Broncos QB Tim Tebow emerges as face of faith and sports

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  Members of Bear Creek High School's football team pray before a game at Mullen. Much focus has been placed on Denver quarterbackTim Tebow's blend of faith and football, but religiosity is nothing new in sports.
  You may have heard:Denver Broncosquarterback Tim Tebow wants to thank his Lord and Savior,Jesus Christ.
  But then, so didKurt Warnerbefore him — early and often. "Thanks to Jesus" were the first words past the quarterback's lips after he led the St. Louis Rams to a Super Bowl win in 2000.
  "Everybody's going to get tired of hearing this, but I never get tired of saying it," Warner told the interviewer.
  Warner eventually would.
  In a Nov. 26 interview with The Arizona Republic, the still-devout evangelical advised Tebow to tone down the religious rhetoric because he has learned that faith cliches make "walls go up" between people.
  While religiosity is nothing new on the playing field, the
• Tebow-inspired furor over faith in what some say should be the secular arena of sports is at a crescendo — both the cheering and the jeering.However, fans who bemoan religion seeping into sports culture should know this: It has always been there.
  Long before Christians were fed to lions in the Roman Colosseum — and ever since — sports arenas have been filled with religious fervor.
  Men of strong religious beliefs invented and molded American sports in order to shape men's character and to keep them in the fold, historians say.
  What is new is the deep resentment over religion in American sports culture.
  Thousands of athletes have signaled the heavens or bent a knee before — or after — a big play. Some etch Bible verses into baseball bats. Countless basketball and soccer players cross themselves at the free-throw and penalty- kick lines.
  When athletes express gratitude or praise for God, most people nod politely and move on, said Patton Dodd, managing editor ofPatheos.com, a Denver-based online forum on religion and spirituality.
  But Tebow, Dodd said, is different.
  "Complex relationship"
  The
• "Like no other athlete today and no athlete before him, Tim Tebow crystallizes the complex relationship between faith and sports," Dodd wrote in his new e-book, "The Tim Tebow Mystique."
  Tebow, in part because of his charisma and in part because of the uncanny nature of recent Broncos wins, might be the ultimate religious phenomenon in sports, Dodd said.
  "Which is saying something," he wrote, "because sports culture is among the most fervently religious sectors of American life. Sports is so religious, in fact, that we've gotten used to ignoring the ghosts that hang around fields of play, or to act like the ghosts don't really matter to the games we love."
  Until the late 1800s, Christians had looked on athletic activity as frivolous and vain and were wary of its roots in Greek pagan culture and gods.
  With the modernization and mechanization of American society at the end of that century, men were leaving their farms and homes to work in factories and businesses. The newly industrialized society left domestic life, including church, to the women.
  Christian leaders turned to sports to bring men back to church. The Young Men's Christian Association reached out to men on the streets until influential ministerHenry Ward Beecherurged the YMCA to open a gymnasium, Dodd said.
  James Naismith, a trained Presbyterian minister, invented basketball at the Y, where he coached "to win men for the Master through the gym," according to Christianity Today historians.
  Volleyball also was the invention of a man with the YMCA. But the towering figure in American sports development wasAmos Alonzo Stagg, a Yale divinity student who reluctantly accepted he didn't have a gift for preaching. Instead he became a pioneering YMCA and college coach who helped refine basketball, invented the batting cage for baseball and introduced a long list of innovations in football that transformed the sport.
  Stagg believed that being spiritually ready for a game was as essential as physical and mental preparedness, according to Christianity Today's online Christian History & Biography.
  Dodd notes that Stagg, along with baseball player turned evangelistBilly Sundayand President Teddy Roosevelt, was part of a large cast of characters who worked hard to combine sports with faith because they believed God wanted people to be healthy.
  Dodd said sports and religion both require and instill virtue — hard work, dedication, cooperation, fraternity and so forth. Achieving our human potential can seem almost miraculous, he said.
  Winning against all odds
  Tebow isn't responsible for the intrusion of faith into sports, said Lincoln Blumell, an assistant professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University. Tebow, he said, "is just the barometer of how Americans are feeling about religion."
  Americans are as deeply divided on that subject as they are on many foundational issues.
  Tebow's religious fans see his winning against all odds — and confounding sports analysts — as vindication of their belief in the power of a personal relationship with God, Blumell said. Tebow's detractors either find it offensive that God is mentioned or resent the implication God would pick sides in a football game.
  As a quarterback for the University of Calgary, Blumell was less comfortable with public displays of his faith. He prayed quietly in the locker room.
  "There is exhaustion with Christian proclamation in the public square," Dodd said. "I don't know how to account for that. Maybe it's because so many vocal religious leaders on big platforms have shown themselves to be unworthy — more interested in proclaiming themselves than in proclaiming God."
  Tebow isn't like that, Dodd said, because his faith is bone-deep.
  Source:http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_19740605