Do the Super Bowl and the Olympics Really Matter?
Author: Stan Guthrie
February 07, 2022
Do the Super Bowl and the Olympics Really Matter?
Stan Guthrie
Chicago sports fans have tasted the thrill of victory,
especially recently. The Cubs (2016), White Sox (2005), Blackhawks (2010, 2013,
2015), Bulls (1991-1993, 1996-1998), and Bears (1985) have all hoisted the
champion’s trophy. But too often Windy City aficionados have experienced the
agony of defeat. As George Will has said, “Chicago Cubs fans are ninety percent
scar tissue.” And yet despite our well-known habit of grumbling, we always come
back for more.
Why is that? I believe that sports is not only in our genes.
It’s also in our souls, in Chicago and around the world. But for all the time,
money, and passion we pour into it, do big-time sports extravaganzas such as
the Super Bowl and the Olympic Games really matter?
America’s love affair—or is it obsession? —with sports is
well-documented. And it’s been with us for a while.
On a harsh Saturday night in December 1929, Charles Sheldon
walked into a jam-packed gymnasium in Kansas for a college basketball game,
Religion News Service recounts. Sheldon, author of the iconic book In His
Steps, later wrote, “I couldn’t help wondering, while looking at the big
crowd and the athletic ten young men running around, how many church members
would be in the fifty different churches at a prayer meeting on a night like
that, and paying a dollar apiece for the privilege of going.”
As John Tunis, a successful author of sports-themed books,
had already observed, sports are “a kind of national religion.”
Sports have been likened to religion many times. Joseph
Price of the University of Chicago Divinity School described sports as a form
of civil religion in his book, Rounding the Bases: Baseball and Religion in
America (Mercer University Press, 2006). Price notes that sports, like
religion, build community and share life-shaping myths.
“There is also something fundamentally human about trying to
secure a victory, as passing as it might be,” Price told UChicago Magazine.
“Theologian Michael Novak pointed out that the experience of defeat in a sport
is a way to rehearse how one will deal with death. Issues of life and death are
dramatized in a timeframe of sports competition that reflects questions of
ultimacy. And that’s fundamentally a religious question.”
Those of us who live and die with our teams certainly can
relate.
But is all this sports passion healthy? And more to the
point, is it Christian? Writing in Themelios, Los Angeles pastor and professor
Jeremy R. Treat says yes, if we don’t idolize sports. Unfortunately, too many
fans—short for fanatics—do just that.
“[M]any today look to sport for that which people
traditionally found in religion,” Treat writes. “Sports are religious in
nature; they are a vestige of transcendence in what Charles Taylor has called
‘the malaise of immanence.’ Peter Berger argues that in the face of such a
secularized, disenchanted society, play can function as a ‘signal of
transcendence.’ When a player is ‘in the zone’—what sociologists call
‘flow’—they are having a spiritual experience that begins with their physical
body but connects them to something beyond the physical realm. And this is true
not only for the athlete, but for the fan as well. As Allen Guttman says, ‘many
sports spectators experience something akin to worship.’”
In post-Christian America, too often our high ideals of
sports as a breeding ground of teamwork, self-discipline, and character have
been buried in an avalanche of gambling, greed, commercialism, showboating,
post-championship rioting, political posturing and virtue-signaling, PEDs, and
other forms of cheating. Many formerly devoted sports fans are fed up, and
rightly so. But abusus non tollit usum—the misuse of something is no
argument against its proper use.
And Christians are positioned better than anyone to point to
a superior way forward for America’s behemoth sports-industrial complex. Treat
notes that the gospel—that Jesus is both saving souls and renewing
creation—gives sportsmen and women a new purpose (enjoying sports as a gift
rather than as merely an arena in which to prove our worth), a new identity (we
are “in Christ” rather than mere athletes seeking selfish accomplishments), and
a new ethic (focused on glorifying Christ rather than winning at all costs).
Further, sports are not just opportunities to point others
to Christ—using everything from John 3:16 eye-black to church Super Bowl
parties—as worthy as that purpose might be. They are also signposts pointing
toward the coming restored creation.
“If Jesus is tossing his fallen creation and saving souls
into a disembodied heaven,” Treat writes, “then the shot clock is winding down
on our sport experience. But the story of redemption in Scripture is not one
merely of rescuing souls from the fallen creation but rescuing embodied souls
and renewing all of creation.”
So, yes, the Super Bowl matters, but not in the way the NFL
wants you to believe, and certainly not ultimately. But when creation is
finally restored and all things, including sports, are offered to Christ, we
will play. In that everlasting day, we will exult in our glorified, perfect
bodies on the fields of a new earth without shame or scar tissue—joyously
walking, dancing, running, swinging, throwing, kicking, catching, and jumping
to the glory of our Creator.
That is a victory infinitely more thrilling any Super Bowl
or gold medal in the Olympics.
Stan Guthrie’s latest book is Victorious:Corrie tenBoom and The Hiding Place. This blog originally appeared as a column for
BreakPoint.
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