What the Super Bowl LIV Half-Time Show Can Teach Christians

“What is modesty?” One might very well ask this in the same tone of voice that Pontius Pilate most likely used when he asked Jesus, “What is truth?” — world-weary, cynical, and uninterested. It seems a topic of concern more to those on the traditionalist-conservative side of orthodox Christianity, at least within the goldfish bowl of Christian social media, than to anyone else. It also seems you can predict the topic coming up at least once a year, the day after the Super Bowl.

On some level, most of us know that Shakira and Jennifer Lopez were inhabiting stage characters, fantasy women, and that their onstage personae don’t necessarily reflect their offstage behavior. What bothers us more is the nature of that fantasy: the abandoned, uninhibited woman who revels in her sexuality, who demands nothing beyond her own pleasure and offers nothing but pleasure in return. No romance, no love, no commitment, no growing old together. She isn’t yours and you aren’t hers, except for the time being. A lot of fun while it lasts, but who says it needs to last?

(Lyrics from The Pussycat Dolls come to mind: Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me? Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was a freak like me? Don’t cha?)

To consider the fantasy directed only at the men in the audience would be a mistake. Women more than men tend to be realistic, to understand that “safe sex” is an illusion and that casual sex is never without potential consequences, especially to themselves. Yet women no less than men desire and enjoy sex. Although there’s still a “gender gap”, women’s porn consumption has increased over the last decade or so. Women have sexual fantasies, often in which they are the ravisher instead of the ravished, the predator instead of the prey — fantasies in which neither love nor commitment need intrude themselves.

The fantasy women Shakira and Lopez portrayed were what many other women sometimes wish they were: strong, beautiful, magnetic, fun-loving … and somewhat amoral.

We can’t ask the question, “What are they teaching our little girls?” without asking ourselves, “Why are adults accepting and even praising this? Why does Gemma Hartley, for example, think her daughter must learn to avoid morally censuring other women’s behavior or clothing? Why does she think that affirming their strength and beauty takes overwhelming priority?” Well, part of the answer is that, for most of history, the burden of modesty and chastity has been borne more by women than by men. Unfair, yes, but addressing this issue goes beyond our present scope.

Unfortunately, the other part of the answer is embedded in the question: “Morality” has become a devil-term. While on the books it still means “conformity to the rules of right or virtuous conduct,” in the popular lexicon it means something more like “stupid, unnatural, religion-based restrictions on sex.” The Christian sexual ethos is no longer credible for many people, for reasons having nothing to do with its intrinsic truth. Partially, it’s because people tend to prefer an ethos that allows them to get their freak on. But it’s also partially because too many Christians have too often been caught out in sexual misbehavior.

Many people in our little goldfish bowl hate the “Do not judge” passage from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:1-5) because it’s thrown at us by people who want us to shut up. And the haters have a point: How can we know what standard to live by unless we state what the standard to live by is? However, the problem isn’t that people don’t know the standards. Rather, they’ve rejected them. Our society has grown tired of our unwillingness to live by our own rules, so they no longer take us seriously.

One of the great principles of leadership is that leaders teach by example — they “walk the talk;” they are the change they want to see in the world. Jesus condemned the scribes and Pharisees for laying burdens on others’ shoulders they themselves were unwilling to bear (Matthew 23:4). If we don’t teach the gospel message by our example, if we don’t do less talking and more walking, we’re not really preaching the gospel. We’re noisy gongs and clanging cymbals (cf. 1 Corinthians 13:1-2). So long as we fail to live the sexual ethos we demand of others, we’re not leaders — we’re merely backseat drivers.

And it really does no good to try to separate the sheep from the goats on this side of the Last Judgment. By that, I mean we do ourselves and the gospel message an injustice by disowning Christians who behave badly, by pretending they’re not an implicit judgment on us as a community. That’s refusing to take ownership of the problem. Certainly, we should draw bright lines between what is and isn’t Christian behavior. But we have to teach those bright lines effectively to ourselves before we can preach them effectively to others.

What we Christians can learn from the Super Bowl half-time show, then, is humility, the humility of the tax collector rather than the arrogance of the Pharisee (Luke 18:10-14). We don’t make saints of ourselves by castigating sinners. On the contrary, our salvation begins with internalizing the reality that we too are sinners. We are the Church, but “the Church is always in need of reform” (Semper Ecclesia reformanda) because we ourselves are always in need of repentance and reconversion.

Does this mean we should abandon social criticism? No; it means we function as social critics most effectively when we become “signs of contradiction” (cf. Luke 2:34), testimonies against the spirit of the age, by living the gospel message in spirit and truth. When we can by our own lives paint a picture of Christianity that reasonable people of good will find attractive, peaceful, and fulfilling, we will do more for preaching modesty and chastity than can a million tweets and blog posts condemning two entertainers at a 15-minute show for their immodesty.

Until we stop aligning with the Pharisee and become more like the tax collector, we’re part of the problem and not part of the solution.