This article is over a year old but it’s worth reading. Here are a few excerpts:
The cover of February’s edition of Christianity Today, the flagship evangelical magazine, puts the issue in stark terms. Over a picture of two screaming Green Bay Packers fans, stripped to the waist with their torsos smeared with gold and green team colors, is the headline: “Fanatics: How Christians have succumbed to the culture of sports.”
The lead essay is by Shirl James Hoffman, emeritus professor of kinesiology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and author of a new book, Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports.
In his friendly jeremiad, Hoffman — a sports lover who has been an athlete, official, coach and professor of sports — is unrepentant about calling a personal foul on the confused values of American Christians who worship the Jesus of the Cross as well as the gladiator of the arena.
“There are simply no easy, straight-faced, intellectually respectable answers for how evangelicals can model the Christian narrative — with its emphases on servanthood, generosity, and self-subordination — while immersed in a culture that thrives on cut-throat competition, partisanship, and Darwinian struggle,” Hoffman writes. “Further, while honesty, sympathy, and generosity are the idealized derivatives of a life lived with God, recent data reveal that immersion in a culture devoted to proving one’s superiority squelches rather than reinforces these virtues.”
It is not just a problem of Christians who are so mesmerized by sports that they forget the gospel, Hoffman writes. It is also the unquestioned and unfiltered exchange of rites, practices and principles between church and sport. The pagan Romans, he says, were amateurs compared to American Christians.
“The cozy coupling of sports and evangelicalism shows itself not only in the outsized athletic complexes that are common features of church architecture, but also in the ease with which sport and its symbols show up in the sanctuary. Pastors incorporate pithy sports metaphors into their sermons. Famous athletes are invited to pulpits to tell how their faith helps them compete.” At the same time, “the symbols of Christianity have invaded sports.”
“Professional football is a heady mixture of toughness, violence, and piety — vicious collisions coupled with post-touchdown genuflections, trash talk mixed with heaven-directed index fingers, anger and aggression interrupted by prayers.” He says these “cheap advertisements of the faith” in big-time sports “smack of cheap grace.”
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As far back as 30 years ago, Frank DeFord of Sports Illustrated described this religio-athletic amalgam as “Sportianity,” which Hoffman defines as ” a mix of locker-room psychology and athletically slanted doctrines of assertiveness and masculinity, abetted by cherry-picked Bible verses pre-screened to ensure they don’t contradict sport’s reigning orthodoxies.”
