Postliberal Lessons from Harrison Butker

Butker's speech contains an essential political truth: that Christian movements, lacking Christian hearts, are bound to fail. Institutional power without personal virtue is dead.

In our era, University commencement speakers have undergone a shift, representative of a corresponding shift in the quality of our elite writ-large. Rather than consisting of erudite addresses relayed by impressive statesmen and scholars, modern commencements are composed of witless flattery given by celebrities and philistines.

Be it Will Farrell’s unwatchable shrieking at the University of Southern California in 2017, or whatever nuggets of wisdom Dr. Anthony Fauci happened to drop at Princeton in 2022, commencement speeches have become as farcical as the ruling class from which they sample their speakers.

Of course, it is not as if commencement speakers were always fantastic up until this decade, as the useless “bring back the 1980s” conservatives argue. American universities have long platformed liberals, be it feminist Bettie Freidan at Yale in 1983 or John Stuart Mill at Harvard in 1862. It is simply that liberals have gotten more liberal, and so more insufferable and unimpressive, over time. 

With that being said, it is no surprise that this year’s undisputed best commencement speech was not given by some cornball diplomat or fake scholar. The best speech was instead given at Benedictine College by Harrison Butker, the twenty eight year old (which is impressive by itself) kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs.

His speech was as eloquent as it was wise, which explains why liberals hated it so much. The NFL has gone so far as speaking out against him and there is currently a petition with 183,000 signatures calling for his removal from the Chiefs. If that was not enough, the hens on The View have bashed him as an “extremist” for faithfully holding to Catholic teaching. For delivering this speech, even in the face of inevitable backlash, Harrison Butker is a hero.

What made the speech so great was that it spoke perfectly to its audience. The speech was wise not only because it was unwaveringly orthodox, but also because it was exactly what young Catholics entering the world need to hear. While his speech had plenty to say about national problems such as abortion and DEI, the solutions he gave to those problems were not national in scale. Rather, he focused on “the small ways” that we, “by living out [our] vocation,” will “ensure that God's Church continues.”

Speaking directly to men, he emphasized the need to be strong masculine presences “in the home”; and to women, he used the invaluable support he has felt from his own wife to implore the graduating women to lean into their vocations as wives and mothers. Likewise, he emphasized the importance of praying, fasting, choosing friends wisely, and attending the Latin Mass more than that of being a groundbreaker in high places.

Within Butker’s words rests the potential for a political lesson. Some politically-minded Catholics will hear this speech and say “the only way for any of this message to stick is if Christians gain institutional power.” They may accuse Butker’s message of lacking teeth. They are mistaken if they believe this: Butker’s appeals to personal holiness are the teeth.

Of course, this does not mean that getting Catholics into positions of power should not be a top priority: it must be if we are to truly win back this country. Yet, with personal virtue comes immense institutional and political power. It is a good first step.

The quality of our future leaders must be that of saints, for if not, the Christian political project will end in disaster. It is arguable, in fact, that it would be better for liberalism to continue than for a Christian political movement to arise, only for said movement to die by its own sinful hand; for the Lord says to John the Apostle in the book of Revelation “so, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth” (Rev. 3:16). 

It is very easy to read this passage as simply a call to courage. However, that is a mistaken reading. Christ’s contempt for lukewarmness (that scandalizes His Church by sinning in His name) applies to all manner of sin. Christ will spit out the cowardly and uninspired with just as much force as the crude and merciless. This passage speaks to courage, prudence, and deference just as much as it speaks to patience, charity, and humility. 

These latter three virtues need to be persistently stressed in political circles because short-term experience disincentives them. It takes far less time to build an audience with hate than with tenderness; far less effort to execute a criminal than to rehabilitate them with dignified justice; far less care to continue a war than to negotiate peace.

It is always important to remember that a confessedly Christian society does not guarantee peace on earth. During Saint Bernard of Clairvaux’s time in the 10th century, the Catholic Church was at the helm of Europe and all the kings declared loyalty to the Faith. Yet, this time was rife with schism, bad kings, and antipopes — all to the point where Saint Bernard’s service was constantly needed; that thoroughly Catholic civilization leaned on an abbot. 

Even then, with all of Saint Bernard’s help, the age was rife with sin and chaos; the Great Schism had just occurred. None of this is to say that his time was anywhere near as confused as ours; it is just to point out that Catholic kings alone do not keep civilization on the narrow path.

If we want our movement to avoid a terrible fate for our country, we need to strictly abide by Harrison Butker’s wise advice, and follow Saint Bernard’s holy example. We must realize that Christ spits out leaders — and their movements — which give Him a bad name.

The AdamoZone is a column by Luca Adamo, Vice President of Marketing at The American Postliberal. Published every Friday at 5:00pm EST.

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