Sensational rookie quarterback C.J. Stroud appeared for an interview over the weekend immediately after leading his Houston Texans to a playoff win. The exhausted, battered, victorious 22-year-old opened with these words:

“First and foremost, I just want to give all glory to my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

The game was carried by NBC. They posted Stroud’s postgame interview but, predictably, edited out his opening statement – the very statement that the player himself said was “first and foremost” to him and his terrific game.

Stroud is Black. It used to be that liberals tolerated Black displays of religion because they thought such displays were cute, as in Black churches with people dancing in the aisle and shouting “Hallelujah!”

Never mind that such displays were profound and spiritual for the Black participants; liberals condescendingly tolerated them only because they saw them as something like a kindergarten Christmas play.

But as liberals drifted toward outright leftism and now censorious wokism, they stopped tolerating Christian displays even if the displays are by kindergarteners or Blacks. The wokesters running the media have decided Christianity is evil and Christian verses and beliefs are hate speech.

They’re insufficiently introspective to notice the irony in characterizing Christianity as bigotedly hateful in order to justify their bigoted hatred of it.

The reason the left hates Christianity is because it’s a threat to their idols. Such as their omnipotent Big Government that controls everything people do, think, and believe. Such as identity politics that elevates skin color over character content. Such as the competing religion of global warming.

And so, the media censor the word “Jesus” unless it’s used as a swear word. Meanwhile, they now spew endless other words that historically are vulgarities.

They show players and performers grabbing their crotch or twerking their butts. But if you make a sign of the cross or point to heaven when you score a touchdown or thank your Lord and Savior for your brilliant game, you’re censored.

And you’ll probably lose your Nike endorsement contract too. (What a horrible company, by the way.)

They consciously distort the First Amendment prohibition against the establishment of a state religion into a prohibition on public displays of religion, at least if that religion is Christianity. If you want to pray or sing hymns, you have to do it in private, sort of like masturbation.

But even real or simulated masturbation is now OK onstage at the Superbowl halftime show in front of a few hundred million of your intimate friends.

Christianity, not so much.

The woke may have overplayed their hand this time, just as they did with DEI. I’m sick and tired of their mindless bigotry and censorious hate, and so are many other Christians, Jews and other people of faith.

Maybe such people of faith are rare in Los Angeles and New York where the woke media reside. But in what the liberals dismiss as “flyover country,” they’re not rare at all. The media will eventually learn that most Americans live in flyover country. Those Americans, tellingly, call it “God’s Country.”