The Most Prominent Christian Athlete in American History

Paul Putz

I was talking to someone who does sports chaplaincy in the northeast, someone who has worked with the Sports Ministry for decades, and I had written a short piece about, is there a revival? And I just talked about how there’s something happening in sports. And she messaged me and said, we’ve had so many athletes wanting to be discipled. We can’t disciple them all. She said, in a couple decades, she has never seen so many young athletes who are wanting to read the Bible, wanting to learn and grow.

Collin Hansen

At the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics, we talk a lot about front porches. It’s the place where you can sit down with someone and talk as friends, even if you disagree about something. It’s a place to explore new ideas and seek to persuade as Christians, we use front porches, both literally and figuratively, to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. Now 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 then for me, and how much more so for the athletes themselves, all the way up to the professional level, I was confirmed in this view about front porches 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 seminaries, faith and Sports Institute at Baylor University. He does a good job of setting the scene in sports today. Paul writes this, a strong case can be made that there is no public workforce 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 in a more secular direction in sports, the opposite is true, compared with 100 years ago, there are far more athletes and coaches today willing to publicly champion Christianity as a formative influence in their lives. Well, that’s a that’s a big deal, and good news sounds like it’s worthy of some deeper exploration as well. So Paul, thanks for joining me on gospel bound. Thanks so much for having me, Paul, as people know from maybe a little bit from this podcast, but especially what I do in life and books and everything, and even on social media. They know that I love sports, but I’m wondering, from your perspective, how did you decide to make an academic career out of sports?

Paul Putz

I didn’t realize you could do what I do now, when I was growing up, I’ll put it that way. You know, it emerged growing up in small town Nebraska in the Midwest. I was a pastor’s kid, and I also love sports. And so being a Christian, being an athlete, wanting to play sports as long as I could, those things captivated my attention. And so, you know, I knew those pieces were really central to who I was and how I saw myself. I was involved with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes when I was growing up in Nebraska, and had a really important mentor who was my high school basketball coach and also led the FCA chapter. And experiencing that caused me to realize the ways that faith and sports could form and shape a person. It shaped me. So when I moved on, I thought I’d be a high school basketball coach myself. I went and got my teacher’s degree, played some small college basketball, and as I entered into my teaching degree, and I’m teaching or teaching career, I’m teaching social studies, I really fell in love with actually doing history, not just teaching history, and was curious about some questions I had, like, where did FCA come from? How did this intersection between faith and sports that shaped my own life? How did it emerge? And so wanting to pursue those questions led me to get a PhD from Baylor University. I taught for a year at Messiah College, and then came back to Baylor to work at truth seminary, and to try to not just study history from sort of a distant perspective, but because I’m at a seminary, I get to think constructively now about how Christians might engage in sports. Well, so it’s, it’s, it’s been a trajectory with with many twists and turns, but it’s a really fun job to get to have.

Collin Hansen

Is it a growing space within the academy?

Paul Putz

I think it is. I’ll nuance that by saying, in the humanities, in the academy, I don’t know that anything’s growing right, having said that, the interest that I’m seeing from scholars who take it seriously is very different. I mean, there’s a number of books that will be coming out related to sports and religion in the coming years, and when I compared to when I started in 2013 When I began my PhD, my advisor warned me against doing sports. You know, he said, other academics won’t take you seriously. This is, you know, your sports book is the book you do after you get tenure. It’s not the book you do, and it’s your first book. And just in the last 10 years, I think we’ve seen more people realize, hey, we actually should take sports seriously, because this is a place that forms and shapes us, and there’s an intellect that goes into it as well. And so I think there’s been a shift in how serious scholars take it.

Collin Hansen

Yeah, one of the major shifts I think that’s contributed to that is not only the increased revenue, but the increased revenue that coincides with a broad, internet based fragmentation of our culture, and so sports are one of the only elements that keeps the culture together. Of course, we see this in the National Football League, especially the Super Bowl, but also when you look at the top 100 most watched television programs every year, just dominated, absolutely dominated by the NFL in particular, and so we have all this fragmentation all over the place, but the one thing that’s held together, things like shared experiences, live TV, in person events, that is, it’s changed a lot because there’s so much more money, but in a lot of ways, I would say, for example, the NCAA Tournament is pretty much unchanged from when you and I were growing up in the Midwest, and our social studies teacher wheeled in the TV on the stand and we watched the basketball games during class. That wasn’t just me.

Paul Putz

Well, no, was not at all. In fact, when I was a teacher, I did that, so I carried on that tradition,

Collin Hansen

very good, a very important tradition. Let’s talk about FCA, because you describe in this book how the founding of FCA marked a turning point in the relationship between Christians and sports. Tell us about that turning point. So

Paul Putz

FCA is this para church sports ministry organization. I’m mindful now that not everyone knows what FCA is. If you don’t live in the Bible Belt or the south

Collin Hansen

really. Okay, so it’s, it’s mostly middle America thing,

Paul Putz

Middle America in terms of immediately recognizing what FCA is, which shocked me when I left Nebraska, because it was a big deal in Nebraska, where I grew up. But on the coasts, you’ll, you’ll see encounter Christians who aren’t familiar with FCA. So FCA, it’s a parachurch ministry started in 1954 and what I argue in my book is that FCA is the galvanizing force that takes these individual Christian athletes or coaches who, of course, their faith shaped how they engaged in sports before FCA, but it takes those individual pieces and it combines them into a shared community. It creates a space where, if you are an athlete or coach, you now see yourself as part of a movement. You see yourself as part of a community of other believers who are trying to do the best they can to follow Jesus in the midst of sports and from galvanizing and creating that community in 1954 you saw other organizations emerge in the 60s and 70s and 80s that create this, this broader subculture. But what I argue is that FCA is the driving force and the the galvanizing beginning point for what becomes this really fascinating subculture in sports that shapes how Christian athletes see and experience their games.

Collin Hansen

Now expand on some of the research you did then on FCA and explain what you mean by middle brow main liners as a Methodist from the Midwest, I’m guessing I’d fit that description?

Paul Putz

Yes. So when one of the fascinating things when I begin my research, I was trying to go where the evidence takes me. You know, as a historian, I’m going and I’m reading primary sources, and I’m trying to figure out, how do I explain how FCA and how sports fits into the American Protestant landscape, a typical story that’s told about Protestantism focuses on evangelicals, and as you know well, the story goes that after World War Two, and around World War Two, you had these reformed fundamentalists who are engaging in culture in more winsome ways, and the Neo evangelical movement sort of emerges, led by Carl Henry and others to re engage become a more intellectually serious movement, also focus on evangelism and so on. So the Neo evangelical movement that emerges from fundamentalism was sort of the dominant narrative that would explain where an FCA or where a group like FCA would have fit. So when I began my research, I sort of assumed FCA must have been a part of this new evangelical movement. It must have been like Campus Crusade for Christ and okay, that’s the story I want to tell. But when I looked at the sources, and I started by identifying who were the Christian athletes and coaches in 1950 Four that FCA pointed to as models, and those athletes and coaches were people like Amos Alonzo Stagg, who’s this legendary football coach and Branch Rickey baseball executive, most known for signing Jackie Robinson, Methodist and Methodist. There you go from the Midwest, although a little further to the east. So Ricky and Stagg had been Christians in sports for decades, and they became a part of the sca movement. But when I looked at their stories and their religious trajectories, they were not connected to new evangelicalism or fundamentalism at all. They just didn’t have those touch points. I found that stag is part of mainline denominations for his whole life that he intentionally doesn’t go to an evangelical church when he’s given a choice to I found that Branch Rickey, as a Methodist, he simply didn’t get engaged in those questions and debates in the 1920s between the fundamentalists and the modernists. It wasn’t something that shaped what he thought was important. So when I looked at that, I realized there’s something else in Protestantism that seems to be driving someone like a stag or a Rickey. Are they? So I thought, okay, are they? Are they mainline Protestants? And typically, when scholars write about mainline Protestants, they focus on intellectualism, social activism, bureaucracy. You know, there’s a sense that there’s a theological modernism that’s shaping their approach, and that didn’t quite fit Ricky or stag either. Their theology maybe, maybe leaned a little bit more liberal or modernist, but they really didn’t think about theology a whole lot. They sort of took for granted the basics of the Christian faith, and they wanted to apply to their daily lives, and they wanted to go to church, and they wanted to follow Jesus as best they could, and they wanted to be good in sports and in their jobs and care for their families and be a part of their communities. And so trying to give a name to that sort of ordinary, everyday Protestantism that wasn’t Evangelical, it also wasn’t, you know, sort of a activist liberal Protestant. And so the the term middle brow Protestant is what I used, drawing on scholars like Matt headstrom to try to identify this middle space that, yes, Methodist in the Midwest occupy, and other other mainline Protestants who are just ordinary every day, usually middle class, usually white church goers, especially in the north and Midwest. You know,

Collin Hansen

well, my my grandparents, two of them Lutheran, two of them Methodists. Would have seen FCA, my involvement, FCA as a football player, track, baseball and that sort of stuff. They would have seen that as a positive thing. There’s no way you could have called them Evangelical, you’d have to be entirely anachronistic to be able to do that. They were they were pious, and they had a default belief in in the Bible, but they were definitely part of mainline traditions. But it would also be foolish to call them progressives by by any stretch of the imagination, they would have been a kind of culturally conservative, but again, not conservative in the way that you would associate with evangelicalism or fundamentalism, but more of just kind of traditionalists and localists, small town, rural localists, essentially. So that part definitely stood out to me, and one that I could could associate with myself. And I’ve got a I’ve got a book Paul that I it’s in my head, and it’s just waiting for some time, I guess, for me to be writing. But it’s about the, the pivot, pivotal year of 1976 on shaping evangelicals. You added to my list here with the april 1976 article on religion and sports by Frank Deford at Sports Illustrated. Tell us about the significance of that article?

Paul Putz

Yeah, I think that year is a good point where we can, we can see with sports, this movement that the FCA started, emerges to national prominence. But I would also say it’s an announcement that what had begun in these sort of mainline establishment circles with FCA. It’s now in the evangelical camp. And so one of the things I try to do with my book is I trace out how this FCA movement starts in the 50s, associated with mainline Protestantism at the as you said, at a sort of local level, with ordinary people who have maybe a cultural Christianity in some cases. So it starts off mainline. By 1976 FCA is fully in the evangelical camp. So they have shifted from being even affiliated with the National Council of Churches in the 1950s which is the mouthpiece of mainline process Protestantism, to by the 70s, they’re they’re part of the National Association of Evangelicals. And so that trajectory in those 20 years is something that I wanted to use sports and use the FCA to figure out, how did that happen, and how did we get here, by 1976 when Frank Deford in. In Sports Illustrated. Writes these series of articles. He coins the term sporty entity to describe this subculture in sports that the FCA started and tried to create. He is talking about athletes who mentioned Jesus, coaches like Tom Landry, who was applying his faith to how he coaches the Cowboys. He’s talking about these chaplains like Billy zioli, who also is someone who shapes Francis schaeffer’s advocacy later on, Billy zioli Someone who mentors, or at least claims to be a mentor, for Gerald Ford. He hangs around important people, but he’s also deeply embedded in this new Christian athlete subculture, and Frank Deford writes about it for Sports Illustrated and kind of announces to the public. Hey, you might not have realized it, but there are a lot of Christians in sports, and they’re talking about Jesus all the time, and he’s trying to make sense of what is going on, and also makes those connections with evangelicalism. And need to

Collin Hansen

remind people. Frank Deford, one of the more significant sports journalists of the 20th century and Sports Illustrated was the journal for American sports during that time. That’s something that people wouldn’t pick up on today, like mentioning FCA in the wrong part of the country. It’s like the

Paul Putz

Bible. So it’d be like Stephen A Smith going off and talking about it, rather than trying to think of a young person, like, how would they connect? Like the most important sports media entity is writing about sports Christians in sports in sports.

Collin Hansen

Pat McAfee spent two weeks just ranting about all these Christians in sports. That’s basically the equivalent kind of thing there. Now I of course, just given my my background, my interest level, I’m always looking for angles related to sports, and for my background as the news editor at Christian today, and then the last 15 years at the gospel coalition, I’ve noticed something, Paul and you, Lord willing, are going to help me solve a 20 plus year problem that I’ve had. Readers do not engage in these Christian places with sports material the way that I would figure that they would. I don’t know why. I mean, especially living here in the south now, sports are so thoroughly intertwined with religion. You know, we don’t do you will not find a Saturday night church around here. You won’t find even Saturday night Saturday games for youth sports. They’re all on Sunday. Why? Because Saturday is the real worship day with college football, things like that. So, I mean, it’s so it’s so intertwined everything down here, sports. And so I just would think that there would be so much more opportunity for reflection on the integration of Christianity sports. But usually when I try to do that, I get a lot of pushback. I get people saying things kind of what, like, what you heard, things like, why would you actually think that your faith, our faith, these are Christians talking. Why would you think our faith applies to that? Or, why do you think that that’s a significant thing to talk about? Or even people who care a lot about sports as a fan, especially, they seem to have these are two different they care a lot about both of them, but they aren’t worlds that meet. I guess what I’m trying to get at, and what am I just am I wrong in what I’ve seen here? Or do you have an explanation for it if I’m seeing something? This is a 20 plus year mystery for me, and I can’t solve it,

Paul Putz

yeah, well, I think, I think you’re on to something, although I’d also would say I think there’s some signs that that’s changing.

Collin Hansen

It could be something that’s changed recently, but, but I think, I

Paul Putz

do think you’re onto something for you know, a couple things going on. One is, and I try to highlight this in the book, the culture of sports at the big time level is necessarily very pluralistic, and it is not a space that Christians can claim for themselves. They have to engage in it with people of other faiths, people who have behaviors that Christians wouldn’t want to associate with. Generally, it’s a, you know, quote, unquote, worldly activity, just in the sense that there are lots of different people involved who aren’t going to adhere to sort of basic Christian ideas about morality, and so in that sense, for some Christians who would want to kind of stiff arm the world and keep a distance to compartmentalize, makes some sense to say, Okay, this I’m here in the sports space. This is different, but the church space, this is, this is what’s holy and sacred. And by keeping those apart, sports just becomes entertainment. It’s that thing you do like watching a movie and you can, you can separate that out from how you live the rest of your life. So I do think, I do think some Christians keep those separate in those ways. I also think there’s, there is a way of thinking about sports for those who are within it, that when you start to reflect it, can take away the magic of sports a little bit, right, like it almost works best when you just fully engage in it. At kind of the intuitive level. And I found this when I teach sports classes, either at the undergraduate or graduate level, you a lot of times you’ll get athletes who come into that class and because they like sports, and it’s like, oh, I’m going to learn about sports history. This is going to be amazing. I’m going to come out of this class and I’m going to love sports more. And once you, when you critically analyze sports, and when you put it as a cultural text that has meaning embedded in it, and you start to think through both what’s beautiful about it and what’s broken about it, that does make some people uncomfortable, because they just want to watch a game and enjoy it. And so I do think that hesitancy to enter into the potential that this activity that gives so much meaning to your life actually is going to have aspects about it that maybe we shouldn’t fully engage or maybe we should try to reform. I think that challenges people and and so that’s, I think that’s a big reason why Christians and sometimes have a hard time reflectively thinking about and even putting it in a theological framework.

Collin Hansen

Clearly, I’m hoping otherwise for your book. That’s one reason I’m touting it. But there’s been kind of a sense that sports is something that you physically engage in or you watch. It’s not something you read about. But again, I don’t think that’s fully true when you look back on Sports Illustrated and look on that whole industry of sports writing, but there’s something maybe we’ll answer the question. Furthermore, I think what you offered there, Paul is a really a good, a good explainer for me. But there may be a few other reasons of why it’s coming together, and that’s probably because of the significance of the culture wars, as they’ve turned to sports. So we could look at Riley Gaines as an example in the transgender issues there with with the NCAA and with swimming as one example. But this has been an extremely volatile area for the culture wars in the last 10 to 15 years, in ways that it was there before, but at a whole new level. And I’m wondering, how do you account for the sudden progressive shift in sports journalism during the 2000 10s? I’m thinking here, especially about the era of Michael Sam and Colin Kaepernick. Yeah.

Paul Putz

So when I, you know, writing my book, I’m relying on primary sources, I’m going to archives, and which is my favorite thing to do is to go look at old memos and documents and letters, and that’s great, but at a certain point you run into some limits on what you can access in the archives. And so I also am doing a lot of reading magazine and newspaper articles from sports journalists. And there is an interesting shift in how journalists do sports when I’m writing in the 1920s and 30s and 40s and 50s, sports journalists are really boosters. You know, the people who write about sports at that time, their careers and livelihoods are embedded within the success of sports itself. And so sure, you have some critics who are sports journalists, but you have a whole lot of people who are there to create heroes and the mythology of sports, and they’re using the printed word to do that, and and have a lot of power in that way. And so, you know, the way sports is covered, then does tend towards this celebrity hero worship approach the 60s, 70s, 80s, especially 70s and 80s, they’re this, these new journalists who are emerging. Frank Deford is one of them, and they’re literary, and they maybe like sports, but they’re also serious journalists, and they’re writing in a style that wants to take sports and analyze it seriously and critically, and not just, you know, use the same old platitudes from the past. And so by this, Jim Marty would be absolutely another one who’s in his newspaper column is a go to for a lot of people. And so when that happens in the 70s and 80s, you see sports journalism take a more critical approach, and sports journalists also around that time, they tend to at least be a little bit skeptical of religion in sports. Before the 1970s you would find even Sports Illustrated, if they talked about FCA, they would sort of puff it up and like, look at these athletes and coaches who have faith in God, sort of a cultural Christianity, patriotic depiction. By the 70s, 80s and 90s, some journalists are starting to write exposes or investigations and sort of problematize what’s going on with these Christians in sports? Are they trying to unduly influence people to accept the faith? Should we? Should they have a place in sports? And so there is. There’s already more critical lens towards Christians because of the shift in sports journalists. But it’s it’s still not quiet, as you mentioned. It’s not like a progressive advocacy. It’s more of a critical analysis that isn’t going to advance a conservative perspective on religion by the 2000 10s and 20s. And you know where we’re at today. You’re right. I think, I think this reflects the broader media ecosystem, shaped by the Internet, shaped by social media, where. There tended to be a way to, I think, create even a brand identity in terms of how you engage in sports, if you could attach how you were writing about sports with a particular issue or cause. And I think it did cause progressive writers, for example, to mine the culture of sports for heroes who were speaking about their faith, and to really put them on a pedestal and to point to them as figures who could champion whatever cause progressives wanted. And and you, well, you always had a strain of progressive activism in sports, dating back especially to the 60s and in the 70s, it reached new heights in the 2000 10s. And I think you’re right that there has been something different on both sides, progressives and and conservatives and how they use sports in those lanes

Collin Hansen

that led to the entire out kick bar stool backlash, 100% has been a massive factor in our national politics. I don’t think there’s any way you could explain what’s happened in our presidential politics, apart from the backlash in sports, and you look at Clay Travis and Pat McAfee as a couple of those absolutely pivotal figures in that shift, and I think it’s also not a coincidence then that you have President Trump going to all of these sporting events, and Not just any sporting events, but things like college football, NASCAR and goodness, college wrestling. I mean that that had to be a first. I mean that that was a really significant thing in there. But a lot of that is rooted in the backlash to the way that kind of the way that I think about it, Paul and of course, I studied sports journalism in college, that was my plan to do that coming out. And so I had some of my actual classmates and colleagues who are prominent writers today. It was almost a sense in the 2000 10s that what they were doing with their lives was insignificant. They were just writing about games, and there wasn’t much meaning in that. They had to attach it to a broader cause, yeah, and there was a lot of that cause, and then, like I said, then the backlash, and now we have this full politicization. It feels like in culture war, in sports media, Well,

Paul Putz

it’s interesting, because one just the alliances that you see now, where you have, again, the bro culture, as you mentioned, the bar stool, folks who are not interested in Christianity or Christian values, but who do align with conservative political Christians on a number of issues, kind of by a shared belligerency, right? A shared enemy. We’re against the liberals. And in the past, that wasn’t necessarily the default. I think if you look at the 90s, you would find would find the bar stool type of person would sort of resist the conservative activists who are trying to insert morality into sports. So those in the 80s and 90s, you had more Christians opposing gambling in sports, right? And so gambling is such a big part of the bar stool culture, so that those alliances are really interesting. They are tied to, when you hit on it, views of masculinity and and a feeling that, you know, a feeling that what it means to be a man in America in traditional ways of being a man. You weren’t allowed to do that within the progressive, liberal political space. And so I think for a lot of young men coming of age and listening to sports podcasts, even if they a lot of those podcasts aren’t inherently political, and yet they have a political resonance because of the way the cultural landscape has developed. It’s really fascinating. I’m curious. You know how that continues to develop? I’m going to

Collin Hansen

put you on the spot here, Paul, do you remember who asked Tim Tebow the virginity question?

Paul Putz

I don’t give any guesses. Okay, guesses. Let’s see which. Remind me which year was this when he’s this

Collin Hansen

would be, oh, goodness, I should know the answer to that question. I should have had that that would have been 2010 or so. I’m going back to Alabama football national championships. So peak Florida would have been eight. So one skip, Bayless, no, okay. Clay, Travis clay, Travis clay. Travis asked him the virginity question, but that’s exactly what I’m trying to illustrate. He would have been on the one side. That would have been the resisting the Christian influence in sports. So asking a gotcha question, which he claims now wasn’t a gotcha question, but it sure felt like it at the time of trying to embarrass Tim Tebow about his virginity as the most outspoken Christian athlete. And then now would just be firmly in that bro culture Trump kind of and would champion sports, Christianity in sports as part of a cultural touchstone there. So I think I’ve learned more about our political shift from watching the sports media landscape than from any other like. Ends and related to that Paul, you know, sports is, of course, a primary area, if not the primary area that I see a lot of cross racial interaction among Christians. I’m just wondering, how did that collaboration survive the George Floyd summer in 2020

Paul Putz

you know, it’s, it’s interesting to see as I in my spaces, and even as I observe, you know, historically, as you mentioned, sports has been one of those places where, for predominantly white Christian organizations, they have tended to be slightly more inclusive in sports than they have in other areas. I mean, you can look at Branch Rickey, who we talked about earlier, Jackie Robinson, this figure, who’s a Methodist, and he signs Jackie Robinson, who’s also a Methodist. And so there you have examples of faith making a difference in terms of a white Christian embracing a more inclusive perspective racially. But it’s not just with Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson. In my book, I try to trace out how black Christians from the era of segregation are advocating for greater equality through sports. And then I trace out how they sort of become a part of this Christian athlete movement. And when that happens, you see some really fascinating relationships develop, even people like Bill McCartney, who’s a founder of Promise Keepers, and he’s a coach for the Colorado football team, and he’s seeing a lot of African American players who come to Colorado, and he’s recognizing the ongoing problem of racism. And he’s, you know, he’s, on the one hand, seen as this culture war Christian who is advocating against, you know, against LGBTQ issues. And yet, on the other hand, he is, he’s also advocating for racial justice, and he is making racial reconciliation one of the main principles of the Promise Keepers movement, and it’s because of sports that Bill McCartney does that. So sports becomes a really important part of racial reconciliation efforts, and in the 1990s it becomes a place where relationships are formed and developed sports ministry spaces wrestle with these questions on the ground level, because you actually have relationships formed that are deep and meaningful in ways that you don’t necessarily have happen in other spaces in Christianity, after the George Floyd protests, my sense is that there has been certainly A backlash in some spaces, in these in these Christian sports spaces, at the higher levels, like organizational leadership levels, there’s a resistance, I think, to advocate for particular causes or to say certain phrases, for example, like don’t say CRT or don’t say black lives matter, those sorts of things. On the ground level, when you talk to sports chaplains and sports ministers and athletes and coaches, you find, at least, I found, a pretty strong desire to think about race in a way that recognizes racism as a problem to work on and to try to build cross racial relationships. And so I think sports continues to function as a space for bringing people together across racial divisions on the ground level, but I do think in terms of the public platform piece, we’re seeing some problems with that because of the way the culture wars have shaped out.

Collin Hansen

Now I think this is actually a related, related question to the previous one, and you asked Benjamin Watson this question and one of the things that you’ve written, but I’ll turn it on you now. Are we seeing a Christian revival now in sports, especially with college football. The reason I’m pointing this out is because it, if there is revival, it’s definitely heavily led by African Americans. Yeah, seems very clear. So tell us what you’re seeing.

Paul Putz

There seems to be something in terms of the intensity level, in terms of the boldness, that is different. And, you know, I have a whole book here where I’m tracing out how Christians have been public about their faith in sports since we have sports going on. So it’s not like it’s brand new. No, definitely not. But what’s fascinating is how accepting even the culture of sports has been, how much encouragement Christian athletes get. I mean, think about you mentioned Tim Tebow when Tebow surges to prominence, or you could even mention Reggie White before him, they were getting a lot of hostility about their faith and how they framed it, and that they’re aligned with this conservative political cause. And, you know, there’s boycotts happening on both sides. I mean, it becomes an issue, and I know a lot of Christian Athletes felt that they needed to be careful about what they said and who they said it to. Now, in the last few years, they’re just coming out of the woodworks, and part of it’s, I think, social media. It’s the way young people engage in social media. If you’re supposed to be your authentic self, and if faith matters to you, then why wouldn’t you talk about that? Is it

Collin Hansen

the nil now they have the leverage. They have the power. And this is. Them, not the not the coaches, not school, 100%

Paul Putz

and so you’re not going to worry about some coach or ad might not like that. I talk about faith. I think it, it does empower athletes to be honest about things that matter deeply to them. And it turns out, I think on college campuses, I have heard on the ground, and we have at least some and, you know, we have anecdotes and at least some data, that there really is this yearning that we’re seeing with young people, for spiritual connection, for something that transcends the right the culture that we’re in now, which is transitory and it’s there’s no permanence to it. I mean, I’ve had, I was talking to someone who does sports chaplaincy in the northeast, someone who has worked with the Sports Ministry for decades, and I had written a short piece about, is there a revival? And I just talked about how there’s something happening in sports. And she messaged me and said, we’ve had so many athletes wanting to be discipled. We can’t disciple them all. She said, in a couple decades, she has never seen so many young athletes who are wanting to read the Bible, wanting to learn and grow. So there is, yes, the flash and the substance, you know, putting out there on social media, but there’s, there seems to be a groundswell on the ground, something happening with people wanting to make those connections. And sports is a special especially open place for that to happen.

Collin Hansen

Does the kind of sport that somebody’s involved with makes make a difference in the levels of Christian adherence? I think it

Paul Putz

does. Culture matters and exemplars matter, and and seeing other people model it matters. And so football and baseball are the two where you have seen the largest number of Christians who have developed things like Team Bible studies and off season conferences and chapel services, where if you become a part of those sports cultures, you will be able to encounter Christianity in some way. And football also just gets the most attention culturally. And so I think we tend to see more football players who are talking about faith. And as you mentioned, many of those players in recent years have been African Americans who are emphasizing their faith, talking about it. I think of the Ohio State football players and what they’ve done on their campus. So those stand out, but we’re seeing it the Olympic Games, we see with the Olympic sports athletes doing this within basketball, you can point to it so it’s happening across the board. But certainly football is the one that I think of in terms of cultural prominence, more than

Collin Hansen

any other. I wonder if, percentage wise, certainly with the American athletes, I think golf might be number one terms of adherence. I don’t know you could, you could correct me on that one, but it’s, it’s very common, and with the international component, that changes it quite a bit. But it’s those, those groups seem to be very active among a lot of the most successful players. Yeah,

Paul Putz

there’s a, I think there’d probably be a difference with men’s and women’s sports too, there, right? Like, I would

Collin Hansen

say men’s golf is, sorry, what I meant, you’re right, yeah, women’s golf would be the opposite.

Paul Putz

Because I’m thinking of, even with women’s golf, we have a student in our finishing up her degree in our we have a master’s in theology and Sports Studies, and she played a Baylor and sort of merging into the pro golf world and trying to make her way. And so talking with her about the culture of women’s golf is clear. There are some Christians and there, there are some chaplains and some women leaders, and yet, yeah, it’s not, not fully developed in the same way. But I think you’re right. The men’s golf, you see a number of of athletes who talk about their faith and and maybe, may it be interesting to, like, crunch out the the numbers and try to figure out, like, what’s the saturation point with these sports

Collin Hansen

well, and I, I mean, I don’t know why I underestimated the gender component, because that would also be significant in basketball, like, especially college basketball, I would say there’s not a lot of this happening in women’s basketball that I so

Paul Putz

what’s interesting about that? I think we’re, we are seeing some prominent examples where it is. I’ll give you a few examples. Okay, Paige Bucha is Connecticut. This is someone who is singing gospel songs before games. This is someone who is this Yes, and she talked about before every game. She reads this devotional book called God in basketball, okay? And you can look at TCU, which I’m a Baylor person, so I don’t want to give TCU too much credit here, but they have an athlete, Haley van Liff, who’s shared her story of experiencing depression, and she got connected to FCA at TCU just this past year, and there’s a leader there named Chauncey Franks. Chauncey someone I really respect him as a ministry leader, and he’s walked alongside Haley van Lith and she talked about how Jesus has changed her approach to faith and supports. And Notre Dame Hannah Hidalgo has talked about faith so they’re. Are. There are different sort of examples. There are a number of athletes who are maybe more open about it in recent years, which fits what we talked about earlier. At the same time with women’s sports, I think for Christian athletes, the there’s there’s more that there’s a more sensitivity in the way they talk about their faith, and partly that has to do with LGBTQ as clearly sexuality

Collin Hansen

differences. I mean, I think if we just look at the broader trends, the broader trends are that younger men are tending more religious, younger women are tending away. And one of the major factors is much higher identification as LGBTQ, especially B the bisexual one among women young women. That’s clearly a major difference, and that’s even heightened in sports,

Paul Putz

yeah, and I mentioned this briefly in the book, but as women’s sports ministry developed after Title Nine, you know, even in the 80s and 90s, in those spaces, if you’re a Christian woman, entering into sports, there was a stereotype that to engage in sports was to potentially call into question your femininity, and the opposite is true for men. So for men, culturally, just to play sports at all, you’re sort of proving your masculinity. There’s no question that, oh, you’re a real man. You play sports. So there’s really, there’s never any resources that I could find given to Christian men about, well, how do you deal with a gay teammate? But if you go to the women’s side in the 80s and 90s, they’re talking about, when you have teammates or coaches who are gay and you’re a Christian who believes in a traditional view of sexuality, how do you go about that? And they’re having to ask that question in ways men did not have to in sports ministry. So it does shape how you talk about your faith. I think it shapes again, how you want to relate to others. You want to be a good teammate and coach. You also want to be true to, you know, to follow what the Bible says about those issues. And I think women in sports ministry have had to navigate those in way more complex ways than a lot of men have.

Collin Hansen

Boy, that’s a good observation. I’m going to use this chance to segue, then to my last question, but I’m gonna use Caitlin Clark as the segue. I’ve not heard any sort of religious expression from her. Do you know anything about that background?

Paul Putz

So she’s Catholic, born and raised Catholic in Iowa, and so that’s in terms of the faith piece. I haven’t seen her talk about it much. Haven’t either, but just read some stories about the Catholic peace shaping her growing up.

Collin Hansen

Yeah, that wouldn’t be uncommon for a Catholic in the Midwest to not be as vocal about faith as a Protestant, especially an evangelical. I was just thinking about the levels of opposition that she’s faced, the combination of popularity and popularity and opposition. I think the last person that I knew in college sports, and a lot of that opposition for Caitlin has been now in the pros, but a lot, and that was certainly the case with this other person. Tim Tebow deserves his own question here. To conclude, we mentioned him, I’m wondering, Is he the most prominent Christian athlete in his in American history? That’s my first question. And the second would be, what is it that has made him such a role model and lightning rod, though, to be fair, since he left sports, and of course, didn’t necessarily leave on his own terms, in part connected to this. It was almost like his faith and his popularity gave him opportunities in sports that he wouldn’t have had otherwise in the pro level, I think, but then also took it away in ways that he didn’t deserve. It was almost like it gave and it took anyway. The first question, is he the most prominent Christian athlete in American history, and if? Well, either way, what makes him such a role model and lightning rod? Yeah,

Paul Putz

so I think the that’s a good question, and I guess the way I would answer it is, if we’re talking about an athlete who’s is known to the highest degree for their religious identity. In other words, when people think of them, they immediately think of the faith piece,

Collin Hansen

and Jackie Robinson would be more prominent, right? You didn’t immediately always think of his faith.

Paul Putz

Sorry, yeah, that’s right, 100% Steph, curry, Reggie. I mean, you know, there’s, there’s a number of athletes who are very prominent about their faith, who were very well known, even more known than Tebow, but not where their identity was connected to those. So I think I would say, I think you can make a strong case for that. But I also would say it’s how I approach the goat arguments, greatest of all time in basketball. Some people say it’s Michael Jordan, it’s LeBron, it’s Kareem, it’s Bill Russell. You know, to me, it’s they’re interdependent on one another. It’s in your era, in your time, Bill Russell was the greatest in the 60s and the 70s. It was Kareem in the 80s, it was magic and bird in the 90s, it was George, you know, and their greatness was built on the foundation of those who came before them and and, you know, we can have those debates about who is the greatest or not with Tebow. I think what I would want to say is, you don’t get Tebow unless you have those Christian athletes who came before. You don’t get Tebow unless you have in the 90s. 1950s Otto Graham and Bobby Richardson and then Roger Staubach and you know, and you go on down the line, Reggie White and so on, like it’s those Christian athletes who spoke about their faith, who made it a part of their public witness. They paved the way for Tebow then to become a Flashpoint, not because he intentionally cultivates it, necessarily, but because of a number of factors, both his success and his fame, his boldness, but then also kind of the media ecosystem at the time. So I think I’d be willing to go there, but I just want to say he is a dependent on what came before him as well,

Collin Hansen

well. And I don’t think there were. There was nobody questioning whether Tim Tebow faith had made him weak or soft as an athlete. First of all, that was kind of the way that he played as a bull rushing fullback at quarterback effectively. But on top of that, it’s probably because people were asking those questions of Reggie White, yeah. And who in the world could ask that question of Reggie White, considering how he played. But I think one thing that makes Tebow stand out, and that’s from the first moment any of us heard about him being recruited down here, is by Mike Schule at Alabama all the way to today. It’s the consistency of his faith. And that’s one thing that is fairly different with Reggie White as an example, because there were a lot of changes and confusion, certainly toward the end of his life. And Steph Curry, I guess I can’t speak with as much authority. I just don’t hear a lot about that. Yeah, the same way. I think

Paul Putz

that’s, I think that’s a good point. The sort of who you seem public from, not that I know Tebow personally, but the what others say about him, even within those Christian athlete spaces, is that he’s the same person. He who you seem public and who you see behind the scenes, that’s that’s what you get. And so I think you’re right. There’s a consistency there. And and this continued even as he’s been a sports media personality, he’s also continued to engage pretty deeply in Christian spaces, which is a little different as well, right, than some other athletes who they finished their career, and that’s sort of the end of it, and we remember what they did, but Tebow has gone on, and he continues to shape the conversation in some interesting ways,

Collin Hansen

an author and an activist, and for people with disabilities, things like that. And I mean, just as you mentioned, you point out how Tebow built on those previous generations. You probably aren’t seeing today what you’re seeing on college campuses without Tim Tebow coming before, because that was truly the mainstreaming, right? I mean, he’s not only maybe the most famous Christian athlete of all time American history, but he he’s either at or near the most popular college athletes ever, just in general. And I mean popular, I don’t necessarily mean the best or most successful, but his popularity levels were simply, that’s why I mentioned. It reminds me of Caitlin Clark, yeah, in terms of that level of just phenomenon. Yeah, that followed him. So I’ll never forget that playoff game that he had for the Broncos, whenever it was just it was so bad, and then all of a sudden, magically, has the touchdown.

Paul Putz

There’s so much that’s fascinating about that, even the way the conversation happened. You know, I close my book and I kind of compare, I think about Tebow, and I contrast with Kaepernick, and I think about these figures right and and what they symbolize and the conversation around them more than who they were as people. It’s about how people talk about them. Because what we often do with athletes or with sports is those, those celebrity figures, those they’re human beings with real life struggles, fears, anxieties, but we see what they do in sports, and we turn them into symbols of our own, cultural symbols to represent some vision of America or some vision of Christianity that we want to promote. And I think we’ve done that, certainly with a with a Tebow and how he represented, if you’re right, the you feel like you’re the Forgotten American, you’re the you know, evangelical Christian and mainstream liberal elite spaces don’t value who you are. Well, at

Collin Hansen

the height of the new Atheism and the Obama administration,

Paul Putz

that’s right. And here’s this quarterback who’s got the eye black and the Bible verses, and it doesn’t make sense that he wins, but he wins and right, like he there’s something about that, that yearning for RespectAbility too, that Christians sometimes see sports as an avenue to do that. And then with Kaepernick, you know, Kaepernick faith is interesting, because he’s a part of FCA in college, he sort of moves away from my understanding. When I researched it, he seemed to move away from Christianity by the time that he’s starting his protest, but a number of people who support his protests are African American Christians, and they’re navigating for them, their faith is leading them to support racial justice, and they’re trying to figure out, how do we do this? Well, because this is an expression of their faith. And yet, I always found it interesting that two. EBO right would get criticized by liberal elites, and I don’t use that word pejoratively. I just mean in the sense that they have cultural power and influence, and we get heavily criticized by them for kneeling and get praised on the conservative ecosystem. If we flip the script right, and it’s with Kaepernick, it’s okay. The Conservatives are like, Yo, you can’t be doing that. Don’t be kneeling. And then the on the liberal side, they’re praising him. This is great. We want more of this. So instead, instead of allowing athletes to bring those parts of themselves into sports, to witness to things that matter, beyond the game to them as fans, we eat them up too much, right? And we turn them into these polarizing figures in ways that I don’t think are healthy,

Collin Hansen

yeah. Oh, very insightful. Paul, the book we’ve been talking about for the last 50 minutes, the spirit of the game, American Christianity and big time sports. Paul putz has been my guest. You’re going to get a lot more that deep historical background. And Paul, thanks for writing the book, and thanks for chatting with me all sorts of different things and helping me to solve some problems today.

Paul Putz

Thanks for having me. Really appreciate what you do with this podcast.