Aaron Rodgers got real about his religious background and current beliefs during a candid conversation with his girlfriend, Danica Patrick.
“Most people that I knew, church was just … you just had to go. Parents made you go,” the 36-year-old Green Bay Packers quarterback said on a recent episode of Patrick’s “Pretty Intense” podcast.
While Rodgers told the 37-year-old former race car driver that he “enjoyed” his time with the religious organization Young Life, which included building houses in Mexico during spring break trips, he didn’t have a “connection point” to religion when he played football at the University of California, Berkeley.
“I had some good friendships along the way that helped me to figure out exactly what I wanted to believe in. Ultimately, it was that rules and regulations and binary systems don’t really resonate with me,” the NFL star explained.
When asked by Patrick when he started to question religion, Rodgers replied high school.
“Religion can be a crutch, it can be something that people have to have to make themselves feel better,” the athlete explained. “Because it’s set up binary, it’s us and them, saved and unsaved, heaven and hell, it’s enlightened and heathen, it’s holy and righteous … that makes a lot of people feel better about themselves. They say, ‘Oh, I’ve got Jesus and I’m saved. I’m going to heaven and there’s only 144,000 of us going even though there’s 7 billion on the planet.'”
Rodgers concluded: “I don’t know how you can believe in a God who wants to condemn most of the planet to a fiery hell. What type of loving, sensitive, omnipresent, omnipotent being wants to condemn his beautiful creation to a fiery hell at the end of all this?”
The football player previously told ESPN Magazine that he grew up with going to church with his parents, Darla and Edward, who are devout Christians.
“I think organized religion can have a mind-debilitating effect, because there is an exclusivity that can shut you out from being open to the world, to people, and energy, and love and acceptance,” Rodgers told the magazine in August 2017, noting he no longer identifies with any religious affiliation. “That wasn’t really the way that I was, maybe the first 25 or 26 years of my life. I was, you know, more black-and-white. This is what I believe in. And then at some point … you realize, I don’t really know the answers to these questions.”
Aaron has had a strained relationship with his family, including Bachelorette alum Jordan Rodgers, for years. E! News reported in November 2019 that Aaron and Jordan, 31, were trying to rebuild their relationship with Patrick’s help.
Us Weekly confirmed in January 2018 that the Super Bowl MVP and the race car champ were dating. The couple bought a Malibu estate for $28 million in October 2019.
