Are travel sports replacing religion in America?
Plus, debating political consequentialism, and an Uneasy Citizenship update
Greetings from the beginning of summer in Northwest Arkansas. Schools are out, which means my kids are home all day, which means they’ve already managed to get into approximately 3,400 conflicts. Still, the sweet moments more than make up for the sour ones. Kind of.
Last week Uneasy Citizenship was released to the world. I’m hoping to be able to share some reviews in the weeks and months to come, as well as point to some podcasts on which I’ll appear to discuss the book. I already have a few lined up, for which I’m thankful.
I’m also planning to develop a discussion guide for the book in the weeks ahead. It will be geared toward college and church groups. Keep an eye out for news on that.
In the meantime, please consider ordering the book and sharing it with others. I’m not naive enough to think Uneasy Citizenship will be the cure to our political dysfunction. But I do think it can play a small role in helping Christians do politics better.
The other day my wife, Caitlyn, had a revelation. She shared it with me, and then told me I should try to write about it. So, here goes.
The business of travel sports in America is booming. Every year families commit countless hours and thousands of dollars—in equipment, fees, traveling, etc—to supporting their kids’ budding love of the game(s).
Travel sports leagues are different than local Boys and Girls Club, YMCA, or city-sponsored leagues. Games and tournaments in travel sports often extend throughout the year and require travel to sites far away. Families participating in these leagues get to know each other very well, as do the kids on the teams. Not only do they practice and play together, but they travel and stay together, bonding over hotel breakfasts and out-of-town dinners.
Part of the motivation to do travel sports might be better coaching and more focused player development that might lead to a college scholarship someday, but I’d wager a lot of it has to do with social benefits. Because of the cost of travel sports, requiring a lot of investment from participating families, families can be confident that everybody is approaching their sport with a similar degree of seriousness. This simply will not be the case in a lower cost, local sports league that practices one night a week and plays one game on Saturday for a few weeks a year.
In travel sports, families form not just teams, but little communities.
And that, Caitlyn suggested, is what makes travel sports the new religion for middle class America.
Research on religion in America consistently paints a picture of decline, from attendance to belief to identification. Ryan Burge, a leading voice on this topic, has written extensively on the decline of traditional religion in America. The results are clear: America is not necessarily a secular-dominated society, but neither is religion as dominant as it once was.
It makes sense, then, for something else to take the place of organized religion in American society. And for a certain subset of the population, that thing very well may be travel sports.
Because of the commitments required for travel sports and the social benefits afforded by them, families who do travel sports may find these leagues just as enriching—in terms of developing social capital and even a sense of meaning and belonging—as organized religion, with the added benefit of involving sports rather than, say, Bible reading and prayer.
Moreover, because of the demanding schedules of travel sports, it is often necessary to play games on Sunday mornings, a time historically reserved for worship services. We have friends who are involved in travel sports (soccer, specifically), and last season the league announced a schedule that would require them to travel and play on Sundays. These friends are also members of our church and were bothered by the schedule conflicting with our Sunday worship service.
When they raised it with the coaches and other families on the team, one parent asked (genuinely, but also confusedly), “Why can’t you just go to a different church for a while? One with a service that doesn’t conflict with games?”
To be clear, I am not suggesting families who do travel sports are prone to be less religious than other families. In fact, the propensity for social engagement in travel sports (not to mention the likely socioeconomic class of these folks, based on the cost of such sports) might mean that these families are more likely to be engaged in other forms of community activity, including religion. That’s a question for another time.
However, I can’t shake the idea that the rise in travel sports is encroaching, at least in some corners of American society, on religion. Both require significant investment, both involve inordinate time spent with the same group of people, and both have their own sets of odd customs and rituals (sacraments like communion on the one hand, and coordinated outfits and cheers on the other).
To put it another way, I think Derek Thompson is on to something when he says, “Everything’s a cult now.”
Churches have often been the safety net for individuals and families in their midst, when babies are born and people die and husbands abandon their wives and any other kind of shock to the status quo. Churches, while by no means perfect, have the potential to organize and get behind people needing immediate support.
Our family has certainly felt this over the years, across multiple cross-country moves to unknown environments. After finding a place to live, the first thing we did in every instance was seek out a church. Not because we’re perfect Christians, but because we, like most human beings, desire community. And for us, that community has most frequently been found in churches.
With religion steadily declining in American society, perhaps the most important question today is what fills that void. And while I’m skeptical that it will be travel sports, it probably isn’t the least likely outcome.
Something interesting happened last week in the small but fascinating world of online conservative Protestantism. It began with a First Things article from Carl Trueman, about as ardent a social and cultural conservative as can be. Trueman, author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self and professor of Biblical and religious studies at Grove City College, critiques what he identifies as a Nietzschean turn in political engagement among certain Christians. Consider this:
The threat to religious liberty remains and has indeed expanded, but a new one has also emerged: the temptation to combat this by fusing Christianity with worldly forms of power and worldly ways of achieving the same. For want of a better term, it’s a kind of pop Nietzscheanism that uses the idioms of Christianity.
He continues:
It’s understandable why such a thing has emerged. Many Christians think America has been stolen from them. And the path to political power today is littered with crudity, verbal thuggery, and, whatever the policies at stake, the destruction of any given opponent’s character. While the left may pose an obvious threat, there is also a more subtle danger in succumbing to the rules of the political game as currently played by both sides.
For Trueman, political consequentialism—that the importance of the ends more than justify the means—leads to a decidedly un-Christian practice of politics. As the title of his article suggests, Trueman thinks there is a trend toward endorsing a Nietzschean view of Christian politics, wherein observers might consider this sort of practice—with its emphasis on service, gentleness, and love—as the epitome of weakness and fecklessness. For Nietzsche, Christianity was “despicable” and “slave morality.” Our moment, these critics might say, demands a stronger practice of the faith.
One of these critics is Ben Crenshaw. Writing in The American Reformer, Crenshaw argues that Trueman’s posture ends up adopting a separatist approach to politics — that is, adopting a posture seeking to keep one’s hands clean from the rough and tumble of daily political life, while ceding important ground to the very real threats from secularists on the political left. Crenshaw writes:
Trueman is allergic to political power. Any desire or attempt by American Christians to serve in political office in order to bring about moral and social order is met with scorn: this is just “worldly power” and “worldly ways of achieving” it; it’s nothing but the will to power to assert oneself and dominate others. Trueman’s characterization of the New Christian Right’s political interest and goals is juvenile.
He concludes with a shout-out to the Old Testament account of Rahab:
What Trueman fails to grasp is that in a negative world setting, the tangible human goods for which political Christians are striving take priority over the procedural means necessary to achieve those goods (unlike in the positive world of a gentleman’s politics in which shared political ends but disagreement over means elevates procedure and decorum as the lynchpin for resolving differences). Rahab understood what Trueman doesn’t, and she was commended for her faith (Hebrews 11:31)—not for some kind of wily pragmatism or will to survive. Politically-active American Christians who defy the enemies of God and wage war against evil, and who necessarily employ crude memes, subterfuge, and even deception toward these ends, will likewise be commended for their faith. Trueman’s faith is too small and anemic for the political, but that does not make us Nietzscheans.
For Crenshaw, a more realistic (for him and his compatriots) approach to politics in an increasingly negative world is not Nietzschean; it is just that—realistic—and more fitting to a negative world environment.
Trueman authored a short rebuttal to Crenshaw’s critique, criticizing his characterization of today’s negative world as uniquely threatening:
Crudity, duplicity and even dishonesty all justified because Crenshaw has decided that America in 2024 is analogous to Jericho in redemptive history and worse than first-century Rome. That paragraph needs to be marked, pondered, and remembered. It is a transvaluation of Christian values if ever there was one.
Trueman then cites the words of the apostles in their various letters to the first century church. Notably, Paul and Peter did not rally these early Christians to “subterfuge” or “deception” on the road to political and cultural victories, but rather preached the necessity of “put[ting] away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy…. that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people.”1
Trueman concludes:
What a pity that the apostle had “too small and anemic a faith” to understand what he was up against. No wonder they crucified him.
Yikes.
What to make of all this? Three initial thoughts:
If Carl Trueman is not sufficiently conservative in the context of the challenges of our political moment, then very few truly are.
Related to this, it is fascinating to watch “traditional” conservatives—not in terms of partisanship, but those committed to conserving institutions, traditions, and the like—duke it out with a newer sort of conservative, those who are more comfortable wielding the power of government and the state to defeat their opponents on the left.2 This is not, these latter conservatives would maintain, a turn toward authoritarian politics, but rather simply playing by the same rules as progressives.
I wrote Uneasy Citizenship to argue for a distinctly Christian posture when doing politics, one that confounds and upsets the world’s emerging consensus of what it means to do politics in an increasingly contentious and volatile world. My book acknowledges a real tension in how Christians should approach politics, on the one hand keeping our faith front and center and on the other hand pursuing political outcomes in line with true justice and the flourishing of our communities. The debate between Trueman and Crenshaw illustrates the tension well.
1 Peter 2.
Some commentators have referred to this latter group as “Barstool conservatives.”
Will there be a Kindle/Audible version (s) of Uneasy Citizenship?
Good column today. I have grandchildren involved in travel sports. Not as bad as many in terms of out of town/state travel but plenty of weekend tournaments. I asked a pastor friend if he had felt the impact of youth sports. I got an earful. How it had totally disrupted their youth ministry. Keep up the good work.