Two Halftime Shows

On Imago Dei and the panic of no longer being centered

I tuned in only for the halftime show. I wanted to see that one thing, and then go back to my actual life.

And unless you’ve been living under a rock the last few weeks, you knew there were going to be two interpretations of reality staged at the same time. Two versions of America running side by side. One familiar. One that has been muffled for centuries, even while it built the whole damn thing.

I tuned in because I wanted to watch the one that’s been muffled. I wanted to let my being receive it. I wanted to take it in as beauty, as expression, as presence. And this surprised me. I felt more connected watching a sea of human beings who didn’t look like me or share my first language than I ever feel watching the version of America that’s been curated for comfort. The one that’s been homogenized and then sold back to us as safety.

This year, because some people didn’t get what they wanted on the main stage, a second version of America was promptly offered up. Curated to keep looking like their Pinterest board. Served up as American.

And the irony of choosing Kid Rock as the symbol of the so-called real America is laughable. It’s cartoonish. It is almost impressive in its commitment to missing the point.

The point is the need for a substitute mirror. The scramble to replace what was actually happening with something that felt whiter. Something that says, no, no, this is the real show, this is the real America, look over here instead.

When I watched the halftime show and saw that white people were the minority, I felt a brief disorientation, like my nervous system lost its map for a second. The map of reality that centers whiteness and English.

And then, when Bad Bunny left the field, I turned the TV off. And the strangest sensation, one I haven’t felt in a very long time, came over me. I felt patriotic. Not in a flag-waving, chest-thumping way. More like a quiet pride. Like, yes. This is where I want to belong. This is who I want to be with.

Ironically, the framework that fits this halftime split-screen moment best comes straight out of the Bible. Imago Dei. Image of God. It’s the claim that every human being carries the image of the divine, not because of belief, behavior, or belonging, but because that image is woven into what it means to be human.

Which is, of course, exactly what some Christians have spent a very long time trying to quietly edit out.

Far too many white Christians have needed Jesus to be white. They have needed the sacred to wear their face. Because if the sacred lives fully in bodies and cultures that do not resemble theirs, then the hierarchy cracks. The illusion of safety cracks. The story that their version of reality is The Version cracks.

It is a strange thing to be living through a moment when many are claiming to pledge faith and allegiance to a brown-skinned, colonized, oppressed man from the Middle East, and then spend their lives defending the comfort of whiteness as if it were part of the gospel.

If the biblical proclamation of Imago Dei is true, then you don’t get to keep pretending the sacred is only safe when it looks familiar. You don’t get to keep calling your insulation acceptable. You don’t get to keep confusing a curated sameness with peace.

Imago Dei is the opposite of making some people central and others peripheral, some stories universal and others optional.

So if you need a second halftime show to protect you from the sight of other people existing loudly, beautifully, and unedited, then what you’re defending is not Jesus.

You’re defending whiteness.

You can call it tradition. You can call it values. You can call it patriotism. You can call it wanting things to feel normal again.

But it’s a betrayal of the faith you’re claiming to defend.