The Great MLK

NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers caught covid this week and we learned that he wasn’t vaccinated like he said he was. He lied. Now he’s in speak-in-code-full-blame-mode, lamenting that vaccine mandates are based on shame not science, that he’s just marching to the beat of his own drum, that he won’t be manipulated by “the woke mob.” On a podcast, he paraphrased “the great MLK” saying we must object to unjust rules that make no sense. That’s right. He compared his battle against the NFL’s vaccine mandate with the Black southern freedom movement’s struggle against white supremacist segregation codes and state-sponsored violence.

Rodgers is not a bad person. He’s a babbling parable for a white-capitalist-christian culture incessantly promoting profit, personal success and individual rights—and justifying it by turning Dr. King (and Jesus) into its own image. It counterfeits the spiritual reality that the great MLK scripted in the same letter that Rodgers quoted out of context. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” Dr. King wrote from jail, “tied together into a single garment of destiny.” Mutuality is a completely different mentality than marching to the beat of my own drum. It moves on belovedness and belongingness, making life decisions with everyone else in mind—especially those who are actually oppressed.