Penalty or No, Athletes Talk Faith

The opening ceremonies of the Olympics are extravagant celebrations of national glories and global unity. But if you watch past this week’s opener to the Games themselves, you’ll notice an unusual pattern: Athletes are always talking about God.

If you caught last month’s Olympic trials, you’ll have noticed the same thing. Athletes of every kind continuously gave God the credit, often in explicitly Christian terms. It was almost like a competition within 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 women’s 400-meter hurdles, she answered a reporter’s question this way: “Honestly—praise God. I was not expecting that, but he can do anything. Anything is possible in Christ. I’m just amazed, baffled, and in shock.” The reporter laughed nervously and moved on to the next qualifier.

It’s not news that athletes thank the Lord for their success. But watching these public displays of piety made me wonder: Why is this still normal? The Oscars couldn’t be mistaken for church. Neither could large gatherings of writers, journalists, musicians, venture capitalists, or politicians. Sporting events appear to be the last refuge of “acceptable” public faith in our secular culture.

After all, almost no one slams McLaughlin-Levrone and other publicly Christian athletes for their praise. It’s allowed. Reporters may find it quirky or even bizarre, but athletes generally aren’t punished for religiosity. And even if they were, it’s clear they wouldn’t care. In a time when belief is belittled, ignored, or relegated to one’s private life, athletes are unapologetically faithful in public. But why?

The place to start, I think, is the nature of sports itself. Athletic discipline is rigorously controlled because, when the whistle blows, nothing is under control. It’s chaos, contingency, and chance all the 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 important 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 that means. 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—at the time the best basketball player on the planet—had to leave prematurely due to cramps. Why? The stadium was slightly warmer than usual. He’d been known to request ice-cold air conditioning wherever he played, so much so 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 game and the series both, all because the league’s MVP couldn’t keep his muscles from spasming.

With good reason, therefore, 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, can be so superstitious. They may or may not believe in God, but they wear the same socks for every game, rub the same statue for good luck, eat the same meal at the same time of day: It’s sports magic. The “sports gods” are quite particular, and they can 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 so long as coach Phil Jackson promises it’ll help them win.

For athletes, God isn’t just in charge of the moment. He’s the governor of history. This is true for all of us, at all 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 more than God answering a prayer. He’ll tell the world a story—a saga divinely directed by the heavenly Playwright. He’ll say: I was born for this; I was meant to do it; this outcome was ordained from the start. Sure, he may be caught up in the moment. Deep down, though, he’s expressing faith in divine providence. It’s one more way to be clear about control. None of us has it, because only God does, and the sooner one recognizes that, the sooner peace is possible when losing and real joy available when winning.

Finally, athletic contests are about nothing less than glory. Homer said as much almost 3,000 years ago: “What greater glory attends a man, while he’s alive, / than what he wins with his racing feet and striving hands?” Glory shines on the last man standing, the first woman to cross the finish line, the team with the winning score when time runs out. The victors are showered with status, fame, money, and applause. Yet what do the victors themselves seem to feel? A few of them strut and jaw, but many will drop to their knees and weep like children. Ask them their emotion and they’ll tell you: gratitude.

From a secular perspective, it makes no sense: Are you grateful to yourself? You’re the one who just did this!

But what athletes intuit is that, somehow, this accomplishment is well and truly theirs and a gift. So they thank their teammates, families, and parents—especially mom—but more than any worldly giver, they thank “the Father of lights,” since they know that “every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above” (James 1:17, RSV). Athletes push themselves beyond the limits of their capability, and in the ecstasy of triumph, they cannot help but declare the truth: I am not my 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 tell you why they made some choice on the field or what they were thinking in the moment. They were so in 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 religious experience.” In a sense, he wasn’t wrong.

This should help to explain 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 religious word—is a kind of bearing witness, and the experience is far 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 press and irreligious public. A more cynical take is that many journalists see it as the price 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 when you hit that shot?”

That’s not the most damning interpretation, however.

At times, if you look closely, you’ll see what looks like an ugly dynamic at work. In many popular American sports, an increasingly privileged, irreligious, and still mostly white media writes about a mostly religious, mostly non-white league in which relatively few come from privilege. The upshot is a chasm between journalists and athletes—whether marked by class, education, race, or all of the above. In this respect, liberals are right and conservatives are wrong: You can’t take politics out of sports. Ironically, this is never more evident than when God enters the conversation.

To take a memorable example, a few years back, sportswriter Dave Zirin dinged quarterback Russell Wilson for attributing a win to God, charging that “football players speak about God as if He … is the Big Coach in 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 a great 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 section about his paraphrase of Isaiah 54:17 (“No weapon formed against me shall prosper”) with “Weapons, God, you know, that kind of stuff.”

Criticism is fair game, and journalists shouldn’t withhold substantive disagreement just to be polite. The optics of these 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 how faithful athletes see themselves in a God-enchanted world.

The lovely fact is that the athletes in question seem to care not one whit, which is quite freeing for those of us who both cheer them on and share their faith. They’re a model for all believers of what it looks like to be cheerfully, unabashedly Christian in public.

Like many in sports media, I used to be guilty of rolling my eyes at such displays of piety. It seemed gauche, unnecessary, maybe even a grift. And perhaps sometimes it is. But I had to admit that I’d be inclined to keep my mouth shut on the victors’ podium—I’d be too embarrassed to be so bold 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 author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry.