The stated objection is morality. Evangelicals are boycotting tonight’s Super Bowl 60 halftime show featuring Bad Bunny because they claim the NFL’s entertainment decision is evidence of cultural decay — not business, not demographics, but depravity.
On Thursday, Rev. Franklin Graham said the NFL is promoting a “sexualized agenda.”
“Like most Americans, I’ve enjoyed watching the Super Bowl. But the halftime shows began pushing moral boundaries and have become more sexualized. This year, they’re having Bad Bunny perform. The @NFL leadership is pushing this sexualized agenda. Thank you, @TPUSA and @MrsErikaKirk for providing an alternative — ‘The All-American Halftime Show’ with the agenda of celebrating family, faith, and freedom!”
The charge is clear: sexualization, immorality, a corrupting cultural agenda.
The proposed solution is counter-programming produced by Ericka Kirk and Turning Point USA featuring Kid Rock as the “family-friendly” alternative. The show “for people who love Jesus” will be aired on Trinity Broadcasting Network — the largest evangelical television network in the country — and streamed on multiple conservative outlets at the same time the official NFL halftime show is airing.
This is where the wheels come off.
Kid Rock is not a Christian artist. He never has been. He certainly is not family-friendly. He is not being presented as a repentant sinner who abandoned a profane past. There has been no apology tour. No testimony of redemption. No “this is who I was, and this is who I am now.”
His career was built on vulgarity, shock, and sexual provocation. That is not speculation; it is his catalog. Evangelicals know this. They are not unaware of it. They are simply choosing to ignore it.
“Cruising through town in my jacked up truck
Eyes open ‘cause I’m scopin for a big butt slut
One that I can take straight back to my house
And have suck my dick and put my balls in her mouth.”
~ Lyrics from Kid Rock’s song entitled “Balls in Your Mouth.”
Kid Rock’s song “Cool, Daddy Cool” celebrates pedophilia, something the church is intimately familiar with, considering the vast number of preachers consistently in the news for sexually abusing children.
“Young ladies, young ladies
I like ‘em underage, see
Some say that’s statutory
But I say it’s mandatory.”
Choosing an artist who celebrates pedophilia right in the middle of the still unfolding scandal of the century is just bizarre.
Some Kid Rock defenders have waved this away by saying that his most disturbing lyrics are “old news.” But his pedophilia song — Cool, Daddy Cool — was released in 2001, only four years before the first official investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual exploitation of minors began in March 2005. What we now recognize as a systemic failure to take sexual exploitation seriously didn’t suddenly appear in the last decade. It was hiding in plain sight, normalized, joked about, minimized, and excused as “edgy,” “irreverent,” or “just lyrics.”
It isn’t “old news” — it’s revealing news.
And evangelicals’ willingness to overlook it — without repentance, without explanation, without even discomfort — exposes what this outrage was never really about.
Because if the concern were truly about sexualization, Kid Rock would be disqualified upon arrival.
If the concern were about moral influence, lyrics would matter more than politics.
If the concern were about protecting families and children, there would at least be an acknowledgment of the contradiction.
Instead, Kid Rock is embraced because he is politically aligned. He says the right things about Trump. He punches the right cultural enemies. He wears the right jersey.
And so an entire career’s worth of vulgarity and moral filth is quietly laundered into “family-friendly entertainment.”
The NFL is not a church. It is not a cultural evangelist. It is a global business trying to grow its audience.
Super Bowl 59 drew 127.7 million viewers in 2025. But the 2022 FIFA World Cup final drew roughly 1.5 billion viewers worldwide — 12 times the size of the Super Bowl audience. The Super Bowl has a lot of room to grow… it’s not platforming artists to shove them down our throats; it’s choosing the artists most likely to grow their viewership.
Bad Bunny is the most-streamed artist on Spotify globally. Nearly 20 billion streams in 2025 alone; 140 billion lifetime. Over 90 million monthly listeners. The most-streamed album of all time. A massive international audience the NFL barely touches.
The league’s decision wasn’t ideology. It was economics. The NFL is agnostic to culture.
Is bad bunny so dominant he is shaping culture?
Or, is he popular merely because he is giving culture what it’s clamoring for?
Evangelicals are deciding what art is “moral” not by content, not by repentance, not by transformation — but by political alignment.
Let’s be honest about what this really is.
Sexualized lyrics are not the problem. Vulgarity is not the problem. Moral impurity is not the problem. Those sins are entirely forgivable — even ignorable — so long as they are committed by the “right” people. What is truly disqualifying for evangelicals is not indecency, but ideological noncompliance.
In today’s evangelical culture war, morality is no longer measured by content, repentance, or transformation. It is measured by political alignment. And once politics becomes the moral compass, sin stops being something to be confronted and starts being something to be managed — excused when useful, condemned when inconvenient.
This moment isn’t about protecting families or preserving decency.
It’s about power — who gets a moral pass and who doesn’t. In this framework, art isn’t judged by what it says or what it celebrates, but by who is saying it. Sexualized content is tolerated when it serves the tribe. Sin is forgivable when it comes from allies. And “immorality” becomes a charge deployed selectively, not a principle applied consistently.
When morality becomes partisan, it stops being morality at all and becomes branding.
- Charley Crockett
