The civil religion of the United States of America has long been the United States of America, with a thin veneer of Protestant Christianity to camouflage its nauseating liturgies of self-love. Its object of veneration is the flag. Its saints are war veterans. America is the promised land and to be an American is to be uniquely blessed by God. Little wonder that the former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, Colin Kaepernick, has proved so threatening to the self-image of this bastardised inversion of the Christian faith.

Two years ago, and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, Kaepernick refused to stand for that unsingable dirge, the Star Spangled Banner. How could he participate in country worship when that same country was so corrupted by injustice and violence against people of colour? But to a nation that has itself become the object of its own collective worship, disrespecting the American hymn is the worst of all heresies. Thus Donald Trump, the Herod of American civic religion, recently called on football club owners to sack any “son of a bitch” that refused to stand for the national anthem. Within days, Kaepernick had been joined by hundreds of other NFL players who also refused to stand and instead, as the phrase now goes, “took the knee”. Soon after, a photograph of Martin Luther King taking the knee went viral, as if his participation in this newly fashionable practice was a great surprise. No surprise, people – it’s called prayer. And it’s been a form of protest for centuries.

Kaepernick doesn’t do gentle Jesus, meek and mild – but he is proper God squad, baptised Methodist, confirmed Lutheran. His body provides a map of his faith, with “to God be the glory” and quotations from the psalms and praying hands tattooed all over it. “When I step on the field, I always say a prayer, say I am thankful to be able to wake up that morning and glorify the Lord with what I do on the field,” he has said. Now he is kneeling for the national anthem and hundreds of others are following him. And Trump is outraged. Only in a country that has been this perverted by civil religion can prayer be deemed an offence punishable by public ostracism.

Writing in the Washington Post, Lutheran pastor and former sportswriter Rev Angela Denker identifies “a deep fear of what Kaepernick has tapped into: a shaking of America’s Christian roots and a question about who owns the narrative of Jesus: white evangelical Christian culture or African American liberation movements?”

A few years before the birth of Christ, the Roman stooge and so-called “king of the Jews”, Herod the Great, erected a golden statue of a Roman imperial eagle over the entrance of the temple in Jerusalem. This was Roman national power stamped all over the house of God. And those who tore the eagle down in broad daylight knew perfectly well that they would be killed for their resistance. But they did it anyway. Loyalty to God always trumps loyalty to the state, even to the point of death. Two thousand years later, it is the American eagle that represents the world’s great imperial power, and it is the American eagle that has stamped itself all over the temple – or, at least, all over the church. The separation of church and state means precious little in a country where the state itself has been so heavily sacralised.

Taking the knee, like all authentically religious prayer, is a form of protest against injustice, in this case against racism, America’s original sin. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people,” says Kaepernick. But it is also a species of resistance against a corrupted version of religion that justifies its sin with lashings of pious blah. And as the Bible continually demonstrates, if you are not being denounced as a heretic in such circumstances, you are not doing it right.

Kaepernick is a modern minor prophet. He has been voted the most unpopular member of the NFL. He has been branded a traitor and received death threats. No one will hire him. He is hated by Trump the Great. Not since Muhammad Ali opposed the war in Vietnam has American sport been so close to God.