Today is a sad day in Central Pennsylvania…a very sad day. Yesterday, the shock waves started to rumble out of State College. The worst fears of many of us seemed to be confirmed (I say seemed to be because I have read about Freeh Report and listened to him explain it). It seems that the top officials at Penn St covered up the crimes of a sexual predatory in order to spare the football program and the University the shame of telling the truth about him. In this, people (children) were devoured in some of the most heinous ways imaginable. The truth was know, but skirted or diminished or dismissed. Today, the pundits are swooping like vultures on the dead carcass in Happy Valley. There are shouts of glee and shouts for justice and charges of hypocrisy (ironically carried to us by the Comcast cable line which also feed more child pornography to the world than any mechanism in human history). Justice should be done. It must be.

Sadly, the most important questions in this entire episode are not being asked or they are only being asked in despair: “Why did this happen?” “How could such good men make such bad decisions?” “Why didn’t Coach Paterno (for he is the only one of these fellows that we know by word and deed to be a good man) just turn Sandusky over to the police?”

I want to try to answer this questions in a way that aims at the broadest solution possible. I do this not to ignore the guilt of PSU officials or to protect the reputation of Joe Paterno whose life and all its deeds will be judged better in the future than now. I do this because I am convinced that the PSU scandal is just a symptom of a much broader and more pernicious problem. Today, the talking heads are tearing down individuals, a particular institution, and a football program. The problem is much deeper. Why did this happen? My answer is this: “We are Penn State.”

As a nation we have built idols and to those idols we make sacrifices. Those sacrifices look very similar to those of Old paganism. We let the powerful and the brutal–the gods–devour their chosen victims. This happened at Penn St, but it happens in every big and even little time college sports program. It happens in high school sports. We allow the gods to feast on their victims. We look the other way. We allow and even celebrate the system and the pedestals that hold the gods up for us–even though we do this by prostituting our educational institutions for big time athletics. Most college students pay highest tuition so that their college can have sports (80% of colleges lose money on athletics). At this crucial time for our country we are failing at the deepest level to use the institutions that we have to give our next generation the education that they need–without making them debt slaves. We do this for the sake of our idols. This idol is what was being protected by Mr. Spanier, Curley, Schultz, and Paterno. They protected it because we love it. They were, of course, protecting it for their own gain, but they our the priest of our religion.

The sexual misdeeds of the monstrous Sandusky must be viewed full bore. We need to know what was hidden inside by our idol. If you believe that the same protection of the same idols are not being made at Alabama, Kentucky, and Notre Dame; you are not paying attention. We cover this over and excuse it by feeding willing (or at least old enough to consent victims) to our idols. Does the drug addled eighteen-year old freshman have consent? Would it matter if she were not drug addled and we just chalked it up, more honestly, to some new form of temple prostitution. The reading of Tom Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons and John Gerdy’s Air Ball are helpful here. We have made idols. We worship them. We make sacrifices to them by averting our eyes when the devour people by having a priestly class cover the horror of the sacrifice and by the massive cultural price that we pay to maintain institutions of higher learning that have less and less to do with learning and at some points (like big time football) have divorced learning and college life all together. We don’t just tolerate this sort of thing. We glory in it. “We are Penn State!”

So what should we do? First, we should point the blame where it needs to be pointed. The courts will deal with the monsters and people that hid his sins. We need to deal with our own complicity in a system that devours. This repentance should not drive us to despair, but it should drive us to Christ for forgiveness. We should come to grips with the fact that if we all stopped watching and packing into stadiums the system would be fixed. We need to do this. We need to stop supporting systems that devour. We need our representative to choke off funding until colleges and universities tear down the idols. We collectively are the fix.

Second, we need to open our eyes to see where this is happening throughout our culture and we need to protect the vulnerable.

Finally, we need to tend our own gardens by unplugging from a systems and ideas that support this sort of foolishness.

Today when I pulled my t-shirt off the top on the pile in the dresser it was my PSU football shirt. I put it on. Today, it should be worn, but not with pride. It should be worn in hands should beat our chests as they did in the old liturgy. “We are Penn State.”