Colin Kaepernick, Tim Tebow, and the magic of comparison: muscular Christianity as white racial frame

ABSTRACTThis article explores how muscular Christianity operates as a media frame for athlete religiosity and how the muscular Christian frame contributes to essentialist and racialised stereotypes about Black and white athletes, which in turn reinforce ‘common-sense’ assumptions around black and white religion that perpetuate and transmit white supremacist values. We present these findings starting from a critical comparative media analysis of athlete religiosity, articulated with respect to Colin Kaepernick and Tim Tebow. Our analysis produced two primary findings. First, while both Kaepernick and Tebow were framed as ‘muscular Christians’ by news media, this framing was racialised, constituting both athletes within what Feagin termed a ‘White racial frame’ (2013, 14). Second, the comparative media sub-discourse of a Kaepernick/Tebow comparison itself functioned to extend the white racial frame by essentializing Kaepernick’s protest as ‘Black Christian progressive’ action and dichotomising this as necessary and compatible with conservative white evangelicalism. The underlying ideas about muscular Christianity in these media representations are not neutral. Presupposing whiteness, they obscure the active construction of a white, masculine, (evangelical) Protestant religiosity against which other representations are measured, sometimes explicitly, but more often implicitly. The article concludes with implications for understanding the cultural politics of Kaepernick and Tebow, adding to extant ‘cultural backlash’ explanations.KEYWORDS: Colin KaepernickTim Tebowsport and religionmuscular Christianitymedia framing AcknowledgementThis article benefited greatly from discussions with Mark Hulsether, Rosalind Hackett, Steven Waller, and many former students at the University of Tennessee and Penn State Harrisburg. We also drew theoretical inspiration from the American Examples program at the University of Alabama. Any definciencies are our own.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. We don’t intend this to be read as an indictment of Kaepernick’s protest, or the counter-hegemonic civil formations stoked by it. Rather, we are highlighting the fundamentally contested nature of these sorts of public visions and discourses and the ways that these are sometimes re-articulated.2. Some exceptions include Hawzen and Newman (Citation2017), Kusz (Citation2007), Newman and Giardina (Citation2011), and Thangaraj (2019) in sport studies. In religious studies, see Martin (Citation2018), Scholes (Citation2018, Scholes Citation2019a, Scholes Citation2019b), Smith (Citation2015), and Woodbine (Citation2015).3. See Appendix A for a list of media references cited in this article.4. We have intentionally chosen the more relational language of mentorship over the forensic language of ‘auditor’ as it better reflects the process of intellectual discussion and formation that took place.5. The Root does feature an article on Kaepernick as a role model for Black youth but does not connect Kaepernick’s character with religion.6. On the media framing of bi-racial and multi-racial athletes see Deeb and Love (Citation2018). One limitation of this article is the extent to which we work within the confines of the Black/white binary racialisation we observed in the pieces we examined.7. We could not locate a single article that linked to or cited Kaepernick in his own words stating that his protest was motivated by his faith. This does not mean that Kaepernick’s actions are not religiously motivated or that if they were they would somehow be suspect or less incisive. Nor does this detract from considerations of Kaepernick in the Black ‘prophetic’ tradition, like Scholes (Citation2018) does. Rather, our point is that like comparison, acts of classification, including classifying something as Christian or not, are political acts (McCutcheon Citation2005). Since we are primarily interested in media framing it seems worthwhile to consider how media pieces (mostly by white journalists) classify Kaepernick’s action as Christian in the face of limited evidence, and to what effect.