In the first of the recent rambling Instagram live sermons that got him fired by the Chicago Bulls, Jaden Ivey hunts through a bible for passages to share with his followers. He evidently did not do the prep-work to place sticky tabs or bookmarks in there, so there are awkward moments of silence while Ivey flips back and forth and sniffs and mutters. It's a lot of very tedious work for almost no payoff: Every passage Ivey selects is a threat of damnation, and the most he ever wrings out of his selections, by way of translating them into plain language, is a superficial and increasingly whiney exhortation. You guys, don't you see how this further goes to show that you are going to go to hell?
He winds himself up like this, so that by the end of the video his voice has risen half an octave or more, as if he has been waiting for some tangible sign of breakthrough and feels his audience is to blame for not having produced one, perhaps due to their inner hypocrisy. But it's a pretty friendly audience, judging by the comments: If recent studies about sycophancy in AI chatbots reveal anything broader about online psychosis, Ivey is absorbing a dangerously potent wallop of behavioral reinforcement. He spent several hours over the weekend preaching to this crowd, much of it from the interior of his car, hammering the same talking points about how to avoid eternal damnation, not refining his message too well but certainly gaining steam through repetition.
It's not surprising, then, that some of the confessions Ivey struggled to articulate in the making of his first video are shouted with authority in the most recent one, which came after his employers decided they'd seen enough of this shit. "God saved me from a life of fornication," Ivey professes early in the first video, in an affectless bass, looking away from the camera. "He saved me from a life of drunkenness, he saved me from a life of, um," and here there is a pregnant pause before Ivey completes the sentence with "pornography." Later in the session, repeating the same point, Ivey record-scratches on that pornography bit, stares blankly, and then moves to another thought. By Monday's video, he'd gotten the hang of it. "I was a fornicator! I was a pornography addict! And I used to get drunk! That's all I knew!"
In the second video, Ivey is sitting in the passenger seat of a large SUV, underneath a panoramic moonroof, parked near a metal fence and a concrete overpass. There is an awkwardly long period of silence to open the video, and then Ivey explains that he recently "left work," where he has been rehabbing the knee injury that last week led to the Bulls shutting him down for the remainder of this season. At first you think he might not have a bible nearby, but there you are wrong: After scolding his followers for caring about his basketball career, he returns to the topic of damnation, and then there is that terrible sound, of Jaden Ivey flipping through the Good Book. "John 14:6," he says, already in that whiney tone. Flip flip. "But many of y'all don't believe!" Flip flip flip. "But may Jesus turn your hearts to believe the truth, the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ." Flip flip flip. "That you can be saved. Right, so."
Watching this, if you are any kind of decent normal person, you feel an almost panicky moral duty to command this confused person to return to his home, for crying out loud. Do not sit in your car in a parking lot, flipping through a bible and scolding internet strangers for sins you can only imagine, young man!
In his third video, also filmed from the car's interior but now with the camera in his lap, Ivey zeroed in on the favorite targets of Christian Evangelicals: gay people. "That the world can proclaim LGBTQ, right? They have, they have, they proclaim Pride Month in the NBA," says Ivey, in a claustrophobic under-chin shot. "They proclaim it. They show it to the world! They say come, come, uh, come join us for Pride, for Pride Month! To celebrate unrighteousness. They proclaim it. They proclaim it on the billboards, they proclaim it in the streets: unrighteousness. So how is it that one can't speak righteousness? How, how, how are they to say that you, you, man, this man is crazy?" Relatedly, the Bulls waived Ivey on Monday, citing conduct detrimental to the team.
I don't think the Bulls fired Ivey, as he would have it, solely because he talked about gay people going to hell and criticized the NBA for hosting pride festivities, any more than I would believe the Bulls fired Ivey because he confessed to having watched a lot of pornography. Ivey is in the final weeks of an expiring contract, is injured, and simply is not good or valuable enough to get away with being exhausting. And it is fucking exhausting to be around this sort of person. Julie Poe of the Chicago Tribune reports that Ivey was already thought of by his coworkers as particularly "outspoken about his faith," and had a well-established reputation with his former team, the Pistons, for his "insistence on steering conversations back toward his evangelical Christian beliefs, even if those answers did not relate to the topic at hand." These videos, posted out of the blue and seeming to indicate an even more fanatical commitment to constant evangelizing, reportedly left his bosses "alarmed by the entire scope of the guard’s diatribes over the last week."
In his fourth video, from Monday, filmed from an airport gate and then from his seat on a commercial flight, Ivey is the thundering, triumphant martyr. "What good is it, uh, uh, driving the store in a Ferrari, for, for a—you only get to drive that Ferrari for the time being! You're not gonna sit and drive the Ferrari for 10 hours," he shouts, literally from the interior of an airplane. "When has anyone driven a Ferrari for 10 hours? No one!"
"That's why you've got Steph Curry, and he's not even surrendered, and y'all believe he's a Christian! Y'all believe he's a Christian because he wrote Philippians 4:13," Ivey continues, as the flight prepares for takeoff. "Y'all think he's a Christian! But he's cursing just like the world!" I hate to think about the other people sitting in Ivey's section, jamming earbuds as deeply into their ear canals as they will go and praying to any available deity that they will not themselves turn up in that shouting man's online video.
In the background, a flight attendant can be heard directing passengers to turn their devices to airplane mode, to return their seats to the upright position, and to stow their tray-tables. Ivey thunders on, going in on Steph Curry, who he evidently sees as a hypocrite. "Friendship with the world is enmity with God! He's friendship with the world! He don't know Jesus! And I pray he comes to the truth! That him and his family will be saved, in Jesus's name! Because all that stuff is not gonna matter on Judgment Day! All them rings he got! All them rings, uh, uh, LeBron got! All them rings Michael Jordan got. All them, all them people in the Hall of Fame, who don't know Jesus Christ! No!"
At this point a flight attendant offers Ivey a set of headphones.
"I'm all good, thank you, bro," Ivey says, in a lowered voice, pausing for one single breath before returning to his rant. "It's not gonna matter on Judgment Day! If you don't know Jesus, and you're not—your name's not written in the book of life!"
Billy Donovan, speaking Monday evening before his Bulls were thumped by the San Antonio Spurs, acknowledged that Ivey's evidently deteriorating mental health is on his mind. Cutting Ivey loose is a curious way for the Bulls to express concern for his wellbeing, but that's the nature of the business. A better, more valuable player might get to be exhausting and bigoted and at least half-crazy while also being injured, unplayable, and employed, all at the same time. Ivey is a somewhat outmoded player with a worrisome injury, stuck in an insecure position for a team headed nowhere. The Bulls would prefer to keep his problems from becoming their own problems. Whatever comes next for Ivey, I hope it looks like help, and I hope it comes soon.
