In 1976, journalist Frank Deford devoted a three-part series in Sports Illustrated to a remarkable development. Across college and pro sports, Christianity was booming, with pregame chapel services, team Bible studies, and athlete-evangelists using their fame to talk about Jesus.
Deford coined a term, “Sportianity,” to both describe and criticize this phenomenon. Every few years since then, another journalist has come along with a magazine feature or book-length treatment to express renewed fascination with and surprise at the persistence of the Christian athlete movement.
Veteran golf writer Steve Eubanks’s book, Godball: How Athletes Are Saving Christianity, is the latest in the genre. But it comes with a twist. The book’s origins, Eubanks explains, date back to his experience in 2023. Working for the Global Golf Post, he interviewed Amy Olson, a conservative Christian golfer who was competing while seven months pregnant. When Olson made comments in support of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the outlet refused to publish her remarks.
Eubanks resigned in protest. Soon afterwards, he set out to write Godball.
This experience with injustice gives Eubanks’s book a different tone from previous accounts. While other journalists have approached the Christian sports movement as outsiders or observers, Eubanks writes as a cobelligerent, seeing Christian athletes as part of his battle against the overreach of secular cultural forces.
Moments of Insight
The idea behind this book makes sense. It’s going too far to say that athletes are “saving Christianity,” but something interesting is happening with sports and Christianity in recent years. Athletes and coaches feel more emboldened to share their faith, and the new media landscape has made it possible to do so more directly.
Eubanks attempts to make sense of this trend with dozens of interviews as well as his own analysis. The book’s structure is somewhat scattered, but there are moments of insight, especially from Eubanks’s interviews with leaders in the Christian sports movement.
For example, Fellowship of Christian Athletes president Shane Williamson emphasizes the long-term transformation that can result from a consistent ministry of presence. “If you put people in a circle talking about Jesus in the context of sports and let that play out for decades,” he tells Eubanks, “what you’re seeing now is what happens” (62).
Jason Romano, a producer with Sports Spectrum, highlights the need to see Christian athletes as human beings rather than as mascots for a cause. “The copycat effect of how social media works makes people bolder in their faith, but we need to be cautious,” he says. “The more seasoned believers need to be careful not to place these guys on pedestals. Remember, they are people” (121).
There’s value in Godball simply because Eubanks provides a forum for a significant cross-section of conservative Christian athletes and coaches to share their perspectives.
Flawed Analysis
Unfortunately, when Eubanks moves from quoting his interview subjects to providing his own analysis, flaws emerge.
Eubanks provides a forum for a significant cross-section of conservative Christian athletes and coaches to share their perspectives.
His discussion of history has several factual and interpretive errors. He claims that in the 1970s, “God was removed from many locker rooms where Bible verses once donned the walls” (39). In reality, these were the very years in which athletes across the sports world were bringing Christianity into the locker room at an unprecedented scale.
Eubanks also frequently overstates the significance of recent events. Writing about Joe Kennedy, the high school football coach who won a 2022 Supreme Court case allowing him to pray on the field, Eubanks claims that the coach “broke the dam of silence for millions of athletes and coaches” (14). Yet many of Eubanks’s interview subjects contradict that claim, pointing to the influence of Christian athletes and coaches who have been publicly proclaiming their faith for decades.
Eubanks also downplays the importance of theology and doctrine. “Most athletes aren’t steeped in the nuances of the Word. At best, most would make passable Sunday School teachers,” he explains. This, to him, is a good thing, because athletes have something even more important: they “project the right vibes” (131).
Of course, we shouldn’t expect athletes to be scholars. But rather than praise Christian athletes for presenting a “saccharine version of the Gospel” (137), we should encourage them to go deeper, to grow in maturity—especially if we’re going to look to them as exemplars.
When it comes to race, Eubanks claims that “an overwhelming majority of athletes and all Christian ones” never let the topic of race cross their mind at all (213).
Set aside the question of whether or not it’s good to ignore race as a factor in American life. His claim is still simply wrong. Prominent Christian athletes and coaches over the past decade—including Maya Moore, Benjamin Watson, Frank Reich, Derwin Gray, Kyle Korver, and Tony Dungy—have spoken in various ways about how Christians should approach this complex subject.
Eubanks’s simplistic approach to race and doctrine carries over into the way he talks about secular critics. Rather than fairly describing their viewpoints, he leans on caricature and hyperbole, presenting them as evil forces intent on mainstreaming pedophilia and forcing Christians to work on subsistence farms.
The result is a book that whiplashes between the frequently thoughtful perspectives offered by the interview subjects and the uncharitable polemical analysis offered by Eubanks.
Missed Opportunity
It’s true that secular journalists have often provided one-sided and unfair accounts of Christian athletes and coaches. Eubanks’s experience with his former employer is a case in point. Yet Christians should model a better way, seeking to explore and explain the truth with care.
Christians should model a better way, seeking to explore and explain the truth with care.
Eubanks does this remarkably well in one place. In chapter 3, he writes about Deford and his “Sportianity” series. Eubanks, it turns out, was friends with Deford. This friendship enables him to criticize Deford’s viewpoint while also providing insight into Deford’s personality.
“It’s impossible to know what’s in a man’s heart, and most who knew Deford wept with him when he lost his daughter, Alex, to cystic fibrosis in 1980,” Eubanks writes. “But the ramifications of his Sportianity pieces pierced the culture in lingering ways” (45). If Eubanks had provided that level of sensitivity and depth throughout the book, his argument would be better for it.
Instead, the story we get in Godball is too thin. It glosses over the quiet faithfulness and complexity of the Christian sports movement. The book presents a revival shaped too much by the shifting winds of vibes and grievance to offer a helpful and sustainable model for the church.
