April 2, 2026
What does it take to correctly call a beloved cultural custom “unrighteous”? To call a lewd TV show everyone’s watching unrighteous. To call a dishonest yet winning style of leadership unrighteous. To call what everyone else calls “sexual liberation” unrighteous.
What does it take?
I would have answered that you need a couple things: an accurate moral compass and a lot of courage. That’s true and if you stop reading now, those aren’t bad takeaways. This week, I learned about a third thing that helps. If you have it, it can sharpen your compass and fuel your courage.
This week, the Chicago Bulls let guard Jaden Ivey go from their team. The reason? According to the headlines, it was due to “anti-LGBTQ comments.” Like most headlines, the explanation was misleading.
The reason was actually the word “unrighteousness.” In an Instagram video, Ivey used the word three times to describe having to celebrate LGBTQ+ in the Bulls’ Pride Night. Here was the offending clip:
“They proclaim Pride Month in the NBA. They say come join us for Pride Month to celebrate unrighteousness. They proclaim it. They show it to the world. To celebrate unrighteousness. They proclaim it on the billboards. They proclaim it in the streets. Unrighteousness.”
It’s ironic that as of 2025, the NBA had fined 9 players a total of $616,000 in the last 14 years for anti-gay slurs—no firings though. Ivey’s was no slur, just an ethical statement about Pride Month, but apparently it crossed a line beyond fines. He’d called a cultural custom “unrighteous.”
“He’d called a cultural custom ‘unrighteous.'”
One take among the sportscasters is that Ivey’s sin wasn’t his off-court comments as much as his on-court underperformance. Players only fined for slurs included some megastars like Anthony Edwards, Nikola Jokic, and Kobe Bryant. An ethically attuned Michael Jordan would have been a lot harder for the Bulls to fire.
For a first-round draft pick (fifth overall), Ivey had only moderate success with the Detroit Pistons and less so with the Bulls. Then, on March 26, 2026, it was announced a knee injury had sidelined him the rest of the season. Within a week, an Instagram video got him cut from the team entirely. These precipitating facts do nothing to diminish the 24-year-old’s boldness to speak unpopular ethics or to absolve the Chicago Bulls for their dogmatism. But it’s not hard to imagine the on-court stats at least playing a role for the team if not their former player as well.
What does it take to call out unrighteousness? Again, compass and courage. But we see a third ingredient in Ivey’s story which might have helped him. Think player trades, meh stats, and knee injuries.
The system wasn’t working super well for him. If he had found NBA superstardom, would he have felt as free to criticize the NBA so bluntly? I don’t know, but I can imagine circumstances made it easier.
“If he had found NBA superstardom, would he have felt as free to criticize the NBA so bluntly?”
When commenting on John the Baptist, Jesus knew the audience knew John’s reputation. So he went with rhetorical questions. “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? . . . A man dressed in fine clothes? No, those who wear fine clothes are in king’s palaces” (Matthew 11:7-8, NIV). They all knew John famously wore coarse clothes, ate bugs, and was comically out of place in king’s palaces. He wasn’t exactly a “Daniel” versed in Babylonian and Persian etiquette.
What if John had been brought up in the palace? Would a well-dressed, well-reputed John the Dignitary have been so blunt as to tell Herod Antipas, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife?” (Mark 6:18, NIV)?
If given the opportunity, we might have tried coaxing some P.R. into that prophet, refining his presentation, telling him, “You know, you might form it more as a question instead of a statement. And you might avoid direct address like you since it’s confrontational. Maybe something more like, ‘What do you think, your majesty—is it lawful for a person to have a close relative’s wife?’”
But too much nuance and too many niceties and we no longer have John the Baptist. You don’t get John the Baptist without the coarse clothes, bug diet, and blunt talk.
“But too much nuance and too many niceties and we no longer have John the Baptist.”
This is not to say that every Christian needs to be a John the Baptist (or that every Christian athlete post disapproving videos like Ivey’s) or that we need no proper prophet Daniels in the halls of power. This is to say it can be easier to call out unrighteousness when the system isn’t working out for you. A season on the sidelines can sharpen your compass and fuel your courage. (It’s also only fair to add that for times that demand courage, the courageous might very well need a “theology of being fired” as well.)
So, it’s not the end when the world isn’t working out for you so well. When you’re sidelined and watching from the bench with a blown knee. Or, using Jesus’ words, when you’re poor in spirit and mourning, it’s easier to hunger and thirst for righteousness—and to call out unrighteousness from a place of genuine concern. Take comfort in times when you’re less of an insider than you’d like to be. It can make it easier not just to speak truth—but to see it in the first place.
