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Can Tim Tebow, the latest American exemplar of “muscular Christianity,” get a witness?
Unless you’ve avoided all sports news since Thanksgiving, you’ve probably heard the name Tim Tebow, the Denver Broncos quarterback and evangelical Christian who likes to thank his lord and savior Jesus Christ for winning football games. Despite his awkward throwing motion and his dismal stats, Tebow still led his team to six “miraculous” comebacks, including completing an unlikely 80-yard pass in the first seconds of overtime to beat the favored Pittsburgh Steelers in a playoff game last week. Already controversial from his college days — his painting John 3:16 in his eyeblack prompted the NCAA to ban the practice — and from a Focus on the Family-sponsored anti-abortion ad that ran during the 2010 Super Bowl, Tebow’s eagerness to talk about his faith as much as win games has made him a touchstone for a debate about the role of religion in sports. “Tebowing” has even become a verb, describing the act of dropping to one knee and touching one’s forehead in apparent praise of God as Tebow frequently does.
Though the scale of hype may make Tebow seem at best a flash in the pan and at worst a prop in a cynical NFL marketing scheme (Charles Barkley has called him “the national nightmare”), the Tebow phenomenon is nonetheless a uniquely American one, tapping into the long intertwining of sports and religion in the U.S. It dates back to the Puritans, who considered sports sinful idleness that detracted from godly work. But as historian Robert Higgs points out in God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America, a competing Christian ideal rose up in America to counter the Puritans: the Christian knight, the progenitor of muscular Christianity, whose icons include Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie (who popularized the Gospel of Wealth), Amos Alonzo Stagg (pioneer of American football and Yale divinity student), and James Naismith (Presbyterian minister and founder of basketball, a sport explicitly designed for missionary work).
