NBA player Jonathan Isaac has problems. When it comes to basketball he’s had a hard time staying healthy. His relatively short career has been plagued by injuries and an inability to stay on the court. When healthy, he is regarded as one of the better defensive players in the league.
Off the court, his problems are a bit more complicated. In particular, Isaac feels out of place as a conservative Christian in a league that proudly touts the progressive and social justice-oriented efforts of its teams and star players. This came to a head in 2020 when in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the players and coaches in the NBA decided to kneel for the national anthem in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Isaac was the only player to not kneel for the anthem nor wear the BLM t-shirt that everyone else did.
Isaac’s reasons for not participating in the protest action were a bit convoluted but it seemed like he believed his religion was a better solution for the problem of racism among other social issues than the racially focused BLM movement.
“I think when you look around, racism isn't the only thing that plagues our society, that plagues our nation, that plagues our world, and I think coming together on that message that we want to get past not only racism but everything that plagues as us as a society, I feel like the answer to that is gospel."
In his full response, he makes it clear that he does believe that Black lives matter. He just had a personal opposition to the particular way that the league had chosen to voice that support. What makes it interesting is that supporting the players' protest didn’t really preclude one from advocating for a biblical solution to racism. It wasn’t an either/or proposition, it appears that Isaac’s objection was to the idea that the gospel wasn’t at the forefront of BLM as a movement.
Three years later and Jonathan Isaac is still looking to have a bounce back year for the Magic after a season truncated by injury. He’s also made a video for the right-wing propaganda outfit PragerU and announced his own “anti-woke” sports apparel brand named Unitus.
This article isn’t about Jonathan Isaac as a person. I don’t know much about him other than his profile as a ball player and his stated allegiance to conservative Christian values. But Jonathan’s public grievances with the social justice efforts of the organization that employs him as well as the companies that his apparel brand wants to compete with provide us with a convenient excuse to talk about woke brands.
Unitus we Stand?
In his statement announcing the launch of Unitus this summer, Isaac says this:
“UNITUS is a sports and apparel company and the basis of it for me is freedom. You have companies in that field who have made a conscious decision to either attack or undermine Christian values, conservative values. Things like that. And I think they have the free choice to do so, as much as I disagree, but I feel that we also have a freedom to create what we want to create.”
If nothing else, you can’t say that Isaac isn’t diplomatic. He isn’t asking people to boycott brands like Nike and Adidas for their social justice stances. He’s merely providing an alternative for those who want to buy sportswear without contributing to a company whose public stances go against their beliefs.
However the phrase “made a conscious decision to either attack or undermine Christian values, conservative values” deserves a bit of unpacking. Despite his opposition to the NBA George Floyd protests in 2020, I don’t think he is referring to sports apparel companies' ad campaigns and social justice initiatives against racism. Most likely, he is referring to things like Nike’s 2016 ad featuring transgender athlete Chris Mosier, or their recent LGBTQ+ targeted #BETRUE collection. He may be thinking of Adidas’s recently released “Pride Swimsuit”, retailing for $70 as part of their Adidas x Rich Mnisi Pride Collection.
I don’t think it was a coincidence that Isaac chose to announce his new anti-woke brand at the beginning of Pride month, that’s all I’m saying.
But does the fact that big name sports apparel companies like Nike and Adidas are consciously advertising to and offering support for the queer community constitute an attack on Christian and conservative values? First, we have to establish what those values actually are in relation to what these companies are doing.
Going by context clues (gestures wildly at the news cycle from the last 3 years), we can safely assume that at least one of the Christian and conservative values that Isaac feels is being undermined is strict adherence to traditional heteronormativity. However, it's not clear that we can clearly delineate opposition to queer expression as a primary value for Christians and conservatives.
A 2015 Pew poll found that most Christian denominations were majority supportive of LGBTQ rights and freedoms. A 2020 study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found that nearly half of the adult queer community is religious with about 4.1 million LGBTQ people believing in some form of Christianity. In 2021 Gallup reported that 55% of Republicans support same-sex marriage. This year Canada’s conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre wished Canada’s queer community a happy Pride month citing the conservative value of freedom, although he demurred on whether he’d attend any pride events.
Now none of this is to say that there is an overwhelming acceptance of queer identity among Christians and conservatives, but it does demonstrate that Christian and conservative can mean many things and that antagonism to the open expression of queerness is not a defining characteristic of those groups. Going back to Isaac’s announcement of Unitus, it may have been more accurate to say that companies were attacking and undermining his specific set of Christian and Conservative values.
Attack the Block
But what does “attack” and “undermine” mean in a real world material sense? Generally, these companies are not putting their LGTBQ-friendly campaigns in direct opposition to Christians and conservatives. They aren’t telling Christians and conservatives to not buy their products, that would be silly given that a significant number of people who are Christian and conservative don’t have an issue with queer identity. They do pledge significant amounts of money to support LGBTQ causes, but big corporations have a spotty track record when actually following through on those pledges. In fact, an investigation into America’s 50 biggest companies which had committed about $49.5 billion to address racial inequality found that 90% of the pledged funds had gone to loans and investments that these justice-minded firms stood to profit from.
Like a $70 swimsuit for trans people.
Just earlier this month it was revealed that 25 Pride celebrating “woke” companies had donated $13.5 million to anti-LGBTQ politicians. Including Dylan Mulvaney’s favorite beer producer Anheuser-Busch who spent just over a quarter of a million on anti-queer Republican politicians, including the sponsors of bills targeting queer people in Texas and Florida.
Isaac’s sense that companies are attacking and undermining his values does not come from any open antagonism toward Christianity or conservatism, instead, it is a reaction to these companies treating the LGTBQ community as a valuable demographic for marketing purposes and thus affirming their validity in American society. The Christian/conservative value under attack is not heteronormativity as we originally surmised, but rather the idea that popular culture (expressed here by marketing to certain demographics) should first cater to conservative Christian sensibilities (including the exclusion of identities that offend those sensibilities). And pop culture product that doesn’t prioritize a Christian worldview serves to undermine their rightful dominion over social mores.
The Unitus announcement ruefully admits that in a free country, these companies cannot be forced to take back their acknowledgment of the validity of queer identities, so the only viable solution is to create an alternative economy. Where people who believe as he does are allowed to participate in the market without compromising their values. And this sentiment has been echoed across the general economy, with a constant stream of conservatives announcing their own anti-woke competitors to woke corporations in everything from social media to chocolate bars. Ironically Unitus is just the latest attempt to divide the country into separate but equal economies, each catering to a specific political identity.
The Graveyard of Disruptors
So far, attempts to introduce anti-woke competition to these companies haven't gotten major traction in the marketplace. Outside of a few niche products like Black Rifle Coffee, conservative alternatives have performed much worse than their woke competitors. Right-wing social media sites like Parler and Gab are known for their facilitation of right-wing terrorism and hate speech more than their profitability. Peter Thiel and Candace Owen’s anti-woke bank GloriFi shut down just three months after launch. Media outlets like Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire+ and Prager U are doing relatively well, but their size and profits are nowhere near that of Netflix or HBO.
Jonathan Isaac further explained the purpose of his brand to the Christian news site Faithwire:
"UNITUS is desperately needed today because more and more brands in the sports and leisure wear space are abandoning the consumers' desire for them to be impartial on matters of culture, spirituality, and politics. Many brands have overtly endorsed harmful and divisive ideologies that have left consumers looking for alternatives."
This particular quote is elegantly demonstrative of the cognitive dissonance that many average people on the right display when trying to explain their opposition to corporate social justice and the introduction of queer identity in the public square. Because the simple fact is that no billion-dollar corporation is going to start marketing to the LGBTQ community, risking the alienation of homophobes and transphobes, if they weren’t completely sure that doing so would make them more money than not doing so.
In the case of Bud Light, it's clear that their partnership with trans creator Dylan Mulvaney was more an attempt to market its beer to a younger more progressive, and online audience than it was any principled stand against conservative values. Isaac and people like him see a misguided moral crusade when in reality there is just an actuarial table. And as much as conservatives love to quote Orwell these days, what is more Orwellian than describing ad campaigns centered around acceptance and self-love as harmful and divisive?
The sobering fact for those looking for conservative economic safe spaces is that the popularity of their values has been severely overstated. There is a limit on how far you can go when your brand's entire selling point is triggering libs. Brands like Nike and Adidas are not just associated with support for LGBTQ causes, they are known for high-quality and innovative products. It’s one thing to want to support the values of a conservative brand like Unitus, it's quite another to trust your playing career to the sneakers they produce.
Of course, conservatives are not just content with creating an alternative economy. This is why Isaac uses words like “attack”, “undermine”, “harmful”, and “divisive”. Whether he realizes it or not (probably not), he’s engaging in a kind of soft fascistic rhetoric. I’m not saying that he or any Christian that agrees with him is a fascist, but I’m also not throwing the word out there for shock value. The framing of your political opposition as simultaneously weak and unrepresentative of a silent majority while also being powerful enough to sway the decisions of global mega-corporations is not just a perplexing contradiction. It’s an excuse for people believing themselves to be in that silent majority to take action, whatever that action may entail because the political enemy has no valid claim to society.
And for Isaac, the proper action is to join a growing list of right-wing figures looking to extract a little capital from their followers, before shuffling off to the graveyard of failed disruptors.
Liberals shouldn’t be gloating, however, because relegating political expression to consumerism and which brands you do and don’t support is a loser's game. The opening weekend success of Disney’s Little Mermaid remake starring a Black Ariel does nothing to address matters of systemic racism. The libidinal pleasure we get from seeing giant corporations spurn the demands of regressive and prejudiced conservatives, the affirmation that comes with a rainbow-colored Nike Swoosh emblem, the pride of seeing diverse identities selling the exact same products as before-- all of these pale in comparison to what we’ve lost by making capitalism a primary partner in social justice.
And that’s what we’ll be talking about in Part 2.
Solidarity Forever.
"What divides us is an illusion, made up by man is his confusion"
Ziggy Marley
i just lost the long comment i had written, i guess not having signed in. i'm glad i read this. it seems as though the middle of everything has fallen away in favor of extremes in this country. if you're not for us you're against us. it is a bit much for a conservative christian to hate on companies that, albeit motivated by greed, espouse inclusion. seems reasonable to hope the tent that includes will grow larger over time than the tent that excludes...