Former Clinton spokesman Mike McCurry finds his faith, marries it with politics

By Michelle Boorstein, Published: February 21

Mike McCurry was President Bill Clinton’s spokesman during the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky years, so suffice to say he knows what it’s like to feel uncomfortable at a podium. But his typical audience these days scares him in a new way.

A few weeks ago, McCurry, 59, became a teacher in religion and politics at Wesley Theological Seminary, from where he graduated last spring. It marked his official transition from a hard-charging, super-political spin doctor who quietly attended church to a very public evangelizer for the idea that religious values can save “the frozen tundra” of today’s politics.

“I had no problem getting up and doing briefings before millions of people, but I am fearful in front of 12 students that I can’t really fake it,” says McCurry, who spent more than two decades as a political spokesman before going on to do communications for corporations and non-profits. “I’m laying it on the line about who I am and what I believe in a way that’s different. When you’re spokesman for someone else, they don’t care what you think.. These people want to know who I am.”

Who McCurry is is, in part, a hybrid: He derides the political scene but is still very much in it, as an advisor to left-leaning religious advocacy groups and candidates. He almost spits the word “spin doctor” but has remained in communications and image-making his entire life. He’s known both as the guy who prompted great skepticism by declaring himself “out of the loop” on the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship and as an elder statesman of respectful, frank dialogue. The whole point of his program at Wesley is to get seminarians - most of whom are on the progressive side -- to be comfortable merging to merge their faith and politics in the public square. And yet several of his closest friends say he never speaks to them about his own beliefs.

When he left the Clinton Administration in fall of 1998, McCurry wrote on White House stationery to a friend that he wanted to do “something that counts.” Yet his is not a story of some radical conversion, some Chuck Colson kind of thing on the left. It’s a more subtle tale of a guy who has always had both a faith life and a political life, but realized later that the two should be one.

Growing up in Northern California in the churning late 1960s, McCurry’s family was involved in the local Congregational church, which is part of the liberal United Church of Christ. While his parents focused on church music, McCurry eagerly participated in youth group trips to protest against the war in Berkeley. He loved politics.

“The church is what brought me to politics. But I thought: If the church is doing politics, I can go do politics on my own, which is what I did,” he said.

As high school newspaper editor, he had advocated for more racially integrated schools. When he was a senior, he chose to switch to the all-black high school “to attempt to prove the courage of my convictions.”

His father and grandfather worked for the government and he saw public service and politics as a noble calling, an expression of his values. At that point — and for a few decades — he didn’t give a lot of thought to what Christianity taught and what he believed. He also didn’t attend church once he left his parents’ home.

After graduating from Princeton University he went right to Washington to work as a press secretary for Democratic senators and a string of Democratic candidates for the White House (all lost, including Bruce Babbitt, Bob Kerrey and John Glenn).

McCurry was considered a gifted communicator, and even though he hadn’t been part of Clinton’s initial campaign crew (Kerrey was a competitor), in 1994 he was brought from the State Department to the White House.

At that point religion was largely associated in politics with the right wing, and as secular Americans became a larger part of the Democratic Party base, Democrats became increasingly uncomfortable framing their values in spiritual terms. By then, McCurry and his wife, Debra, were parents and had become regulars at St. Paul’s United Methodist church in Kensington, where he taught Sunday school and made the separation between religion and politics more formal.

“I went to church on Sundays but it never dawned on me - it never occurred to me that that should affect how I should behave,” McCurry says. “... “Church for me was a sanctuary away from the world of politics, where I could get away from it all, and have my own spiritual reflections. I wasn’t contemplating what scripture said about right and wrong. It was more like: How can I get through this day?” He never spoke about his faith at the White House.

Speaking openly about faith was not the Democrats’ way, but it wasn’t McCurry’s way either. He was - and is - somewhat private about his faith.

“He’s more likely to talk about John Boehner than John Wesley. I think that’s a side of himself he’s happy to share but reluctant to impose,” said Joe Simitian, a childhood friend with whom McCurry remains close and who went on to become mayor of Palo Alto. Other friends chuckled at the image of McCurry-as-choir-boy, talking about prayer or sitting around reading the Bible quietly.

But the scrutiny of the rough-and-tumble Clinton years began to wear on McCurry. He was a huge defender of the president and of their policies, but says he was hurt when editorial writers or others would question his character. Even though McCurry was popular with reporters, it was the nature of the job for him to evade, bully and sometimes even threaten.

In 1996 a New York Times editorial said McCurry’s “stonewall” on a campaign finance issue had left “his reliability in tatters.” McCurry and the emotional rollercoaster of being at the podium featured prominently in former Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz’s popular 1998 book “Spin Cycle.”

“For the first time in twenty years in public relations, his personal credibility was being questioned, and it hurt,” Kurtz wrote of the time around the editorial.

Meanwhile, his faith remained in a different compartment.

But he began to look at his role in a more critical way when longtime network correspondent Brit Hume “said I was the most political person who had ever been at that podium,” he said. “When Brit said that, it may have been the moment when I said: Am I dialed up too much?”

Ironically, McCurry was popular with the press - and the public - in part because he was seen as relatively transparent.

He remembered reading reporting about himself and thinking: ‘What have I done besides being a spin doctor that has created something important or some common good?”

When he left the White House in late 1998, his pastor said, now “you can do something important,” McCurry recalls. The pastor asked him to take a bigger leadership role at the Sunday School, but at that point, he recalls (in slightly more profane language), he didn’t know that much about Christianity. To fill that gap, he began taking courses at Wesley, a mainline Protestant seminary in Northwest affiliated with McCurry’s Methodist denomination.

He went into private communications consulting with the firm Public Strategies Washington and did some political advising, including at the tail end of John Kerry's 2004 campaign when the Swift Boat controversy was raging. By then his guidelines were clear.

“I said, I’ll do it, but I don’t want to be a mad-dog and say mean things about [George W.] Bush and the other side, ” McCurry says. “...I think that experience for me said: This Christian thing has a practical application, a lightbulb went off. We can have serious debate in this country, without always questioning the other side’s motives. It’s corrosive.”

The Wesley courses slowly shifted his perspective about the purpose of his church life – and of politics. He was fascinated to see how early Christians dealt with similar issues: power politics, sex scandals and the tension between pure morality and the pragmatic pursuit of policy change. And he thought about what he really believed for the first time.

“It brought out for me how you articulate what a creator God is for you. I don’t think I ever thought in those terms. I did my church thing, but as far as: What is God, how is God interacting with you, how is God affecting the world — those are profound questions I’d spent no time thinking about. I began a lifelong search for those answers,” he said.

As he slowly worked toward his degree he began doing some bipartisan presentations to groups like chiefs of staff or Senate staffers. He became increasingly convinced that what modern political life needs is an infusion of basic scriptural values, primarily: treat others with respect. He wanted to help both sides: infuse progressive religious types – such as many of his students – with the skills to be models of effective, and yet loving politics, and get sheer politicos to realize “you don’t need to blast your opponent every time they get a traffic ticket.”

McCurry’s place in Washington public life has changed quite a bit.

Since leaving the White House he has played the role of generous, wise mentor to a generation of progressive Christians. He has advised most of the advocacy organizations that have sprung up in the past decade to give voice to religious liberals who felt conservatives were unfairly claiming the Bible in politics. He began doing some bipartisan presentations to groups like chiefs-of-staff or Senate staffers.

“People are always deferential to him and just want to listen to whatever wisdom he has to share,” said Mara Vanderslice Kelly, who was a faith advisor to Kerry in 2004, a position unheard of at the time for a Democratic presidential candidate, but now slightly more common. “He is incredibly kind and generous. If there is a rough and tumble side to him, it certainly doesn’t come out anymore.”

Another thing that still doesn’t come out a lot is McCurry’s faith.

At a recent Monday afternoon class, he sat around a huge square table in his downtown office with Kelly and the 13 students in Wesley’s National Capitol Semester for Seminarians, which is geared toward students interested in politics or policy.

Kelly recently left the office at the White House that works with faith-based groups, and was telling students about her path. They were animated not by juicy details of the White House, but about her own coming to Christ.

McCurry sat watching, quiet.

“I am not an openly-professing evangelical Christian who tells people on the street: ‘Let me tell you about my pal Jesus.’ I don’t wear my religion out there,” he said later. “That has not been the vocabulary of my world. It’s a little outside the box for me. But I’m getting more comfortable.”

The Transformative Power of Music

Magen Morse, January 2014

I was recently asked to speak in my church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, on the topic of church music.  The unspoken agenda was that we wanted more people to sing the hymns during the service and more people to sing in our church choir.  I have had lots of great experiences with music – hearing music, singing music, learning about music in my church in my formative youth but I wondered what I could say about the relevance of music to each individual on a more profound spiritual level – how does, as the song goes, ‘music move us’ in our relationship with our God?   

Here, then are some ideas about that topic:

Our music is an essential part of our worship service.  Our leaders have told us this and we read it in the scriptures.  Emma Hale Smith (the wife of Joseph Smith, Jr.) was directed to select hymns soon after the organization of the LDS church;  we read in Doctrine & Covenants 25:11  And it shall be given thee, also, to make a selection of sacred hymns, as it shall be given thee, which is pleasing unto me, to be had in my church.   And the Lord tells us why he wants the hymns in the church in the following verse 12:   For my soul delighteth in the song of the heart; yea, the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me, and it shall be answered with a blessing upon their heads.

I’d like to talk today about the power of music to transform people both in secular and religious settings in a specific spiritual ways to each soul.  I would also like to touch on the power of music as a vehicle and expression of conversion.

I think we could all agree that there is a transformative power to music.  It can be healing, unifying, help us be more courageous, help us express love, or just be good for our soul.    Just this past week I came across two stories that I found touching and that I think illustrate how music can transform a person or situation. 

The first was a story told by a veteran of WWII:    2 weeks after D day he was in France, he was cold because it was dark, rainy, and muddy.  He was feeling stressed and decided to get out his trumpet.  His commander said, don’t play that, there is one sniper left.  He thought to himself, this German soldier out there is as scared and lonely as I am.  He decided to play a German love song.  The next morning a jeep full of German prisoners drove up.  One of the men kept asking in broken English who played that trumpet last night?  He said, ‘When I heard you play that song, I thought of my fiancée in Germany, about my mother and father, my brothers and sisters, and I just couldn’t fight anymore.’  He offered his hand and they shook hands.  The veteran said, “I shook hands with the enemy but he was no enemy, he was scared and lonely, just like me.” (http://www.visualnews.com/2011/03/08/the-power-of-music-an-inspiring-story-from-wwii/)

The other was a story on the radio about on a new film documenting how Beethoven’s 9th symphony has, over the years, became a vehicle of solidarity around the world.  For instance, the last movement of 9th symphony, known as the “Ode To Joy” is sung every year in Japan in December – the diku – the great 9.   Five to-10 thousand people get together to sing the Ode to Joy, as a way to bring good things into the New Year.  Some slip papers in their pockets, writing their resolutions or things they value; the power of singing all together gives them courage and conviction for things they want to accomplish in the next 12 months. 

The “Ode to Joy” was sung by women protesting, at the risk of their lives, the torture and unjust imprisonment of people outside a Chilean prison in the early 70s.  They had learned the song in their churches as it had been adapted as a hymn.  One of the political prisoners inside reported that hearing that music was like a colorful butterfly in his heart “it was fantastic, it was hope,” he said.  (NPR, All Things Considered, The Ode to Joy as a Call to Action, January 14, 2014)

I love that image of music, like a butterfly, able to get in through those prison bars.  The music gave him hope, that when and if he was released from prison, there would be people waiting for him.

[Of course that image of music entering into prison makes me think of the Prophet Joseph Smith in Carthage Jail asking John Taylor to sing to them, “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief” to try to bring comfort to their terrifying incarceration.]

All these examples show how music and singing can unite people.  There has actually been a resurgence of choirs across the United States; probably thanks to some popular TV shows about choirs and there have been lots of studies done about the benefits to singing in choirs.  As it turns out there are no downsides to singing together:

One article called “Singing changes your brain” explains it more scientifically:

“The elation may come from endorphins, . . .  Or it might be from oxytocin, . . . released during singing, which has been found to alleviate anxiety and stress. Oxytocin also enhances feelings of trust and bonding, which may explain why still more studies have found that singing lessens feelings of depression and loneliness.  . . .”

“The benefits of singing regularly seem to be cumulative. In one study, singers were found to have lower levels of cortisol, indicating lower stress.  A very preliminary investigation suggesting that our heart rates may sync up during group singing could also explain why singing together sometimes feels like a guided group meditation.  Study after study has found that singing relieves anxiety and contributes to quality of life.

“. . . It turns out you don’t even have to be a good singer to reap the rewards.  According to one 2005 study, group singing “can produce satisfying and therapeutic sensations even when the sound produced by the vocal instrument is of mediocre quality.”   (Stacy Horn, “Singing Changes Your Brain,” Time.com, Aug. 16, 2013)

All those benefits sure sound like “blessing on your heads,” talked about in D&C 25:12.  The actual act of singing makes people happy, and improves their health and well-being.

In these stories, those transformative moments came through the power of music that was not necessarily designated as sacred music – a German love song or Beethoven’s 9th symphony.  What can happen when we allow music to spiritually feed us and teach us?

I recently was talking to a man at a party.  It turned out he loves singing at his Baptist church but he took some persuading by the director before he joined.  He was understandably nervous about singing with the choir.  But he emphatically told us is that anyone who called themselves a Christian should also be a singer because when we take Jesus into our hearts we start singing the song of the gospel.  We have a song in our soul when we are baptized, he said.  Now, he admitted that some still can’t carry a tune but we still are singing in our hearts.   I appreciated those sentiments very much because they rang so true.  It also rings true because we find the same expressed in the Book of Mormon scriptures.   Alma asks us something similar in chapter 5 verse 26:

“I say unto you, my brethren, if ye have experienced a change of heart and if ye have felt to sing the song of redeeming love, I would ask, can ye feel so now?

“If you have felt to sing the song of redeeming love. . .”  How has the gospel transformed you and do you feel to sing the song of redeeming love?  We have the chance every week to proclaim our faith and testimony through music.  But it is reciprocal – the hymns offer us sustenance.

Dallin H Oaks said in a talk in 1994, that music, specifically the hymns, are an essential part of our worship service.  Some reasons why are outlined in this quote from the first presidency under the prophet Howard W. Hunter:

“Some of the greatest sermons are preached by the singing of hymns.  Hymns move us to repentance and good works, build testimony and faith, comfort the weary, console the mourning, and inspire us to endure to the end.  (Hymns, 1985, p. ix; Worship through Music, Dallin H. Oaks, 1994.)

A few years ago, I had an experience that helped build my testimony and faith as we sang “Come, Come Ye Saints” as a choir to commemorate Pioneer Day (the day when the LDS pioneers reached the SLC valley.)  As I sang, I was feeling the words and visualizing the experience of the saints described in that beautiful hymn specific to our people.  It was so powerful to me to experience, in a glimpse, their struggle as I sang.

Hymns have the power to console:  My mother came to visit a month after my father passed away.  For his funeral, she had wanted to sing “Be Still My Soul” but instead we chose a hymn he loved, “O Ye Mountains High.” Here in this chapel, a month later, it was no coincidence that one of our hymns that day was “Be Still My Soul.”  The words to that song helped unlock that grief a bit and give her some emotional release.  Hymns and music can be so powerful, they can move us to repentance and good works, they can console the mourning, and inspire us to endure to the end.  My father while he was sick and dying could not abide listening to any music but the Mormon Tabernacle choir.  I think that music helped him endure to the end.

This same power of transformation can happen to us every week in our meetings and as we repent and prepare for the sacrament.  Those feelings in our hearts as we worship through music become a vital prayer to our Heavenly Father.  Importantly, singing and music is both a way we can be converted and is an expression of our conversion to the gospel of Jesus Christ – how we sing the song of redeeming love.

In closing, I’d like to share an excerpt of one more story that is special to our family because it is told by Richard’s great uncle, Kenneth Brown.  It tells the story of how one man truly expressed the song of redeeming love:

Kenneth J. Brown was serving as a US Marine in Japan following the dropping of the bomb in Nagasaki.  He tells the moving story about a Japanese Christian he met at Christmastime.  This man came to the base to see the Chaplain:

 “‘I am Christian,’ he said. ‘I am told this is the head minister’s office. Are you a Christian? It is good to talk with a follower of Christ; there are so few Christian Japanese.’

“I took him to the inner office of the division chaplain and waited while the two men conversed. Professor Iida stated his request briefly. He was a teacher of music in a Christian girls’ college until it was closed by imperial command. … He had been imprisoned because of his professed Christianity. After being released he had returned to Nagasaki and continued his music instruction in his home even though it was forbidden. He had been able to continue a small chorus and would be pleased if … they [could] sing a concert for the American Marines.

“‘We know something of your American Christmases,’ he said. ‘We should like to do something to make your Christmas in Japan more enjoyable.’

“I felt sure the chaplain would give a negative reply.. … Yet there was something about the man that bespoke sincere desire to do a good deed so that … permission was granted. The concert would be Christmas Eve.

“The rains had stopped and a calm settled over the atomic bowl reminiscent of the calm that night long ago. The concert was well attended; there was nothing else to do. The theater … had been cleared of its fallen roof and men were sitting on the jagged walls. The usual momentary hush fell over the audience as the performers filed on stage. …

“The first thing we noticed was that they were singing in English and we became aware that they didn’t understand the words but had memorized them for our benefit. Professor Iida had taught his students well; they sang beautifully. We sat enthralled as if a choir from heaven were singing for us. … It was as if Christ were being born anew that night.

“The closing number was a solo, an aria from ‘The Messiah.’ The girl sang with all the conviction of one who knew that Jesus was indeed the Savior of mankind and it brought tears. After that there was a full minute of silence followed by sustained applause as the small group took bow after bow.

“Later that night I helped Professor Iida take down the trimmings. I could not resist asking some questions that propriety forbade but curiosity demanded. I just had to know.

“‘How did your group manage to survive the bomb?’ I asked.

“‘This is only half my group,’ he said softly, but seemed unoffended at my recalling his grief so that I felt I could ask more.

“‘And what of the families of these?’

“‘They nearly all lost one or more members. Some are orphans.’

“‘What about the soloist? She must have the soul of an angel the way she sang.’

“‘Her mother, two of her brothers were taken. Yes, she did sing well; I am so proud of her. She is my daughter.’ …

“The next day was Christmas, the one I remember best. For that day I knew that Christianity had not failed in spite of people’s unwillingness to live His teachings. I had seen hatred give way to service, pain to rejoicing, sorrow to forgiveness. This was possible because a babe had been born in a manger [and] later taught love of God and fellowmen. We had caused them the greatest grief and yet we were their Christian brothers and as such they were willing to forget their grief and unite with us in singing ‘Peace on earth, goodwill to all men.’

“The words of Miss Iida’s song testimony would not be stilled, ‘Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows.’ They seemed to echo and re-echo over the half-dead city that day.

“That day also I knew that there was a greater power on earth than the atomic bomb.” 

 (recounted by James E Faust, Christmas Devotional, 2005, “A Greater Power,” http://www.lds.org/ensign/2004/12/the-power-of-peace?lang=eng, and  in Christmas I Remember Best: A Compilation of Christmas Stories from the Pages of the Deseret News (1983), 51–53.)

God wants us to sing because the love that we share though music is the conviction and testimony of our hearts and can be a great transformative and healing power.  

By Chris Beneke and Arthur Remillard

Chris Beneke is an associate professor of history at Bentley University and the author of “Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism.” Arthur Remillard is an associate professor of religious studies at Saint Francis University and the author of “Southern Civil Religions: Imagining the Good Society in the Post-Reconstruction Era.”

“Some people go to Jerusalem. I go to Pittsburgh.”

So remarked Brent Osbourne in 2012 after his homemade Pittsburgh Steelers banner made him a winner of the NFL’s “Fan Flag Challenge.” The Army veteran, then 35, lived in North Carolina at the time, but his attachment to the team abides.

Osbourne’s devotion is hardly unique. American sports fans have forged imperishable bonds with the people, places and moments that define their teams. You might even call this attachment religious.

But that would be unfair — to sports.

While teams and fans are building powerful, cohesive communities — think Red Sox Nation or the legions of University of Alabama faithful who greet one another with “Roll Tide” — churches are losing followers. According to a 2012 survey by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and Duke University, 20 percent of Americans “claimed they had no religious preference,” compared with an unaffiliated population of 8 percent in 1990. Roughly two out of three Americans, a 2012 Pew report noted, are under the impression that religion is losing influence in the country.

Sports are on the opposite trajectory. Fifty years ago, just three in 10 Americans considered themselves sports fans. By 2012, that proportion exceeded six in 10. Tens of millions of U.S. viewers tuned in to regular-season National Football League games last fall, with the most popular match-ups attracting upwards of 30 million viewers. Nearly 3 million people watched the National Basketball Association’s Christmas Day games. And for devotees of these and other sports, lifelong loyalty to a certain city and team is de rigueur. “Once you choose a team,” sports commentator Bill Simmons says, “you’re stuck with that team for the rest of your life.”

Simmons was half-kidding, but sports are clearly attracting strong adherents as religion is shedding them. This raises the question: Are Americans shifting their spiritual allegiances away from praying places and toward playing places?

Of course, there’s no shortage of religion in American sports. Witness Tim Tebow’s famous genuflections, David Ortiz’s raised index fingers to heaven, Phil Jackson’s invocations of Zen Buddhism, and Muslim high school football players choosing to maintain their Ramadan fast in the midst of a playoff run. Roughly one in five Americans is convinced that God influences game outcomes. NFL games often end with midfield prayer circles. There is a certain wisdom to former football and baseball star Deion Sanders’s observation that faith and athletics go together “like peanut butter and jelly.”

But high-profile displays of piety belie a deeper reordering of spiritual priorities. Modern sports stadiums function much like great cathedrals once did, bringing communities together and focusing their collective energy. This summer, the Archdiocese of New York is expected to outline plans to close or merge some of its 368 parishes; 26 Catholic schools in the archdiocese have ceased operation. By contrast, the city and the state of New Jersey spent hundreds of millions to build new baseball and football stadiums.

And while the public display of religious imagery such as the Ten Commandments and Nativity scenes remains highly contested, the stars, swords, bears, lunging felines and muscled birds associated with sports teams bolster communal unity. After the Boston Red Sox won the World Series in October, the championship trophy was paraded through the halls of the Massachusetts Statehouse while the governor donned a team cap. Outside, a colossal Red Sox banner hung from the building’s portico.

Spiritual leaders have long feared that religion and sports would vie for loyalty — and that sports would win. Before the Civil War, clergymen and devoted lay people regarded sports as needless distractions and gateways to moral dissipation — clear competitors for sacred time and attention. A 17th-century English Puritan named Thomas Hall expressed a common view when he suggested that “gaming” was among the surest means to “debauch a people, and draw them from God and his worship to superstition and Idolatry.”

“We came into this world not for sport,” a Christian magazine opined in 1851, but “for a higher and nobler object.” The fact that sports were often played on the Christian Sabbath made them all the more damnable.

As the 20th century approached, however, attitudes toward sports pivoted. Baseball, tennis, golf and football gained respectability among the aspiring middle classes. Meanwhile, a new breed of Protestant ministers extolled their virtues under the banner of “muscular Christianity.” Many echoed the Rev. Washington Gladden, who in 1898 called sports “a means of grace” and a training ground for “a godly life.” James Naismith, a Presbyterian minister, invented a game he called “basket ball” in 1891. And across the nation, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) added gyms to its facilities, with countless houses of worship following suit.

Today, those old YMCA — now nicknamed the nonsectarian “Y” — and church-basement gyms seem like offerings to a rival deity that conquered the world. In a 2013 survey of shrinking congregations, eight out of 14 pastors “identified sports as the main culprit for low Sunday service attendance.” According to a newly released study by the Public Religion Research Institute, a quarter of Americans “report that they are more likely to be in church than watching football” on Sundays, though almost as many say they are more likely to be taking in gridiron action than sitting in pews.

In short, sports are succeeding by the measures that have traditionally defined success for religious institutions: regularly immersing people in a transcendent experience and keeping them ardently committed over the long term. It could simply be that faiths do not stir the same competitive passions they once did. Tolerance for other religions and acceptance of intermarriage have risen sharply since World War II. Both trends correlate with flagging religious attachments among many groups.

This may be a salutary change. Religious adherents once hung heretics, discriminated against dissenters and tangled with those of other faiths. Methodists defined themselves against Episcopalians; Catholics defined themselves against Protestants; Christians defined themselves against Jews; and vice versa. We are better for having put such interfaith hostility behind us. But religious institutions may not be.

As faith attachments weaken, sports fill a psychological and cultural vacuum. Rooting for the Sabres, Lions or Broncos — and against the Bruins, Bears or Raiders — allows us to display unwavering devotion. Team attachments license us to love and hate in the most dedicated ways. And happily for sports aficionados, these antagonistic feelings are largely contained within games. St. Louis Cardinals fans who saunter around Chicago’s Wrigleyville should expect some badgering, but not physical harassment or abuse.

Americans remain believers of one sort or another. Less than 10 percent say they are atheists, and even the unaffiliated tend to profess spiritual inclinations. That compares very favorably with Europe’s withered religious culture. Moreover, American faith institutions can justifiably claim that their missions transcend mere competition — that they are charged with fostering goodwill between people, nudging individuals toward salvation and spiritual fulfillment, and bringing about the kingdom of God on Earth.

But when it comes to the passionate attachments that sustain interest and devotion, it’s time to acknowledge that sports have gained the edge. And they show no sign of relinquishing the lead.

By Michelle Boorstein and Peyton M. Craighill

Most Catholics worldwide disagree with church teachings on divorce, abortion and contraception and are split on whether women and married men should become priests, according to a large new poll released Sunday and commissioned by the U.S. Spanish-language network Univision. On the topic of gay marriage, two-thirds of Catholics polled agree with church leaders.

Overall, however, the poll of more than 12,000 Catholics in 12 countries reveals a church dramatically divided: Between the developing world in Africa and Asia, which hews closely to doctrine on these issues, and Western countries in Europe, North America and parts of Latin America, which strongly support practices that the church teaches are immoral.

The widespread disagreement with Catholic doctrine on abortion and contraception and the hemispheric chasm lay bare the challenge for Pope Francis’s year-old papacy and the unity it has engendered.

Among the findings:

●19 percent of Catholics in the European countries and 30 percent in the Latin American countries surveyed agree with church teaching that divorcees who remarry outside the church should not receive Communion, compared with 75 percent in the most Catholic African countries.

●30 percent of Catholics in the European countries and 36 percent in the United States agree with the church ban on female priests, compared with 80 percent in Africa and 76 percent in the Philippines, the country with the largest Catholic population in Asia.

●40 percent of Catholics in the United States oppose gay marriage, compared with 99 percent in Africa.

The poll, which was done by Bendixen & Amandi International for Univision, did not include Catholics everywhere. It focused on 12 countries across the continents with some of the world’s largest Catholic populations. The countries are home to more than six of 10 Catholics globally.

“This is a balancing act. They have to hold together two increasingly divergent constituencies. The church has lost its ability to dictate what people do,” said Ronald Inglehart, founding president of the World Values Survey, an ongoing global research project.

“Right now, the less-developed world is staying true to the old world values, but it’s gradually eroding even there. [Pope Francis] doesn’t want to lose the legitimacy of the more educated people,” he added.

After his election to the papacy 11 months ago, Francis seemed to immediately grasp the significance of the divisions among the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics. He has chosen inclusive language, has played down the importance of following the hierarchy and has warned against the church locking itself up “in small-minded rules.” The poll reflects previous ones in finding that the vast majority of Catholics appreciate his approach.

Other faiths have seen many fissures over similar questions about doctrine, including Protestant denominations and Judaism.

Pope Francis appears particularly eager to engage with divisions around sex, marriage and gender and has called a rare “extraordinary synod” this fall on “The Pastoral Challenges of the Family.” For that, he has asked bishops to survey Catholics about their views of cohabitation, same-sex parenting and contraception, among other things.

Areas of similarity

Of the seven questions pollsters asked about hot-button issues, there appeared to be the greatest global agreement on contraception (opposing church teachings) and gay marriage (supporting the church’s stance).

Seventy-eight percent of Catholics across all countries surveyed support the use of contraceptives, which violate the church’s teaching that sex should always be had with an openness toward procreation. The church teaches natural family planning, which Catholics can use to plan sex and attempt to avoid getting pregnant.

More than 90 percent of Catholics in Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Spain and France support the use of contraception. Those less inclined to support it were in the Philippines (68 percent), Congo (44 percent) and Uganda (43 percent). In the United States, 79 percent of Catholics support using contraception.

Debate in the church over reproductive technologies is nothing new, said Jose Casanova, a leading sociologist of religion at Georgetown University. He noted that a papal commission in the 1960s recommended approving the use of birth control pills (it was later rejected) and said dramatic recent medical advances have challenged theologians.

“If you accommodate contraception, does that mean you’d allow abortion? How do you distinguish which aspects of teaching go together? Bioethics is a new frontier that forces moral thinkers and ethicists to constantly ask: What is humanity?”

Catholics have been intensely divided over the centuries over other issues, he said, from whether it was all right to evangelize native peoples to how the church could accumulate wealth while holding up the value of poverty.

However, the disagreements around sex and pregnancy have built to “a crisis in the church with women,” Casanova said. The church can neither accept “the radical secularization of sexuality” — or the idea that sex has nothing to do with religion — nor can it continue insisting on practices that are being completely ignored. “Unless they face it, the church will be in trouble.”

The poll also showed 66 percent of Catholics opposing same-sex marriage, with majorities in eight of the 12 countries surveyed agreeing with church doctrine.

The poll suggests that in his first year, Pope Francis has proved apt at navigating this diverse flock. Eighty-seven percent of Catholics around the world said the Argentine pastor is doing an excellent (41 percent) or good (46 percent) job. Catholics in Mexico were least likely to approve of his performance, at 70 percent.

Areas of disagreement

The poll showed stark divisions among Catholics over church teachings on abortion, divorce and remarriage. Catholics who don’t get an annulment or who marry again outside a Catholic Church setting aren’t eligible for Communion and are considered not in unity with the faith.

Overall, 65 percent of Catholics said abortions should be allowed: 8 percent in all cases and 57 percent in some, such as when the mother’s life is in danger. But the highest support for abortion rights is in European countries, then in Brazil and Argentina, then in the United States, where 76 percent of Catholics said it should be allowed in some or all cases. In the Philippines, 27 percent of Catholics said abortion should be allowed under certain circumstances. In Uganda, 35 percent said so.

Catholics are most evenly split over the question of whether women and married men should be priests. The dividing line, again, falls on hemispheric lines, with those in Africa and Asia more traditional and others less so.

What’s distinctive today, Catholic theologian Lawrence Cunningham said, isn’t that there are disagreements but that they center on similar topics.

“Even if you look in the North American church of my youth, Polish Catholics and Irish Catholics and Italian Catholics weren’t focused on the same issues. They had their own views on family,” Cunningham said. “I don’t think [today] it’s an issue of disagreement. It’s more: ‘Whoa, we’re finding a lot of people from across the Catholic world talking about the same kinds of issues and we better face up to them.’ ”

U.S. and Latin America

Catholics in fast-developing Latin America fit somewhere in the middle, but not neatly. Thirty-nine percent of the world’s Catholics live in Latin America and the Caribbean, the biggest share in any region of the world. But Latin American Catholics’ relationship with the institutional church varies depending on many factors, including whether their government has been intertwined with church officials and whether evangelical Protestants have made recent inroads.

In the United States, Catholics are divided on some issues, including gay marriage (54 percent support it; 40 percent oppose it). Compared with Catholics worldwide, they are more liberal than Africa, Asia and some parts of Latin America but not as liberal as Spain. The poll mirrored ones that show U.S. Catholics support married priests, female priests, abortion and contraception.

Since the liberalizing and divisive Second Vatican Council, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II appeared to approach the gap with an explicit plan: Narrow it. They emphasized doctrine and called for institutions that wanted to call themselves Catholic to follow the rules. Benedict prompted a lot of debate by saying and writing that a period of shrinkage seemed inevitable if the church was to stick to its teachings.

Francis seeks feedback

So what is Pope Francis’s plan, if he has one?

Critics say his solicitation of opinions wrongly gives the appearance that Catholicism is a democracy. Others — including the authors of this poll — say there’s no evidence that he would touch doctrine and is seeking a deeper understanding of why so many Catholics reject church teachings so as to better market them.

Casanova said it’s not clear what Francis plans to do with the research, but the approach “fits with his idea of the church going out into the world and encountering the world as it is, not expecting the world to come to it.”

Any change would be a complex undertaking, as Catholics are going in many directions, he said. He noted that Catholics in Brazil, the most populous Catholic country, widely reject some core church teachings but are seeing a surge in men becoming priests for the first time in decades. Filipino Catholics, he said, support church teachings on some social issues but have a powerfully charismatic faith that isn’t focused on being in step with church leaders.

The church “may be in a period of moral evolution,” he said. “It’s not about seeing where the wind blows, but which are signs of God and which are simply fashion? This is a very difficult theological enterprise, kind of a new way of trying to understand the situation of the church in the world.”

Is religion losing ground to sports?

By Chris Beneke and Arthur Remillard

Published: January 31

Chris Beneke is an associate professor of history at Bentley University and the author of “Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism.” Arthur Remillard is an associate professor of religious studies at Saint Francis University and the author of “Southern Civil Religions: Imagining the Good Society in the Post-Reconstruction Era.”

“Some people go to Jerusalem. I go to Pittsburgh.”

So remarked Brent Osbourne in 2012 after his homemade Pittsburgh Steelers banner made him a winner of the NFL’s “Fan Flag Challenge.” The Army veteran, then 35, lived in North Carolina at the time, but his attachment to the team abides.

Osbourne’s devotion is hardly unique. American sports fans have forged imperishable bonds with the people, places and moments that define their teams. You might even call this attachment religious.

But that would be unfair — to sports.

While teams and fans are building powerful, cohesive communities — think Red Sox Nation or the legions of University of Alabama faithful who greet one another with “Roll Tide” — churches are losing followers. According to a 2012 survey by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and Duke University, 20 percent of Americans “claimed they had no religious preference,” compared with an unaffiliated population of 8 percent in 1990. Roughly two out of three Americans, a 2012 Pew reportnoted, are under the impression that religion is losing influence in the country.

Sports are on the opposite trajectory. Fifty years ago, just three in 10 Americans considered themselves sports fans. By 2012, that proportion exceeded six in 10. Tens of millions of U.S. viewers tuned in to regular-season National Football League games last fall, with the most popular match-ups attracting upwards of 30 million viewers. Nearly 3 million people watched the National Basketball Association’s Christmas Day games. And for devotees of these and other sports, lifelong loyalty to a certain city and team is de rigueur. “Once you choose a team,” sports commentator Bill Simmons says, “you’re stuck with that team for the rest of your life.”

Simmons was half-kidding, but sports are clearly attracting strong adherents as religion is shedding them. This raises the question: Are Americans shifting their spiritual allegiances away from praying places and toward playing places?

Of course, there’s no shortage of religion in American sports. Witness Tim Tebow’s famous genuflections, David Ortiz’s raised index fingers to heaven, Phil Jackson’s invocations of Zen Buddhism, and Muslim high school football players choosing to maintain their Ramadan fast in the midst of a playoff run. Roughly one in five Americans is convinced that God influences game outcomes. NFL games often end with midfield prayer circles. There is a certain wisdom to former football and baseball star Deion Sanders’s observation that faith and athletics go together “like peanut butter and jelly.”

But high-profile displays of piety belie a deeper reordering of spiritual priorities. Modern sports stadiums function much like great cathedrals once did, bringing communities together and focusing their collective energy. This summer, the Archdiocese of New York is expected to outline plans to close or merge some of its 368 parishes; 26 Catholic schools in the archdiocese have ceased operation. By contrast, the city and the state of New Jersey spent hundreds of millions to build new baseball and football stadiums.

And while the public display of religious imagery such as the Ten Commandments and Nativity scenes remains highly contested, the stars, swords, bears, lunging felines and muscled birds associated with sports teams bolster communal unity. After the Boston Red Sox won the World Series in October, the championship trophy was paraded through the halls of the Massachusetts Statehouse while the governor donned a team cap. Outside, a colossal Red Sox banner hung from the building’s portico.

Spiritual leaders have long feared that religion and sports would vie for loyalty — and that sports would win. Before the Civil War, clergymen and devoted lay people regarded sports as needless distractions and gateways to moral dissipation — clear competitors for sacred time and attention. A 17th-century English Puritan named Thomas Hall expressed a common view when he suggested that “gaming” was among the surest means to “debauch a people, and draw them from God and his worship to superstition and Idolatry.”

“We came into this world not for sport,” a Christian magazine opined in 1851, but “for a higher and nobler object.” The fact that sports were often played on the Christian Sabbath made them all the more damnable.

As the 20th century approached, however, attitudes toward sports pivoted. Baseball, tennis, golf and football gained respectability among the aspiring middle classes. Meanwhile, a new breed of Protestant ministers extolled their virtues under the banner of “muscular Christianity.” Many echoed the Rev. Washington Gladden, who in 1898 called sports “a means of grace” and a training ground for “a godly life.” James Naismith, a Presbyterian minister, invented a game he called “basket ball” in 1891. And across the nation, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) added gyms to its facilities, with countless houses of worship following suit.

Today, those old YMCA — now nicknamed the nonsectarian “Y” — and church-basement gyms seem like offerings to a rival deity that conquered the world. In a 2013 survey of shrinking congregations, eight out of 14 pastors “identified sports as the main culprit for low Sunday service attendance.” According toa newly released study by the Public Religion Research Institute, a quarter of Americans “report that they are more likely to be in church than watching football” on Sundays, though almost as many say they are more likely to be taking in gridiron action than sitting in pews.

In short, sports are succeeding by the measures that have traditionally defined success for religious institutions: regularly immersing people in a transcendent experience and keeping them ardently committed over the long term. It could simply be that faiths do not stir the same competitive passions they once did. Tolerance for other religions and acceptance of intermarriage have risen sharply since World War II. Both trends correlate with flagging religious attachments among many groups.

This may be a salutary change. Religious adherents once hung heretics, discriminated against dissenters and tangled with those of other faiths. Methodists defined themselves against Episcopalians; Catholics defined themselves against Protestants; Christians defined themselves against Jews; and vice versa. We are better for having put such interfaith hostility behind us. But religious institutions may not be.

As faith attachments weaken, sports fill a psychological and cultural vacuum. Rooting for the Sabres, Lions or Broncos — and against the Bruins, Bears or Raiders — allows us to display unwavering devotion. Team attachments license us to love and hate in the most dedicated ways. And happily for sports aficionados, these antagonistic feelings are largely contained within games. St. Louis Cardinals fans who saunter around Chicago’s Wrigleyville should expect some badgering, but not physical harassment or abuse.

Americans remain believers of one sort or another. Less than 10 percent say they are atheists, and even the unaffiliated tend to profess spiritual inclinations. That compares very favorably with Europe’s withered religious culture. Moreover, American faith institutions can justifiably claim that their missions transcend mere competition — that they are charged with fostering goodwill between people, nudging individuals toward salvation and spiritual fulfillment, and bringing about the kingdom of God on Earth.

But when it comes to the passionate attachments that sustain interest and devotion, it’s time to acknowledge that sports have gained the edge. And they show no sign of relinquishing the lead.