After witnessing the anti-Christian parody of the Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Last Supper” during the opening ceremony of this year’s Olympic Games in Paris along with the non-apology that followed, many Americans Christians are understandably boycotting the games altogether. As we learned when Budweiser and Target both sponsored failed campaigns that promoted transgenderism, the prospect of lost profits seems to be the only thing that compels the leadership of big organizations to reconsider their inclinations to insult Christians. Maybe declining viewership will cause organizers to rethink the wisdom of focusing these spectacles on queer advocacy instead of promoting family-friendly homages to sport.

Or maybe nothing will change and those objecting will end up looking more like provincial yokels taking issue with the French simply being French (i.e. offensive, pretentious, and goofy all at once). Recall, this is the country that brought us Duchamp’s “The Fountain” and Serge Gainsbourg’s porn ballads. They have a reputation to maintain, after all.

Besides, the only people really hurt by a boycott are the athletes who, of course, had nothing to do with planning the opening ceremonies and among whom are many devout Christians who glorify God and country in all they do. Far from exhibiting the decadence afflicting today’s culture, they conserve what’s best about it.

The best arguments for boycotting the games have little to do with the wokeness we saw on display this summer. As Friday Night Lights writer Buzz Bissinger argued in the lead up to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, the games have been irredeemably corrupted by the “troika of politics, money, and sports.” By this, he explains that they have downplayed global conflicts, fostered shameless commercialism, and incentivized rampant cheating.

And yet, even these claims amount to loser talk.

No one in touch with reality ever argued that the Olympics would bring about world peace, but the games do at least bring the world together in something besides war. If anything, the Olympics have shed light on the more troubled corners of the world (e.g., Russia is noticeably absent this year because of the war in Ukraine) and have helped countless Americans reacquaint (or perhaps, merely, acquaint) themselves with geography. Compared with the efforts of the United Nations, there’s no question that the Olympics has been far more effective as an organization dedicated to building up a global community and advocating for universal human rights.

As for the moneymaking involved in hosting and sponsoring the games and the inevitable cheating that sometimes happens, all of this is part and parcel of modern athletics. Countries will always want the economic boost of the Olympics, and athletes (and not just Olympians) will always feel tempted to indulge in the physical boost of performance enhancers. And there will always be disagreements about how events are scored—I’ve personally given up trying to understand Dressage, Olympic horse dancing.

Even so, real efforts have been made to make the games fair. While there were plenty of obvious instances of doping and score manipulation in the Olympics in past decades, it’s much harder to engage in these things now—much to the chagrin of repeat offenders like China.

More importantly, what critics of the Olympics fail to appreciate is the abundant display of sheer human excellence and the fact that so little of it is staged or enhanced. In a world rife with mendacity and mediocrity, the Olympics proves that people are still capable of achieving amazing and inspiring feats of strength, agility, focus, and endurance.

This is what makes the Olympics so entertaining and unpredictable. In the first week at Paris, we’ve seen the gymnast version of Clark Kent take off his glasses and become Superman on the pommel horse, a former Olympic gymnast from Guatemala win gold in shooting, and an unassuming older Turkish man with one hand in his pocket win silver in pistol shooting. We’ve also seen the French reincarnation of Michael Phelps set new records in swimming, Chinese divers defying the laws of physics by plunging into the water from 10 feet without making a splash, and an American legend calmly winning her eighth gold medal as she set an Olympic record in the mile-long swim.

Contrast this with the utter fakery of today’s politics, where everything seems to part of some gaslighting campaign to prop up the latest personality or fad policy. Nothing seems trustworthy or connected with reality. Even popular entertainment fails to entertain. So much it is derivative drivel we can sense was almost entirely created with a green screen and artificial intelligence. Indeed, today’s mass culture has become so totalitarian in its impulses that even the briefest brushes with reality are enough to shake the conscience and cause a person to take in deep breaths of fresh air from the real world.

Ironically, this point brings us to the newest elephant in the room: the International Olympic Committee’s allowing athletes in female sports who are said to be intersex—having female reproductive organs along with XY chromosomes and male testosterone levels. The recent controversy over Italian boxer Angela Carini prematurely ending her fight with Imane Khelif is now ubiquitous in the public imagination. Far from affirming the unreality of transgenderism where sex is a matter of choice, the whole episode powerfully exposed the very real biological differences between men and women. More than any argument or social campaign, the sight of an apparent male brutalizing a female in an Olympic contest has effectively moved the issue away from ideology to concrete lived experience. Putting it differently, the issue finally becomes real for people, and we can thank the Olympics for bringing it to the fore, albeit unintentionally.

This forced confrontation with reality is why, along with everything else, we should get over ourselves and watch the Olympics. Yes, we should voice our objections to the opening ceremony, idiotic commitments to environmentalism, and the broken policy on transgender or intersex athletes, but we should also share in an experience that really does bring the world together and cuts through the illusions. Not only is the competition exhilarating, but the camaraderie between competitors is inspiring. All of it enkindles a love for one’s country and goodwill for humanity—feelings that are hard to come by these days. It would be a huge mistake to make the games yet another casualty of the culture war. It will make little difference, and only deprive us of something unspeakably beautiful.