Tag: Olympics

Why the Olympics are Un-American

Published on by D. G. Hart4 Comments

The Silver Medalists for 2015:

Seattle Seahawks
Cleveland Cavaliers
Tampa Bay Lightning
New York Mets

Yes, those are all the teams that made it to the championships last year and lost. Did the players on those teams receive a consolation prize? So why the big deal with silver medals? And who even thinks coming in third is noteworthy? Does anyone remember Dortmund?

Chalk some of this up to old age. I used to be glued to the television during the 1960s broadcasts of the Olympics. (But remember, back then sports on television were rare. To see Lew Alcindor play Elvin Hays in the college basketball game of the century you needed to travel to Houston.) Then it dawned on me, thanks to Wide World of Sports, that every year some international competition in track, swimming, or skiing was happening, and that the record-winning times had as much significance as performances in the Olympics. The Olympics were no longer special, and they had yet to be hyped the networks or doped by the pharmacists (at least in the free world).

Add to that the admission of professional athletes to what used to be a competition for amateurs, though of course Harold Abrahams superiors at Caius College had other thoughts about gentlemen athletes, and I figured I’d just as soon watch national sports as opposed to those competitions promoted by liberals who pined for one-world-government.

Would the Papal States Have Fielded a Bobsled Team?

Published on by D. G. Hart12 Comments

The question is of course anachronistic since the International Olympic Committee did not start until 1894, a good quarter of a century after the papacy lost its temporal powers. Even so, if ever Christians had wanted to root for a Christian team in the Olympics, the Papal States would have come the closest to integrating faith, politics, and sport since in that context the church was running things.

The reason for this little venture in wonderment was a recent story at Christianity Today about God and country at the Olympics in Sochi (in contrast, this one avoids nationalism):

It’s nice to find fellow Christians among the 230 men and women who make up the 2014 Team USA delegation to Sochi, Russia. We don’t root for them because they’re on “Team Jesus,” but all the same it’s nice to see people at the peak of their field, on the world’s biggest athletic stage, turn the credit back to the One who gave us bodies to run and jump and spin on ice and imaginations to push the limits of those bodies to run faster, jump higher, and spin faster than we ever thought possible.

Here are a few Christians to watch as they compete for Team USA in Sochi. Many of them are medal contenders; all of them know that no matter what happens over the next two weeks, God will still be good.

The question this article raises is the one that 2kers constantly ponder: to whom do I have a higher allegiance, the temporal city (Team U.S.A.) or the eternal city — no, not the Vatican — the church? It may be a two-fer to have an American and a Christian on one of the Olympic teams. But why would American Christians be more interested in U.S. Christian athletes than believers on Team France, Team China, or Team Brazil? And how about Reformed Protestants pulling especially hard for the nations that gave us the Reformed churches — Team Switzerland, Team Netherlands, and Team United Kingdom?

At the same time, since God has little to do with the Olympics, since the teams arise from temporal polities not from spiritual ones, why should U.S. Christians root any harder for believers on Team U.S.A. than for the non-believing team members? The answer is, there is no reason, unless you think — like the transformers, theonomists, and neo-Calvinists — that “neutral” realms may not exist and religion needs to be part of everything. Oh, the inhumanity of the IOC and Russian officials not acknowledging God (and for shame on the BBs and Rabbi Bret for not raising a ruckus about the secular Olympics)! If realms like the Olympics need religion, then Christianity Today’s article makes perfect sense. But then so does reducing the kingdom of God to the earthly, fleeting, and spurious politics of the IOC and the U.S. Olympic Committee.