According to an account my son came across a while ago: “Football is one of the most powerful institutions in American society. It is so powerful that it claimed an entire day of the week. It said, ‘This day is ours. We own it.’ Not only did football take a day of the week, but the previous owner was God.”

Though a failed fan myself (no less a figure than Jack Kemp advised me to give up trying to master the rules), I am an American, and accordingly can hardly miss the fact that football is one of most unifying aspects of American culture. The games have become the one thing that most Americans, especially men, can comfortably discuss. No matter what region of the country you’re visiting, you are bound to hear men who find themselves thrown together asking “Did you see the game?” Animated analysis, crowing, and/or cringing follows. Black and white, immigrant and native born, men and (mysteriously) women, adults and children, liberals and conservatives – huge swaths of the country speak the same idiom and share the experience of football. Super Bowl Sunday is close to a national sacrament.

You think it’s easy to maintain national cohesion? It isn’t. That’s why demagogues since time began conjure external enemies and scapegoat minorities — which is not to say that enemies are always imaginary. In our time, the things that divide us are all too obvious. We are increasingly self-segregating by income and education. Due in part to choice and in part to history’s overhang, we continue to live in racially distinct enclaves. Democrats and Republicans despise one another to the point where they avoid living in the same neighborhoods or dating each other. Many parents now frown on their children marrying “outside the faith” — by which they mean not Catholic or Protestant, but Republican or Democrat. And speaking of faith, in actual houses of worship, things haven’t changed much since Martin Luther King, Jr. called 11 a.m. Sunday morning “the most segregated hour” in American life.