But it also means that the buzzer has sounded on summer writing projects. No more “I’ll get to that next week.” Next week is here and gone, and all we can do is accept reality for what it us (until next year at least).

I certainly did not accomplish all that I set out to do this summer. But I pushed the ball down the field. I made a final round of edits on my new basketball book, I finished a couple articles, and I started research on a new long-term academic history project (I should be able to share more about that in 2028). I also came away with a book contract for a new project that I’m super excited about. The working title: The Meaning of Sports: A Christian Vision for the Purpose and Significance of Athletics. Look for it in 2028 with Eerdmans.

This book is different from my previous projects. The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports is an academic book with a university press. It was written first and foremost to contribute to scholarly conversations about the history of sports and Christianity and the relationship between the two in American culture.

Jesus and James Naismith: The Christian History of Basketball (coming your way in 2027) blends the academic and trade worlds. It includes original research and makes a genuine contribution to scholarship on the history of basketball and on religion and sports. But it’s written with a broader audience in mind. It’s shorter and more accessible than The Spirit of the Game.

The Meaning of Sports is not a work of history. It’s a work that is designed to speak to the present and help shape the future. It’s also a work that is deeply influenced by the role that I’ve occupied for the past seven years, helping to build and grow the Faith & Sports Institute while working with and alongside Christian scholars and leaders in sports.

I am convinced that, for all of its flaws and contradictions, sports remains a crucial cultural space that can speak to many of the challenges we face in our society. In an online-first, digital world, it reminds us that our bodies matter. In a time when the frictionless ease of AI promises to do the work for us, it teaches us that growth comes through struggle. In a time when loneliness is on the rise, it provides a point of connection. In a time of deep division and polarization, it remains one of the few places where common ground across areas of difference can be found. And for all of those reasons, for those of us who are Christians, sports offers a unique cultural space for proclaiming the gospel and serving the common good.

As a historian, I know that sports have never been “pure,” that there have always been challenges, hypocrisy, and destructive tendencies. I know that sports can form us in harmful ways just as much as in flourishing ways. But I also believe, from my research, experience, and observation, that sports truly can be a place of human connection and formation. And I believe Christianity has something to offer that can help us experience and realize that possibility.

The first step is to get a renewed sense of the “why” behind the sports we watch and play. In The Meaning of Sports, my hope is to invite Christians to consider why sports matter, what they are for, and how we might participate in shaping the culture of sports so that future generations can experience more of what makes it beautiful.

If you check out my recent conversation with Preston Sprinkle, you can get a small glimpse of some of the ideas I’ll be developing:

One other cool thing worth mentioning: My book will be part of an incoming wave of new, constructive work related to sports and the Christian life. I’m aware of no less than eight projects that are in the works right now. Some are seeking to provide a theology of sports. Some are more broadly focused on fitness and the body. Some hone in on the spiritual meaning of a particular sport. Some are more theoretical in nature, some are more practical. All of them will have something meaningful to offer Christians who care about sports.

And that’s to say nothing of several other academic book projects on sports and religion that are in the works, too. Put simply, there has never been a better time to think, write, and read about the Christian meanings of sports and the role that it plays in our culture and society.

I’ll have more to say about The Meaning of Sports next year after the manuscript is finished and sent off to the press. In the meantime, I’ll be locked into writing mode. I’ll also be spreading the word about Jesus and James Naismith—I am incredibly excited to share that book with the world next year. And I’ll also be using this space to highlight and discuss some of the good work on sports and Christianity from other scholars, thinkers, and leaders.

Much, much more to come! (And if you have a new project that I should know about, please reach out.)

Three More Things

(1) Scenes from seminary life: Celebrating summer graduates and welcoming new residential FSI students to Truett.

(2) Five books I can’t wait to read this fall:

• Jeremy Treat, Everyday Discipleship: How Faith Shapes the Most Practical Areas of Life

• Charlie Dates, What Hath Justice to Do with Righteousness? Reclaiming the Intersection of Protest and Prayer

• Jonathan Abrams, When We Were Young and Fearless: Kevin, Russell, James, and the Making of the Modern NBA

• Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made

• Bonnie Kristian, In Defense of Evangelicalism A Response to Its Cultured Despisers

(3) An article you should check out:

My Truett colleague Hunter Brown, a New Testament scholar, has a new academic article in the Journal of Theological Interpretation that examines 1 Timothy 4:8. Brown writes: “This verse, often thought to speak a derogatory word about bodily training, actually appears to provide a measure of biblical grounding for the conviction that athletics can play a beneficial role in the Christian life."

Between the New York Knicks and the World Cup, sports fandom is having a moment right now.

As the Knicks went on their title run, NPR ran a segment on the “collective effervescence” of the fan experience. Religion News Service described a trip to Madison Square Garden as a sacred pilgrimage. The New York Times published a piece on “The Knicks as Religious Experience.” For The Free Press, Arthur Brooks declared that sports fandom is good for our country, providing an antidote to loneliness and isolation.

The World Cup has added to the conversation, with stories like this one from the Washington Post: “For U.S. soccer fans, one question matters most: Is it safe to believe?”

I was interviewed for that story, asked to discuss the ways that faith and hope are part of the sports fan experience. The point I made was simple: To be a sports fan is an act of faith. Not faith as abstract belief or mental assent, but instead faith as actively entrusting yourself to another.

Thinking about sports fandom in this way helps us see how and why sports matter so much. As sports fans, we choose to give ourselves over to the team—to identify with their struggles and their triumphs, to connect our identity and aspirations in some way with the action in the arena. We give up control over the outcome, choosing to enter into a story whose plot we do not control.

This can lead to heartbreak and disappointment. It can also lead to ecstasy and joy. And the thing is, you cannot have one without the other.

Some people might decide that being a fan is not worth the trouble. It’s just a game anyway. Aren’t there more important things in life? This is a perfectly rationale, reasonable decision. But when you decide not to step out in faith into sports fandom—when you choose to watch from a distance, with the perspective of an objective observer—you close off the possibilities and the community that only faith provides.

Hope works in tandem with faith to shape the sports experience. As philosopher Sabrina Little puts it, hope “provides the constancy and resolve that faith requires.” It enables us to “envision and act” in light of some future good. It is an orientation to the future that shapes how we relate to the present, reminding us that the suffering or struggles of the current moment are not the final word.

Theologian Robert Ellis also sees hope as foundational to the meaning of sports. Riffing off of Jürgen Moltmann, he writes of the “unquiet heart” of hope within sports—the sense that things are not as they should be, that there is something more for us. This restless striving to reach beyond ourselves, Ellis argues, is part of our God-given nature and one reason that we are drawn to sports.

Both Ellis and Little connect hope to the experience of playing and competing. But I think what they have to say is relevant to the fan experience, too. By design, modern sports cultivate a posture of hope for both fans and competitors. After each game, the scoreboard is reset to zero. After each season, the standings are wiped clean and teams begin to regroup and prepare for a new beginning. There is a seasonal rhythm to it all, a cycle of hope, struggle, and disappointment (or on rare occcassions, triumph) that leads to hope again.

It is a rhythm expressed in future MLB commissioner Bart Giamatti’s often-quoted words about his favorite sport:

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”

This sense of new opportunities, of possibilities on the horizon, keeps fans coming back. And this hope also has the potential to stretch beyond one lifetime; sports fandom carries a hope that can be passed down from generation to generation.

Of course, fans can reject the practice of hope. They might wallow in pessimism or cynicism. They might talk about their team as “cursed,” and list all the pain and disappointment over the years. When a big game comes, they might expect their team to lose. And yet, for all their performative cynicism, there is always a seed of hope just waiting for sunlight to bring it forth. Even if the most jaded fans are afraid to say it, in their hearts they know: This might be the year.

Faith and hope, then, work together in the fan experience to give sports meaning, to root it in our hearts.

I think those virtues also point us to the formative possibilities of sports fandom. True, there is a big difference between being a competitor and a fan. Athletes are actively participating in the game itself. Their embodied engagement is what fuels the potential for character formation (or so its advocates claim, and I happen to believe them).

But even if it is not the same thing, in its own way sports fandom is (or can be) an active, embodied experience. We bring our whole selves into the act of rooting and cheering for a team. We get caught up in the action, and we are able to feel and express parts of ourselves that we sometimes leave unattended. “Sports generate emotions that we do not often have permission to fully express in other facets of our lives,” theologian Marcia Mount Shoop writes. “Excitement, disappointment, anger, joy, frustration, and delight are authorized as full-bodied experiences.”

This necessarily carries implications for how we are formed as people, creating opportunities for us to respond and react in ways that shape the type of person we become.

Consider some of the negative possibilities. Caught up in the passion of sports, some fans over-identify with their teams. They lash out in anger, choosing violence, hatred, and resentment. They berate referees, coaches, and (for some youth sports parents) their own kids. They channel the emotional power of sports, the potential for goodness and connection, into expressions of sin, brokenness, and destruction.

Those actions are not shouts into the void with no consequences in the “real” world. They reveal something about a person’s character. They actually shape the soul of a person, too.

So it is with the opportunities that sports fans have to respond and grow in positive ways. This is the point that Arthur Brooks makes in his Free Press piece, and that several recent studies have suggested. It is not widely embraced yet—most of the connections between character formation and sports still emphasize the athlete—but exploring the formative possibilities of sports fandom is an intriguing and growing area of study. The University of Syracuse recently received a grant to develop this work, and I know of several others who are moving in a similar direction.

Of course, we don’t become sports fans because we see it as an opportunity for character formation. We do so because it is fun, because it provides entertainment, because our friends and family do it, because it is something to do.

But as we root and cheer for a team, we should recognize that we are being formed in some way. Faith and hope are entry points into the fan experience. For Christians sports fans in particular, they are also destinations towards which we should travel, strengthened and rooted in love.

Interested in diving deeper? My book The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Sports looks at the ways Christians have channeled interest in sports to promote their vision of the good life. Several of the scholars I mentioned in this post have written excellent books that are worth a read as well.

• Sabrina Little, The Examined Run: Why Good People Make Better Runners

• Robert Ellis, The Games People Play: Theology, Religion, and Sport

• Marcia Mount Shoop, Touchdowns for Jesus and Other Signs of Apocalypse: Lifting the Veil on Big-Time Sports

For the past week, as the Knicks were closing in on their title, I’ve been working on an academic article exploring the historical relationship between the rise of modern psychology, the “muscular Christianity” movement, and modern sports.

Hang with me here, I promise not to get technical. I just provide that background to explain why I’ve been reading William James.

James is one of the most important intellectuals in American history, a Harvard professor from 1873 to 1907 who shaped the fields of philosophy, religion, and psychology. While he was not a Christian, his writings about religious experience and character formation influenced Christians of all kinds, including segments of the evangelical movement. I have mixed feelings about James and the cultural implications of his ideas—as well as the way they fit (and do not fit) within a Christian understanding of the world. But I admire the breadth and depth of his thought.

One throughline for James is his resistance to determinism. He did not like it when it showed up in Christian doctrine. And he did not like it when it showed up in science, in the growing popularity of biological determinism, the theory that human beings are basically machines.

James insisted instead on the idea of chance and the possibility that we could exercise free will—not that we could do anything and everything, but that we could at least choose between options available to us. The human mind, he said, needed to know that spontaneity was possible, that it had a vote, that “it is in the game, and not a mere looker on.”

“All that the human heart wants,” he insisted, “is its chance.”

I was thinking about James as I watched the NBA Finals. Because for me, what makes this Knicks title special—and what makes sports special—is the way that it puts the potential of the human will on display.

You’re not supposed to win a game when you’re down 29 in the second half. You’re not supposed to win a championship when your best player is barely six feet tall, or when you’re the three seed in the East, or when you’re down 2-1 to the Atlanta Hawks in the first round. You’re definitely not supposed to win when you’re the New York Knicks and you carry the weight of a fanbase that has 50 years of disappointment.

But the beauty and magic of sports is that it invites us to believe that we have a chance, that the outcome is not predetermined. That in any given game, any given series, any given season, the human beings who compete might rise to the occasion, they might accomplish what previously seemed impossible (or at least highly unlikely).

Whether in William James’s day, when modern sports were emerging as a powerful social force, or in an age like ours, where we are taught to see the world in a coldly analytical way, this belief in chance and surprise and possibility matters. It is not the “chance” that sports gambling companies promote, the invitation to play a fool’s game in which the house ultimately always wins. Instead, it is the chance that is tied to human action, to the exertion of the human will.

And, crucially, it is also tied to the expression of human community. Because another thing that makes sports special is the way that teams embody and represent the hopes and aspirations of a community, the way that they become part of the cultural narratives that we tell about what it means to belong to a particular place.

True, only the players and coaches are exercising their will in a way that determines the outcome; and yet, it also requires an act of the will for us as fans to decide that we will invest ourselves in the collective experience of sports. In that act, we enter into a shared community where we become part of a greater whole and where we open ourselves to the possibility of the drama and experience of sports.

The scenes of joy that poured out from Knicks fans after the championship were a testament to these possibilities. As the New York Times understood, it was like a religious experience.

Look, I’m a historian. I know that sports have never been “pure,” that they have always included both the best and worst of our impulses, that money has always been a part of the game. Just as joy flooded the streets of New York City on Saturday night, so did a few scenes of destruction, showing that fans can choose to channel the power of sports in harmful directions.

Even so, sports teams, from William James’s day to our own, have provided social and civic goods that remind us, in a unique and powerful way, of what it means to be human and what it means to belong to something bigger than ourselves.

It’s a strange feeling being a sports fan these days because it feels like the people in charge are doing everything they can to undermine the things that have made sports special. Rather than steward the imperfect but beautiful gift of sports, they seem more interested in exploiting its unique status as a quasi-civic institution, wringing every possible dollar until sports becomes wholly and entirely transactional, from top to bottom.

Fifty years from now, will a championship matter to a community like this one does for New York? Will the next generation of sports fans, raised and encouraged by our leaders to think of sports primarily as an opportunity to gamble, still believe that there is a deeper purpose behind the games we watch and play? Will people care about sports in the same way?

I honestly don’t know.

But in this moment at least, with this Knicks title, we get to witness and affirm the beautiful possibilities of sports.

It’s a feeling those of us who believe in the social value of sports will need to remember in the years ahead, because it won’t be easy. The forces and the incentive structures arrayed against us might feel overwhelming. The outcome might seem predetermined. What can we possibly do when many of the executives and decision-makers across the industry seem to be actively undermining any long-term vision of sports as a source of the common good?

We don’t have much, but we have the ability to choose what we will celebrate, what we will give our attention to, what we will remember.

We don’t have much, but we have a chance.

As a basketball fan though?

I feel the excitement and appreciate the significance. There’s too much history, too much meaning bound up in New York City’s relationship with basketball. And the Knicks are the most visible expression of that story.

It’s a history that has received plenty of attention. Only a handful of NBA franchises have ever had the Big Book treatment, where a journalist or historian takes a deep dive into an entire era of a team’s history—exploring not only the on-court action, but also how a team fits within the broader cultural and social world that it inhabits.

The Knicks have had three such books, one each for their 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s teams.

My angle to this history, as always, is to look for religion. And as I worked on my new book, Jesus and James Naismith: A History of Basketball and Christianity from Origins to the NBA (coming in 2027!), I found plenty of it.

It’s true that Christianity is just one part of the story. The fan who recently went viral for his chant—“My Mayor is Muslim, My Bagel is Jewish, My Christian’s Dior… Knicks in 4!”—is tapping into the cosmopolitan, pluralistic culture of the city. Even so, there are key moments from the past where basketball and Christianity were intertwined in New York.

Here are two, plus a few more recent bonus examples.

When Episcopalians were Cool

The Christian history of basketball has two foundational eras. First is the 1890s, when seminary graduate James Naismith, inspired by his desire to “win men for the Master through the gym,” created the sport at a YMCA training college in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Second is the 1900s, when Black Americans, segregated from the YMCA and other white Christian institutions, began to build a basketball culture of their own.

New York City was one of several cities where this occurred. Claude Johnson, author of Black Fives: The Epic Story of Basketball’s Forgotten Era, is the go-to source for the story, telling how a collection of Black athletic clubs—beginning with Alpha, Smart Set, and St. Christopher’s—formed a basketball circuit that captured the imagination of the city’s Black community.

Black churches helped to foster the game’s spread. Alpha held its first meetings at Mount Tabor Presbyterian Church. Smart Set was closely related with St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church. St. Christopher’s, led by Rev. Everard Daniel, was sponsored by St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, the wealthiest and largest black congregation in the city. And other churches got in the game, too, including St. Cyprian’s Episcopal Church, which sponsored a team called the “Speed Boys.”

Why so many Episcopalians? While most Black churchgoers at the time attended Methodist or Baptist denominations, Black Episcopalians exerted influence beyond their numbers in big cities. They often attracted socially privileged Black “elites,” giving them access to resources, buildings, and programs that could support recreational activities. The Anglican tradition had also birthed muscular Christianity in the first place. While other Black denominations continued to look warily at sports, Episcopalians had a history of support for the idea that sports could serve a moral and spiritual purpose.

Cultural geography mattered, too. Episcopal churches were prominent among the city’s growing Caribbean community (especially those from the British West Indies). And many of the early leaders in Black basketball were immigrants from the Caribbean: the founders of the Alpha Club (immigrants from Jamaica); pioneering sportswriter and basketball advocate Romeo Dougherty (Virgin Islands); Rev. Everard Daniel (Virgin Islands); and the greatest of them all, basketball manager Bob Douglas (Saint Kitts).

Douglas first encountered the sport at St. Cyprian’s, the city’s largest Caribbean congregation. He fell in love with the game and formed a club team of his own, the Spartan Braves, competing against Alpha, Smart Set, and St. Christopher’s throughout the 1910s.

In the 1920s, Douglas took things to the next level: He organized a pro team, the New York Renaissance Big Five, establishing a powerhouse built on the culture of Black basketball that had been forged in the preceding decades.

The Rens developed a rivalry with the best pro team of the era, New York’s Original Celtics. Led by Catholics Dutch Dehnert and Joe Lapchick and featuring star Jewish player Nat Holman, the Celtics represented the ethnic and religious pluralism of New York City. The two teams would battle back and forth in the years ahead, before the Rens began to pull away as the premiere team in the 1930s.

In 1932-33, Bob Doulgas’s team won eighty-eight games in a row. In 1937, they played 110 games in ninety-seven days, winning 102 of them. In 1939, the Rens capped off their decade of dominance with a visit to Chicago, where they won the World’s Championship in Professional Basketball, the first tournament of its kind, featuring the top Black and white pro teams of the era.

Through it all, Douglas worshipped at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, a congregation founded in 1928 by Rev. John Howard Johnson—himself a product of the early Black basketball circuit, and the first Black basketball player to compete for Columbia University.

I’ve gone back and read through Johnson’s sermons. This one still preaches today:

“Without the resurrection of our Lord, there would have been no Church, no New Testament, no Gospel. Christianity is essentially a Gospel—the announcement of something God has done. From the Gospel, there flows the system of Christian ethics with its demands upon us for certain kinds of conduct….

The Gospel of the resurrection is not only an announcement that Jesus has conquered death, that we and our loved ones shall live again, but also it is an announcement about the power of God to renew the life of the world…Despite our feebleness of purpose, we are commanded to do our best to renew the life of the place where we are.”

As far as I know, there aren’t any prominent Episcopalians on the current Knicks roster. But the two best players, Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns, do represent the early history of Black basketball in another way: Brunson’s mother is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, while Town’s mother is from the Dominican Republic.

The Original Exvangelicals?

It has been half a century since the Knicks last won a title. But the players from that era, encompassing the 1970 and 1973 championship teams, remain sainted figures in Knicks lore: Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Dave DeBusschere, Earl Monroe.

Religion was mostly a minor subplot for those teams. Their founder and president, Ned Irish, was Catholic. Their coach, Red Holzman, was Jewish. Cazzie Russell, who was traded away in 1971, had been involved with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in college and would later become a minister. But religion was not something emphasized in great detail.

There were two important exceptions. For forwards Phil Jackson and Bill Bradley, religion was a major part of their stories—in both cases because they had been deeply influenced by evangelical Christianity, only to walk away from that version of the faith.

Phil Jackson was a pastor’s kid. His parents served in Montana as ministers with the Assemblies of God, a leading Pentecostal denomination. Jackson grew up sheltered from outside influences, taught to be on guard against the messages and temptations of the secular world.

But Jackson always had his doubts, and when he enrolled at the University of North Dakota, studying philosophy and religion, he began to explore them. “I became embarrassed about being a Pentecostal when I took sociology and learned that Pentecostals were among the lower socioeconomic and intellectual groups in the country,” he wrote in his 1975 autobiography.

At the same time, Jackson could not fully embrace the academic rationalism of his professors. He found his path forward after reading William James’s classic 1902 book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, as a senior. “James said that there were mysteries which mankind has yet to touch,” he recalled. That moment marked what he called his “first contact with religious mysticism.”

From there Jackson began experimenting with Zen Buddhism and exploring new religious experiences. After joining the Knicks in 1967 his world expanded even more. He embodied nearly every stereotype of the hippie movement, growing out his beard and trying out vegetarianism, yoga, astrology, and LSD.

“I seemed to experience a union of my mind and my body,” Jackson recalled of his first acid trip, which happened on a Malibu beach. “I knew I had to love myself before I could ever learn to love other people. And I realized that man has to love himself in order to make himself whole.”

For all his experimentation, Jackson remained fascinated with the figure of Jesus. But he rejected institutional Christianity, preferring a “choose your own religion” approach that typified the emerging ethos of New Age spirituality. “God is present in all religions,” Jackson decided. “We must move our own personal consciousness to a place where we can see and realize the extent of His power.”

As Jackson was exploring new religious dimensions, he thought he might have a fellow traveler in his teammate, Bill Bradley. But the future US Senator kept his distance. “I think he believed in mystical experiences,” Jackson wrote of Bradley, “but he was so analytical about his own life that he may have had some trouble empathizing with my conflicts.”

Bradley’s journey in and out of evangelicalism started in high school. Born and raised in small-town Missouri, where his family attended a mainline Presbyterian church, Bradley made a trip to Wisconsin in 1960 for a Fellowship of Christian Athletes camp. There, he had a powerful conversion experience, coming away with the feeling of being swept up in a new story.

While he had what he called “an intellectual belief” before arriving in Wisconsin, it had not taken “possession of my heart and my emotions.” After the conference, his faith felt real, it felt personal.

Considered one of the top high school recruits in the country, Bradley enrolled at Princeton and embarked on a remarkable college career. He won a gold medal with the 1964 US Olympic Team, brought Princeton to the Final Four in 1965, and earned back-to-back All-American honors. His fame was so widespread that he was the subject of an entire book while still in college: John McPhee’s acclaimed A Sense of Where You Are.

Through it all, Bradley spoke publicly about his Christian faith, sharing testimonials about the support and guidance he found in the Christian athlete community (see below for an example). He was, in many ways, his era’s Tim Tebow.

Yet, even as Bradley gained fame as a Christian athlete, he wrestled with doubts. When he spoke at an FCA conference in 1964, he was surprised to learn that his roommates did not share his support for the civil rights movement. He became increasingly sensitive to the racial dynamics of his own celebrity, where his status as a standout white player in a sport increasingly associated with Black excellence turned him into one of many “Great White Hopes” to come.

He also began to see the shadow side of the evangelical community, where the love showered on him as their champion could turn into demands that he conform to their image and perform whenever they wanted to put him on a platform.

“Religious commitment without thought became nothing more than emotions that one day soothed and the next day assaulted me,” he wrote. “I retreated into myself.”

When Bradley joined the Knicks in 1967, he still had a public reputation as an All-American Christian. But he had already left his evangelical commitments behind—although, ever the politician, in a quieter way than Jackson.

Christian Knicks Today

While Christianity was not a prominent feature of the championship Knicks teams of the 1970s, there have been moments over the past few decades where Christians had a visible presence.

The 1990s Knicks were known for their hard-nosed, gritty style of play, with “Nasty Knicks” characters like Charles Oakley, Anthony Mason, and Patrick Ewing. At the same time, they had a strong group of Christian players, led by Charlie Ward and Allan Houston, who organized team Bible studies, spoke frequently about their faith, and earned a reputation as a “God squad.”

Houston, who has served in an executive role with the Knicks for nearly two decades, remains one of the most significant Christian voices in the NBA today.

In the 2010s, when Jeremy Lin arrived on the scene and set off the “Linsanity” phenomenon, his evangelical background became part of the story, too. Timothy Dalyrymple, who would later serve as CEO and president of Christianity Today, wrote a book on that theme: Jeremy Lin: The Reason for the Linsanity.

The Knicks were also front and center during the celebrity Christian / “hype priest” turn of the 2010s. In 2015, when NYC Hillsong pastor Carl Lentz was at the height of his fame, he befriended several Knicks players and famously used center Tyson Chandler’s bathtub to baptize Justin Bieber (five years later, Lentz would have a very public fall from grace).

Today, Josh Hart is probably the most outspoken Christian on the team. He prays before games, quotes Scripture, and seeks to model Jesus on the court by embracing a “servant mentality.”

It is not like the early days, when Black churches were at the forefront of the city’s basketball culture. But it’s also not the same as the early 1970s, when, on the Knicks at least, Christianity seemed to be in retreat. Christianity has an important presence alongside other faith traditions, part the dynamic religious pluralism that has long shaped New York City’s relationship with basketball.

For more on religion and the NBA, I was recently interviewed for a Religion News Service story: “How NBA Playoff Teams Embrace Faith”

Check out the table of contents here:

Why this book?

Basketball is unique among the major world sports in two ways. It has a specific origin story that we can trace back to a person (James Naismith), institution (the YMCA), and day (December 21, 1891); and it has an origin story deeply intertwined with Christianity.

Those religious influences are relatively well known. James Naismith’s famous quote—that he wanted “to win men for the master through the gym”—is often repeated in Christian basketball circles. Nearly every historical analysis of basketball’s early years discusses Naismith’s connection to the YMCA and a movement called “muscular Christianity.” And there have been numerous articles about the spiritual origins of the game (I’ve written a couple of them myself).

But as I read and encountered those accounts of basketball’s religious origins, I always came away wanting more. What do we really mean when we say that basketball was created to “win men for the master through the gym”? What were Naismith’s ideas, and how did theology and culture shape his perspective? How did Christians continue to nurture the game after Naismith’s time?

That last question is crucial. Christian influence on basketball did not stop at its founding. The truth is that Naismith’s creation of the game was the beginning, not the end, of the Christian history of the sport. Even when it developed into a global game embraced by people of all faith traditions, Christians continued to play an active role in cultivating and nurturing its development, in giving shape to its meaning and significance.

My new book aims to tell that story.

It is not comprehensive—I wanted to keep it relatively short and compact. And it does not claim Christian ownership over the sport. In fact, Naismith designed it from the beginning to be a game for all people. But it does draw attention to the Christian athletes and coaches, pastors and sports ministers, who saw basketball as a venue for living and expressing their faith. It provides an account of the deep relationship between basketball and Christianity that is true to the complexities and nuances of the past while also being accessible to readers who might not usually read history.

So what are the next steps?

There is still work to do in refining and editing the manuscript into a final version. It will likely be 2027 before the book is out in the world. I’ll be sure to share status updates here, including when pre-orders from my publisher (shoutout to Eerdmans) are available.

But I’d also love to hear from you. If you’re interested and involved in basketball in some way—or if you know someone who is—I’d love to explore ideas for getting this story into the hands of as many people who love basketball as possible.

Hit me up and let’s talk.

In the meantime, I’ll be over here taking in March Madness, enjoying a month when this beautiful game—a game developed by a Christian minister at a Christian college for Christian purposes—takes center stage in the American sports scene.

From left to right: Baylor men’s basketball coach Scott Drew, Jim and Beverly Naismith (Jim is the last surviving grandson of James Naismith) and me.

When I found out that he had been a college quarterback at North Carolina A&T, however, and that some of the leading athletes of the 1960s and 1970s—Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, Gale Sayers—admired him and counted him as their friend, I knew that I needed to learn more.

Over the course of my research, Jackson helped me better understand the links between sports and the Black church, as well as the ongoing racial divides between the experiences of Black and white Christians within sports ministries. I ended up writing a whole chapter on that theme, titling it “Jesse Jackson Has Reason To Be Concerned.”

There is much more to say about Jackson’s legacy and profound influence in American life, and other people are better equipped to tell that story. My lane is Christianity and sports. For those interested in learning how Jackson’s influence extended into that sphere—how he related to the evangelical sports movement—below is an excerpt from my book.

Excerpt from The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports

To understand the racial divides within Sportianity, a good place to start is with a person who embodied the fusion of racial uplift and social activism within both the Black church tradition and Black muscular Christianity: the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

A former college football player, Jackson played quarterback at North Carolina A&T in the early 1960s, the same years that the sit-in movement took root at the school. Like several other Black Christian activists, including Medgar Evers and John Hurst Adams, his experience with college sports helped to prepare him for leadership in the civil rights struggle.^[i]

As Jackson jumped into the protest movement, he found inspiration in Martin Luther King Jr.’s model of leadership. Accordingly, after college he attended seminary, became a Baptist minister, and expanded his activist work by joining King within the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

Jackson set up shop in Chicago, overseeing the SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket from 1966 until 1971, before stepping out and creating his own organization, People United to Save Humanity (PUSH). As Jackson biographer Marshall Frady put it, PUSH combined the economic equality focus of Operation Breadbasket with “a more general social ministry” and “an interracial popular movement” aimed at extending Martin Luther King Jr.’s “perspectives into all reaches of the nation’s life.”^[ii]

Jackson had support from star athletes. In the 1970s both Jackie Robinson and NFL standout Gale Sayers served in leadership roles within PUSH, and baseball stars Hank Aaron and Reggie Jackson counted Jackson as a friend. Writing in his autobiography, published in 1972, Jackie Robinson praised Jackson and offered his endorsement. “I think he offers the most viable leadership for blacks and oppressed minorities in America and also for the salvation of our national decency,” Robinson declared.^[iii]

As a minister and a former college athlete, Jackson technically had the markers of a “Christian athlete” identity. Yet, like Robinson, Jackson remained outside of the Christian athlete movement. One reason for this was his association with theological liberalism. Jackson was no radical and he had evangelical leanings—some observers saw him as theologically conservative—but his openness to the idea that Christianity did not offer the exclusive path to God made him suspect to evangelicals.^[iv] Of course, middlebrow Protestant members of Sportianity, including John Wooden, had expressed similar ideas.^[v] But they remained comfortably within the movement in part because they did not have two other traits associated with Jackson: his roots in the social justice wing of the Black church tradition and his political progressivism. While Jackson had a reputation for cultivating connections with celebrities and social elites, his messaging highlighted the marginalized and the oppressed.

Jackson’s engagement with sports followed this pattern. He developed friendships with athletes, but he focused his public declarations on matters of injustice. In 1973 Operation PUSH hosted a conference centered on racial inequality in athletics. “Virtually the entire sports establishment in this country is dependent on Black athletic excellence for its very existence,” Jackson said. And yet, he noted, Black people continued to be barred from leadership positions, ranging from those on the field of play (like the quarterback position) to those off the field, including general managers and athletic directors. The theme of racial disparity in sports leadership remained a consistent part of Jackson’s work in the years ahead.^[vi]

Although Jackson had considerable clout in the 1970s, he built a truly national political profile in the 1980s, launching presidential campaigns in the 1984 and 1988 Democratic primaries around what he called the “Rainbow Coalition.” Jackson’s political campaigns, occurring during the same years in which the Christian athlete movement was growing closer to the Republican Party, furthered his distance from Sportianity while also offering a different vision for Christian political engagement. In contrast to the Christian Right, which believed that Christians had a special relationship with the United States that needed protection, Jackson made pluralism and diversity central tenets of his creed.^[vii] He presented his Rainbow Coalition as a multicultural vision for American society comprised of “the white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay, and the disabled.”^[viii]

As Jackson moved into the realm of presidential politics, he kept his eye on the sports world. In 1987 he organized several panels focused on the absence of Black leaders in front office positions and suggested that Black baseball players should boycott games on July 4 to protest their lack of executive opportunities. In the early 1990s, Jackson organized the Rainbow Commission for Fairness in Athletics, which spent the next few years bringing attention to racial disparities in major sports leagues and organizations.^[ix]

Yet, Jackson’s stature as a political leader of international significance meant that his investment in sports was sporadic compared with his broader ambitions and activities. He did not establish a sustained ministry of presence within the sports industry that could offer an alternative to Sportianity rooted in Black Christian institutions and networks.

What Jackson represented for the Christian athlete movement, then, was not so much a direct challenge for control as a window into the ways racial identity could lead to different moral and political priorities for Christian athletes who otherwise attended the same chapel services and Bible studies. While white evangelicals viewed Jackson with alarm and suspicion, among Black Americans he was widely admired and respected—even though many Black church members held more theologically and socially conservative positions than did Jackson.^[x]

Jackson also exemplified the strong Black support for the Democratic Party and the sense among Black Americans that the Republican Party seemed uninterested in their concerns. As historian Leah Wright Rigueur notes, in the 1980s and 1990s Black affiliation with the Republican Party was never higher than fifteen percent, and Black support for a Republican presidential candidate never exceeded twelve percent. A study in the late 1980s found that eighty-three percent of Black people—and a remarkable fifty percent of Black Republicans—believed that the Republican party did not care about African Americans’ problems.^[xi]

The differences extended beyond political affiliation, reaching into the heart of the narratives that white and Black Christians told about their place in American society. While the Christian Right framed the 1960s as an attack on America’s foundations, many Black Americans saw the decade as a time when freedom and righteousness advanced. While the Christian Right saw Ronald Reagan’s presidency as a blessing from God, an opportunity to recover America’s traditional values, for many Black communities the Reagan years brought little benefit, with Black poverty rates remaining over thirty percent, nearly three times higher than the rate among white Americans, and a white backlash against government support for the poor that trafficked in stereotypes depicting Black people as lazy and dependent.^[xii]

To be sure, Jackson’s experience with the Democratic Party showed that it was not a fully welcoming place for Black Christian leadership either. Party insiders worked to thwart Jackson’s presidential aspirations in 1984 and 1988, and in 1992 eventual president Bill Clinton cultivated white voters by publicly humiliating Jackson at a Rainbow Coalition event.^[xiii] Even though Jackson’s religious identity was central to his influence—Black churches served as the base of support for Jackson when he launched his voter registration and presidential campaigns—many white Democratic leaders preferred to de-emphasize distinctly Christian language. They also weeded out socially conservative religious convictions, like opposition to abortion, as the culture wars took shape. In 1977 Jackson declared his opposition to abortion on the grounds that life “is really a gift from God” that people do not “have the right to take away.” By 1988, Jackson followed Democratic leaders in supporting abortion rights.^[xiv]

Yet, even if white progressive leaders within the Democratic Party were more suspicious of Christian rhetoric than white leaders in the Republican Party—and even if some Black Christians could overlap with conservative white Christians on social issues—most Black Christians felt that the Democratic Party at least listened to their concerns. The Christian Right may have viewed the GOP as “God’s Own Party,” but for African Americans, the racial group with the highest rates of church attendance, Bible reading, and prayer, the Democratic Party better represented their constellation of moral priorities.^[xv]

When Black Christian athletes became involved with Sportianity, then, they were, on average, coming from religious families and communities that voted for or were sympathetic to the Democratic Party, and they were entering a world in which the Republican Party was viewed as the only choice for true Christians. They were coming from communities that saw the continued effects of systemic racism in society, and they were entering a world in which those effects were generally denied or ignored. But they were also entering into a space that desperately wanted them to be involved. The logic was simple. Sports ministries, built on the foundation of celebrity endorsements, needed major sports stars. And increasingly in the 1980s, the biggest sports stars were African Americans: over seventy-five percent of players in the NBA, over fifty percent in the NFL, and eighteen percent in MLB, up from twelve percent in the 1960s (although this would decline in the 1990s while the rate of Latino players would soar).^[xvi]

These demographic shifts carried over into the world of sports ministry. While only a handful of Black athletes had been involved with the Christian athlete movement in its early years, by the 1980s it seemed as if they were front and center. With Andre Thornton, Madeline Manning Mims, Vince Evans, Mike Singletary, Julius Erving, Reggie White, A. C. Green, Darrell Green, and David Robinson—among many others—Sportianity became one of the few spaces in the world of evangelicalism in which Black people had substantial involvement.

In public, at least, the infusion of Black athletes into the Christian athlete movement brought few tensions. This was in part because Black athletes in the 1980s, regardless of their faith perspective, generally preferred not to prioritize social activism. Television money was flowing into sports and contracts were soaring; corporate sponsors were showing a greater willingness to sign Black athletes, at least those deemed noncontroversial. As Howard Bryant notes, these were the years when the model of the apolitical, corporate-friendly Black athlete took hold, with O. J. Simpson and Michael Jordan leading the way.^[xvii]

But the apparent lack of tension was also a matter of who controlled the narrative. The donors, grassroots supporters, and leaders of sports ministries still came primarily from white evangelical networks. They could choose what voices to promote, what causes to prioritize, and what parts of an athlete’s testimony to publicize. Probe deeper behind the official publications and pronouncements of sports ministry organizations, and it is clear that even in the doldrums of sports-focused racial activism, Black Christians affiliated with Sportianity were willing to speak about racism in ways that challenged the individualistic, colorblind approach preferred by white evangelicals.

Consider the example of Cleveland Indians slugger Andre Thornton. The first baseman received national attention in 1977 when his wife and daughter died in a tragic car accident. His steadfast faith earned the admiration and respect of fans and sports insiders, and he became a prominent leader in both Baseball Chapel and Pro Athletes Outreach, as well as one of the most recognizable Christian athletes of the early 1980s.^[xviii]

In addition to proclaiming his faith in Jesus, Thornton went on record with his views about racism. In 1980 when an anonymous baseball executive suggested that Black and Latino players were more likely to use drugs than white players, Thornton called him out for unfairly profiling athletes of color. The following year, Thornton wondered aloud why he and other Black players on the team “have not been promoted by the Indians like some of the other ballplayers.” In 1987, he agreed with Jesse Jackson that racism persisted in MLB, particularly in its hiring practices. “Jesse Jackson has reason to be concerned. It’s not just the teams. It’s the whole administrative arena of baseball,” he declared.^[xix]

Henry Soles, an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) minister and one of the few nonathlete Black leaders in Sportianity, expressed similar concerns about politics. Soles had entered sports ministry work in the 1970s, eventually founding Intersports Associates to facilitate his efforts. He focused on the Chicago area, working with the Bears, Cubs, and White Sox. But it was with the NBA’s Chicago Bulls that he had his greatest influence, serving as the team’s chaplain for three decades with the help of associate chaplain Scott Bradley, a Church of God in Christ minister.^[xx]

Writing in 1985, Soles discussed the frustration among Black Christians with the moral priorities of the Christian Right. “At present, blacks are waiting to see if white evangelicals will use some of their zeal to vigorously fight racism and stand with the black church on behalf of the poor and the oppressed,” he wrote. “The black community views the Moral Majority, and similar right-wing religio-political pressure groups, as weak in their application of biblical principles to the needs of oppressed people, in general, and blacks in particular.”^[xxi]

Neither Soles nor Thornton was a progressive activist in the vein of Jesse Jackson. Both had positive relationships with white leaders within Sportianity and generally worked as bridge-builders to connect Black and white Christians. And yet, white leaders within the Christian athlete movement paid little attention to their race-related concerns and certainly did not prioritize or amplify them. The presence of Black athletes in sports ministry spaces was considered progress enough.

^[i] Marshall Frady, Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson (New York: Random House, 1996), 116–120; Gary Dorrien, A Darkly Radiant Vision: The Black Social Gospel in the Shadow of MLK (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023), 104–187.

^[ii] Frady, Jesse, 264; See also Dorrien, A Darkly Radiant Vision, 104–187.

^[iii] Robinson, I Never Had It Made, 270; Howard Bryant, The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), 424.

^[iv] Adam L. Bond, The Imposing Preacher: Samuel DeWitt Proctor and Black Public Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 23–27; Gilbreath, Reconciliation Blues, 112–129.

^[v] Nudelman, “He Blinks and Breathes and Beats ’em All,” 8–10.

^[vi] “Justice for Blacks in Sports Subject of Black Athletes Meet,” Atlanta Daily World, March 27, 1973, 2.

^[vii] “You Can Pray if You Want To,” Christianity Today, August 12, 1977, 12.

^[viii] Jesse L. Jackson Sr., “The Rainbow Nation,” in Keeping Hope Alive: Sermons and Speeches of Reverend Jesse L. Jackson Sr., ed. Grace Ji-Sun Kim (New York: Orbis Books, 2020).

^[ix] “Aaron Hits Lack of Black Execs,” Chicago Defender, June 13, 1987, 52; Merlisa Lawrence, “The Silent Minorities,” Sports Illustrated, April 5, 1993, 108.

^[x] Frady, Jesse, 294, 492; Gilbreath, Reconciliation Blues, 112–129; “Jesse Jackson Spoke, but Not Many Listened,” Christianity Today, March 7, 1986, 47; Dorrien, A Darkly Radiant Vision, 418–484.

^[xi] Leah Wright Rigueur, The Loneliness of the Black Republican (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 305–306.

^[xii] Maurice A. St. Pierre, “Reaganomics and Its Implications for African-American Family Life,” Journal of Black Studies 21, no. 3 (March 1991): 325–340; Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 307–332; Kenneth A. Briggs, “Black Churches Forging Coalition to Battle Economic and Social Ills,” New York Times, December 12, 1982.

^[xiii] Frady, Jesse, 330–464; 484–487.

^[xiv] Jesse Jackson, “How We Respect Life Is the Over-riding Moral Issue,” Right to Life News, January 1977, 207; Colman McCarthy, “Jackson’s Reversal on Abortion,” Washington Post, May 21, 1988; Frady, Jesse, 77–78.

^[xv] Rigueur, The Loneliness of the Black Republican, 302–310; Joshua Farrington, Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 230; Robert Joseph Taylor et al., “Black and White Differences in Religious Participation: A Multisample Comparison,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35, no. 4 (December 1996): 403–410.

^[xvi] Adam J. Criblez, “White Men Playing a Black Man’s Game: Basketball’s ‘Great White Hopes’ of the 1970s,” Journal of Sport History 42, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 371–381; Mark Armour and Daniel R. Levitt, “Baseball Demographics, 1947–2016,” Society of American Baseball Research, https://sabr.org/bioproj/topic/baseball-demographics-1947-2012, accessed March 15, 2024; Oriard, Brand NFL, 210–249.

^[xvii] Howard Bryant, The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), 52–99. See also Johnny Smith, Jumpman: The Making and Meaning of Michael Jordan (New York: Basic Books, 2023).

^[xviii] Andre Thornton with Al Janssen, Triumph Born of Tragedy (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 1983).

^[xix] “Indians’ Andre Thornton Blasts Exec,” Afro-American, September 13, 1980, 10; Ronnie Clark, “Andy Thornton Irked over Indians Failure to Promote Black Players,” Call and Post, July 18, 10A; John Humenik, “Edwards Has Mixed Emotions,” The Times (Munster, IN), July 17, 1987, B1.

^[xx] Trudy S. Moore, “Athletes Come Together to Pray before They Play,” Jet, May 3, 1982, 28–29; Reverend Henry Soles interviewed by Adele Hodge, August 23, 2002, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive, http://www.thehistorymarkers.org/.

^[xxi] Henry Soles, “Confronting Change,” United Evangelical Action, January/February 1985, 4–6.

Read on for a hot take, a little bit of gratitude, and some overdue book recommendations!

Hot Take: Sports Chaplaincy Edition

I haven’t had time to really look into Matt Moberg, the Minnesota Timberwolves chaplain who went viral for his social media post about ICE (because, ironically, I’m trying to finish my book about Christianity and basketball).

But I’ve started to read up a bit. Here’s one interview:

https://sojo.net/articles/news/chaplain-helping-timberwolves-stand-solidarity-minnesota

It raises some fascinating questions about the role of sports chaplains.

I’ve spoken with some of my progressive Christian friends in the past about sports chaplains and why they don’t usually speak out in public on social issues. It’s not just about theology and it’s not that chaplains aren’t concerned about causes like racial justice. The biggest thing is that the nature of their role is centered on a ministry of presence and behind-the-scenes work that intentionally avoids the spotlight. When they become the center of the story, it’s more difficult for them to serve the team.

Many progressives get frustrated with this. They seem to think that the only way to truly advocate for a cause is to make an official public statement, to write an op-ed, to post a video. They’re more interested in someone saying the words they want to hear in a public forum than having someone who believes what they believe working on the ground in a quiet way to minister to and care for athletes.

In general, whenever a team chaplain becomes a big news story, it’s bad news for their continued involvement in the role. In The Spirit of the Game, I write about the original sports chaplains, entrepreneurial evangelicals like Doc Eshleman and Billy Zeoli, who loved talking to the press when they got started in the 1960s/1970s.

By the 1980s, they had been set aside in favor of a new generation of team chaplains who were far more circumspect in what they shared with the public.

In the interview with Moberg, he seems to get this. He made his comments from his personal social media account, not in his official capacity as a volunteer chaplain. He never invoked the Timberwolves or his role with the team. Even so, whoever put his words on a document with the Timberwolves logo and made it look as if it was an official statement did him no favors, at least when it comes to continuing in his role.

We’ll see how it plays out. His words clearly resonated with many people trying to make sense of the pain and devastation in Minneapolis. And the NBA is different with chaplaincy than the other sports leagues. It’s more decentralized and ceremonial, and chaplains are usually less integrated and involved with the team. It’s also usually more open to progressive perspectives. Back in the 1990s, after the Rodney King beating, the Chicago Bulls chaplain published a book where he directly addressed racism in sports and society.

But even if teams generally agree with the perspective of their sports chaplain, they never like to receive questions from the press about something their chaplain said.

Like I said, fascinating questions to explore. I’ll have to read and think more about this. For now, back to writing my final chapter, where I cover (among other things) the rise of sports chaplaincy in the NBA.

Professional News / Gratitude

Last month I visited Chicago, where I got to hang out with a bunch of historians at the annual conference of the American Society of Church History.

I’ve been attending ASCH for twelve years, since I was in grad school. But this year was especially meaningful, for three reasons.

First, I experienced a first: a conference panel devoted to my book. Many thanks to Hunter Hampton for organizing and to Karen Johnson and Brantley Gasaway for their generous and thoughtful responses (and to Leah Payne, who wasn’t able to attend).

I also received recognition for the Brewer Prize, awarded to outstanding scholarship in the history of Christianity by a first-time author.

And I got to congratulate two of my good friends on the publication of their brand new books: Hunter Hampton’s The Gridiron Gospel: Faith and College Football in Twentieth-Century America and Tim Grundmeier’s Lutheranism and American Culture: The Making of a Distinctive Faith in the Civil War Era.

I highly recommend both!

Book Recommendations

Speaking of book recommendations, I have a tradition of pausing in December and taking time to reflect on my favorite new books from the past year. I put my 2025 list together like usual, but I didn’t get the time to share my thoughts since I needed to focus on writing my own book.

Even though the end-of-the-year window has passed, I’d still like to put my list out. You can check it out below, along with a few words about my three favorite books.

Keep in mind that my reading mainly revolves around these three categories:

• Christian theology/living

• Sports history and culture

• American religious history

And my list is focused especially on books that can cross over between academic and general reader audiences. I left some of my favorite academic reads out.

3. Bobby Jamieson, Everything is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes’ Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness

Ecclesiastes is such a gift. When the world doesn’t make sense, when everything seems absurd, it gives language to the human condition. It names the paradoxes that are part of our everyday reality. Really, I think of Ecclesiastes as the antidote to the prosperity gospel and to the cult of success that shapes both American culture and American Christianity.

Although I’ve often turned to Ecclesiastes, Jamieson’s book helped me meditate and reflect on Ecclesiastes anew, and to consider how it speaks to my own heart and to our current culture moment. “Happiness comes not from trying to make this world satisfy all your desires but from realizing that it never will,” Jamieson writes.

That’s a message I need to hear (again and again).

(Also, shoutout to the TCU sports chaplain who is using the book in his work with the baseball team).

2. Seth Wickersham, American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback

I loved this book. It’s history, journalism, and memoir combined into one, along with a little bit of psychology. It tells the story of the cultural meaning of the quarterback in American life, the history of the quarterback position in the NFL, and also the mindset that is required to excel at one of the most demanding positions in all of sports.

You’ll come away with a better understanding of some of the all-time great QBs as well as a better sense of what it costs to reach that level of success.

“Most of them don’t question what they’re doing and what it’s turning them into,” Wickersham writes in one section, “lest the exercise itself threaten their identity and pierce the story they tell themselves.”

1. Molly Worthen, Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump

Molly Worthen’s latest is a sprawling, ambitious book that covers four-hundred years of American history, looking at a remarkable array of figures in American religion and politics who attracted followers and led movements that transformed American life in significant ways.

I like this book first and foremost because Worthen knows how to put together a compelling historical narrative. But I also found it helpful as a way to understand how and why movements grow, and why Americans have been so drawn to identifying with and following charismatic leaders.

Fellow scholars in my line of work can sometimes reduce religious movements to sociological categories, granting categories of identity too much explanatory power.

Without ignoring those social forces, Worthen sees something messier, more human, more surprising at play. “Humans are fundamentally religious, in the sense that we yearn to impose order on the chaos of existence and worship some source of ultimate meaning,” she writes. “Time and again, scholars overestimated the degree to which any humans—including themselves—would follow the evidence if it meant letting go of a story that provided the right balance of personal agency and surrender to a great cause.”

Spellbound is provocative, sometimes overstating its claims. And yet it was absolutely a joy to read from beginning to end.

It was a wonderful experience getting to spend time with professors, students, and staff from Wheaton’s Department of History and Archives & Special Collections. Special thanks to Katherine Graber, Karen Johnson, and Tracy McKenzie in particular for extending such a warm welcome.

I also enjoyed connecting with Mike Schauer, Wheaton’s Athletic Director. He provided a response after my talk, and we participated in a Q&A together. I love bridging academic and practitioner spaces, and this event was set up well to do that.

During my talk, I discussed my research and shared how I approach the study of sports. My main point was that we need to pay attention to the ways sports are embedded within cultural narratives that give shape and meaning to a community’s ideals and aspirations.

Check out the beginning of my talk below to see how I set up the conversation. You can find a link to the video recording at the bottom of this page as well.

It was nearly ten years ago that I first stepped foot on Wheaton’s campus, spending a week burying myself in the archives.

That week was transformative for my research project. Back then, as a grad student in the middle of a dissertation, I had only a hazy vision of what could be, only a vague outline of the sort of book I hoped that I could eventually write.

To come back now, with that vision fully formed in the shape of a book, is truly a gift.

The questions I want to think about tonight—the questions that drove me to visit Wheaton’s archives, the questions that have animated my mind for the last ten years—are these:

Why do sports matter? And how do sports shape us as people and as Christians?

Now, those questions can be theological questions. We could consider sports as a universal part of the human experience, born out of our createdness as human beings, with the desire to play built into us by a creative God who made us in His image.

But those questions are also historical questions. Because when we ask why sports matter, we need to ask: to whom and for what ends?

Sports take place in particular communities and contexts that give shape to their meaning and significance. Organize a game of American football in Athens, Greece, and no one is showing up. Do the same in McCook, Nebraska, where I grew up, and our entire town of 8,000 people is shutting down all other activities to gather at Weiland Field on Friday night to yell and cheer and high five and hug whoever happens to be nearby.

That’s because sports are embedded within cultural narratives that a community tells about itself—and it is those stories, woven in the history of a place, that ultimately provide a language and a framework that give sports its weightiness. Sports are a game, but to many they are more than a game. They hold something sacred: A shared, fully embodied activity, where the drama of possibility, of struggle and triumph, of a community’s aspirations and ideals, is put on full display.

Historian Frank Guridy puts it like this: “Stadiums make possible the spectacular staging of a society’s ideologies and self-perceptions.”

I think of my own experience. I was a pretty good student in high school and college. I got good grades. I enjoyed most of my classes.

And yet, if you compared the time and attention that I gave to even my favorite classes with the time and attention I gave to basketball, there was no comparison. Basketball was far more important to my sense of identity, to how I saw myself—it captured my devotion in a way that no other activity did during my formative teenage years.

I felt a tension during those years, however, because there was another part of my identity that I knew should matter even more. I was a pastor’s kid. I grew up reading and memorizing the Bible. I gave my life to Christ when I was 12 years old. And sometimes I felt as if my love for sports pulled me away from the love I knew I was supposed to have for Jesus.

I would read passages like Jesus’s command to turn the other cheek. Was being a fully committed Christian compatible with the competitive drive required to be a successful athlete?

An organization called the Fellowship of Christian Athletes helped me navigate those questions and integrate my identities as both a Christian and an athlete during my high school years. I learned from examples like San Antonio Spurs center David Robinson, who proved to me that it was possible to be both. I began to consider myself as part of a broader community of Christian athletes and coaches who saw sports as an opportunity to glorify God.

They say that historical research is often autobiographical. That’s true of me. When my time playing organized basketball came to an end after college, and as I moved into a career as an educator and began thinking about becoming a historian, I grew more and more interested in the history of organizations like FCA.

How was this community of Christian athletes and coaches, one that shaped my own life in profound ways, formed and developed?

What ideas did they promote? What tensions did they grapple with?

Essentially, I wanted to understand the stories that Christians in the United States have told about why sports matter and how we ought to engage and relate to this cultural activity.

That’s what brought me to Wheaton nearly 10 years ago: To explore those questions, to study the cultural narratives surrounding sports within Christian communities.

Watch a recording of the talk here.

I’ll be doing talks in Colorado Springs, Sioux Falls, and Boston in the coming weeks. Get more details here.

And finally, my book has nine reviews on Amazon right now. If you’ve read and enjoyed it, would you help me hit double digits?

You can read this press release from Baylor for more.

The American Society of Church History (ASCH) has been a major part of my development as a scholar. It hosted one of the main conferences I attended each year as a graduate student, where I got to test out my research and ideas. Many of my best friendships in the academic world have been with people involved in ASCH.

Beyond those relationships, another reason the award is so meaningful is that it validates what, on my best days, I hoped that my book could be. I wanted to make legitimate contributions to sports history, yes. But at its core I wanted to tell a story about American Christianity through the lens of sports. I wanted both sports fans and people who don’t follow sports at all to be able to pick it up and enjoy.

To have that vision validated by my fellow scholars is incredible.

There’s one more piece that I want to mention, too, and it has to do with the name that is on the front of the book: Paul Emory Putz.

I use my full name in my published writing to honor my grandfather, Emory, a man who lived in Nebraska most of his life. He made a living selling life insurance and raised five kids with his wife, Lucille (grandma Lucy to me).

Most of my memories of him revolve around sports. He taught me how to golf and to root for the Atlanta Braves. He went to almost every basketball game I ever played, from my 5th grade YMCA games all the way through high school. I still remember how he would scribble on a notepad in the stands, keeping his own hand-written stats. He was always way more generous with my assist totals than the official scorekeeper, giving me credit if a teammate missed a shot he felt they should have made.

Emory was smart and he had a way with people. But he didn’t have a college degree. Higher education was just not a big part of my family’s history on either side. As I’ve written before, I can see now how my upbringing in small-town Nebraska prepared me for my path as a historian, but it wasn’t always apparent. And I was the first person in my immediate family to get a bachelor’s degree.

That part of my story was not something I thought much about until I started my PhD program. For the first time in my life I began hanging around intellectuals and academics who came from places like Princeton, Yale, Notre Dame, and Wheaton.

My background? I got my bachelor’s degree from Grace University in Omaha, a small Bible college with a few hundred students that shut its doors for good in 2017. And my master’s degree came from the University of Nebraska Omaha, a state school whose history program focused on developing high school teachers.

I loved both schools, but they were not designed to produce future historians.

Coming from that context, I sometimes felt out of place as I entered the world of academia. It helped that I was studying at Baylor in a history department that prioritized community, connection, and support. And my dissertation supervisor, Barry Hankins, understood where I was coming from. He had played college basketball, spent time as a high school teacher before getting his PhD, and made his way as a historian while working at a small college.

Friendships formed through ASCH and through the welcoming community of American religious history scholars helped ease the transition, too—people like Paul Harvey, Heath Carter, and so many others.

But even with that support, academia is a space that can fundamentally change you. You spend most of your time around bookish, intellectual people who get excited about producing and analyzing highly specialized knowledge in niche subfields. Like athletes or coaches in sports, your whole sense of identity and self can become bound up in its systems, structures, norms, and networks.

Different people navigate those tensions in different ways. For me, the growing disconnect I felt between my small-town Nebraska roots and my aspirations as an intellectual and college professor made me more committed to maintaining my identity beyond academia.

I still wanted to be a historian. It’s just that I didn’t want to give up being Emory’s grandson to make it happen.

So I did something small. I decided to use my full name in my published academic work. It would honor Emory and it would remind me of who I was and where I came from.

Emory died in 2008, before I graduated from college, before I started my PhD journey. What would he think about a book like The Spirit of the Game? To be honest, there’s a good chance he probably wouldn’t make it through the whole thing. He was more of a newspaper sports pages type of guy.

But you can bet he would be proud—not because of what I produced, but simply because it was something important to me.

He also would have absolutely loved that a book by his grandson won an academic award. I can picture him slapping his knee, laughing with fascination at life’s surprises: “How about that?”

I feel the same way.

This week marks the one-year anniversary of my book’s publication. I continue to be so grateful for the support and encouraging feedback I’ve received.

Here are two of the most recent reviews/features:

• “A History of Muscular Christianity in the U.S.” (Christian Century)

• “Jocks for Jesus” (America Magazine)

If you’ve read and enjoyed the book, would you leave a review of your own at Amazon, Goodreads, or your favorite online book place?

And as always, please don’t hesitate to reach out if you’d like to connect!

It’s unclear how they determined what classes to include. Their list features subjects like “Arguing the End of the World” (Texas), “The Zombie in Media and Popular Culture” (Texas Tech), and “How to Build a Time Machine” (SMU).

But the course that really caught my attention was Baylor’s entry: Religion and Sport.

Several people reached out asking if I taught the class. I wish I could claim it. But credit goes to my colleague Andy Meyer, Associate Professor of Sport Foundations in the Department of Health, Human Performance, and Recreation. I’ve been a guest lecturer in his class, and I always come away impressed by the spirit of inquiry and engagement that he fosters.

So the class is great, and I’m glad it got some attention. But the idea that a class on religion and sports is unique, that it belongs with eccentric electives about zombies and time machines?

That is what’s crazy to me.

Religion and sports are two of the most significant cultural forces and sites of identity formation in modern life. If the goal of higher education is to cultivate a deeper understanding of our world, “Religion and Sports” should be a standard course in almost every university.

There are obvious logistical challenges to making this happen. We’re in an era where humanities courses are being cut, not added. And how that course is taught would significantly shape how much buy-in you could get from a broad base of students.

If the basic vibe is “sports and religion (especially Christianity) are problematic, and we’re going to learn just how problematic it gets when you combine those forces,” then it’s probably best to keep the course as an upper-level elective for a small group of religious studies majors.

If the goal instead is to foster a sense of wonder, curiosity, and fascination with the human experience and the cultural expressions we create, then you’ve got something. The intersection of religion and sports can be an entry point into questions about meaning and purpose, identity and belonging, and about the social worlds that shape us and that we in turn shape.

My friend Art Remillard’s new book, Bodies in Motion: A Religious History of Sports in America, is a great example of this approach. And there are other scholars who do this well, too.

If you work in higher education and have ever thought about putting together a religion and sports class, the resources are there! Hit me up and I’d be happy to help out with suggestions and sample syllabi.

SUMMER HIGHLIGHTS

Speaking of religion and sports, I wanted to share a couple of recent highlights from my work with the Faith & Sports Institute.

At the beginning of August, we hosted the 4th Global Congress on Sport and Christianity (GCSC). This is a conference that happens every three years, with new host sites each time. The goal is to provide a meaningful, interdisciplinary space for scholars and practitioners to explore sports and Christianity together.

As the conference organizer, there are always things you can do better. But as a team, we were thrilled with the overall experience and the feedback we’ve received. We had over 250 attendees from 35 different states and 10 different countries, and they came ready to connect, learn, and grow.

A few weeks after the Global Congress, we graduated our 10th student from Truett’s online MA in Theology and Sports Studies (MATSS) degree.

When we launched the degree in 2022, I had no idea if anyone would sign up. There wasn’t a market I could study, because there wasn’t any other seminary degree program quite like it.

Three years later, with 10 graduates and another 30 students enrolled, it’s clear to me that the program is meeting a need. Numbers matter to a point, but they are not the main goal. I get most excited about the depth and quality of the leaders who have come through the program.

Among our graduates we have people who are leading college athletic departments, coaching high school sports, serving in key roles within major sports ministries, ministering to college athletes, and even writing transformative books that will shape the ways Christians engage in sports in the future.

Both the Global Congress and the MATSS degree, I think, point to the growing desire to study and learn more about religion and sports—whether it is as a Christian who wants to serve and work within sports out of a sense of mission and calling, or as an educator and scholar who wants to study and understand our world more deeply.

I’m glad that Baylor is a space where this work can happen in multiple ways.

It’s been a few months since my last post, so here are a few other media things I’ve done over the summer:

• For Christianity Today, I wrote about the religious roots of Indiana’ basketball obsession. The essay is a preview of some of the material that will be part of my new book with Eerdmans (more on that in future post): The Religious Roots of Hoosier Hysteria

• For The Gospel Coalition, I wrote about Scottie Scheffler’s viral interview moment. This might be my most-read (certainly most-shared) piece in a long time: ‘What’s the Point?’: Struggle and Hope in Scottie Scheffler’s Interview

• I was interviewed for an article that ran in Men’s Health. The author did a really great job diving into the fascinating world of Christian bodybuilding: Faith, Fitness, and the New Gospel of #Gains: Inside the Conflicted World of Christian Bodybuilders

• I was honored to be a guest on Skye Jethani’s podcast. He asked great questions and sparked some new ideas:

It’s one of my favorite podcast conversations so far. We got to dive into my book and touch on all sorts of topics related to sports and Christianity: the culture wars, the creation of sports ministry, the influence of Barstool Sports, the Christian athlete GOAT, racial reconciliation, and much more.

During our conversation, Collin asked two questions that I’d like to highlight here.

First, he asked if the study of sports and Christianity is growing as an academic field. Second, he shared his own experience in Christian media and publishing. Christians seem to love watching sports, he said, but they are less interested in deeper reflection about sports. He asked if I saw that trend too, and why that might be the case.

Check out the episode to hear my full response. What I didn’t share in the moment is that I think the two questions are related.

When I started my doctoral program in history twelve years ago, there was a stigma around studying sports. It was fine as a passion project, the sort of thing you did with your second book, after you got tenure. But it wasn't “serious” enough for academics, certainly not for those looking to establish their credentials.

Of course, there were pioneering scholars who paved the way for people like me: Shirl Hoffman, James Mathisen, Clifford Putney, Joseph Price, William Baker, and others. But they were exceptions to the norm, operating in a variety of academic disciplines that did not always intersect (kinesiology, sociology, history, religious studies, theology).

Over the last decade, acceptance and interest has grown. Major academic publishers are more open to books on sports and Christianity, from Annie Blazer’s Playing for God: Evangelical Women and the Unintended Consequences of Sports Ministry (NYU Press) to Randall Balmer’s Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America (University of North Carolina Press) to my own book with Oxford University Press. There are a variety of reasons for this—perhaps I’ll get into them in a future post. But the main point is that, although no area of higher education is thriving right now, the study of sports and Christianity has increasingly become a legitimate subject of inquiry.

And that brings me to the second question. As the conversation about sports and Christianity has expanded in academic circles, editors and writers at Christian publications have grown intrigued as well. But, as Collin noted, interest from the intellectual class does not automatically translate to interest from ordinary Christian readers. Those readers might love sports and love Jesus, but they don’t necessarily want to read the articles or buy the books that encourage deeper reflection on those subjects.

Why is this?

For one, much of the intellectual work on sports and Christianity is not written for people outside of those intellectual spaces. It prioritizes theory over practice. It’s critical more than constructive. It’s detached more than engaged. It often requires familiarity with the tools and texts of advanced graduate studies, creating a higher bar of entry into the conversation. It’s also a conversation about sports among people who are not usually participants within sports.

To be clear, we need scholars doing their thing, ideally from a variety of perspectives and from the distance needed to honestly and critically evaluate sports as a cultural practice. But we should not expect that Christian sports fans and practitioners are automatically going to find scholarly work helpful, meaningful, or worth engaging simply because it’s about a thing that they love. If we want scholarship and theological reflection to connect with practice, we need people inside and outside the academy to work together to cultivate spaces for shared conversation and collaboration.

Here's the good news: I think we are seeing signs that this sort of work is happening, and that Christians are growing more interested in deeper reflection about sports. I see this in my role leading the Faith & Sports Institute, where I get to regularly connect with people like:

• Sports ministry leaders who are seeking out and developing stronger and more robust theological resources for their work.

• Athletic directors and coaches at Christian high schools and colleges who are drawing on research to implement comprehensive approaches to faith and sports integration.

• Parents with kids in youth sports who are seeking guidance on how to lead and disciple their kids well.

The response to my book is another example. Although it was written with the tools and methods of academic history, what stands out to me the most are the positive reactions I’ve received from non-academic readers, especially sports ministry leaders.

It’s true that continued challenges remain. There is plenty of scholarship that isn’t helpful at all for sports fans and practitioners, and there are strong incentives within the sports industry that keep Christians from asking hard questions or engaging in introspection. But I see lots of opportunities ahead for Christians who love and care about sports, and who also want to analyze and reflect on how best to integrate athletics with faithful Christian perspectives and practice.

If you are in that category, two events this summer can help you get more involved. From June 8-10, Baylor’s Center for School Leadership is collaborating with the Faith & Sports Institute to host a gathering for Christian coaches and ADs. Baylor Athletics will be participating as well, with several panels featuring coaches and staff. The goal is to bring together Christians who are pursuing high-level competitive excellence and authentic faith formation, and to discuss challenges and possibilities in that work. Get more details here.

Then from July 31 – August 2, the Faith & Sports Institute is hosting the 4^th Global Congress on Sport and Christianity. Held every three years since 2016, the Global Congress has helped to galvanize growth in both the academic study of sports and Christianity and also deeper reflection from Christian practitioners. Check out Sport.Faith.Life. to learn more and stay connected to the Global Congress movement, and visit the conference website to get information about the gathering this summer.

I’ll be at both events, and so will other leaders who will be sharing their experience, expertise, and wisdom. If you want to think more deeply about the connections between sports and Christianity—and help others do the same—I’d love to see you this summer.

Let’s keep the conversation going!

Want to get a glimpse of the people you’ll get to connect with at the Global Congress? Here’s a selection of books authored by speakers and participants:

The Papio South Titans were playing in the Nebraska state basketball tournament. I couldn’t make the drive up from Texas, but I was going to do whatever I could to follow along. From my laptop screen I watched as the Titans, led by my high school basketball coach, went on one of those magical March runs, winning three straight games and culminating with a 61-58 win and a state title.

After watching the Titans cut down the nets, I took to social media to articulate why it mattered. I’m sharing that post below. If you’ve ever had a coach or mentor who changed or shaped your life, I think you’ll be able to relate.

I want to share a few thoughts about Joel Hueser and what makes his state championship so special to former players like me

I was a junior on Coach Hueser's 2003 McCook team, his last at that school before he became the first coach in the history of Papillion La Vista South High School.

We went to the state tournament that year and were legit contenders to win it all. But we got upset in the first round.

In the locker room after the game, in what must have been one of the most difficult moments of Hueser's career, he had to not only provide comfort and perspective to a devastated group of kids—he also had to say goodbye.

He let us know he had accepted a job at a new school. He wanted us to hear it from him. It was a move up, to a bigger city and the largest division in the state. It was a chance to build a program from the ground up. And that was Hueser's gift: He had the discipline, patience, and vision to build a sustained culture of basketball development.

He had done it in McCook. He had turned our football town into a place where basketball was also a big deal, where players actually learned how to play the game and where we consistently made state tournament appearances.

For me, Hueser was more than a coach, too. There's a reason I mention him in the acknowledgments to my book. He was an important spiritual mentor, helping to lead the Fellowship of Christian Athletes at our school. He was the person who really inspired me to begin to think about what it looks like to combine faith and sports.

Losing a coach like that before my senior year was incredibly hard. And yet I always knew it was the right decision.

I ended up moving to Omaha for college, close to Hueser's new school, and I became an honorary Titan myself. I helped out at some of his first basketball camps in Papillion. I attended games when I could, and I regularly stopped by to hang out and talk about hoops and life.

I saw him stay true to his vision of patient, long-term development and community investment, even as success in high school basketball seemed to be moving in different directions.

After I moved to Texas I stayed in touch and continued to follow the Titans. Hueser had some good teams and several state tournament appearances over the years. But the thing that makes him special is that it's always been about process, about *how* you do the thing.

He didn't need a state championship to validate his lifetime in coaching or the way he goes about teaching and leading. But man, there's a part of me that kind of needed it. It's good to see, once again, that championships are compatible with humility, patience, and quiet faithfulness.

Congrats Coach Hueser! I couldn't be happier for you and your team—and for the many people like me who have been inspired and encouraged by your example.

More basketball thoughts:

The best sporting event of the year, in my opinion, is March Madness. The sheer amount of basketball, the high-stakes intensity and drama, the element of surprise—it’s hard to beat.

And all of that joy and exhilaration—in fact, the sport itself—would not exist if not for Christian people working through Christian institutions to spread Christian ideas.

My next book project, under contract with Eerdmans, focuses on the Christian history and meaning of basketball. To get a glimpse of some of the themes I’ll be exploring, check out this chapel talk I delivered at Truett Seminary.

“This generation of youth is living on leftovers from a previous generation and most of it is thin, precarious, and inadequate,” he wrote. “They need God for themselves—for personal living, social change, morality, and a meaning to their universe.”

I’ve been thinking of that quote over the past couple of years. Like the 1930s, people today are living through major social upheaval and uncertainty, a dizzying re-orientation of the world. One response seems to be a heightened yearning for spiritual meaning and purpose—and in the United States, a greater openness to the claims of Christianity.

We see it through anecdotes and examples across culture: the Asbury University revivals of 2023, the growing internet popularity of Christian musical artists like Forrest Frank, the conversions of intellectuals and skeptics.

But we especially see it in sports.

There was the 2024 Ohio State football team, where a group of players made waves early in the season for leading what NPR described as a “religious revival” on campus.

During the College Football Playoffs, a stream of players took turns publicly proclaiming their faith. Boise State’s Ahmed Hassanein was typical. "I want to start off and say all glory to Jesus Christ,” he said in a post-game interview. “He's a true champion."

There was also plenty of Jesus talk throughout the NFL season and during the Super Bowl. Afterwards too. “God is good,” Super Bowl MVP Jalen Hurts told a reporter. “He's greater than all the highs and the lows."

In college basketball, the Auburn men’s team, ranked first in the nation for much of the year, has a roster full of Christian players who have embraced a “call God” celebration after big plays.

On the women’s side, one of the game’s top stars, Connecticut guard Paige Bueckers, sings gospel music during warm-ups and reads a devotional book, God x Basketball, before every game.

There are also Olympic athletes like hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, who displayed her faith with depth and thoughtfulness during the Paris Olympics. Her identity in Christ, she said, sets her “free to run the race God has set out for me to run.”

The point is, if you’re looking for anecdotal evidence of religious renewal, there’s plenty of it in sports.

There’s also some data underscoring the anecdotes. Pew’s Religious Landscape Survey found that Christianity is no longer on the decline in the United States. And earlier this year, a survey by Sports Spectrum found that most American sports fans want to see athletes talk about their faith. As I wrote for Christianity Today, the survey suggests that sports are a cultural space that is especially open to Christianity.

So what do we make of all this?

I’d like to offer four observations/thoughts:

1. Yes, there is something new going on.

Because I study the history of sports and Christianity, I’m frequently asked if there is something different about our moment compared with what’s happened in the past.

The short answer: I do think something new is happening.

I don’t know if I would call it a “revival.” More than anything, it’s an intensification of trends that have been building over the years. But the scale and scope of the blending of sports and Christianity in public life is at a higher level than it’s ever been. It’s clear that athletes feel more emboldened to share their faith, and there’s a social media ecosystem that allows them to connect directly with fans and supporters who share their convictions—and also to Christian influencers who love to amplify faith-themed quotes and statements coming from the sports world.

Even the mainstream sports media, which downplayed religious themes in the past, has shown more openness. When ESPN analysts are pausing and praying live on television, it’s clear that something is shifting.

2. Whatever this moment is, it has a history.

While something new might be happening, the blending of sports and faith that we see now didn’t emerge out of nothing. As I try to show in my book, it took decades of behind-the-scenes work to build and grow the ecosystem of sports ministries (led by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Athletes in Action, Pro Athletes Outreach, and others) that serve and shape Christian athletes and coaches today.

You might never see or hear about the sports ministers and chaplains involved in this work. But it’s because of their consistent and faithful presence within the sports industry that so many athletes and coaches feel comfortable and confident sharing their faith.

If we want to understand the depth of the Christian sports movement, we need to move beyond the post-game quotes and pay attention to the behind-the-scenes institutions and structures that provide the resources and support to make it possible.

3. Politics matter, but it’s not the main thing.

At this point, I probably have two types of readers. Some are thinking “Amen! Isn’t it great that sports have become so open to the claims of Christ?”

And there’s another set thinking “Hold up! What kind of Christianity are we talking about? Is this movement just propaganda for right-wing politics and Christian Nationalism?”

To the second group, I’d say this: There are definitely political implications to what is happening in sports. Personal expressions of faith must be situated within a larger cultural and political context, one that (for young men in particular) has moved in more politically conservative directions in recent years.

But I don’t think that labeling all of this activity as right-wing political activism is helpful or accurate to the reality of what is going on. Put simply, politics are not the main thing Christian athletes and coaches have in mind when they talk about the meaning of faith in their lives.

Instead, they are seeking guidance for everyday living. They want religious resources to meet the practical concerns of the sports world: how to build and sustain healthy marriages; how to navigate injuries and setbacks; how to achieve peak performance; how to steward finances; how to handle the pressures and anxiety of being an athlete.

Conservative-leaning evangelical sports ministries have been able to build a thriving network in sports because they have focused on meeting those needs.

In contrast, progressive and liberal religious groups have failed to gain a foothold in sports in part because they’re the ones who have emphasized political activism as the primary task of Christian athletes. They’ve tended to engage in sports (if they do at all) as critics or activists, not as a ministry of presence walking alongside people within sports.

The racial and ethnic demographics of sports are uniquely diverse and pluralistic, too, in ways that can lead to different combinations of faith and politics than might be seen in other cultural spaces. While politics matter to the Christian movement in sports, I would be careful about making politics the main driver of what is going on.

4. Soundbites and viral moments aren’t the goal.

Finally, a word to my other group of readers: those Christians cheering on what is happening in sports.

It’s a good thing that Jesus’s name is proclaimed in and through sports. If it’s just a soundbite or a video clip and stops there, however, it’s missing the point of what really matters. We need to be careful that we’re not more captivated by celebrity status and winning than by the fruits of the spirit that result from faithfully following Christ—from a “long obedience in the same direction.”

“By some strange alchemy,” theologian Miroslav Volf warns in A Public Faith, “‘Take up your cross and follow me’ morphs into ‘I’ll bring out the champion in you.’”

Sports are especially prone to this sort of distorted thinking. But the answer is not to discourage Christian athletes from speaking about the meaning and significance they find in Christ. Volf is once again helpful here. In A Public Faith, he writes about athletes who pray, affirming that “it is important to connect God with success in work.”

This is not because of a prosperity gospel logic—If I pray the right words and muster up enough faith, God will bless me with worldly success. Instead, Volf writes, it’s because God is the giver of any gifts and talents we have. “If God is the source of our being, then we do all our work in the power that comes from God.”

Former NFL player Benjamin Watson is one of the most thoughtful public voices speaking about faith and sports, and his words are worth quoting in full:

What happens a lot of times is that an athlete says, “I love Jesus.” And then the next thing you know, every single Christian organization on campus and around campus wants you to come speak. It doesn’t matter if you just became Christian yesterday or two days ago or if you just say it because that’s what people say culturally.

This is what people do in America sometimes. They think, Man, if that person says something about Jesus, then God will use that to save everybody. Maybe or maybe not, because a lot of people have been hurt by those who have professed Christ on a large scale. It’s been shallow and inconsistent, and there have been charlatans….We’re not all at the same maturity level. Part of becoming more mature as a believer is in your own personal practice but also the helpful and loving critique of others.

As the Christian movement in sports grows—and I think it will—there will be challenges that come from hype and flash over substance. There will also be opportunities to meet people where they are and to help one another grow in depth and maturity.

What about you and your circles? Have you noticed a growing interest in the connection between faith and sports? What do you think is going on, and where do you see things going in the future?

…

Book update: We’re now four months into the release of The Spirit of the Game. I’ve been incredibly encouraged by the response so far. The book has opened the door to some exciting opportunities that I’ll be able to share in more detail in the year ahead as well.

If you have read and enjoyed The Spirit of the Game, would you take a couple minutes to leave a review at the online marketplace of your choice?

Thanks for reading and supporting!

It’s an inexact science, more impressionistic than comprehensive. It has to be. In December I inevitably have a stack of new books on my “to read” list sitting on the desk in my office or the end table near my bed. Many are books I suspect I’ll love if I just carve out the time to dive in (for example: James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis).

But, as the writer of Ecclesiastes puts it, “Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.”

So I do my best. I read as much as I can and then in December I pause and reflect back on my year in books. Usually, my reading revolves around these three categories:

• Christian theology/living

• Sports history and culture

• American religious history (especially Christianity)

I read both old and new. This year, J.H. Bavinck’s The Riddle of Life, a short little book written in the 1930s, was a favorite. And Jeremy Treat’s more recent The Atonement: An Introduction (from 2023) was especially meaningful. But the list below represents new books only. While it doesn’t capture everything that I enjoyed (there were so many good new books this year), it captures something.

If you see a book that resonated with you, I’d love to hear about it. Or perhaps there’s a book missing from my list that you think I’d enjoy. In either case, drop me a note and let me know!

10. Jemar Tisby, The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance

My take: I’ve read, enjoyed, and benefited from Jemar Tisby’s previous books, starting with The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism. To me, Tisby is a model for historians seeking to connect the academy and the church. As a public intellectual, he has a gift for synthesizing historical scholarship on race and Christianity and presenting it in an accessible way for lay Christians.

The Spirit of Justice offers more in that style from Tisby, but with even deeper research and a broader scope. Here, his focus is on Americans from the past (primarily Black Christians) whose faith inspired them to resist racism. With vignettes and profiles, his sweeping and compelling narrative introduces readers today to a “great cloud of witnesses” who pursued racial justice and human dignity in the face of deep and significant opposition and struggle.

9. Eliza Griswold, Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church

My take: I remember watching the classic 1967 documentary A Time for Burning and thinking (in a good way) “I can’t believe they allowed this to be made!” The award-winning film chronicled the efforts of a white Lutheran pastor in Omaha, Nebraska, as he sought to engage his church in racial reconciliation efforts. It was revelatory for its unvarnished access. It showed, in real time, the tensions and struggles of ordinary Christians navigating the profound social changes of the civil rights movement.

Circle of Hope is not exactly the same, but it evoked similar feelings. Here, award-winning journalist Eliza Griswold provides an intimate portrait of a Philadelphia-based progressive evangelical church in crisis as it navigates issues like COVID-19, anti-racist activism, LGBTQ+ inclusion, and more. Griswold’s level of access, stretching from 2019 through 2023, is astounding. And the story she tells is deeply empathetic to all parties involved, with layers of nuance as she chronicles the painful disintegration of a church (as well as its new birth in other forms).

For anyone seeking to reflect on the cultural challenges and tensions facing the American church over the past decade, this is an essential read.

8. Daniel Silliman, One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search for Salvation

My take: When I first heard that Eerdmans was publishing a religious biography of Richard Nixon, I’ll admit it: I was not interested. I could see the narrative already. A chapter on Nixon’s Quaker upbringing here, a chapter on Nixon as the Christian Cold Warrior there. A big section on Nixon as the harbinger of white Christian nationalism, with Nixon cast as the president who set the stage for the rise of the Religious Right. Perhaps some moralizing about ethics and power.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just that it would be another in a long line of books about white evangelical politics, with Nixon as the conduit to get to that theme. It would be a story I’ve read in numerous books over the past few years.

But then I saw that Daniel Silliman was the author. Silliman is both a historian and a journalist, working with Christianity Today. He has a knack for finding unique angles to his stories, for seeing what others might miss. And he knows how to write.

So I gave it a chance.

Silliman did not disappoint. In One Lost Soul he offers an original and provocative interpretation and analysis of Nixon’s life. “Nixon wanted to be loved by God,” Silliman claims, “but couldn't figure out how.”

That yearning to prove himself worthy of love and acceptance, in Silliman’s telling, was a driving force propelling Nixon’s unlikely rise to power.

Of course, Silliman provides plenty of detail on the cultural and political implications of Nixon’s ambitions and actions. But by starting with Nixon’s existential questions—questions of belonging and acceptance, of what it means to be human and how we relate to God—Silliman drew me in. In the end, I went from a reluctant reader to knocking out the book in one weekend.

7. Louis Moore, The Great Black Hope: Doug Williams, Vince Evans, and the Making of the Black Quarterback

My take: Sports historian Louis Moore, one of today’s leading voices on the history of sports and race in America, has reached “immediately pre-order” status with me. If he publishes something, I’m going to read it.

His first two books highlighted both his specialty and his versatility

In I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1880-1915 (2017), Moore established his academic credentials. Published with a university press, this is a scholarly book presenting original research analyzed through lenses of race, class, and gender. It highlights Moore’s commitment to the craft. As a scholar, his deep dives into microfilm of old newspapers enable him to get at sources and angles that scholars looking only at newspapers available online will miss.

We Will Win The Day: The Civil Rights Movement, the Black Athlete, and the Quest for Equality (2017), meanwhile, is more of a teaching book. It’s the sort of text that could be the centerpiece for a class on sports and race. While it includes Moore’s trademark microfilm research, it also has more historical synthesis, presenting a broad narrative that is accessible to students.

The Great Black Hope is Moore’s best work yet. It’s built on a foundation of original research, with plenty of microfilm digging. It’s also a narrative-driven book, written for a general audience.

Focusing on Vince Evans and Doug Williams, two NFL quarterbacks who launched their careers in the 1970s, challenging racist stereotypes about the ability of Black men to play the position, Moore shows how the story of the Black quarterback is intertwined with the story of race in America. At the same time, he tells a deeply human story about two unique and remarkable individuals—and he offers analysis on changing styles and strategy in football as well.

There have been several other books on the rise of the Black quarterback in recent years. You don’t have the full history until you’ve read Moore’s book.

6. Elesha Coffman, Turning Points in American Church History: How Pivotal Events Shaped a Nation and a Faith

My take: To me, one of the most daunting tasks you can give a historian is to ask them to write a concise and accessible one-volume history of a topic.

So many of these books have already been written. There’s so much material to cover. It seems impossible to produce something fresh and new. I’d rather dig into the archives for original research and build a book from that.

Yet, in Turning Points in American Church History, historian (and Baylor colleague) Elesha Coffman succeeds with style. Using thirteen carefully selected historical events as hinge points to cover 500 years of American Christianity, Coffman provides a rare combination of expert and interesting. She deftly blends captivating writing and sharp analysis with wide-ranging mastery of historical content.

This is a book that would work well in a classroom. It can also be read and enjoyed by anyone who wants to learn more about the fascinating story of American Christianity.

5. Leah Payne, God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music

My take: I grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s, in the heyday of the Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) scene. As a pastor’s kid taught to be suspicious of secular music, CCM was a formative influence in my life.

The first musical artists I listened to were CCM giants like Keith Green, Steven Curtis Chapman, Michael W. Smith, and Twila Paris. As I got older, I moved onto CCM music with a slightly cooler vibe: Switchfoot, Reliant K, Jars of Clay. I had a Five Iron Frenzy phase, too. And I also got into the strange world of Christian hip hop. Cross Movement, Grits, John Reuben, Mars Ill, and—my #1 favorite—LA Symphony. In high school, I was probably the only person in all of Nebraska with LA Symphony stickers plastered on the back of their car.

How deep was I into the Christian music subculture? I would make weekly stops at my local Christian bookstore to see what new CDs came in; my first internet message board experience was with the CCM Magazine website; and my first internet writing gig was penning music reviews for Sphere of Hip Hop, an indie Christian rap website.

I could not possibly be more inside the target audience for historian Leah Payne’s new book.

Even with my lofty expectations, God Gave Rock & Roll to You delivers. There’s a reason it has been on numerous “best of” lists for 2024, including winning best History/Biography book by Christianity Today. It’s a brilliant work that blends critical scholarly analysis with a sense of empathy and understanding for people like me who have fond memories of their CCM days.

Reading it helped me see that the Christian music subculture that I simply took for granted—as if it emerged organically—was forged out of a combination of strategic, intentional choices by evangelical gatekeepers and musical artists, and also broader consumer culture trends in American society.

It helped me see, too, how the music I listened to growing up shaped my social and political imagination (for better and for worse).

4. Gavin Ortlund, What It Means to Be Protestant: The Case for an Always-Reforming Church

My take: A few years ago I was talking with a friend and fellow historian about what it’s like to be an evangelical Christian historian. We agreed it’s not all that bad—at least not in our experience. We’ve felt welcomed and supported by fellow scholars who do not share our religious perspectives. And we have a whole network of Christians historians who provide encouragement, too.

Still, in the secular academy, there is a subtle impulse to engage in what my friend called the “ritual disavowal.” It’s the move where you mention or admit to your evangelical affiliations, but at the same time make sure to distance yourself from “those” Christians—the ones that progressive folks see as irredeemably bigoted or hopelessly ignorant.

“I’m a Christian, but I’m not that kind of Christian.”

This impulse, combined with the type of critical analysis we do as scholars, means that those of us who study Christianity usually spend a lot of time engaging with all that is wrong with our faith tradition—all the ways that people and organizations from the past (and present) have failed in significant and sobering ways.

This is important work and should by no means be diminished. But if all that exists of evangelical Protestantism is what academic historians describe in books written about the movement (especially those written in the past decade or so), there is no good reason to remain within the faith. There are other options on the table, after all: Catholicism, #exvangelical deconstruction, ecumenical/mainline Protestantism, agnosticism or atheism, go-through-the-motions cultural Christianity, you name it.

But for me at least, it’s within evangelical Protestant churches and institutions that my faith comes alive, that my soul is nurtured. These are the spaces where I’ve encountered Jesus, where I’ve witnessed and experienced spiritual transformations that defy logic.

So I’ve remained.

Still, to sustain my own faith, I’ve found that I need to be reminded of what it is ultimately about—not just on a personal level in my devotional life, but also in its big ideas. I need to engage with and reflect on the essential claims my faith tradition makes about ultimate reality, about who God is and who we are as human beings.

For me this year, Gavin Ortlund’s What It Means To Be Protestant helped to serve that purpose. Short and accessible, written for a broad audience, it provided a positive and constructive reminder of the core elements of historic Protestantism, of key ideas and teachings from the Reformation that provide the basic structure to my evangelical understanding of God, the Bible, the church, and the Christian life.

Importantly, too, Ortlund’s book reminded me that critical analysis need not be set in contrast to a constructive vision of the faith. Instead, the work of scholars and historians can serve a distinctly Protestant purpose—helping to reform and refine the church so that it more fully conforms to the gospel.

3. Kevin Baker, The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City

My take: These days I’m more into football and basketball than baseball. And as a proud Midwesterner, I’m not inclined to give undue attention to big coastal cities. They get enough of it already.

And yet, I can’t deny the riveting power of this book. Covering the emergence of baseball in the 19th century through its place at the center of the American sports landscape in the 1940s, it’s a sweeping narrative history of both New York City and of the baseball teams that called it home. Journalist and historian Kevin Baker focuses heavily on the Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers, but also gives attention to Negro League teams and other New Yorkers who shaped the game.

Baker writes with the flair of a novelist and the robust research of a scholar. He weaves in stories about the fascinating cast of characters who made New York baseball go, while maintaining an eye for cultural and historical context.

Through it all, he keeps the game central. While Baker knows that baseball provides a lens into broader developments in American society, he also revels in shifts and transformations in the sport itself—in the way the game was played and in the competitive drama played out on the diamond.

It adds up to a truly enjoyable achievement. This book clocks in at nearly 500 pages—yet when I was done, I wanted it to keep going.

2. Frank Andre Guridy, The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play

My take: I wrote a review of this fantastic book for Christianity Today.

Here’s an excerpt:

A professor of history at Columbia University and director of the Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rights, Guridy did not begin his career as a sports historian. His first book, the award-winning Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (2010), established him as a leading scholar of the Black Freedom Movement in the United States and the Caribbean.

With his second book, he turned his attention to sports, producing The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (2021). His background and expertise gave him a vantage point to see and understand sports as a cultural phenomenon, with an eye toward the broader social and political meanings bound up in the games we play.

In The Stadium, Guridy continues this line of inquiry, weaving sports history with economics and politics, culture and geography, race and class, gender and sexuality. “Stadiums,” he writes, “make possible the spectacular staging of a society’s ideologies and self-perceptions.”

Guridy sweeps through American history as he explores those “ideologies and self-perceptions” from the late 19th century to the present. Throughout, he emphasizes a core tension at the heart of the stadium’s presence in American culture. “Elites have constructed stadiums as monuments to affluence, technological wonder, and exclusivity,” he writes. “Yet, America’s marginalized groups have transformed them into venues to express their desires and discontents, and to proclaim a more inclusive vision of American society.”

While Guridy’s narrative is soaring in scope, he also shows a careful eye for granular detail. He describes the physical landscape and the shifting architecture, aesthetics, and design of stadiums. He explores the human experience of the stadium too, including the sights, sounds, and smells that Americans would have encountered when they clicked through the turnstiles. And he identifies particular places in specific cities as anchor points for his narrative—symbols of the broader themes he tries to illustrate…

…The Stadium remains an essential read and a book of lasting importance for anyone interested in exploring the deeper social meanings of American sports. Guridy shows with clarity and insight that stadiums are “inextricable parts of American social, political, and cultural life”—and that they will continue to mirror and reflect the debates, tensions, and developments in American society in the years ahead.

Thanks to this fascinating book, I’ll never look at stadiums in the same way.

1. Sabrina Little, The Examined Run: Why Good People Make Better Runners

My take: My favorite book of the year comes from philosopher and ultramarathon runner Sabrina Little.

Taking on an ancient question—can sports help us cultivate virtue?—Little combines her experience as an elite runner with her expertise as a scholar to answer in the affirmative. Along the way she provides examples and suggestions for how to do this well, and takes on various concerns and complications that come from the culture of sports. And she writes with a personable and captivating style, too.

While sports scholars and philosophers will be interested in The Examined Run, it’s a book that belongs to practitioners. If you’re a coach, athletic director, parent, or athlete who believes that sports have the potential to develop our character in positive ways, you need to read this book.

I’d rank it right alongside Joe Ehrmann’s InSideOut Coaching: How Sports Can Transform Lives (2011) as a book that provides a deep, thoughtful, and constructive vision for cultivating human flourishing through sports.

Bonus: Check out my interview with Little to get a better sense of what the book is about:

Double bonus: Little will be a keynote speaker at the 4th Global Congress on Sport and Christianity, held next year at Baylor (check it out and join us!).

One final note: 2024 was a great year for books, and it was a big year for me as an author, too. If you’d like to read the most recent coverage of The Spirit of the Game, check out the January issue of First Things. Matthew Schmitz wrote a really good piece exploring and expanding on some of my key arguments. Give it a read here.

If you’ve had a chance to read the book, I’d love to hear about it! Please feel free to send me a note and let me know your thoughts.

And if you enjoyed it, I’d be grateful if you would help spread the word. Sharing on social media, leaving a review on Amazon or other online spaces, or simply telling a friend are all super helpful.

Thanks so much for reading and for your support this year. Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you and yours!

Outside the air is crisp and cold, perfect for a November night in the Midwest. Inside, the scent of molasses and ginger from holiday cookies lingers. It’s warm, comfortable, welcoming. It feels like home.

My last post was about this town and the way it shaped me as a person and a writer. I wrote it just two days before my book was officially released to the world.

I planned to write a follow-up post about my journey as a young scholar, reflecting on the historians and academics who invested in me as I pursued a career in higher education. Then work responsibilities piled up and life got busy. I wasn’t able to carve out the time to put my thoughts together.

I’m still going to write that post. But right now, as I hang out in my hometown during Thanksgiving week, it’s the perfect time to pause and reflect back on the past month and the response I’ve received since my book dropped.

From beginning to end, it’s an exercise in gratitude.

Let’s recap a few highlights:

• Kelsey Dallas of the Deseret News is one of the best journalists out there covering the intersection of sports and religion. On the release day of the book, she published an interview with me about the way athletes talk about faith.

• In the Boston Globe, Craig Fehrman wrote an essay centered on my book: “When sports got religion: A new book examines how Christianity became woven into the fabric of American athletics”

• Matt Brown, founder of the Extra Points newsletter, is one of my favorite sportswriters. His newsletter is a go-to source for anyone interested in the landscape of college sports. He gave The Spirit of the Game a great shoutout in one of his recent mailbag posts.

• My favorite Christian publication, Christianity Today, published an excerpt from the book and featured it in its weekly books newsletter: “After Making Baseball History, Branch Rickey Faced a Spiritual Crisis”

• Roger Lipe has been serving in the sports chaplaincy community for decades. He started his career with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and now serves as Character Coach Director of Nations of Coaches. Roger shared a few thoughts after reading the book: “I just finished reading this outstanding book. Though I grew up in, volunteered in, and have been employed for 30 years by ministries of the Christian athlete movement, I had no idea of some of the nuance and cultural shifts within it.”

• RaShan Frost played football at Auburn and then served as a college coach and a team chaplain. He’s now a pastor and a professor. And he wrote a great review of The Spirit of the Game for The Gospel Coalition. Here’s Frost’s main takeaway: “[Putz’s] groundbreaking survey shows how sports, religion, and politics converge to influence American life and culture...From my perspective, Putz tells this important story well. Coaches, athletes, and pastors who hope to understand the relationship between Protestant Christianity and sports in the United States will find this an important book for years to come.”

• Sean Strehlow, professor of sport management at Messiah University, shared a few thoughts about the book on Threads. “If you have an overlapping interest in sport and American religious history,” he wrote, “this book is a must-read.” Check out his whole thread if you want to know what I was trying to do with the book. I think Sean really captures the nuanced, balanced, complex story I was trying to tell.

• Brian Smith, a sports ministry leader and author of The Christian Athlete, wrote these kind words in an Amazon review: “Whether you’re a sports enthusiast, a history buff, or a student of American religion, Dr. Putz’s work offers rich insights into how faith has shaped the world of American athletics. It's a beautiful blend of being well researched but also extremely accessible. In other words, you don't need a PhD to wrap your head around the role that faith has played in shaping the culture of sports in the US.”

Along with the public feedback I’ve received, I’ve also had the opportunity to do a couple invited talks about the book, including one with the athletic department at George Fox University. (Side note: Oregon is absolutely beautiful). And I’ve loved seeing so many people sharing photos of The Spirit of the Game on social media or messaging me individually to let me know they’ve read it.

That part has been especially encouraging: hearing from readers what they liked, what they didn’t, and what stood out.

I had coffee a few weeks ago with someone who has spent 40+ years in sports ministry at the elite sports level. He’s lived through and experienced many of the events, people, and developments I write about in the last three chapters of the book. And while he definitely had some pushback—some sections of the book had more of a critical edge than he would like—he also genuinely enjoyed it. He felt it put together in a new way some of the big-picture pieces of the Christian sports world that he has inhabited for most of his life.

As an author, I couldn’t ask for more.

The same goes for the overall response I’ve received since October. If you’ve read or spread the word about The Spirit of the Game, thank you for making this first book release so special. On Thursday, when I list the things I’m thankful for, your support will be near the top of the list.

Along with book release activities, I’ve shared my thoughts on sports and Christianity in a few other places recently.

• For Common Good Magazine, I contributed to a panel discussion titled “What Happens When Sports and Church Conflict?”

• At Sports Spectrum, I wrote about the work we’re doing at the Faith & Sports Institute.

Happy Thanksgiving y’all!

But the truth is that, to me at least, it is a big deal. I’ve poured a major part of my life over the past decade into writing this book. Seeing it out in the world is the culmination of a dream I’ve chased through ups and downs, believing that this story, this history, needed to be told.

I shared some of those feelings when I got to see and hold a physical copy of my book for the first time:

Along with feeling gratitude and joy (and many other emotions), the end of the book process has led me to reflect on the journey it took to get here. So many people have invested in me and shaped who I am. I can’t possibly thank or mention everyone, but I do want to highlight a few.

And I have to begin with my hometown.

I grew up in McCook, Nebraska. Population 8,000.

We knew we weren’t a big town, but we were bigger than most of the communities around us. We had a Walmart and a movie theater. A daily newspaper and several radio stations. A high school whose teams competed in Class B, the second-highest classification in the state.

There was something about McCook that always seemed to punch above its weight.

Located in the southwest corner of the state, we were the hometown of George Norris, the “fighting liberal” senator of the early twentieth century, and Ben Nelson, the governor of Nebraska when I was growing up in the 1990s. Two other Nebraska governors, Frank Morrison and Ralph Brooks, had roots in McCook. And Gene Budig, the last president of the American League, grew up in our town.

We also had a beautiful public golf course, Heritage Hills, ranked by Golf Digest as one of the 75 best public courses in America. And during a six-year stretch in the 2000s, our high school football team made it to five state championship games, winning two—usually against larger schools from Omaha and Lincoln.

True, we didn’t have much of a reputation for producing scholars and intellectuals. There was no university in town, just a community college. In my own family, I was a first-generation college student; no one before me had ever graduated with a bachelor’s degree.

Still, McCook provided the foundation for the historian and scholar that I became.

First, I had parents who loved to read. Books, magazines, and newspapers were a constant in our house. My dad, who worked full-time as a UPS driver while also pastoring Cornerstone Fellowship, a small nondenominational church, subscribed to a monthly Christian book club and to Christianity Today. My mom was constantly reading evangelical devotional texts: Oswald Chambers, A.W. Tozer, Watchman Nee.

I learned to love books and reading from my parents. It was not just about knowledge and intellect. I saw it as an essential part of my spiritual life.

I also came to see reading as a pathway to transformation and growth.

While most people in McCook were Christians of some sort, at Cornerstone Fellowship we thought we were a little different. We were born-again, speaking-in-tongues, tambourine-playing Christians.

We tended to see ourselves as more zealous than “nominal” believers. And one way we expressed this commitment was by avoiding secular, worldly activities. For the first decade of my life, we did not have a television, we rarely watched movies, and we avoided non-Christian music. Before my siblings and I could play outside after school (there were four of us then, and two more came later), we were required to write Bible verses in a loose-leaf notebook. Not only did we avoid Halloween, we also did not celebrate Christmas because of its supposedly pagan roots.

But reading books brought my parents to a different perspective, one more open to recognizing the good gift of God’s presence in the world. I remember Philip Yancey’s influence in particular, with his books like The Jesus I Never Knew and What’s So Amazing About Grace. Some of the strict rules fell away (my parents even bought a Christmas tree for the house), while the passion for loving and following Jesus remained.

Speaking of “the world”: I had incredible public school teachers. One especially important teacher was Linda Crandall. She taught journalism and served as the advisor for the high school student newspaper, the Stampede.

It was rare to have a high school journalism teacher of her caliber in a town the size of McCook. But she invested in us, teaching us how to write, edit, report, create, and find our voice. She advocated for us; she made us believe that our words mattered. Under her watch, the Stampede won awards from the Nebraska High School Press Association and set a standard of excellence that students sought to meet. My first attempts at writing for a public audience came because of her.

And then there was the basketball court.

More than any other activity, basketball gave me a sense of meaning, purpose, and direction. It helped me feel like I belonged.

Even in my early years, when my family was deeply suspicious of secular activities, sports were an exception—they were one “worldly” cultural space that we could participate in and enjoy. On Saturdays in the fall we would visit my grandparents, Emory and Lucille, to watch Nebraska Cornhusker football; on summer evenings we stopped by to watch the Atlanta Braves. Nebraska basketball was rarely on television, but we would listen on the radio to the exploits of players whose names have been forgotten by most today, but who were childhood heroes to me: Eric Piatkowski, Tony Farmer, Bruce Chubick.

Recognizing my passion for basketball, in third grade my dad converted half of our backyard into a cement basketball court, with painted free-throw and three-point lines. After school, as soon as I wrote down my required Bible verses, I would run to the backyard and work on my game. I still have vivid memories of winter nights, the crunch of snow beneath my feet, as I shoveled the snow and ice off the cement court so that I could dribble, shoot, and dream.

My hoop dreams back then were simple. Forgot the NBA: I wanted to play for the local high school team, the McCook Bison.

A young coach named Joel Hueser had moved to town in the early 1990s and began building up a program, bringing energy and excitement for basketball in a community typically dominated by football.

I followed the Bison on the radio and went to games when I could, hoping that one day I would don the red-and-white jersey and play for Coach Hueser. The best part, I discovered as I got older, was that the coach I admired was an evangelical Christian, a leader in McCook’s chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA). He provided a model for what it looked like to compete as a Christian, for navigating the tensions I continually felt between being “in the world but not of it.”

As I entered high school, basketball became even more important in my life. My relationship with one of my best friends, Willie Williams, was forged through our shared obsession with the game. Beginning in ninth grade we spent countless hours in the gym working on our shot and our dribbling. We joined a summer basketball team. We played pickup hoops at the local YMCA

To my amazement, the work paid off. As a sophomore, I made the varsity team. As a junior, I was the second-leading scorer on a team that made it to the state tournament. I started getting interest from area colleges.

Meanwhile, Coach Hueser became a mentor both on the court and off. Through his influence, I began to think about the intersections between my identities as a Christian and an athlete. Although he left after my junior season for an opportunity at a bigger school, he remains a good friend today.

After high school I left McCook as well and moved to Omaha, the largest city in Nebraska. I ended up spending a couple years as a student at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Then I transferred to a small Bible college, Grace University, were I played basketball and got my secondary education degree.

I fell in love, too—naturally, with a girl from McCook. After Bethany and I got married we made a home in Omaha, where I spent a few years teaching social studies before embarking on the journey to a PhD.

At the time, there was a part of me that thought I was leaving my small-town roots behind when I entered the world of academia. I would only realize with hindsight that much of who I would become as a scholar was all right there in McCook.

From my parents, there was the constant desire to read and learn, the idea that books had a spiritual purpose, that they really could transform a life.

From teachers like Ms. Crandall, there was the interest in writing, in telling true and meaningful stories about people’s lives and their place in the world.

And from Coach Hueser there was a realization that sports mattered in a deep way—that they were more than a game, that they could actually form and shape our characters, our minds, and our souls.

In a future post, I’ll write more about my experience in higher education, including my journey through a PhD program and my winding path towards completing a book.

None of that, however, would be possible without the love and support I first received in McCook.

If you’re curious about my book and want to know more, I published two previews this past week. Thanks so much for your ongoing support!

• At Current, I use a recent revival led by Ohio State football players to preview the main ideas and themes of my book.

• For the Danforth Center’s newly re-launched Arc Magazine (formerly Religion & Politics), I published a book excerpt that looks at the Christian athlete response to the "sports revolution" of the 1960s/1970s.

You can check out my full review at Christianity Today, but here’s a taste:

In The Stadium, Guridy continues this line of inquiry, weaving sports history with economics and politics, culture and geography, race and class, gender and sexuality. “Stadiums,” he writes, “make possible the spectacular staging of a society’s ideologies and self-perceptions.”

Guridy sweeps through American history as he explores those “ideologies and self-perceptions” from the late 19th century to the present. Throughout, he emphasizes a core tension at the heart of the stadium’s presence in American culture. “Elites have constructed stadiums as monuments to affluence, technological wonder, and exclusivity,” he writes. “Yet, America’s marginalized groups have transformed them into venues to express their desires and discontents, and to proclaim a more inclusive vision of American society.”

As you can tell from the paragraphs above, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It’s both fascinating and revelatory, helping me see stadiums in an entirely new light.

At the same time, I did take note of one missing piece: there was almost nothing said about religion in the book.

In my review, I spent a few paragraphs discussing this gap, concluding with this: “No doubt Guridy encountered examples [like Billy Graham and Promise Keepers] throughout his research, and every author has to leave important themes on the cutting room floor. But it’s precisely because of Guridy’s skill as a historian that I would have loved to see him explore the religious side of the stadium experience in more depth.”

Sure enough, Guridy had done some research on the topic.

On X/Twitter, he graciously responded to the review and offered some explanation on the missing religion angle.

Guridy’s response stood out to me for two reasons. First, it highlights one of the challenges of writing a book and sending it out into the world.

You can spend years working on a subject and exploring multiple research angles. But when it comes time to put the final draft of the book together, there are simply going to be some things you have to cut. Your editor and your publisher will make sure of that. And inevitably some reviewer will note a “missing” topic or a “gap” in the narrative, as if you hadn’t explored the topic in detail and agonized over the decision to cut it.

Now, it might be entirely fair and appropriate for a reviewer to mention those missing areas. They are responding to and evaluating the book that actually exists in front of them, not the hypothetical book that could have been.

But hopefully (and I at least tried to do this) the reviewer can make note of what is present and what is missing without expecting the author to include it all—or to write the book that the reviewer would have written.

Second, Guridy’s response stood out because it pointed to the cooperative and communal dynamic of doing history. A book, even a landmark achievement like The Stadium, is not the final word on a subject. It’s part of a conversation, building on literature that has come before and helping to shape and inspire additional work that will come after.

As Guridy noted, another scholar has a “big story” to explore if they’d like to take up the topic of religion and the cultural meanings of stadiums.

With my own book coming out soon—and with it my first experience on the receiving end of reviews—I hope I can be as gracious as Guridy was with me.

Speaking of: the official release date for The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports is October 8.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to share some of the blurbs/endorsements that I’ve been grateful to receive.

First up: Annie Blazer. Annie is one of the leading scholars of sports and religion today. I've read and benefited from her work, especially her book on evangelical women and sports ministry. So it was especially meaningful to have a scholar of her stature describe The Spirit of the Game as “a new bedrock” for studies of sports and Christianity in the US.

Then some things happened along the way:

• This spring, I took the lead with a grant proposal put together by the Faith & Sports Institute and Baylor Athletics. We found out in June that we were awarded the grant.

• The graduate program that I direct at Truett Seminary, the MA in Theology and Sports Studies, had a surge of interest, culminating in what will be a record number of students entering the program this year.

• In June, I moved from Assistant Director to Director of the Faith & Sports Institute.

• I began work on my second book, finishing a proposal and a first chapter (more details to come on this front soon).

• I put together pieces for Christianity Today on the Christian origins of the Dallas Mavericks and the meaning and significance of Eric Liddell’s 1924 Olympic triumph, as well as a review of a new Magic Johnson biography for Current.

But I’m here and I’m back because in the midst of all of that, I’ve also been working with my publisher on finalizing my first book: page proofs, copy edits, blurbs, cover design, index, etc.

At this point, pretty much all that is left is for the book to actually come out in the world.

If you follow me on social media, I’m sure you’ve seen some of my posts about the book. If not, let this be the official Substack announcement: The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports is coming out this fall, and it is available for pre-order now.

I’m going to share more about what the whole book process has been like in future posts, as well as some of my thoughts on writing and what has worked well for me (and what has not). For now, let me just say that I feel incredibly grateful. In spare moments I’ll find myself wondering how all of this has happened—how did I, a first-generation college grad from small-town Nebraska, end up here, where I get to be a historian and write books about things that I love?

The answer, really, is that so many people have poured some part of themselves into making what I do today a reality. It’s a privilege I don’t take lightly, and it’s one that I hope to steward well in the years ahead.

In the meantime, if you’re wondering what The Spirit of the Game is about, here’s what Molly Worthen, a professor of history at North Carolina and the author of one of my favorite books, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism, has to say:

Putz weaves together an incredible range of characters and athletic endeavors to show that it is impossible to adequately tell the story of 20th-century American sports without paying serious attention to religion. He shows how the playing field, the basketball court, the racetrack—and every other athletic arena—were crucial battlegrounds in all the great cultural and theological battles of the century, from arguments over evangelism and anxieties about masculinity to white supremacy and the civil rights movement. A tour de force.

Worthen’s blurb both floored me and left me walking on air after it came in. On my best days, I’ve hoped that I was writing a book like the one that she describes.

No promises that you’ll feel the same. But I’d be honored if you gave it a read and let me know your thoughts when it releases this fall.

When I was growing up as an evangelical pastor’s kid in the 1990s, there wasn’t a bigger name in the Christian athlete space than Reggie White. I still remember watching him win the Super Bowl in 1997 and then, in the glare of the postgame spotlight, thank Jesus Christ.

For evangelical kids like me, struggling to reconcile our religious identities with our love for the “secular” activity of sports, White offered proof that the two could go together.

So when ESPN released its new 30 for 30 documentary in December, Minister of Defense, I was immediately intrigued. What would it say about White’s faith? How would it explain his shifting religious beliefs, which left many evangelical sports ministry leaders surprised and confused?

I have a section in my book that analyzes White as a religious figure in the 1990s. A few thoughts about the film, based on what I’ve found in my research, are below.

What I Liked

This is a sports documentary, and it includes plenty of game footage to help viewers understand White’s greatness. An impressive array of NFL dignitaries give their respects, too, from coaches like Bill Bellicheck and Joe Gibbs to players like Bruce Smith and Cris Carter.

If you grew up watching Reggie White, you’ll be reminded of his dominance. If you didn’t, you’ll get to see what made him an all-time great.

The film also takes White’s faith seriously; it’s a central thread throughout. Viewers learn about the role of the church in White’s early life: how he was formed and shaped by the Black Baptist tradition, becoming a preacher when he was seventeen. "Once he decided that he wanted to be a minister,” one family member says, “he lived his life, day-to-day, after the word of God."

While White is depicted as a showman who drew inspiration from professional wrestling and Muhammad Ali, his integrity and consistency come through, too. His wife, Sara, and his son, Jeremy, are featured heavily, and their love for White is evident.

The film also makes it clear that White did not only talk about Jesus when the cameras were on. Viewers get a sense that White’s faith was essential to his identity, always at the forefront of his mind, infusing his whole life.

“I've never met a player,” sports journalist Andrea Kramer says in one scene, “who was more genuine in his religious beliefs than Reggie White.”

Of course, there was another side to White’s religion. His conviction that the Bible spoke clearly against homosexuality—and his willingness to say so, loudly—was a frequent source of conflict and controversy.

The filmmakers try to address White’s statements on sexuality in a relatively fair and nuanced way. Journalist LZ Granderson is given substantial air time to share his perspective as a gay Black man; he describes the feeling of being targeted by White’s words. “You stick to sports, Reggie’s incredible,” Granderson says. “You get away from the field, Reggie's a little more complicated.”

At the same time, plenty of voices highlight White’s sincerity and his care and concern for people around him. The Reggie White that comes through is complicated and complex, but largely sympathetic.

Racial Justice Activism

While the film is solid throughout, there are two things I wish it could have explored more.

First, although White’s racial justice activism is briefly highlighted, it focuses mainly on White’s response to a cluster of Black church burnings across the South in 1996. It does not dig into the more pointed comments White made about racism—comments that would likely get White accused of CRT today.

In his 1997 book, In The Trenches, White spoke extensively about racism. He presented himself as “not liberal, not conservative” and sought to chart a path forward that relied less on government intervention and more on creating economic opportunities for Black communities.

At the same time, White saw racism as a systemic issue, tracing it back to America’s founding. “Blacks in America are hurt and angry because the laws of America seem to be rigged against us,” he wrote. “Most people don't realize the U.S. Constitution was not written for black people. As originally written and ratified, the U.S. Constitution deems me to be three-fifths of a human being.”

White argued that the inequalities of the past continued in the present. He cited policing in particular, where “the laws are designed to put more black men in prison than any other class.”

White also encouraged a greater awareness of Black history and the history of race in America. “The system gives us one month out of the year,” he lamented “and it's the shortest month of the year. Black history should not be black history, it should be American history.”

Declaring that “it's time to kick racism's tail,” he called on the church to do more. “It is also important for us as Christians to see the role the church played, both its tragic participation in justifying slavery and its positive role in the abolition movement,” he wrote. He urged Christians to follow the example of Jesus, a poor man “from the ghetto” who battled racism in his day.

In 1997, White reprised some of the themes from his book when he delivered a talk to a predominantly Black high school in Knoxville. “There's a lot of focus on you all and a lot of that focus is on putting you in jail,” White reportedly said. “That's why police harass a bunch of you guys, because they want you to snap.”

When reports of White’s comments made it to Green Bay, the city’s newspapers were filled for weeks with criticism of the defensive end—this, even though White was at the height of his popularity, having just delivered a Super Bowl victory.

One police officer wrote in to complain that White “has judged me by the color of my uniform. How hypocritical.” A local man argued that Black men were actually “underpoliced” and that they were too willing to wallow “in the slop of victimhood.” Still another reader wondered if he knew Reggie White at all. “This is a quote I would expect from someone like rap singers Ice T or Snoop Doggy Dog, certainly not Reggie White.”

White’s discussion of racism was overshadowed the next year by clumsy and awkward comments he made to the Wisconsin state legislature. Attempting to highlight the positive contributions that all racial groups brought to American society, he instead trafficked in racial stereotypes.

Even so, his advocacy for racial justice in the 1990s strikes me as an intriguing theme worthy of more exploration. It offers a window into the broader evangelical racial reconciliation movement, led by organizations like Promise Keepers, which gained momentum in the 1990s. And it was a precursor to the more organized expressions of Black athlete activism that would emerge in the 2010s.

White’s Religious Evolution

There’s one more reason White’s concern for racial justice would be worth exploring: I think it helps to explain White’s evolving religious views, a theme the filmmakers emphasize but do not really analyze.

The filmmakers want to make White’s faith palatable to the sensibilities of a mainstream, college-educated American audience in 2024. Put another way, they don’t want to define White by his comments on LGBTQ issues. To do this, they focus heavily on an interview White gave to the NFL Network in 2004, just before he died.

In that interview, White looks back at his work as a preacher in evangelical spaces and expresses regret. “I've been a preacher for 21 years,” he says. But he was “more of a motivational speaker than a teacher of the word” because he had not been “a student of Scripture.”

He says he felt used by evangelical communities that put him on a pedestal as a religious expert simply because of his success on the field. “When I look on it now, most people who asked me to speak at their churches, only wanted me to speak because I played football,” he explains. “In many respects, I've been prostituted.”

White goes on to explain his feeling of shock when he began to study Hebrew and realized that things he believed about the Bible might not be true. “I've realized over the centuries that church leaders have used fear tactics to keep people under control,” he claims. “There's a lot of things that I preached about, that I couldn't prove.”

In White’s mind, the sermons and talks he used to give to churches no longer represented what he believed. “When I look on it now, I misled people,” he laments. Instead of preaching and speaking in public about his faith, he planned to spend his time in retirement studying the Bible. “I’ve got to sit down and get it right,” White concludes.

For the filmmakers, White’s repudiation of his earlier evangelical views offers a chance to present him as a person on his way to an affirming and accepting progressive faith.

But what views did White have in mind when he said that he “misled” people? And why was White so intent on studying Hebrew?

The filmmakers explain this in part by interviewing Nehemiah Gordon, one of the people who taught Hebrew to White. It’s not mentioned in the film, but Gordon is a Karaite Jew and a scholar/entrepreneur who has built up a personal ministry to Christians by claiming to hold a “secret” that church leaders have tried to hide: the gospel of Matthew, he argues, was originally written in Hebrew, and its true meaning (as well as the meaning of the Tanakh—the Hebrew Bible) can only be understood by reading the texts in their original language.

From what I can tell, White never fully rejected his Christian views about Jesus. But he was strongly influenced by at least two ideas held by many Karaite Jews and taught by Gordon.

First was the belief that only the written Torah is from God and is authoritative for religious practice. “The Torah is the perfect word of God revealed through Moses,” is how Gordon explains it. The oral Torah, represented by the Talmud, is rejected as man-made and based on human interpretation.

Building on this, while Karaite Jews do not believe that Jesus is the Messiah, many see him in a sympathetic light, arguing that he rejected the authority of the rabbinical interpretations put forward by the Pharisees and instead encouraged people to follow the original, authoritative source from God: the written Torah. When Reggie White talked about religious leaders using “fear tactics” to keep people under control, he was drawing on these ideas from Gordon.

Second is the idea that each individual person has a responsibility to read the Hebrew Tanakh and interpret its plain meaning for themself, and then practice what it says. This is one reason White became so passionate about studying and reading Hebrew. It’s also why he began to adopt some Jewish practices in his own life. “What God needed from me more than anything,” he says in the 2004 interview, “was a way of living, more than what I was saying.”

There is an element of both fundamentalism and freedom here. On the one hand, White was empowered to read the Bible in the Hebrew language for himself and come to a personal conviction on what it says and how it should be followed. On the other hand, White was taught that the vast majority of Jewish and Christian people have gotten things wrong and that a strict set of rules and guidelines set down in the Torah must be practiced in the present.

While Nehemiah Gordon is interviewed for the documentary, there is little discussion of the broader context of his beliefs and ministry. There is also no mention of the man who connected Reggie White to Gordon in the first place: a Black NFL chaplain named Keith Johnson.

In the 1990s Johnson was a Methodist pastor leading a prominent interracial congregation in Minneapolis. He became friends with Minnesota Vikings coach Dennis Green and wide receiver Cris Carter, and eventually decided to leave behind his pastoral ministry to work full-time in sports ministry, serving as the Vikings chaplain.

There’s a racial dimension to this story that I explore more in my book. The cliff notes version is that, like Reggie White in the 1990s, Johnson and Carter believed that more needed to be done about racism in society. They also felt that Black leadership was not valued in evangelical sports ministry spaces. So they teamed up to form a new Black-led sports ministry organization called CAUSE: Christian Athletes United for Spiritual Empowerment.

Along with retreats and events that featured Black gospel musicians like Kirk Franklin and pastors like T.D. Jakes, CAUSE focused on outreach and uplift efforts within Black communities. Reggie White got involved early on, with Johnson serving as an important mentor. “It's composed mostly of pro football players who are black,” Reggie White explained when discussing CAUSE in 1999. “Our goal is to spearhead these spiritual changes in America and to invigorate the black faithful.”

By the early 2000s, CAUSE lost steam. Keith Johnson’s role had been tied to support from Dennis Green and Cris Carter; when they left the Vikings, Johnson did too. In the process, Johnson turned his attention to a new interest: tours to Israel and exploring the Hebrew roots of the Bible, which is how he got connected with Nehemiah Gordon. To this day, Johnson and Gordon continue to work together, presenting themselves as an interfaith team encouraging Christians to recover the Hebrew roots of their faith—and to discover what Christian leaders have been trying to hide.

It was Keith Johnson, in the early 2000s, who introduced the recently-retired Reggie White to Gordon. Gordon and Johnson convinced White that what he had been taught to believe about Christianity was based on man-made tradition and that he needed to uncover the “true” source of his faith by reading sources in the original Hebrew.

None of this context is explained or explored in the documentary. Instead, White’s evolving religious views are presented as a potential journey towards progressive enlightenment.

“I don't want to put words in his mouth,” Jeremy White says. “But I do know that he would continue to have that growth mindset. And in having that growth mindset, there would be more gray area.”

I found myself deeply moved by the way Jeremy talked about his father. Although I remain within the evangelical tradition of my upbringing, Reggie White’s desire to seek the truth is admirable, and so is his willingness to question ideas that he previously held. I came away from the documentary with a deeper respect for White as a football player and a human being.

But while the documentary presents White’s religious pivot as an inspiration, I also see tragic elements. It’s hard not to feel that rather than breaking free from religious groups that wanted to use White’s fame to build up their own platforms, he had switched over to a new religious leader who claimed to hold the “secret” truth—and who seemed eager to use White’s story to advance his own ministry.

Ultimately, then, while I appreciated the filmmakers’ attempts to present White as a person of complexity, it too often felt that they wanted White to fit into their own box. The Minister of Defense gestures and hints in the direction of nuance, but it does not truly explore and analyze White’s evolving faith—and the broader contexts in which it developed.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled….

I was in my early 20s the first time I was truly drawn in and captivated by the Sermon on the Mount.

As a pastor’s kid who had attended a Bible college, I knew all the verses and the basic outline. But I had not really thought of it in a comprehensive way.

Then I went through a study of the Sermon on the Mount with the pastor of a new church I was attending. It was one of the most transformative experiences in my development as a Christian. I saw more clearly how Jesus’s teachings turned worldly values and priorities upside down, calling Christians to a different kingdom— a different way of living right here and now.

I’ve been reflecting on that experience this week because my church is starting its own deep dive into the Sermon on the Mount (and so is a podcast I follow, the Bible Project).

This means, of course, that I’ve also been thinking about the sports angle.

For some, the Sermon on the Mount seems to clash with the competitive ethos of sports. How can Christian athletes square Jesus’s command to “turn the other cheek” with the inherent need in sports to face your opponent and refuse to back down?

I think it’s good for Christian athletes and coaches to wrestle with these questions and tensions. But it’s also good to know that there are Christian athletes in the past who have thought deeply about the meaning of the Sermon on the Mount.

That’s what I’d like to focus on as we kick off the start of a new year.

The interpretations of the individuals below might not match my own. But they have all approached the text as a challenge requiring a response, rather than something to explain away or ignore.

Christians across the United States, I think, would do well to sit with Jesus’s teachings from the Sermon on the Mount in a similar way this year.

Eric Liddell

Eric Liddell is most famous for his performance at the 1924 Olympics. The Scottish sprinter, a contender to win the 100 meters, withdrew from the event because the heats were held on a Sunday. And Sunday, Liddell believed, was supposed to be a day of rest and worship. Instead, he raced in the 400 meters, an event with which he was less familiar—and in which he won the gold.

While Liddell was a hero in the United Kingdom, it was not until the 1981 film, Chariots of Fire, that his Olympic story truly caught on in the United States. “I believe God made me for a purpose,” Liddell says in a famous (and fictionalized) line from the movie, “but he also made me fast! And when I run I feel his pleasure.”

Still, even in the 1920s, his willingness to prioritize Christian convictions over the glory of a gold medal made him a model Christian athlete for many. Liddell’s career after the Olympics also won praise from his Christian fans: he became a missionary in China, where he continued to develop and grow in his faith (and occasionally participate in sports).1

The Sermon on the Mount loomed large in Liddell’s spiritual development, serving as a key part of his personal creed. “I believe in the Sermon on the Mount and in its way of life,” he wrote in The Disciplines of the Christian Life, “and I intend, God helping me, to embody it in my life.”

Influenced by Methodist missionary E. Stanley Jones’s The Christ on the Mount: A Working Philosophy (1931), Liddell believed the Sermon on the Mount presented Christians with a vision of the type of person they should become. By surrendering selfish desires, trusting God, and practicing the disciplines of faith, love, and obedience, Christians could grow into people who exemplified the Beatitudes.

“Read the Sermon on the Mount over and over again. Ponder its meaning; apply it to your daily life,” Liddell encouraged. “Do not hedge or try to explain it away. Do not dilute its meaning but face its challenge. Discover—or rediscover—it as a practical way of living.”

Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson

Liddell died in a prison camp in 1945, right at the end of World War II. A few months later, across the Pacific Ocean in North America, the most famous example of the Sermon on the Mount within sports was put into practice.

It started in the office of Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey as he met with Jackie Robinson. During that historic August day, Major League Baseball’s color line would be broken. But first, there was a one-man show put on by Rickey.

The story has been told plenty of times: How Branch Rickey worked himself into a lather acting out different scenarios and situations Robinson might find himself in, asking if the star athlete would be able to withstand the racist abuse sure to come his way.

According to Rickey’s biographer Lee Lowenfish, in the middle of this scene, Rickey paused and “pulled out of his desk drawer a heavily marked passage from one of his favorite books, Giovanni Papini's The Life of Christ.”

Translated from Italian and published in English in 1923, Papini’s biography of Jesus had been a best-seller in the 1920s. Rickey read Robinson a section in which Papini discussed the “revolutionary” teachings of nonresistance found in the Sermon on the Mount: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: But whosoever shall smite thee on thy cheek turn to him the other also.”

According to Rickey, “it was not the philosophy of Papini that hit me so hard.” Instead, it was the “assiduous acquaintanceship with the Christ" that Papini’s book conveyed. Papini wanted to “make Christ more living…to make us feel Him as actually and eternally present in our lives.” That was Rickey’s focus as well.

Unlike Liddell, who saw the Sermon on the Mount as a creed to live by, Rickey saw it as an expression of the dynamic personality of Jesus. It inspired more than instructed. “His Sermon on the Mount really makes me wish to be a good man—a better man,” Rickey wrote.

As for Robinson, his response was more layered and complex. He was a Methodist, like Rickey. He sought to follow Jesus, like Rickey.2 But “turning the other cheek” in his context meant ignoring racist taunts and actions, a burden that went against his fiercely competitive personality and sense of justice. It was also bound up with racial paternalism, in which Black players were expected to meet a special standard of perfection on and off the field in order to be accepted.

"Could I turn the other cheek? I didn't know how I would do it,” Robinson wrote in his autobiography. “Yet I knew that I must. I had to do it for so many reasons.”

Over the years, the “turn the other cheek” narrative has sometimes been exaggerated and mythologized. And yet, it reflects a part of the story that Robinson himself embraced, and a compelling—and costly—example of the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount lived out in the real world.3

Martin Luther King, Jr. put it well when he honored Robinson in 1962:

“Jackie Robinson incessantly raises questions to sear America’s conscience,” King wrote. “Back in the days when integration wasn’t fashionable, he underwent the trauma and the humiliation and the loneliness which comes with being a pilgrim walking toward the lonesome byways toward the road of Freedom. He was a sit-inner before the sit-ins, a freedom rider before the freedom rides.”

Bruce Bickel and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes

Eric Liddell, Jackie Robinson, and Branch Rickey may have been Christian athletes. But for most of their careers, they were not part of an organized Christian athlete community—no such thing existed.

In 1954, that changed with the formation of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Branch Rickey was a founding member of the group. And by the 1970s, the movement had expanded to include multiple sports ministries, forming an evangelical Christian subculture within sports.

As this subculture matured, sports ministries developed new teachings and trainings to help Christian athletes and coaches live out their faith within sports. They asked: What does it mean to be a Christian athlete? How are Christian athletes different from the world around them? What are the distinctive ways Christian athletes are called to live?

For FCA staff member Bruce Bickel, working in Chicago in the 1970s, the Sermon on the Mount offered an important guide. He noticed a contrast between the platform-based evangelism of sports ministries, which often associated celebrity and fame with Christian witness, and the teachings of Jesus. “Being in the public eye as an athlete or coach is not necessarily a sign of successful Christian living,” he came to believe, “nor does it necessarily contribute to the Kingdom of God (read Matthew 6).”

Bickel developed a Bible study on these themes for the athletes he worked with, including the Chicago Bears. And he wrote about his ideas in the FCA’s magazine.

“The message of the Gospel within the athletic community is only as powerful as Christian athletes and coaches present an alternative,” he explained. And this alternative was “the style of life as lived by Jesus and taught by him in the Sermon on the Mount.”

By learning to live the “alternative life” modeled and taught by Jesus, Bickel suggested, Christian athletes could provide an authentic, mature, and credible witness to teammates, coaches, and fans.

Bickel moved on from FCA in the 1980s. But in the decades since, other sports ministry leaders have followed his lead in trying to apply the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount to the world of sports.

What do you think? Where have you seen Christian athletes and coaches living in ways that reflect Jesus’s teachings in Matthew 5-7? What are the unique challenges and opportunities Christians in sports might face?

I’d love to hear your thoughts, so drop me an email or a note in the comments.

In the meantime, as my church community moves through the Sermon on the Mount this year, I’ll be considering anew what it might have to say about sports.