The Most Prominent Christian Athlete In American History

At The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, we talk a lot about front porches. It’s the (metaphorical, but sometimes literal) place where you can sit down with someone and talk as friends, even if you disagree. It’s a place to explore new ideas and seek to persuade. As Christians, we use front porches to share the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The best front porch I know today, at least in the United States, is sports. I don’t have many venues for small talk with my neighbors, let alone a context where we could spend enough time together to explore bigger ideas together. Sports is that front porch for me. How much more so for the athletes themselves, all the way up to the professional level.

I was confirmed in that view as I read the new book The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports by Paul Putz (with Oxford University Press). Paul serves as assistant director of Truett Seminary’s Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor University. He does a good job of setting the scene in sports today. Paul writes,

A strong case can be made that there’s no public workplace or industry in American culture today with a greater concentration of organized and committed Christians than big-time sports. . . . While many sectors of American public life, including education and entertainment, have tended to move in a more secular direction, in sports the opposite is true. Compared with one hundred years ago, there are far more athletes and coaches today willing to publicly champion Christianity as a formative influence in their live.

Paul joined me on this episode of Gospelbound to discuss the historical and contemporary relationship between American Christianity and big-time sports, the influence of Fellowship of Christian Athletes, the evolving role of sports journalism within cultural and political contexts, and more. Listen in as we discuss a possible revival among college athletes today, and debate whether Tim Tebow has become the most prominent Christian athlete in American history.