Matt Friedeman
Professor, pastor, author, dad
January 2011 – Recently I jokingly noted to my congregation how wonderful it was that my college football team this year is pitiful (Kansas Jayhawks), so that now I could forget all about them and lift up my heart totally to God.
For those wondering if the sporting dynamic of our lives has gotten out of hand, wonder no longer, and read Shirl James Hoffman’s volume titled Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports. Some quotes:
The Christian community, which only a century ago was still ambivalent about whether sports were legitimate leisure pursuits for believers, has long since joined the parade. … Many fundamentalist denominations that had been sports’ worst enemies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are now its closest friends.
Sports Illustrated senior writer Frank Deford, whose three-part series on evangelicalism and sports stands as one of the most lucid and penetrating analyses written on the topic, marveled that:
“… no one in the evangelical sports-faith movement … speaks out against the cheating in sport, against dirty play, no one attacks the evils of recruiting, racism, or any of the many other well-known excesses and abuses. … Religion seems to have become a support force for athletics, like broadcasters, trainers, cheerleaders and ticket-sellers.”
Asked if sport has had a greater impact on religion than religion has had on sport, Deford said: “The bad things about athletics have rubbed off on religion. Religion is like the tar baby – it’s gotten stuck and the more it struggles, the more tar it gets on it. There’s the danger when anything moral plays with anything as public, as notorious, as celebrated as sport – you get stuck.”
Whether or not sport develops character and instills the sub-Christian values is hardly a trivial issue for Christians. Sports sap enormous amounts of time, energy, and money from their personal budgets and agendas and from the students, staff and resources of their institutions. At the same time, sports produce nothing in and of themselves. In light of the biblical mandate to “redeem the time” and be good stewards of God-given resources, evangelicals – like their Puritan forebears – would seem especially obligated to demonstrate that their digressions into the play world would have some ultimate payoff.
In a radio interview, Hoffman bemoaned that when the church rams up against the sporting world these days the latter wins every time. The “culture of sport” has usurped the culture of the Church.
In one of the most penetrating sermons I ever heard in our seminary chapel (I am a professor at Wesley Biblical Seminary.), one of the members of our board said that a friend had said to him that he quietly feared that his children might not want to attend Ole Miss.
The board member said not to worry: “You drink from Ole Miss cups, give money to Ole Miss, never miss an Ole Miss ballgame, wear Ole Miss clothes, have scrapbooks full of Ole Miss in your home, talk/joke/dream Ole Miss … of course your kids are going to go to Ole Miss.”
Remembering that great Shema passage in Deuteronomy 6:4-9, it appears the friend had replaced the law of God with a school. Wonder how many of us have done the same with sports teams. 
