Kid Rock and evangelicals’ obsession with celebrity

This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on February 12, 2026.

In a world where everyone cycles through being an expert, the week after the Super Bowl typically turns into everyone posing as professional semioticians, offering their artistic analysis of the Super Bowl halftime show and the game. Most often, this devolves into conservatives fussing about the halftime show being too sexual or woke.

But this year is different because conservatives were so preemptively hot and bothered by the NFL choosing the Spanish-speaking artist Bad Bunny that they created an entirely separate alternative halftime show of their own.

“You see all these foreigners speaking a foreign language with foreign flags marching into the camera like a caravan!” Fox News host Jesse Watters yelled. “This was an open borders moment.”

Megyn Kelly shouted at Piers Morgan: “To get up there and perform the whole show in Spanish is a middle finger to the rest of America. Who gives a damn that we have 40 million Spanish speakers in the United States? We have 310 million who don’t speak a lick of Spanish!”

She went on to claim that English is the official language of the United States despite the fact it isn’t.

“This is supposed to be a unifying event for the country, not for the Latinos!” Kelly yelled, mimicking a Spanish accent and shaking her shoulders on the word “Latinos.”

“We have to keep the Super Bowl,” Kelly demanded. “Football — that kind of football — is ours! They call it American football! And the halftime show and everything around it needs to stay quintessentially American, not Spanish, not Muslim, not anything other than good old-fashioned American apple pie! There should be a meatloaf, maybe some fried chicken, and an English-speaking performer!”

Of course, nothing about Bad Bunny’s halftime show had anything to do with Muslims. But facts are beside the point in this story.

Unfortunately for conservatives, they’re having to fight their annual Super Bowl culture war on two fronts this week because in addition to their annual outrage over the Super Bowl halftime show, they’re also having to defend their own alternative halftime show from accusations of being overly sexualized.

TPUSA, TBN and Kid Rock?

As I covered on Monday night’s episode of “Highest Power: Church + State,” those of us who grew up in conservative Baptist churches found it quite ironic to see TPUSA partnering with the Trinity Broadcasting Network and inviting Kid Rock as their headline performer for the alternative halftime show.

Continue reading at Baptist News Global.