Published: March 13

I appreciated Ruth Marcus’s March 12 op-ed column, “Going to X-tremes,” on how degraded our culture has become, especially in the debased sex of modern adolescence. Unfortunately, she doesn’t offer the solution, which is God and religion.

Ms. Marcus wrote that “bygone” rules such as not allowing members of the opposite sex in students’ dorm room are relics. Respectfully, they are not. I’m a freshman at Brigham Young University, and these relics are our rules, which I enjoy. These rules protect the dignity of each sex and also respect the powerful attraction between the genders. This attraction is perfectly acceptable and wholesome, except when it is misused. Intimacy is sacred, and I believe that it should be reserved until marriage.

Does Ms. Marcus also consider this belief a relic? It is one of the most freeing truths I know. I respect her for recognizing the degradation of society, especially in sexual mores, but a secular culture provides no framework for sexual chastity. If physical immorality is not a sin, why should our physical passions be bridled?

Our culture is degraded, but sex wasn’t the start; it is only a symptom.

Adam Stevenson, Purcellville

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.

Pastor Joe Brosious
Bethel Lutheran Church
Madison, Wisconsin
November 4, 2013

Five years ago November a homeless man was found dead on the doorsteps of our downtown Madison, Wisconsin church.  It was an event that sparked action on the part of the congregation and staff.  Today we have a homeless ministry that, although nowhere near problem free, operates five days a week and attempts in every action and detail to be a solution as opposed to a band-aid for our homeless friends.  If you lead or pastor an inner city church you have no doubt dealt with some of the same problems and growing pains we have in getting the ministry started.  Inner city ministry is both a blessing and a curse.  Blessing insofar as you are faced with a myriad of opportunities to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, to live out the gospel on a daily basis.  But at the same time cursed because you are faced with the hungry and the naked and no matter what you have on your “to do” list the gospel smacks you right between the eyes on a daily basis.

The church I serve is in the midst of a massive capital campaign, the largest it has ever imagined, raising funds to expand the current campus.  The proposed additions would have several multi-purpose spaces, an auditorium, coffee shop, preschool, daycare and a whole host of other facilities designed to help us “be” the church in our downtown locale for generations to come.  In discussions about the project I hear a lot of people comment that it will help us “meet people where they are at.”  But the more I hear the phrase, the more I think it is as loaded as the term ‘evangelical’ or the phrase ‘missional church.’  In order to meet people where they are at we have to first understand where we are at.  In order to meet people where they are at we may have to ask questions to which we may not like the answers, and realize that a shiny new building may not solve many of the problems and concerns in people’s lives.

So I will be thinking a lot this month about where people are at.  Pulitzer Prize winning author and journalist Chris Hedges defines the point from which I am starting.  Hedges’ defines where America is “at” in his book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.  He testifies that Americans are dulled to reality, the economic, environmental, educational, and political realities of this modern US democracy, which look nothing, like the country we pledge allegiance to (that is in places where the pledge is still allowed), or stand to sing about during the 7th inning stretch.

Instead of facing and challenging the realities of injustice and discrimination that have permeated this meritocracy or oligarchy (take your pick) that we love, we retreat into the pseudo-realities of our modern world; reality TV, WWF, pornography, Facebook, video games, fantasy football, the list goes on.  What many view as a culture of rampant individualism and materialism is, in Hedges eyes, a society where the biggest fear is to be unknown.  Our cultural habits “expose the anxiety that we will die and never be recognized or acclaimed, that we will never be wealthy, that we are not among the chosen but remain part of the vast, anonymous masses.  The ringside sagas are designed to reassure us.  They hold out the hope that we, humble and unsung as these celebrities once were, will eventually be blessed with grace and fortune” (5). 

As opposed to individuals Hedges would say America is mired in self-absorption.  We have taken the neighbor out of Jesus’ command to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31), and sacrificed relationships and the difficult realities of our world for extreme forms of entertainment posing as reality.  The modern American society is characterized by “superficial charm, grandiosity, and self importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt.  This is, of course the ethic promoted by corporations (and I painfully add most politicians).  It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism.  It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality.  We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire.  WE can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous.  Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality.  How one gets there is irrelevant.  Once you get there, those questions are no longer asked” (33).

It may sound like a dark or macabre place to start but it feels real to me.  It feels stripped of all the buzzwords and pithy aphorisms we so often use in church circles.  It feels real because it is exactly where I find myself each and every morning (maybe this is one of those questions I didn’t want the answer to).  Martin Luther once defined our Christian vocation as “daily rising and dying with Christ.”  I think this is what he was talking about, the daily shedding of our own self-absorption so that we may be used to advance the Kingdom.  Used to be in relationship with the homeless person at our doorstep, to advocate, to visit, to vote, to write letters and send emails, to challenge and invite, to listen and teach and share the love of Christ in a world that does not play well with others. 

Real love, true sacrificial love that can only be shown by serving our neighbors.  The kind of love that is so countercultural it can produce a reality that starts a movement.  This kind of love finds value in understanding differences; it leads to communal transformation as opposed to individual, and transforms our narrative from self-interest as selfish, to self-interest as the self among others; love that leads us to the self-realization that the Christian life happens when my self-interest or concerns are united with the concerns of others for the sake of the common good.  This is where all started for the Apostles.  It is what we as Christians strive for every day.  To prayerfully change our communities and local governments through the challenge and promise of God’s love.

http://www.bethel-madison.org/