Aaron Rodgers says prayer helped him after his season-ending injury last year

As Aaron Rodgers prepares to make his long-awaited return to NFL action on Monday night with the New York Jets, Netflix is promoting a new documentary series on the star quarterback’s personal life and career.
“Aaron Rodgers: Enigma,” which is coming Dec. 17, “will reveal a side of Rodgers that few get to see,” per a Netflix press release.
In the trailer, Rodgers can be seen discussing football strategy, as well as how prayer helped him in the aftermath of the injury that knocked him out of the 2023-24 NFL season.
Rodgers tore his Achilles in the opening minutes of the Jets game on Sept. 11, 2023, game and missed the rest of the year after having surgery to repair the injury.
“I believe in the power of prayer and intention and from the first night this happened, hours after that, I was surrounded by a bunch of really special people in my life and we just laid down a lot of prayers,” Rodgers says in the trailer for the new documentary.
Rodgers’ comments on prayer build on other comments he’s made in recent years about embracing spirituality after leaving his childhood religion behind.
Rodgers was raised in an evangelical Christian church in Chico, California, and religious events provided a foundation for his family’s social life, as the Deseret News previously reported.
Although the quarterback didn’t feel at home in the church as his parents did, he has talked about getting a lot out of a youth group called Young Life. He went on at least two mission trips with Young Life while in high school, according to a new biography of Rodgers called “Out of the Darkness.”
Rodgers continued to engage with Christian groups throughout college and spoke about his relationship to God during the 2005 NFL draft, when he was picked by the Green Bay Packers.
“The Lord has been teaching me a lot about humility and patience … and He kind of threw both of those in my face today,” Rodgers said after he was drafted later than expected, as the Deseret News previously reported.
But by 2017, Rodgers no longer identified as Christian. He told Mina Kimes of ESPN that year that he worried about the effect organized religion can have on people and had chosen to focus on “being open to the world, to people, and energy, and love and acceptance.”
The reference to prayer in the Netflix trailer is one of the first times Rodgers has spoken about religion since then.
Netflix’s new Rodgers documentary, “Aaron Rodgers: Enigma,” will premiere on Dec. 17.
Here’s a look at the trailer.