Not So Sweet Escape

by Gabe Moore

When I lived in North Carolina as a young man, the church we attended had a circuit-riding pastor who frequently enjoyed doing his best Jerry Lee Lewis impression during the song segments of services. He’d play the piano, run around back and forth at the front of the church and holler “Amen!” incessantly.

This pastor also dearly loved to engineer a revival service. In fact, he concocted a series of them at least once every year. They were good times. I remember listening to loud, fun services and eating baked beans and mac and cheese in the fellowship hall following the service. Everyone tarried for hours, shooting the breeze and just being together. I remember the vast majority of the congregation enjoying them immensely.

Until it happened that our pastor committed an unpardonable sin. I know—a pastor committing an unpardonable sin is an oxymoron—but trust me, it happened. What indiscretion, you may ask, did our flamboyant preacher commit? Greed? Larceny? Lust? Did he take the Lord’s name in vain? No, I’m afraid it was much more serious than any of that. You see, he made the mistake of planning a revival service on Super Bowl Sunday. Yes, it was truly awful—a real “fire and brimstone” situation.

Needless to say, several members of the congregation brought it to our pastor’s attention how distraught they were over this violation. The pastor responded by pitching the idea that they show the game in the fellowship hall following the revival service. That way, everyone would win! The congregation agreed to this, and so it was. To this day, I can remember being in the fellowship hall and watching Tracy Porter run down the sidelines with his game-clinching pick-six of Peyton Manning.

Now, you may be asking why I’m reminiscing about this. No, it’s not because I’m a Saints fan. It’s because I remember that Super Bowl, Super Bowl XLIV, as being something we all enjoyed, something that seemed to unify all of us. The congregation was very diverse in a lot of ways, but for those few hours, we could just watch and laugh and talk while we watched the game.

Don’t you wish we could say the same about Super Bowl LX, which took place only a couple of days ago?

I can never in my entire life remember the leadup to a Super Bowl being less about. . . well, the Super Bowl. Normally, a lot of people are worried about the game, and understandably so. But this year, all I heard about was the halftime show (both halftime shows, actually) and whether it would involve an anti-I.C.E. message, and who would watch which show and what would happen as a result of this performance. It seemed, at times, like people forgot that it’s still just a football game at the end of the day.

Now, I’ll be fair: the game itself was certainly part of the reason for that. It was incredibly boring, remnant of the Brady/Belichick Super-Bowl-Swan-Song back in Super Bowl LIII. Remember watching that drudge fest? But even that was preferable to the whirlwind of political nonsense that we had in the buildup to this year’s edition of the pinnacle of sporting events. The craziness that always accompanies the Super Bowl suddenly had a new layer of animosity to us, with the finger pointing and the vitriol seemingly at an all-time high (and believe me, that says something).

What’s really irritating is that with the recent political climate being as volatile as it has been, I would guess that most people (right, left, or otherwise) would have preferred a break from the political nonsense, even if it was just for a few fleeting hours. There’s been so much rhetoric slung around in the first six weeks of 2026 that it’s been hard to keep track of all of it (or, really, any of it). Tempers have been boiling over with a frightening regularity in recent days. Wouldn’t it have been better for everyone to have just backed off for a while? To have let the pot cool down before we stirred it again? To let sports unite us for a few hours rather than continue to find excuses to point fingers at one another?

We’ll never know the answer. Because we have a media in this country that tells us we cannot agree with someone who has “x” belief, we had many people elect to turn the temperature up rather than down. Instead of using the Super Bowl as an escape from politics, people—on both sides—used it to continue to push narratives down the throats of a people who are increasingly unwilling to swallow.

I, for one, am tired of having politics crammed in my face at every turn. I am tired of being told that my political identity must be my only one, or at the least that it must be the most important thing about me, the one thing I center my entire life around. Why must it be that way? Politics are designed to be divisive. Why can we not center our identities around something a lot more, I don’t know, wholesome? Something like, say, sports?

Personally, I would rather focus on what brings us together than what tears us apart. We will have our disagreements, sure, but we won’t let them define us. If you think everyone in that church on the night of Super Bowl XLIV agreed politically, I’d advise you to reconsider. We had differences—but we didn’t let them pry us apart. We didn’t let them be the only thing we focused on.

That is, honestly, the only way forward. I don’t think very many people on either side would say we’re going in the right direction as a country right now—and we’re not going to as long as we continue tearing each other apart. Only by focusing on what we have in common can we start to repair this divide.

I invite anyone reading this to do just that—whether you watched Bad Bunny or Kid Rock, whether you root for the Seahawks or the Patriots or anyone else, and whether you agree with me or not. Let’s cool the temperature rather than raise it. Let’s move away from the divisiveness and toward the healing.

Before it’s too late.