The opening ceremonies of the Olympics are extravagant celebrations of national glories and global unity. But in case you watch past this week’s opener to the Games themselves, you’ll notice an unusual pattern: Athletes are at all times talking about God.
If you caught last month’s Olympic trials, you’ll have noticed the identical thing. Athletes of all kinds repeatedly gave God the credit, often in explicitly Christian terms. It was almost like a contest throughout the competition to see who could outdo the others in redirecting praise heavenward.
For my money, US track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone won. After breaking the world record (again) for ladies’s 400-meter hurdles, she answered a reporter’s query this fashion: “Honestly—praise God. I used to be not expecting that, but he can do anything. Anything is feasible in Christ. I’m just amazed, baffled, and in shock.” The reporter laughed nervously and moved on to the following qualifier.
It’s not news that athletes thank the Lord for his or her success. But watching these public displays of piety made me wonder: Why is that this still normal? The Oscars couldn’t be mistaken for church. Neither could large gatherings of writers, journalists, musicians, enterprise capitalists, or politicians. Sporting events look like the last refuge of “acceptable” public faith in our secular culture.
After all, almost nobody slams McLaughlin-Levrone and other publicly Christian athletes for his or her praise. It’s allowed. Reporters may find it quirky and even bizarre, but athletes generally aren’t punished for religiosity. And even in the event that they were, it’s clear they wouldn’t care. In a time when belief is belittled, ignored, or relegated to 1’s private life, athletes are unapologetically faithful in public. But why?
The place to begin, I believe, is the character of sports itself. Athletic discipline is rigorously controlled because, when the whistle blows, nothing is under control. It’s chaos, contingency, and likelihood all the best way down. The skies fill with rain clouds; the court is slick with sweat; the track is spongy; your opponents are strategically unpredictable.
The most significant variable is the body. Top athletes treat their bodies almost like a separate entity—caring for it, treating it, feeding it, resting it, trusting it, blaming it. An athlete who trips and stumbles or suffers an injury says, My body failed me. We know what meaning. Who can predict, with absolute certainty, when a ligament will snap or a muscle cramp?
In Game 1 of the 2014 NBA Finals, LeBron James—on the time the most effective basketball player on the planet—had to depart prematurely because of cramps. Why? The stadium was barely warmer than usual. He’d been known to request ice-cold air con wherever he played, a lot in order that fans speculated that the opposing team, my beloved San Antonio Spurs, kept things warm for a competitive advantage. True or not, the Spurs won the sport and the series each, all since the league’s MVP couldn’t keep his muscles from spasming.
With good reason, subsequently, do athletes turn to God. None but God is sovereign. I can’t control the weather, but he can. I can’t stop my body from failing, but he can. Even the wind and the waves obey him (Matt. 8:27). Shouldn’t footballs and softballs obey him too?
This is why athletes, as much as fans, could be so superstitious. They may or may not consider in God, but they wear the identical socks for each game, rub the identical statue for good luck, eat the identical meal at the identical time of day: It’s sports magic. The “sports gods” are quite particular, and so they could be propitiated through complex rituals or angered by the slightest transgression. “Karma” gets called in for apostates, traitors, and cheats. Even a skeptic like Michael Jordan, peeking at teammates, will bow for Zen meditation as long as coach Phil Jackson guarantees it’ll help them win.
For athletes, God isn’t just in command of the moment. He’s the governor of history. This is true for all of us, in any respect times, but elite athletes are viscerally reminded of it with a frequency few of us experience.
It should come as no surprise, then, that a victorious athlete will speak of greater than God answering a prayer. He’ll tell the world a story—a saga divinely directed by the heavenly Playwright. He’ll say: I used to be born for this; I used to be meant to do it; this consequence was ordained from the beginning. Sure, he could also be caught up within the moment. Deep down, though, he’s expressing faith in divine windfall. It’s another option to be clear about control. None of us has it, because only God does, and the earlier one recognizes that, the earlier peace is feasible when losing and real joy available when winning.
Finally, athletic contests are about nothing lower than glory. Homer said as much almost 3,000 years ago: “What greater glory attends a person, while he’s alive, / than what he wins together with his racing feet and striving hands?” Glory shines on the last man standing, the primary woman to cross the finish line, the team with the winning rating when time runs out. The victors are showered with status, fame, money, and applause. Yet what do the victors themselves appear to feel? A number of of them strut and jaw, but many will drop to their knees and weep like children. Ask them their emotion and so they’ll let you know: gratitude.
From a secular perspective, it is not sensible: Are you grateful to yourself? You’re the one who just did this!
But what athletes intuit is that, by some means, this accomplishment is well and truly theirs and a present. So they thank their teammates, families, and oldsters—especially mom—but greater than any worldly giver, they thank “the Father of lights,” since they know that “every good endowment and each perfect gift is from above” (James 1:17, RSV). Athletes push themselves beyond the bounds of their capability, and within the ecstasy of triumph, they can not help but declare the reality: I’m not my very own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Creator, the sovereign Lord.
Sports, like other art forms, are potential channels of transcendence. It’s why we watch and admire athletes. It’s why athletes sometimes can’t let you know why they made some selection on the sector or what they were considering within the moment. They were so within the flow, so self-forgetful, so present to teammate and circumstance that they lost themselves. The beauty that results, for them and for us, is marvelous. Our breath catches in our throat. David Foster Wallace called watching Roger Federer “a spiritual experience.” In a way, he wasn’t flawed.
This should help to elucidate the sometime acquiescence of otherwise secular fans and journalists to athletes’ relentless religious enthusiasm. For many, following sports is as close as they get to liturgy. Observance—already a spiritual word—is a form of bearing witness, and the experience is removed from passive: Fans participate vicariously through their cheers, boos, clapping, stomping, and chanting. Athletes in turn draw energy, strength, and encouragement from this unique relationship.
Having said that, there are other, less savory reasons athletes’ faith is tolerated among the many press and irreligious public. A more cynical take is that many journalists see it as the value they pay to cover sports. They must feign listening to the devout drone on about Jesus before asking, for the umpteenth time, “So, what was going through your head while you hit that shot?”
That’s not essentially the most damning interpretation, nevertheless.
At times, in case you look closely, you’ll see what looks like an unpleasant dynamic at work. In many popular American sports, an increasingly privileged, irreligious, and still mostly white media writes a few mostly religious, mostly non-white league by which relatively few come from privilege. The upshot is a chasm between journalists and athletes—whether marked by class, education, race, or the entire above. In this respect, liberals are right and conservatives are flawed: You can’t take politics out of sports. Ironically, this is rarely more evident than when God enters the conversation.
To take a memorable example, a couple of years back, sportswriter Dave Zirin dinged quarterback Russell Wilson for attributing a win to God, charging that “football players discuss God as if He … is the Big Coach within the Sky, scripting outcomes like Vince McMahon with a baggy sweatshirt and a headset.” If there even is a God, Zirin added, “this all-powerful force doesn’t care an amazing deal about football.” One wonders how he knows.
Coverage was similarly dismissive when Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis was inducted to the Hall of Fame. Deadspin was baffled by his conviction that God spoke to and cared for him amid tragedy, and SB Nation headlined a bit about his paraphrase of Isaiah 54:17 (“No weapon formed against me shall prosper”) with “Weapons, God, you understand, that form of stuff.”
Criticism is fair game, and journalists shouldn’t withhold substantive disagreement simply to be polite. The optics of those encounters aren’t great, though, and responding to athletes’ piety with derision or mock forbearance is neither respect nor tolerance. It’s barely masked contempt—and a revelation of the yawning gap between how our secularized culture thinks about religion and the way faithful athletes see themselves in a God-enchanted world.
The lovely fact is that the athletes in query appear to care not one whit, which is kind of freeing for those of us who each cheer them on and share their faith. They’re a model for all believers of what it looks prefer to be cheerfully, unabashedly Christian in public.
Like many in sports media, I was guilty of rolling my eyes at such displays of piety. It seemed gauche, unnecessary, possibly even a grift. And perhaps sometimes it’s. But I had to confess that I’d be inclined to maintain my mouth shut on the victors’ podium—I’d be too embarrassed to be so daring about my faith. Yet these sisters and brothers are downright unafraid. I, for one, have something to learn from their example.
Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the writer of 4 books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry.
