Every time I hear a pastor critique the world of sports and hear advice to “be careful what place sports occupy in your heart,” some small part of me wants to grab the evangelical church complex by the shoulders and whisper: You’re missing the point.
No matter what you think about sports, or whether you even play sports or not — when a large swath of the American population (70 percent to be specific) are either watching sports, talking about sports, or playing sports on a daily basis, it’s worth considering why. Even if you have incredibly strong opinions about the place of sports in church, there’s something happening here that shouldn’t be so swiftly dismissed.
Yet, too often within Christian circles, sports are relegated to distractions to the gospel at best, and more sinisterly as forms of idolatry. So a fumbling cycle manifests itself: Pastors demur Christians succumbing to sports culture and, inevitably, then struggle to treat sports with any real importance within the Christian life. Rarely are thoughtful connections attempted between that thing that so many of us love and the spiritual life to which we’ve been called. Instead, the call rings forth, “Exorcize!”
Sports itself is not the problem. Rather, it’s our lack of ability to leverage sports for theological gain. The silence of theologians on sports, historically and presently (even though, apparently, John Calvin played a bit of bocce ball and supposedly Dietrich Bonhoeffer played tennis), reveals the way that this topic has been relegated to a non-issue in some circles. And this silence alone has impacted seminary preaching labs more than we realize.
As it pertains to sports today, to quote Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, “you don’t have to like it, but you have to accept it.” As a pastor, you’re not going to be able to convince a congregant to stop watching their favorite sports team, though your criticism will definitely make them leave your church. People love sports, and sports are here to stay.
Pastors must stop trying to strip the average American from the object of their love and instead spend more time understanding its origins and how to generate spiritual conversations around it.
WHAT SPORTS REVEAL ABOUT THE SELF
Any preacher worth their salt knows that there are sports analogies in Scripture. The Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 9:24, for example, “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize.” Paul’s athletic metaphors are also found in 1 Timothy 6:12 and 2 Timothy 3:16.
On some base level, the Apostle Paul’s writings lend a biblical precedent to interweaving preaching and sports. But I’m not here to tell you, “See, Paul talked about running, so you should have running references in your sermons.” Instead, the question I have is this: Why did Paul talk about sports in conjunction with the Christian life when he could have easily used so many other analogies instead?
It certainly is worth hypothesizing. Maybe Paul was a sports fanatic himself. Maybe he attended the Delphi or Nemean Games in Corinth in A.D. 49 and 51 and enjoyed the first century’s version of tailgating. Or maybe he had an aversion to sports and personally dismissed them because they were pagan. Maybe he had strong opinions about the perishable celery wreaths that athletes received (Why not make them out of olive leaves?). Maybe he was unathletic and gangly (he was a scholar, after all) and his only knowledge of current events came from the “talk around town.”
Regardless, Paul knew something that many pastors seem to be easily oblivious to today: For many people, their identification with sports can be more important than their identification with work, social groups, and even with religion.
Everyone who loves a sport has one, or more, defining moment in their life that elicited such a strong feeling for a specific team (or an individual athlete) that a deep attachment was immediately created — an attachment that remains with that individual for the rest of his or her lifetime.
In his book The Secret Lives of Sports Fans Eric Simons argues that sports are a physical representation of a person’s sense of self. It’s the reason why I love the Minnesota Vikings so much. I grew up in Minnesota, and Vikings culture was baked into the very fabric of my childhood. It played on the TV in the background while I did Sunday afternoon homework, it was visualized in jerseys my classmates wore, and it was the staple of casual chitchat amongst my parents’ friends. These reasons alone don’t feel like they should be enough to explain why this team captivates so much of my attention and emotion. Yet I can’t deny that I beam with midwestern pride every time I tell someone I’m a Vikings fan.
Unlike, say, opera, where one aspect of your self finds identification and satisfaction, sports have figured out how to have many levels of both. I’m talking about regional pride, ethnic affiliations, aesthetic preferences (as is my husband’s case, who first started following the 49ers as a child because he likes the color red), familial traditions, educational alignment, and even community values.
There’s something about sports that captures the complexity of the human identity and offers a medium for personal expression. Sports tap into the human psyche, into our basest desires — for pleasure, for belonging, and for being a part of a greater story. Testosterone spikes, psychological boosts of self-esteem, feeling more attractive, even increased aggression — all of these feelings are triggered while viewing sports, and these give language to our lives and function as a means of release. It’s the reason why you see grown men on cable TV weeping in the stands after their team drops out of March Madness, why there are spikes in births nine months after the Super Bowl, and why a person can truly feel like their life is complete when the soccer team they’re rooting for wins the World Cup.
Truly, where else — besides the world of sports — can you experience these emotional builds? Certainly not at the office, where life often feels exhausting and meaningless. Not even, I might argue, in relationships where the initial highs of first love eventually get replaced with the mundaneness of everyday child-rearing and never-ending responsibilities. The hunger for sports is indicative not of misplaced enthusiasm in juvenilism, but of a very understandable desire for experiencing life to the fullest.
LEVERAGING SPORTS FOR THE GOSPEL
Knowing this, what do pastors need to change about their teaching and preaching to leverage sports to positively influence the spiritual state of a person?
As Paul Gardner argues in his exegetical commentary on 1 Corinthians, first-century and early second-century writers understood that games and their various sports were used as a metaphor for life. This brings me back to 1 Corinthians 9:24–27. Underlying Paul’s commendation to Christians is a sociological appeal to our fundamental desires. Pleasure and pain, belonging versus isolation — it’s all in this passage, reflected in the terminology of “prize,” “crown,” “enslaving,” and “disqualification.” These games, these kinds of objects, which produce very real highs and the threat of very real lows, are the reason why we live.
Paul modifies the emotional tropes in sports as a means for Christians to live life to the fullest: A person can chase that same athletic high while seeking a spiritual prize, they can create defining moments in their life, like receiving the crown of eternal glory; they can assure their life has meaning, as opposed to “beating the air”; and they can even experience the lows of life, in a statement like “I strike a blow to my body,” in controlled forms.
In other words, Paul utilizes the emotions of sports as a container for people to develop their faith identities, spiritual devotion, and religious practices. He understands that humans were not merely made for play; we were made for sport. For competition, emotional builds, motivation via prizes and losses, and ultimately the pursuit of victory.
The Olympic games of the first century have been replaced by the stadiums of the modern era that seat 60,000-plus people, but in all that time the love of sports has remained. It’s like Ecclesiastes says, “There is nothing new under the sun.” The Apostle Paul simply legitimizes the competition we know by rooting it in the Christian’s support of Christ, the Victor. I don’t think 1 Corinthians 9:24–27 should be treated as a throw-away passage so that we can criticize football stadiums as modern-day temples; I do think Paul understands that the ritual of sport has the potential to be aligned with the religious practices to which we are called as believers in holy, meaningful ways.
Of course, there are always caveats. Yes, a pastor who starts off every sermon with “So, how bout dem Cowboys?!” can potentially set the wrong mood for the worship that’s to come. Does it really make sense for a pastor to use sports analogies in places like Silicon Valley where your typical engineer couldn’t tell you who Tom Brady is? And if you’re going to use sports analogies, do you work your way through all the sports? Perhaps these are questions for another time.
The articles on the morals of sports fanaticism are rampant. But my question remains: What other topic can connect with so many folks on such an emotional level so quickly? If we can actually get over the unnuanced conversations that define sports as “a distraction to the gospel,” a whole world of spiritual gain becomes possible.