When Mr. Harrison Butker, the 28-year-old kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs football team, spoke at a commencement address this past May, he kicked up quite a controversy. Some saw it as simply another example of the culture war going on in Western civilization: traditional family structure and traditional values versus modern, progressive ideology. And, frankly, it was refreshing to see someone famous and under the age of 30 taking a public stand against the moral rot of our times.
Yet his speech was more than that. There was—believe it or not—a prophetic edge to it. Most commentators would miss that edge, but the members of God’s Church must not. If we take a little time to reflect, Mr. Butker’s speech may remind us of long-understood prophetic truths that can slip through our fingers in the ideological noise and confusion that surrounds us.
We published a shorter take on his commencement address in a commentary on the Tomorrow’ World website, titled “Harrison Butker’s Speech: Right, Wrong, and Possibly Prophetic.” But here in the Living Church News, let’s spend a little more time with it—and, in doing so, remind ourselves of truths we cannot afford to forget as Jesus Christ’s return draws nearer than it has ever been.
If you have not seen or heard Mr. Butker’s commencement address, you can find it in its entirety on YouTube or read its transcript on the website of the National Catholic Register. He gave his address on May 11, 2024, at the graduation ceremony for Benedictine College, a private Catholic liberal arts school in Atchison, Kansas. Mr. Butker had already made some waves with his views, so Benedictine College leaders surely understood what they were getting when they invited him to be their keynote speaker. And, if they did, he did not disappoint.
Let’s examine Mr. Butker’s speech from three perspectives: What it got right, what it got wrong, and what elements of it might touch on prophetic developments just ahead of us.
What He Got Right
Mr. Butker is to be commended for how boldly he called out many evils of today’s world and defended many biblical values that the morally deteriorating Western culture has increasingly rejected as backward and passé, and even as vile.
He called out society’s fascination with many facets of the culture of death, such as euthanasia, as well as abortion—which he rightly called “the murder of innocent babies.” He noted how these sins, “as well as a growing support for degenerate cultural values in media, all stem from the pervasiveness of disorder.” Lest he be misunderstood, Mr. Butker described the “pride” so celebrated by the homosexual community as “the deadly sin sort of pride that has an entire month dedicated to it.” He pushed back against the notion that ideas and religious beliefs must be hidden away and kept private “whenever they go against the tyranny of diversity, equity, and inclusion,” noting that many “fear speaking the truth, because now, truth is in the minority.”
And the Chiefs kicker went further, advocating traditional concepts of gender roles, rooted in the biblical design of the family. He charged men to be “unapologetic in your masculinity, fighting against the cultural emasculation of men.” As for women, Mr. Butker expressed special concern: “I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you.”
He noted that many female graduates in the crowd were surely looking forward to successful careers in the business world, but also conjectured that most of the young women listening “are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.” Choked with emotion while explaining how his wife’s support has been a necessity in his and his family’s success, he praised her choice to “embrace one of the most important titles of all: homemaker.” The comment brought a prolonged burst of applause from the audience.
Unsurprising Reactions
The reaction across the political spectrum was unsurprising. Social progressives, LGBTQ+ advocates, and others took Mr. Butker to task for his “hateful” and “bigoted” views. A Guardian piece by columnist Arwa Mahdawi—which would surprise no one familiar with her articles—was titled “Harrison Butker’s Misogynistic Graduation Speech Shows the Bigots Are Winning.”
As for the National Football League’s official statement that Mr. Butker’s views “are not those of the NFL organization,” the satirical website The Babylon Bee was on target with its tongue-in-cheek headline: “‘Harrison Butker Does Not Reflect Our Values,’ Says League of Woman Beaters.”
To be sure, it is encouraging to hear a 28-year-old man use his platform to push back against the wickedness of our age, and we should not think he is alone in his generation. Many are waking up to the fact that the world is not what it should be, and a hunger for older ways—too hastily cast aside by past generations—seems to be growing among young adults. As Mahdawi laments in her article, sales of the kicker’s Kansas City Chiefs jersey have soared since his address. In fact, sales of the jersey in women’s sizes quickly sold out within days of the speech.
What He Got Wrong
But we cannot listen to the speech without noting that it was far more than a call to embrace traditional values, conservative values, or even biblical values. It was a call to embrace Roman Catholic values—actually, to embrace traditional Roman Catholicism itself.
On one hand, this should not be a surprise; Mr. Butker is a passionately traditional Catholic, and he was speaking at a Roman Catholic university. But for all the good in his address, it is in its Roman Catholic center that the speech loses its footing.
Mr. Butker said in his speech that the “Catholic faith has always been countercultural.” But it hasn’t been. In fact, much of what we see in Roman Catholic traditions are purposeful, intentional adoptions of pagan culture, adulterating Christ’s original teachings. Mr. Butker declared the Roman Catholic Church to be “the Church founded by Jesus Christ,” when, plainly, it is not. Its teachings, in ways large and small, stand in stark contrast to the teachings of the Church that Jesus Christ established and the “faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). Mr. Butker pointed to “the holy sacrifice of the Mass” as “more important than anything else,” though Christ’s original followers would consider the ritual foreign and unlawful—a perversion and corruption of the biblical Passover.
Much more could be said, but in his well-delivered and stirring speech, Mr. Butker illustrated that it isn’t enough just to recognize the maelstrom of evil into which society is being drawn. In fact, his solution—embracing an apostate counterfeit of the true faith of Jesus Christ—is a big part of how our present world got to where it is.
Put bluntly, the Roman Catholic Church and its Protestant offspring are the Harlot of Revelation and her Harlot Daughters, described in Revelation 17. They are founded on the rejection of God’s divine law and its replacement with the ideas of men—the attitude that since Adam and Eve has served as the broken foundation of our world. Turning from the satanic hedonism we see around us to Satan’s counterfeit Christianity as a “solution” would be as unwise as leaping from frying pan to fire.
Prophetic Possibilities
Yet it is in this aspect of Mr. Butker’s speech—its passionate devotion to traditional, conservative Roman Catholicism—that we can see potentially prophetic significance in what one young football player has to say.
The counterfeit Christianity to which Mr. Butker would point young college graduates will one day wield massive authority in the world as no other religion ever has. That religion and the False Prophet who will lead it are represented by the First Horseman of Revelation, who goes out “conquering and to conquer” (Revelation 6:2). That apostate church will create an unholy union with a European beast power and will leverage the political, economic, and military might of that union to “make war with the saints and to overcome them” (Revelation 13:7) and to force the world to bend the knee to its twisted false version of Christianity (vv. 11–18).
It is easy in the secular West for Christians to get caught up in the illusion that end-time persecution will come at the hands of atheists, communists, or whatever bogeymen our over-politicized culture suggests. And, of course, there is a very real culture war between the secular and the religious. But Bible prophecy does not detail a future in which secular atheists run the world. Rather, it pictures persecution coming upon the saints of God through a triumphant, world-conquering, counterfeit Christianity—a religion that, in multiple ways, appears to be headed by Jesus Christ, but teaches the subtle twists of the devil (Revelation 13:11).
The persecution prophesied to come upon true Christians will not be in the name of Marx, Lenin, or Mao. It will be in the name of Christ (Matthew 24:4–5). Jesus Himself says that “the time is coming that whoever kills you will think that he offers God service” (John 16:2).
And with this in mind, we can see how a speech by a 28-year-old sports star, exhorting young Roman Catholics to embrace a more traditional version of their faith, is very significant. In an age when many Roman Catholics are frustrated by their church—headed by a largely progressive pope—appearing to compromise with worldly values, the robust and unapologetic devotion to “old school” Roman Catholicism that Harrison Butker represents could catch on among a new generation rejecting modern mores.
Mr. Butker encouraged the young men and women in his audience to embrace “our duty and ultimately privilege to be authentically and unapologetically Catholic.” We need to remember that Bible prophecy reveals that a time is coming when billions of deceived people around the world will heed such a call—and we need to remember what such a time will mean for Christ’s true followers.