Sports in Post-secular America

The “Tebow Phenomenon”

Abstract

Whether found in curses believed to plague certain baseball teams or in religious-like devotion that fans express towards their team, the relationship between religion and sports is alive and well in the United States. This relationship is frequently assumed to be one of a turf war that pits religion and sports against each other. Such a stance is often predicated on the idea that sports and religious discourses occupy separate realms, yet it is at odds with the historical evidence of the intertwining of the sacred and secular in America. In this paper, I assert that while the “separatist” model has always permeated the American consciousness, an “integrationist” model that draws on a post-secular perspective is appropriate when analyzing the way that sports and religion come together in the figure of football player, Tim Tebow.