Last week Donald Trump tweeted 

Standing with locked arms is good, kneeling is not acceptable

This statement puzzles me. Though I am not a religious man, I was raised Roman Catholic. Lots of people make jokes about the transitions between sitting, standing, and kneeling that are part of the Catholic Mass being a strategy to keep worshippers awake throughout the service, but in fact gestures and physical actions have meaning in the Catholic Church, just they do in most faith traditions. A 2002 document from the Catholic Diocese of Worcester explains the significance of some of these gestures. 

Standing is a sign of respect and honor. From the earliest days of the Church, standing has been understood as the stance of those who are risen with Christ and seek the things that are above (see Colossians 5)…

Kneeling signified penitence in the early Church: The awareness of our sin casts us to the ground! In the Middle Ages, kneeling came to signify the homage of a vassal before his liege lord. More recently, kneeling has come to signify humble adoration…

Genuflecting (kneeling on one knee) is the gesture of adoration…

While not all faith traditions interpret these actions in the same manner as Roman Catholics do, it is generally seen as respectful. I am aware of no faith tradition that interprets genuflecting or kneeling as a sign of disdain.

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In an op-ed piece he wrote for the New York Times, San Francisco 49ers Safety Eric Reid explained that he and teammate Colin Kapernick took at knee during the National Anthem as a respectful way of calling attention to “the incredible number of unarmed black people being killed by the police.”  

After hours of careful consideration, and even a visit from Nate Boyer, a retired Green Beret and former N.F.L. player, we came to the conclusion that we should kneel, rather than sit, the next day during the anthem as a peaceful protest. We chose to kneel because it’s a respectful gesture. I remember thinking our posture was like a flag flown at half-mast to mark a tragedy.

They could have registered their protest in many ways such shouting violently or making obscene gestures during the anthem. Instead, they chose a method that demonstrated both respect for the ideals on which this nation was founded, that all are created equal, while simultaneously calling attention to continuing injustice and our inability to live up to our own ideals.

An excellent and fascinating segment of this week’s episode of WNYC’s On the Media provides a historical perspective on “The Star-Spangled Banner,” demonstrating that NFL players were not the first to use the song as a protest vehicle. Our national anthem results from the marriage of Francis Scott Keys’s 1814 poem “The Defence of Fort McHenry” with a melody written in the 1770s for an English social club. It is not sacred, and many versions of the lyrics were written before the song was declared our national anthem in 1931. One version, published in 1844 by an abolitionist newspaper, highlighted the immorality of slavery, ended with the lyrics:

And our star-spangled banner at half-mast shall wave, over the deathbed of freedom, the home of the slave.

As the show points out, the players who kneel during the anthem are heirs to this tradition of protest. (Check out the segment, beginning around 7 min, 30 seconds into the show.)

Would those who are so outraged by the players kneeling during the anthem be equally outraged if the players gave a reason for their protest that was not racial injustice?  I doubt it. In fact, I suspect that if they said they would kneel until abortion was outlawed or prayer allowed in public schools, they’d be lauded as heroes by the very people who denounce them now!