MAGA has a meltdown over male cheerleaders

“The next generation of cheer has arrived!” the Minnesota Vikings announced as they revealed their 2025 cheerleading squad. And just like that, MAGA had a meltdown.

The video opens with one Vikings cheerleader doing a backflip. Then the camera pans back and reveals the full squad dancing in dark uniforms with Vikings logos across the front and white pom poms. Forming two lines, the dancers walk side by side toward the camera. And when all the cheerleaders pass from view, a group of elementary kids is revealed, screaming and cheering with their own uniforms and pom poms.

So why is MAGA declaring a moral state of emergency?

The initial cheerleader who did the backflip is a guy.

MAGA’s meltdown

“He’s a DEI hire,” Dana Loesch declared on her nationally syndicated radio show. “He’s a twinky-looking dude.”

“I don’t want to see a male on the football field of an NFL game unless he’s running camera, reffing the game or he’s got a helmet on. That’s it,” she said. “I don’t want to see no little, you know, dude out there throwing himself around, shaking what he does not have on the field. That’s for ladies. … This is a man thing. Women love football. But come on. More men love football than women do. Men don’t want to see that out there.”

“I would like to ask the ownership of the NFL and the commissioner, ‘What the hell are you doing?’” Sen. Tommy Tuberville mocked on the Hot Mic podcast. “You’ve got the No. 1 sport on planet earth in terms of people watching it. Your business is growing. It’s getting better and better. There’s some ways you’ve tried to attack it over the last 10 to 15 years, but you’ve been able to withstand that.”

Remember, this isn’t the first time MAGA has entered a collective panic about the NFL. When NFL players were kneeling during the National Anthem during Donald Trump’s first administration, Trump responded by demanding, “Get that son of a bitch off the field.”

And when Taylor Swift started dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelsey, MAGA became overcome with fear the NFL would rig the games to help the Chiefs win the Super Bowl in order to give Swift a bigger stage with which to endorse President Joe Biden. So they declared “holy war” on Swift.

Tuberville, a former college football coach, continued: “But if you’re going to be woke and you’re gonna try to take the men out of men’s sports, which is what you’re doing — they’re trying to take gender and say, ‘OK, we’re going to make it more about gender than we are about masculinity’ — then you’re going to have a huge problem. … This is not just about a couple of people being men cheerleaders. It is about pushing a narrative that you want to put gender into sports and let everyone know we’re trying to show, ‘Hey, we’re going to take the masculinity out of it a little bit.’ And that’s not going to happen in the South.”

Of course, despite Tuberville’s ignorance on the topic, there are teams in the South that already have male cheerleaders. In addition to the Minnesota Vikings, other NFL teams that have men on their cheerleading squad include the Baltimore Ravens, Carolina Panthers, Indianapolis Colts, Kansas City Chiefs, LA Rams, New England Patriots, New Orleans Saints, Philadelphia Eagles, San Francisco 49ers, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Tennessee Titans. That’s 38% of the league, with a number of those teams in the South.

But Tuberville counters: “Just be an American. Just push the American narrative. Push sports as it’s supposed to be.”

The former head coach at Auburn apparently has forgotten that school — like many of the top football universities in the South — has both male and female cheerleaders.

American football and Christian masculinity

Tuberville’s connection between football, America and Christian masculinity is nothing new. In her book Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters Who Elected Donald Trump, Angela Denker explained: “In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, to be an American, especially in red states, meant to love God, honor the flag, and cheer for your football team. Somehow, American pride, Jesus and pigskins got conflated, and the NFL came to represent all that is sacred about the America Trump was elected to represent.”

Denker knows what she’s talking about. Before becoming a pastor she was a sports reporter.

In an interview with Baptist News Global from 2021, Kristin Du Mez — author of Jesus and John Wayne — expounded: “Sports, especially football, serves as a metaphor for war.” Then she added that football is “definitely the most masculine sport for their purposes.”

Regarding the ideal evangelical masculine superhero Tim Tebow, who won a playoff game with the Denver Broncos, Du Mez reflected: “Evangelicals have long had competing ideals of masculinity. In the 1990s, with the Promise Keepers movement, there was an emphasis on servant leadership, on a kinder, gentler patriarchy. By the end of the decade, however, many evangelicals started to see this softer side of evangelical masculinity as too soft, and we see the pendulum swing back to a more rugged, tough guy masculinity. This dovetailed with a resurgence of culture wars militancy. Tebow is an interesting figure because he could bridge these two somewhat conflicting ideals. He was a football star — so his masculinity was never in question. And he took all the right sides in culture war skirmishes. But he was also the clean-cut nice guy, and so he was in many ways the perfect hero for evangelicals shaped by this conflicted history.”

With evangelicals conflating American football and Christian masculinity so closely, it’s no wonder they’re reacting as they are when they see more men on the cheerleading squad.

More than bodies

In an interview with Baptist News Global, Denker explained: “I am so tired about this ridiculous conservative ‘outrage’ over non-issues driving our news cycle. The Vikings having male cheerleaders disadvantages and/or harms no one, except maybe for perverted men who like to stare at women’s bodies rapaciously while watching men play football.”

I’ll never forget the day I experienced this as an evangelical man broke down into tears in front of me over football. But it wasn’t about his team winning a championship or losing a heartbreaker to an arch rival. Instead, it was about a cheerleader’s legs.

“If we really cared about where we spend eternity after we die, we’d stop watching football!” he sobbed.

Of course, women are beautiful. And many of us men are attracted to them. There’s nothing wrong with that. But for evangelical men who have been shaped by hierarchical theology to see women as being created to submit to and serve men’s calling — who consider men to be almost helplessly sexual and women’s bodies as threats to their calling and their souls — they end up reducing women to their bodies and thus become obsessed with keeping women’s bodies in supposedly women’s roles and men’s bodies in supposedly men’s roles.

For all of us to be whole, we have to separate our biological attraction to women from white men’s theologically driven sense of entitlement, recognize the full humanity of women, and then do away with white male entitlement altogether.

Cheerleaders as athletes

While Denker may be a growing name among Christians today for her writing on Christian nationalism and American boyhood, she also spent many years as a sportswriter.

“As a former sportswriter who used to cover the NFL, I would say the football players themselves largely don’t share this proclivity about cheerleaders,” she said in the interview. “Athleticism recognizes athleticism, and NFL cheerleaders are phenomenal athletes. In fact, I previously wrote a story profiling one of the Vikings cheerleaders for the Minneapolis newspaper, and one of the largest angles of the stories was hearing about their intense training and the physical requirements of their job.

“Athleticism is athleticism, regardless of gender.”

“Athleticism is athleticism, regardless of gender. Cheerleading in my lifetime has come to be known as a competitive sport. That’s why I was frankly surprised by this ‘outrage’ or backlash about male cheerleaders, because if they made the team due to athleticism, then that is what it is!”

Antiquated ideas about gender

One reason I put “stay at home dad” in my bio is that it opens people’s curiosity for what might be possible. After all, in the years after we deconstructed our complementarian gender role theology, my wife and I still struggled financially as I worked in janitorial cleaning and she stayed at home with the kids, despite her having a degree in interior design.

It took a while for it to dawn on us that she could make more money if she focused full time on interior design, which would allow me to become the primary caregiver for the kids and begin pursuing a career in writing.

Within seven months, I was writing for Baptist News Global, where I’m in my sixth year of writing now. It’s been a dream come true for our family. By deconstructing our theologically motivated gender roles and crossing what we were taught men and women were supposed to do, we opened ourselves to a much more fulfilling life.

Another reason I put “stay at home dad” in my bio is that it always baits the TheoBros into revealing their cards. I’ve been called every homophobic slur in the book for supposedly abdicating my headship responsibilities as a man, which always reveals what these men really think about women. To them, women are dangerous and must be kept in check.

In an interview for my upcoming book, Weapons of Worship: How the Songs of Evangelicalism Form the Soundtrack of Extremism, Chrissy Stroop told me: “People who believe strongly in a patriarchal social hierarchy are severely threatened of what they see as men abdicating their rightful place in authority. They will also, of course, discipline and punish women for stepping outside of their biblically prescribed roles. But that’s not quite as scary as people that they see as men saying that they aren’t men at all or even people who are men and who do identify as men saying, ‘I don’t want to be in charge. And I think you’re bad for thinking that men should always be in charge.’”

“You’ll find plenty of homophobic slurs from conservatives lashing out against them for daring to dance.”

Because the power of heterosexual white men is dependent on distinct binaries set up in hierarchical relationships of authority and submission, Stroop told me, “Queerness has always subverted those hierarchies.”

And if you search for Blaize Sheik and Louie Conn on social media, the two Vikings male cheerleaders, you’ll find plenty of homophobic slurs from conservatives lashing out against them for daring to dance.

But by catching our attention and breaking our assumptions about gender roles, male NFL cheerleaders like Sheik and Conn open our imagination to what could be possible.

Imagine how much better the game could be if women could participate just as much as men. Of course, a 5-ft.-2 inch woman isn’t likely to hit the A gap on a fullback dive with defensive players three times her weight flying in to take her head off. But there’s no reason women can’t announce the games from the booth, officiate on the field, coach on the sideline, choose the players in management or own the teams.

And there’s equally no reason why men can’t cheer. Who cares? If that’s what you’re good at and what makes you happy, who cares?

MAGA cares, though. Why? Because in Tuberville’s world where being American and pushing the American narrative has ramifications for what it means to be a man, women are simply there to look at without appreciating them as humans or even as athletes.

This is why we need men like Sheik and Conn to counter the cheap male power narratives of men like Tuberville. It’s not simply about letting men dance. It’s about respecting the athleticism of women as well for the wholeness of us all.

As Denker told me, “Sure, there are plenty of football players (paging Harrison Butker) who have antiquated ideas about gender. In my experience covering professional sports, though, many more athletic men respect women for their athleticism and not for their physical appearance. I see that same trend in the ways NBA stars like LeBron James are supporting the WNBA and women’s sports. I’m much more interested in that conversation than some outdated debate focusing on the sex appeal of cheerleaders.”

 

Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a Master of Arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.