kansas City Chief. You don’t fire a kicker for demeaning Taylor Swift as “my teammate’s girlfriend.” The right response is to sing Swift lyrics at him, preferably from “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.”

Butker has every right to speak his faith and his mind and should be able to do so without fear of professional reprisal; he was representing only himself at a personal engagement at Benedictine. We’re always asking athletes to be role models, and it’s more than a little hypocritical to praise football players when they protest cops but to stifle one for being religious or conservative. Enough with the outrage over his beliefs. Who cares whether a kicker thinks a woman’s proper role is in the home, so long as you don’t have to live as a handmaiden in his household? I’m more concerned with his scaremonger, doomwatcher language. It’s his symptomatic inflationary alarmism that’s worth worrying about.

The cheapening of words by public speakers across the spectrum has begun to rob us all of perspective — and of the art of proper contextual retort. Inflate the word “trauma” with enough overuse, and there’s no meaning left in it. Every experience is equated at the same cheap, low level: What should be merely mildly upsetting becomes equated with actual torture — which denies actual sufferers recognition of their legitimate pain. Butker’s a victim of that: He’s just a kicker. But he’s guilty of it, too. The personal conduct of anyone who does not comport with his faith is “degenerate.”

Inflated words are throughout his speech. Butker drops calumnies like nickels. President Biden is “delusional” for the way he practices his faith. Pride Month is a “deadly sin.” Those who quest for diversity are engaged in “tyranny.” He is fighting against “the cultural emasculation of men.”

In Butker’s view, women are too encouraged to define success as attainable only through professional rewards, rather than through family. A fair enough point. But here is the inflationary way that Butker phrased it to the young women in the audience that rendered it idiotic. “I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you.”

Actually, here is a more appropriate use of “diabolical”: It describes the thousand-year persistence of teaching that young women are such dumb defenseless prey they cannot discern lies on their own and need a man with medieval monastic face hair to guide their morality and define their happiness. Even if he’s just an NFL kicker.

Inflationary language is, of course, inherently lazy. It’s the recourse of people who are trying to take shortcuts to power and influence. Butker is clearly over-striving for both, and, thanks to NFL hagiography, no doubt believes he’s equipped to lead. Sprinkled throughout his speech are grievances about government, and rather unnerving references to “the pervasiveness of disorder,” as if he’s the only man who can put us straight — forcibly. “If we are going to be men and women for this time in history, we need to stop pretending that the ‘Church of Nice’ is a winning proposition,” he says.

It was too bad that such an unrefined speech was delivered at Benedictine. The Association of Benedictine Colleges and Universities takes some pains to stress the thoughtfulness and nuance of their rich educational tradition and to avoid categorical certainties and hyperbole. Its website says that to be rightly shaped by the Catholic intellectual tradition means to be “unafraid of ambiguity or the unknown,” and it gives “special attention to Christ’s unexpected arrival from outside in the person of the guest.” It urges students to put aside their preoccupations “in order to let the unexpected person in.”

Sounds like a commitment to the “tyranny” of inclusiveness.

St. Benedict himself cautioned against “the wicked zeal of bitterness which separates from God.” Now there is an articulate statement that sums up the reductive harm of inflationary language. In a recent essay on St. Benedict, the Catholic abbot Marion Nguyen expanded on this thought, describing it as a “kind of false fervor” that emanates from those who believe in the perfection of their own worship, and think they have more rigor than you or I. Butker’s inflationary language smacks of that false fervor.

It’s important not to overreact to Butker with the same false outrage and overstatement. His personal belief about women’s true vocation is not threatening in the least, and neither is the sidelong dumbellism he showed in statements such as, “Congress just passed a bill where stating something as basic as the biblical teaching of who killed Jesus could land you in jail.”

There is enough off-with-their-heads censoriousness in public life without recruiting a kicker into it. Keep Butker in his proper context, and scale. It’s the best way to fight inflation.