The Rise of the Christian Quarterback

I have here a few disparate thoughts on the near end of the college football season, including one sociological observation that may or may not be correct, but in the spirit of shooting from the hip I will make anyway.

First of all, part of me wants to be really bitter about the success of Notre Dame. Lou Holtz, former ND coach and ESPN talking head, defended them last week saying that they beat a team from every major conference, except the SEC. I thought, well Lou, that's a big exception. They beat someone from the Big East! And the ACC! Their win over Oklahoma was solid and unexpected, but their win over Stanford was the product of some inscrutable distraction on the part of the official that prevented him from seeing the ball break the plane before the runner's knee was down. Also, I am of the firm belief that any team requiring three overtimes and a missed 30 yard field goal to beat Pitt is undeserving of the national championship.

But this would all be mere howling at the wind. Notre Dame is in, and there is nothing to be done about it. This season, like the Broncos run last year with Jesus, Jr. Tim Tebow, seemed marked with providence. The aforementioned events, plus Matt Barkley not being able to play the other night, leaving a kid six months removed from prom as the quarterback for the Trojans, left little doubt about the outcome. The one upshot, and the reason I very halfheartedly cheered for the Irish the other night: there is a chance that the SEC's dominance might end. Hey, anything can happen. One game. One night. And as much as I think Notre Dame hardly deserves to be a top ten team, they ran the table and get to try and prove they belong. And I hope they win.

My prediction: Notre Dame 7, Alabama 27

Secondly, on the bolstering of the Big 10 conference with the stellar programs and great traditions of Rutgers and Maryland football. If this does not serve as damning evidence of the completely money grubbing nature of college athletics than what else possibly could? Were people clamoring for an annual battle between Minnesota and Maryland? Is the Rutgers vs Michigan State battle going to undo the prestige of The Game between Ohio State and Michigan? This was purely about acquiring all of those television sets on the east coast. Maryland and Rutgers are both good schools, don't get me wrong, but this does nothing to enhance the prestige of the league. Big 10 football has been in a slide for awhile and this will not arrest the descent. It will only further it. But everyone will still make money. Which really is the point of college, right?

Thirdly, on Ohio State deserving a co-national champion for their 12-0 season. Simply put: hell freaking no! In this country you don't get rewarded for cheating and lying. Right? Right? Bueller? Why I say hell freaking no is because Ohio State doesn't have to play in the Big 10 championship game or defend their title-worthiness in a bowl game. They ran the table in a pathetic conference. And here is the kicker for me: they did it with precisely nothing on the line. All season they knew there was no bowl in store for them, so there was really no pressure. Pressure effects teams as the season goes on and everything is on the line. For example, see Alabama vs Texas A&M, Notre Dame vs. Pitt, and K-State vs Baylor. All of these teams looked tighter than bark on a tree in these games. Ohio State never had that burden. They were playing for nothing except that good old The Ohio State University pride. And that is simply not enough to deserve a national championship.

Finally, I want to make a sociological observation that, like most observations made by individuals, is almost entirely anecdotal. I was thinking recently about how many high profile Christian quarterbacks there are right now. Not just Tim Tebow, either, who is really more of a glorified fullback (sorry, you can like a guy personally and think he is not the greatest player ever). Sam Bradford, Heisman winner from 2009 is an example. So is Colt McCoy, his rival for the trophy that year. Phillip Rivers, the Broncos chief nemesis for the rival Chargers, is also outspokenly religious, with six children as proof of his fidelity to the command to be fruitful and multiply. Kansas State's one time Heisman hopeful, Collin Klein, is famous for his refusal to kiss his bride-to-be until their wedding day and is essentially a less outspoken Tebow. Matt Barkley at USC. Robert Griffin III. The list goes on. 

I don't know that there are more high profile Christian quarterbacks as a percentage today than there have been in the past, but it certainly feels that way. Some are complete athletic freaks, like RGIII, who could make a career out of whatever sport he chose. Some have the golden arm like Barkley at USC or Bradford for the Rams. Some are workhorses, like Tebow and Klein, who don't do anything fancy or pretty but grit out tough wins. There is no m.o., but the success is staggering.

So, why? Is there any reason or is it just a historical fluke? An accident? Maybe. Probably. Or, you could take my explanation. My generation, of whom these quaterbacks are all members, has a discipline problem which is very closely related to our distraction problem. It is not easy to be either disciplined or focused in our culture of instant gratification everything. This should not be a controversial statement. But what Christianity does (or any faith for that matter), serious Christianity, is instill a significant amount of discipline into its adherents. And a significant amount of discipline and a crazy amount of focus is precisely what is needed to succeed at the upper echelons of sports. Freak talent or not. You can get discipline and focus from other sources, but it seems harder and certainly less common. The homeschooled kids might not be as "cool" as the other kids, but who gets along easier with adults? Socialization, training in diversity, and the other shibboleths of our modern educational system do not prepare children to be the disciplined, focused members of society who really succeed. Christianity can provide that, and perhaps that helps explain the rise of the Christian quarterback.

Voluntary Heartbreak, or Being a Sports Fan

I had resisted writing about sports this entire fall because I didn’t want to jinx the incredible run of my Kansas State Wildcats. Now I see it was unnecessary. What a heartbreaking loss. Sunday morning when I got up I was still depressed. I ate breakfast and went for a run and saw blue jays and cardinals and was still depressed. I came back and read the scene in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Tom is sold to Haley by Mr. Shelby and I was still depressed about a freaking college football game. That is amazing (and probably not a good thing). Being a fan is sheer madness. It is volunteering for routine heartbreak, but we just keep deluding ourselves into believing that there is that chance this time it won’t end in disaster. This must be what Taylor Swift thinks at the start of a new relationship. Maybe this time.

I have been trying to put things in perspective. We started the year ranked 22^nd in the nation and projected to finish in the middle of the pack in our conference. And then we won 10 games in a row. And if we rebound and beat Texas in two weeks we will go to the Fiesta Bowl in Phoenix as the Big 12 champions. If you had told me at the beginning of the year that we would go to the Fiesta Bowl I would have been tickled pink. But such is the capriciousness of sports that for a time it seemed that we could have more. National champions more. A shot against Alabama or Oregon for it all. Now, sadly, the national title will likely come down to Alabama beating Notre Dame 35-3. Two “classic” programs squaring off in a terrible mismatch. And I will be disappointed with a BCS game. There was a time when I was running much better than I do today and I was trying to run a half marathon in under 90 minutes. My previous record was 105 minutes. I finished in 92 minutes and was depressed. This is the same thing. 92 minutes isn’t that good when you’re going for 90. The Fiesta Bowl isn’t Miami on the final day of the college football season. Two years ago we went to the freaking Pinstripe Bowl and now I am disappointed. I hate sports.

But, of course, I love them, too. And I will always be a fan. I will always watch my Wildcats. I thought a lot on my run the morning after about what it is to be a fan and how glad I am to be a fan of the team that I love. Sure, I could become an Alabama fan or a Notre Dame fan or a whoever has a shot every year to win it all fan. I could also root for the Lakers/Heat, Yankees/ Giants, Patriots/ Steelers. But I am a K-State fan because it is in my blood. This team represents my state and what I value. And I never let go of them even when living in Colorado and Texas for a decade and a half. When I was an undergraduate at Colorado State my drawers had one or two pieces of CSU apparel and half a dozen K-State shirts. I love that they are small town. That their recruiting class is always outside of the top half of Division 1 teams. That their players wear suits and don’t mouth off on Twitter. That they are scrappy and old school and led by a coach who would babysit an assistant coach’s children after their mother died so they could get by. That I don’t have to worry about a big scandal coming out of the program, like the vaunted Leaders Division of the Big 10. I love this team.

And I hate losing. But it comes with the territory. And, however little I feel it now, I do believe it is worth the tradeoff. It is difficult to believe in anything, whether a person or an institution or a religion. To believe exposes you and opens you up to being letdown by someone or something outside of your control. It is scary. And I don’t mean to oversell the importance of sports, but what is the value of life without faith?

Cultural Literacy

Reading E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, one of those rare academic works that found a wider audience (sidenote: why do the books that do this always have awesome titles? To wit, The Closing of the American Mind, Amusing Ourselves to Death, The Organization Man, How to Read a Book. Part of me thinks that more people buy these books for their cool title and because they look good on a bookshelf than actually read them, but that sounds rather cynical and unlike me.) I really like Hirsch’s perspective, classically liberal as it is, and here he argues that radical politics must be grounded in conservative knowledge of language and culture:

“Radicalism in politics, but conservatism in literate knowledge and spelling: to be a conservative in the means of communication is the road to effectiveness in modern life, in whatever direction one wishes to be effective.

To withhold traditional culture from school curriculum, and therefore from students, in the name of progressive ideas is in fact an unprogressive action that helps preserve the political and economic status quo. Middle-class children acquire mainstream literate culture by daily encounters with other literate persons. But less privileged children are denied consistent interchanges with literate persons and fail to receive this information in school. The most straightforward antidote to their deprivation is to make the essential information more readily available inside the schools.”

There was a woman in my graduate program, very intelligent, one of the smartest people there, who wrote a paper on alternative languages and how we need to find room for different colloquialisms or slangs in the contemporary classroom. In other words, making all students use “proper” English is oppressive and unfair to those who were never taught proper English in the first place. I understand and sympathize with her point. All of us as graduate teachers taught students who were incredibly underprepared for the relatively pedestrian rigors of an introductory writing course. Students who could barely comprehend the content of a simply written newspaper article, let alone string together a coherent, well-reasoned response to that article. It was sad, and tempting to play down to the lowest common denominator.

But what Hirsch is pressing toward, and what I certainly noticed while teaching, is that it is not merely deficiencies in language usage or grammar that is keeping these students back. It is what I mentioned in the previous paragraph: there is no reading comprehension to begin with. So, it is not as if I had students write papers that deeply engaged with the text to which they were responding but did so in colloquial language. Rather, the two seemed to be of a pair. The students who wrote in slang also struggled mightily to comprehend the none-too-difficult content of the texts we read and discussed. To turn what I am saying into an aphorism: you have to understand the system before you can subvert it. My students who had poor grammar had a poor understanding of the system of the English language (for the most part, nothing of course being true in all cases).

I remember listening to this fellow student read this well-meaning paper about how we should allow and encourage students to be rebellious and subversive in the way they use language, and thinking how entirely she had missed the point. My problem was twofold. Firstly, most of the students who enroll in English 100 are not going to go on to careers as journalists or authors or college professors. Most will take jobs in business or engineering or construction or nursing or elementary education or go into debt and become lawyers and what they will really need to know is not how to be subversive with their language or ironic in their company emails but how to not sound like idiots when they speak or write like people who missed everything after early phonics instruction. What they need, then, if they are ever truly going to be able to challenge the system, or find it worthwhile to do so, is to know the system really well. That, as I saw it, was our job as teachers.

My second problem stems from this first problem and is the main point in my response: subversion is meaningless if you don’t understand the system you’re subverting. This is why so many atheistic critiques of religion fall short: they seem to equate Christianity with the Crusades, eliding the quite obvious fact that most Christians these days are not motivated by a desire to reclaim the Holy Land from its Muslim occupiers. And a critique of English grammar, of which there are many valid points of entry, will not sound right unless it is couched in the terms of contemporary English grammar. If one were attempting to foment rebellion in China, one wouldn’t publish a pamphlet in French. The same principle applies.

Even our rebels, then, must in some measure enslave themselves to the system if they wish at some point to truly challenge it. I think the kids these days call that irony.

The Sins of the Father

The other day I was on my way to a customer’s office in my work truck listening to country music on the radio. Country, of course, is the great populist music of our nation. They sing about the stuff that matters to most people, especially in central Kansas: love, commitment, faith, tradition, and beer. Musically I am not very much drawn to country, but I love the message, packaged as it is, ever so carefully, by executives in Nashville.

So the other day I am driving and this song comes on the radio. I have heard this song before, as anyone who has listened to a country music station for more than 18 minutes certainly has. But I hadn’t heard it since Owen was born. And I’ll be darned if somewhere around verse two I didn’t break down and start weeping in my heavy duty half-ton pickup.

You see my son is now at the age where I see the truth of this song. He is watching me. He does try to do what I do. And it is wonderfully beautiful and incredibly frightening at the same time. Good or bad, as the song tells us, my son will pick up on what I do. How I react when I’m surprised. How I pray. How I treat his mom. How I use my free time. He’ll be watching it all.

And it is moments of realization like that when parenting becomes a responsibility not only in the sense of providing for physical needs and putting your child’s interests ahead of your own, but in the sense of shepherding their heart, teaching them that though I am a sinner, by grace I can repent. And though little Owen will be like me in so many ways, it is my goal that he be better than me. That he loves more and sees more grace in this world, this glorious place, as he longs for his true Father to redeem it all.

Mumford and Sons, Church Music, and Emotion

One thing most of the cool Christians my age seem to find agreement on is that contemporary church music is cheesy, manipulative of emotions, and overall not nearly as good as it used to be or one day could be again. You hear this all of the time, as well-meaning Christians struggle to control their disdain for Christian radio and other such enterprises. And I get it, and feel the same way a lot of the time. (Jeremy Pierce, writing in the now shuttered First Things blog Evangel, nailed people like me and all of these other dissenters to the wall a couple of years ago with this truly excellent post. If you get anything out of this post, let it be this.) For me what is most lamentable, though, about the current state of Christian music isn't how cheesy or "positive" it is, but how much it is exactly like the music of the world. Really, it's true. Listen to a pop music station and then listen to Christian radio and see if, apart from lyrical content, you can tell any difference at all. This lack of originality is unfortunate and unfitting for people who see themselves as filled with the Spirit of a quite creative God. 

But another thing people seem to take aim at is the emotional response provoked by contemporary worship songs. You know what I am talking about: the songs with the mindless lyrics that you repeat ad nauseum while the music swells in the background and, darn't, you just can't help but lift your hands in worship. This critique finds eloquent expression in Jordan Bloom's article in The American Conservative (non-subtle plug: if you are a conservative in the sense of holding traditionalist views, such as respect for the land, appreciation of both the basic dignity of all humans as well as our fallenness, and essentially hold to the ethical traditions of the great faiths of the past, and are not conservative in the sense that whatever big business decides to do next is awesome, subscribe to The American Conservative; it is truly fantastic). Bloom takes aim at the emotionalism and manipulation at work in the band Mumford and Sons. There is an ironic note to make here: most all of the cultured Christians I have been around who disdain contemporary Christian music freaking love Mumford and Sons, a band who quite unashamedly practices the same things they purport to hate when they are done by Chris Tomlin or Hillsong. Perhaps it is the British accent or the fact that Mumford isn't afraid to throw out an f-bomb every now and then to show just how dern serious they are, but in any event hanging outside a venue before a Mumford show you are likely to see a lot of the cool Christian kids with beards and skinny jeans and iPhones talking about how more "spiritual" music (we can't be attaching labels like Christian to a band like Mumford) should sound like this. And to them I say, I've got a Creed album to sell you. (Full disclosure: I dig Mumford and Sons.)

But I take issue with some of Bloom's complaint. Mostly, the idea that worship music shouldn't be laden with emotion. Presumably austere, Orthodox style music with lots of chanting is the ticket. Don't get me wrong, Bach is great. We listen to him over dinner most every night. People will still be listening to Bach in 200 years. I don't think they will be listening to Hillsong or Lecrae or Mumford and Sons, or, God help us, anything else on pop stations. But I don't like the notion that because Bach is great we should only listen to Bach. This is akin to the notion that you should only watch movies from the AFI Top 100 or read books that were put on a list by Mortimer Adler. Sure, you should watch Citizen Kane, and, yes, everyone should read them some Plato at one time or another, but it does not follow immediately from this that you should not watch Dawn of the Dead or read Stephen King. Both of those, in fact, should be done as well. 

As to the substance of Bloom's complaint, that worship music is cheaply manipulative and emotional, Jonathan Edwards took care of this one far better than I ever could have some 300 years ago. The New England of Edwards' time was aflame with revival and, as revivals are wont to do, this one encouraged some rather grandiose displays of religious fervor, prompting the polite and thoroughly British inhabitants of the area to bristle at all of this barbaric emotion. Edwards, writing in a tract called, aptly, "Some Thoughts Concerning the Revival," has this to say: "I should think myself in the way of my duty to raise the affections of my hearers as high as I possibly can, provided that they are affected with nothing but truth, and with affections that are not disagreeable to the nature of what they are affected with."

Now Edwards isn't endorsing people dancing with snakes or shouting weird things while waving flags, necessarily. What he is saying is that if God is really as awesome as the Bible says he is, grace is as great and freeing as promised, and Jesus really will one day come back to make all things new, then it is probably a fine response to be excited about these things. Which makes pretty good sense. Bloom's thought that this type of emotive response is all heart and no head strikes me as too simplistic as well as too judgmental. How can he possibly know what is going through every worshiper's head? And why is it wrong to get lost in reverie?

Edwards' point, and our goal, ought to be to be worshipers who worship in spirit and in truth. Who love the Lord our God with all of our heart, mind, soul and strength. To be able to raise up holy hands or bow our heads reverently in awe of this world, the work of our Creator's hands, and his promises to us.

Race and the Election

This election is far closer than I ever imagined it would be. It really is incredible what that first debate did for the Romney campaign. The cynic in me says that we vote for the candidate we perceive to be more presidential, regardless of experience or other more accurate qualifiers. This is surely how Obama was elected. I like the guy, but no one who voted for him could honestly make the claim that he won because of his vast experience in government or the private sector. People voted for him for a variety of reasons, but surely two big ones loom: we enjoyed the narrative power of electing the first black president in a nation whose first politicians owned black people, and he just seemed more presidential than John McCain (and certainly more so than Sarah Palin). And, Mitt Romney, in that first debate, seemed more presidential. And it did wonders for his campaign.

But alas, that narrative is too unsatisfying to many on the left who in this zero hour of the campaign are thinking of ways to spin a potential Obama defeat. The current answer: race. Now, don't misunderstand me, it is 100%, incontrovertible fact that there are people in our nation who will not vote for Barack Obama because he is black. Working in a blue collar industry in Tulsa this past summer I received direct confirmation of this truth. My boss there, a staunch Republican, lamented that honest, hardworking Republicans like him, unmotivated by prejudice (there were, after all, Republicans before 2008) are made to look like racist idiots by some of the things we heard people say in our store. There are racist Republicans, as, surely, there are racist Democrats. But you know what? They all voted against Obama four years ago. In other words, it is not like they were egalitarian left-leaning vegans before the 2008 election and then became the frothing at the mouth racist Republicans who are trying to unseat the Nefarious Kenyan this year. So it is not like Obama has lost the racist support this year; he couldn't, because he never had it. He is losing support among other voters dissatisfied with what they see as four more years of stagnation in the economy.

Andrew Sullivan, one of my favorite voices in politics who has become increasingly unhinged over the last few years (you should read his posts about his recent move to New York City; he makes it sound like a third world country because his internet speed is slightly slower than he is used to, not to mention the way he went absolutely apoplectic over Sarah Palin, even to this day refusing to acknowledge the excess she drove him to), is one of the principal figures spinning thisnarrative. (Here is a great takedown of Sullivan in the Dartmouth Review, exposing his utterly uncomprehending grasp of U.S. history). And it is surely a comforting narrative for those on the left to try and sell. We were not defeated because our ideas were bad or our policies failed, but because this country is still filled with a  bunch of backwards rednecks. 

These folks cite a recent AP Survey on race to justify their claims. I have perused this survey and I didn't find this dramatic uptick in racial prejudice. The favorability numbers for whites and blacks are largely the same as they were two years ago and consistent between the two races as well. And the survey also features frustrating questions like the following: "It’s really a matter of some people just not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder, they could just be as well off as whites." You are then asked whether or not you agree with this statement.

Now, how do you answer that question? Think carefully. Say that you respond, "no." You say this because you are aware of the crippling effects of generations of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow on the psyche of a people. But you know what that sounds like to me, the cynic? You don't think black people can work hard enough to succeed. So say that you answer, "yes", because you believe in the ideals of the American Dream, that through hard work and perseverance we can all become successful.  Now, the cynic in me sees you as a blatant racist who believes the age old trope that blacks just don't work as hard as whites. How can you answer that question without your response being spun as racist? You do what slightly over a third of the respondents did: you say neither agree nor disagree. Really, what else can you do?

Again, I am not saying America is healed of its racist past. Show me a place that is. The Enlightened Europe we like to look to as an example for everything right is either entirely homogenous in its composition or filled with racists (or both), as was readily evident in the Euro Cup soccer tournament last summer, the great French resentment of the growing Muslim population, and on and on. My point is simply that it is too easy, yet all too predictable, that any Obama loss will be sold to the believers on the left as ample evidence of the rise of racism in this country. The AP poll is providing the fodder for that narrative. But it is not true. Obama won four years ago on the backs of independents who liked his hopey changey message. If he loses this year, which I seriously doubt he will, it will not be because those same people all of a sudden became racists, but because they do not like the direction he has taken this country in his term of office. 

On a side note, I am well aware that if Romney loses the narrative on the right will be that this is all due to the refusal of the lamestream media to hold Obama to account for his mistakes in office. If Bush would have tried to spin Benghazi like Obama has the media would have crucified him (which is probably true), if growth was this slow under a Republican there would be widespread calls by the media for something to change in Washington, etc. And it will surely be comforting for them to hear.

Gary Johnson, 2012.