Wide Right? Why We're (Still) Talking About Harrison Butker

The controversy surrounding the now-infamous commencement speech won't go away. Don't expect it to anytime soon.

Source: Generated with AI.

Not since the bygone days of Ray Finkle has an NFL kicker captured the public imagination the way Harrison Butker has managed to over the past two weeks.¹

As you probably know by now, Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker made headlines recently when he gave the commencement speech at Benedictine College in Atchison, KS. For the sake of time, let’s be charitable to him and say his speech didn’t exactly sit well with a lot of people. In addition to extolling the virtues of the Catholic religion to these graduates, Butker’s speech notably covered many of the current major right-wing talking points: abortions rights, COVID lockdowns, DEI policies, Pride Month, and (most notably) gender roles within the family unit. In short, Butker said a lot of stuff that, whether you believe what he said or not, has become nigh-unsayable in the public sphere over the last 10-15 years. Think what you want about the guy, but you can’t say he’s not ambitious.

If you haven’t seen it for yourself yet, I’ll add the link to his speech here:

Already, much ink has been spilled in service of this story, and I’m admittedly a bit late to the party at this point. But what set this story in motion for me was this: we’re now more than two weeks on from the day of Butker’s speech, and somehow his words continues to reverberate in a world where stories are devoured by the 24-hour news cycle. This point I have found more interesting than anything Butker managed to say. I have suffered my fair share of commencement speakers over time, including the great R.C. Sproul prior to his passing, and I can honestly tell you their words left my memory the moment the speaker stepped back from the podium. Plenty of people step on a stage as a commencement speaker and express their personal ideologies and political beliefs. I’ve sat through those speeches, too.

So what makes this speech any different from all the rest?

On Speaking in Public

To understand why the Butker discourse won’t go away, it helps first to acknowledge something about the way communication works in the digital age. In her recent article in First Things on Butker’s speech, Catholic University professor Catherine Ruth Pakaluk makes the case that Butker is primarily speaking to the college’s graduating class in this case, not to the general public at large; in her words, he is “speaking in public, but not to the public.” Pakaluk makes the case that Butker’s speech ought only to be understood in the context in which it was delivered; if we grant him that, she argues, we would be free of the impulse to reckon with his words because, as she says, they really weren’t intended for us. And as much as I might want to agree with her here, I don’t think the problem is so easily solved.

In the age of the internet, when everyone you know carries a device with a camera that transmits information to space in the blink of an eye, what we mean by the “public square” covers a demonstrably larger area than ever before. I live in New Jersey, and today I’m writing about what Harrison Butker said at a school in Kansas two weeks ago. If you’ve said something to anyone in a public forum, you’ve effectively said it to everyone, everywhere, all at once. Even if there’s a good reason why you said it the way you did, it probably won’t matter much if you’re ever called to explain yourself. How you and I might feel about this tenet of our modern world (and there is a good deal we ought to feel about it) is really beside the point. It is the reality of life in our digital age: we are all public figures now.

To wit, it matters not that Butker, an orthodox, conservative Catholic, the kind who openly advocated for the traditional Latin mass during his speech, was specifically asked to speak at a traditionally Catholic university, to what we can only presume was an at-least-somewhat-Catholic audience, during which he made statements that could be construed as lining up closely with traditional Catholic teachings, and was ultimately met with an extended standing ovation at the conclusion of his speech. No, all the news-reading public heard was that Harrison Butker is a misogynistic homophobe who wants to oppress people with his outdated, Christian nationalist beliefs. The headline was always going to do all the heavy lifting here. To mix metaphors: the soundbite became the story, and the medium became the message.

As I was researching for this piece, I came across a journal article that helpfully articulates the harsh reality of culpability in an internet world:

“Estimating wrongly the limits of the private space in the Net, many people make statements or actions that become noticeable online-events due to the confusion of public and private spheres; this can influence offline-life. It is shown that in the current Internet any utterance can become the centre of many people’s attention and the author of the utterance can be made responsible for one’s words before the whole wide world.”²

We’re seeing this happen for Harrison Butker in real time. He knew he was speaking to college kids in Kansas, but his speech also got posted to YouTube and currently has over 2 million views. I don’t think he’s getting flak for his speech because people can’t understand he wasn’t speaking to them. He’s getting flak because his words and beliefs are anathema to people who can’t stand that someone like Butker is allowed to have a microphone and say things they disagree with.

A Cultural Trauma Response

A second point we can observe from the ongoing Butker dialogue is the way it demonstrates our ongoing confusion about the roles men and women can and should occupy in the modern world. I would argue that Butker’s speech doesn’t have nearly the legs it’s shown itself to have if our society were comfortable with how it understands manhood, womanhood, and family life. What Butker advocates for in his speech has been called sexist, homophobic, and dangerous, on the level of something straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale. But take the time to read what he said, and you’ll find much of what he has been accused of saying is absent from his speech.

For instance, Butker clearly states that many women of the graduating class he addressed will go on to have successful careers. He never says women should forego all other careers and stay home instead. Rather, he makes a point of elevating the “vocation” of motherhood, not necessarily instead of but in addition to other vocations. Both are possible options, but one is being overlooked in his eyes, hence his emphasis. He’s saying “Ladies, just make sure you’re not forgetting about this other vocation, which is also legitimate and necessary even if it doesn’t always feel as rewarding.” Interestingly, he follows this exhortation to women with almost the same charge to men: “Do hard things. Never settle for what is easy. You might have a talent that you don't necessarily enjoy, but if it glorifies God, maybe you should lean into that over something that you might think suits you better.” This was the countercultural point of Butker’s speech, not the gender roles nonsense that everyone wants to focus on. As you might imagine, much of this was altogether absent from the articles calling for Butker to be fired for believing something that hurt some people’s feelings.

As a counselor, I have often found a person’s unaddressed personal insecurities to be the cause of great misunderstandings in their relationships. Their accusations toward others usually stem from a tendency to overgeneralize based on some past pain that was particularly hurtful to the person. In much the same way, I think Harrison Butker is not being villainized for what he actually said, but because of what the idea of what he said evokes in the hearts and minds of his dissenters. If what we’re seeing seems like an overreaction (as apparently it did to Bill Maher), I’d argue that’s probably because it is. It is an overcorrection, a trauma response masquerading as a form of moral superiority, just on a cultural level instead of an individual level.

I don’t have nearly the real estate here to talk about what exactly those gender roles ought to be. But I will say that I don’t think Christians have done an great job lately at selling a robust moral vision for the Christian life, especially in light of the trauma response our culture currently has toward established institutions. For example, if all we have to offer people in our communities are traditional gender roles straight out of the 1930’s, we shouldn’t be surprised when that is exactly the criticism we receive from the wider culture. Not all criticism is worth listening to, to be sure, but neither is all criticism entirely unhelpful. We need to learn to listen for the truth in the trash, even if it is buried under a mountain of castigation and ignorance.

Resisting Normophobia

Finally, and maybe most importantly, the Butker backlash points to a phenomenon that

Mary Harrington

has recently (and brilliantly) dubbed “normophobia.” In her April 2024 article in First Things magazine, Harrington lays out her terms accordingly:

“Normophobia frames everything conventional, average, given, assumed, traditional, and normative—whether its origin be physiological or cultural—as arbitrarily and coercively constructed to support vested interests, particularly those of white, Christian, heterosexual men. Radical normophobes describe their aim explicitly as the total eradication of this (they claim) artificially naturalized domain of the “natural,” in favor of untrammeled, free-floating, individual desire.”

Harrington initially developed this concept to point out how the family unit becomes a weakly-defended battlement when affronted by modern beliefs that challenge the legitimacy of traditional morality. But I think we can apply her term to some of the reactions we’re seeing to Butker’s speech.

Butker checks every box Harrington lays out in her essay: white, Christian, heterosexual, male. By choosing to speak publicly about what he believes, he willingly paints a target on his back just like anyone else; however (and this is crucial), it is not the same kind of target that anyone accepts for speaking in public. There is an observable asymmetry present when someone like Butker, a placekicker, talks about his beliefs compared to someone like Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts, who bravely came out in support of women everywhere shortly after Butker’s speech, or former US Women’s soccer star Megan Rapinoe. Who Butker is, specifically as it pertains to his Christian beliefs, amplifies the response to what he says in a way that is incongruent even with those who demonstrate considerably more star power than him. No one usually cares much what a kicker thinks about anything, unless of course they are so scandalized by his audacious beliefs that they photoshop him in pictures of drag to publicly shame him into oblivion. This is normophobia in action: eradicating traditional institutions and beliefs at all costs, so that desire can be permitted to bloom unimpeded as humanity ascends to the pinnacle of its potential. Or something.

I think part of what makes Butker’s speech so inflammatory is the way he delivers it without a trace of embarrassment. As Joe Rigney recently wrote, Butker does not argue for the legitimacy of his positions, but rather argues from those positions as though they are inherent goods that do not require a ready-made defense (Rigney refers to this as “assuming the center”). Butker’s words stand diametrically opposed to the free-floating desire of Harrington’s normophobia, which only increases the outrage towards him. “Celebrating the glory of motherhood? That’s tantamount to slavery!” “Telling men to be unapologetic in their masculinity? That’s the tyrannical patriarchy!” And so on.

I want to be especially clear at this point. I do not believe anything like what has become the most reductionist view of Butker’s speech: that a woman cannot have a career, that she should only ever be in the home, that a man’s career should always take priority over a woman’s. I do not even think Harrison Butker believes any of that. But I do believe he’s inadvertently created an opportunity for Christians to build out a fuller vision of life in the home that testifies to the glorious grace we have received in Christ Jesus.

Conclusion

Many of you reading this know my wife and I have two young daughters. Sometimes as I watch them play together around our home, I allow myself the momentary conceit of imagining them as grown adults one day. Like any parent worth their salt, I want the world for my children. I want them to have everything I had and more. But I do not want the world for them however they would wish to have it, as if the engine of desire were capable of taking them wherever they wish to go purely by virtue of their wanting it. For while desire surely matters, so too does design. Passion and purpose are normally pitted against each other in our modern world, but they don’t always have to be. It comes down to a matter of order and orientation: which will come first? Will their desire control their design, or will design serve to regulate desire? Whose will be done, mine or Thine?

I want our daughters to know the goodness of God in their womanhood. That He knew what He was doing when He made them female. That their design is not a prison, but a prism through which the light of heaven reflects out into the dark corners of our world. That it is good to be a woman, and whether they are a wife, a mother, a scientist, a lawyer, all of these or none of them, their vocation will always follow from their abdication; we all find our place in the kingdom of God when we given Him the throne of our lives and surrender fully to His purposes.

Harrison Butker got that part of the story right, even if not many people heard him. Eventually, we’ll all move on from talking about his speech. But until then, he can rest knowing his last effort was straight and true, with plenty of leg to spare.

1. If you know, you know.

2. Trufanova, E. (2021). Private and Public in the Digital Space: Blurring of the Lines. Galactica Media: Journal of Media Studies, 3(1), 14-38. https://doi.org/10.46539/gmd.v3i1.130