Dan Foster and Rich Lowry have some thoughts on why there is so much hostility to the openly Christian quarterback.

As a non-believer (but not a fundamentalist atheist), I think that he raises hackles in two different groups of people — those who are bigoted against Christians in general (and they are legion — it is the last acceptable bigotry in our society) and those Christians who feel guilty because he sets the bar too high (and there is actually a non-zero intersection of those two sets). I would think of him as the Ned Flanders of the NFL, the completely unironic guy who is made fun of because in living up to his beliefs rather than down to his impulses, he makes everyone else look bad. And because he’ll continue to do so, he won’t care. Which will just make them all the angrier.