LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Today's Salon (day pass required) has a great article about the mixture of sports and evangelical Christianity.

Former NFL player Anthony Prior is one of the most outspoken critics of Christian practice in pro football. Prior, a defensive back for the Jets, Vikings and Raiders from 1995 to 2000, has published a book, "The Slave Side of Sunday," that likens the experience of black pro footballers to slavery. He cites a deep racism in a system in which whites hold most of the administrative positions of power, and in which young black men burn out their bodies in short, physically brutal careers like so many plantation field workers.

Religion, Prior says, is one means by which players are inured to injustices and encouraged to swallow the status quo. "It's mind-boggling the way they push Christianity on players," says Prior. "It's packaged in a way to basically make players submissive."

Prior also questions popular religious practices in pro football that he believes border on the superstitious and silly. "How can you say Jesus helped you score that touchdown when the player you beat believes in Jesus too?" asks Prior. "You've embarrassed him in front of his fans. God answers your prayer and not his? Why pray for protection for your body? You can get seriously injured, even die, in a professional football game. But my philosophy has been that if you're scared to play, don't play."

In training camp, Prior adds, some marginal players vying for roster spots carry around their Bibles and attend religious services to impress management. If they're still on the roster after the final cuts, "then their Bible is nowhere to be found," Prior says. "Until they get injured, of course, and then the Bible is back in your hand."

Prior and others say evangelicals often drive a wedge between players on a team, with Bible study and chapel participants forming one camp and the outliers forming another. Former NBA player and Dennis Rodman sidekick Jack Haley has described such a dynamic affecting the San Antonio Spurs teams of the mid-1990s. The Christian faction was led by the fervent new convert and team superstar David Robinson; Haley and the decidedly unreligious Rodman headed up the other clique.

Esera Tuaolo, who played in the NFL for 10 years before retiring in 2000, says he was offended by team religious practice during his season with the Jacksonville Jaguars, whose roster included a group of players participating in Champions for Christ, another evangelical sports ministry. As Tuaolo, a Christian, told Between the Lines, a Michigan weekly, the evangelicals formed a clique and displayed an intolerant attitude toward teammates who did not share their beliefs. "I went to a Bible study, and, lo and behold, it was about homosexuality," recalls Tuaolo, who came out as a gay man after his retirement. "I was thinking, 'Is this a sign?' That was what really turned me off."

"Evangelical Christianity is very exclusive in its claims," Hoffman says. "And that doesn't go down well in a society where you're not supposed to make judgments about someone else." In the evangelical mind-set, he adds, "the gospel is pretty cut-and-dried: There's a formula for going to heaven, and if you don't follow it, you're doomed."