Please, leave Tim Tebow alone! We can distinguish between liturgical piety and popular piety and further draw distinctions between personal piety and public piety. The church has general norms for piety because it's primarily about praising and thanking God, even though, secondarily, it has pedagogical and ecumenical value and, characteristically, it is also an aesthetic reality. Human life would be incomplete without this praise and thanksgiving and the unitive goals of our prayer. There is certainly no Biblical injunction against public piety, only against misguided motives regarding our public displays. It seems to me that keeping these liturgical purposes front and center can help us make wise choices. Hopefully, there's a great deal of alignment between liturgical and popular piety (one reason so much attention is paid to getting the vernacular translations right --- they help close the gap between life and worship). Popular piety is a great gift! Living in a country that not only allows but fosters "free exercise" of all faith expressions is a great gift! We must remember that nonestablishment in the First Amendment pertains to the government and not the public square and culture. Our catholic cultures, such as in Latin America and here in South Louisiana are IMMERSED in popular piety. Our cultural and ecclesial celebrations overlap! And we know how to party! And how to play football! We celebrate our faith with bonfires on the levee at Christmas, with King Cakes at the Epiphany, with Mardi Gras prior to Lent, with St Joseph Altars and May Crownings, blessing our shrimp and oyster fleets, with Second Line Jazz Funerals through the streets of New Orleans, decorating our tombs on All Saints Day (which closes many public schools), calling the workers in from the sugarcane fields with church bells ringing the Angelus, decorating the oaks in New Orleans, bayous in Natchitoches and downtown St Francisville in brilliant Christmas light displays and other ways too numerous to count and not so easy to see since we're like pious fish who don't know we're swimming in holy water, so close it is to our existence. Making the Sign of the Cross at meals in a restaurant, after making a touchdown or walking up to homeplate with a bat is devotionally reflexive in a beautiful way. This all orthopathically reinforces our holy desires and keeps green the life that the liturgy instills in us. I doubt that many of us are consciously thinking about the evangelical or pedagogical value of our piety as we are just living out our Eucharistic existence in a fitting and just endless thanksgiving, not compartmentalizing the time spent in the pew from that spent in the bleachers. Because there is an important aesthetic reality in play, we should keep in mind aesthetic values and sensibilities. And here's one for all to consider. Because the goal of our 1
unitive living is precisely intimacy, we should also keep front and center the different degrees of intimacy involved when we engage in public displays of affection, whether to one another or our God. Putting up a Christmas tree is less of an intimate display than prostrating ourselves on the floor in earnest supplication or praise. Holding hands with one's spouse is less intimate than a peck on the cheek which is less intimate than a long French Kiss which is less intimate than sexual intercourse. We start drawing a line on public displays of affection based on how much intimacy is involved in any given gesture. The more intimacy involved the less public it should be. The more intimacy involved, the more we risk offending others' aesthetic sensibilities, social mores and cultural traditions and the more shock value and counterproductive a gesture will be vis a vis our secondary ecumenical or pedagogical goals (and the more we are engaging in really bad art). Because it is primarily an aesthetic reality and only derivatively a moral reality (once others begin to justifiably take umbrage, for example), it is something like what a Supreme Court justice said about pornography: "I can't define it but I know it when I see it." A lot of public piety in the US gets a bad rap because it is so often associated with bad, fundamentalistic theology or with publicly pious people who are later discovered to be rather unsavory characters. I suspect both Ron Rolheiser and the late Scott Peck would not approve of Tim Tebow's public piety based on things they wrote in the past. I also suspect that many of the people attacking him so vitriolically right now are the same ones who would zealously rush to the defense of artwork depicting a crucifix in a jar of urine. So, I can understand some of the dynamics and offended aesthetic sensibilities. But I would err on the side of free expression and live and let live because that's the default libertarian stance. Besides, I don't want to set a precedent that would incite anyone to complain about the Angelus ringing across our canefields or making fun of us when we bow our heads as they toll. Again, please, leave Tim Tebow alone!
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