Football binds us together. Millions of Americans will gather to watch this Sunday’s Super Bowl. I’ll be watching at home with my dad. As Benjamin J. Dueholm put it recently, NFL football is “the central liturgical act of American civic religion.”

Dueholm is a Lutheran pastor in Wauconda, Illinois and a die-hard Green Bay Packers fan. In the Winter 2013 WQ, we highlighted his reluctant but compelling argument against American football. Writing as a concerned member of the faith in The Christian Century, Dueholm says the game’s physical and possibly neurological damage to those who play it is too large to ignore.

On the face of it, the evidence is mounting that a career in professional football, or even playing in high school or college, can haunt athletes after they hang up their cleats. A four-year study completed in December 2012 of the brains of 85 deceased athletes and military veterans found at least some symptoms of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease, in the brains of 34 of the 35 athletes who had played professional football.

These findings grabbed headlines, but the doctors behind the study cautioned against snap judgments. The players were far from a representative sample. Players’ families usually donate their loved ones’ brains to this research because they showed symptoms of CTE, such as dementia or depression, while still living.

Another group of doctors recently tested

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