Faith, sports, and journalistic inquiry

The Wall Street Journal today had a thought-provoking piece by Christianity Today online editor Sarah Pulliam (@spulliam on Twitter) about journalism’s handling of faith and sports. The piece has a great news peg attached to it after all the controversy surrounding the Super Bowl ad from an anti-abortion group starring Florida Gators star and soon-to-be NFL draft pick Tim Tebow and his mother.

The column dissects some of the troubles journalists face when covering athletes who profess faith. Journalism is a profession based on inquiry and skepticism, and so when covering athletes who talk about religion this can get complicated. Pulliam neatly summarized some of this clash:

• Journalists see a lot of sides of athletes, including their bad sides. How do they match words with deeds, and are they qualified to judge hypocrisy or a person’s devotion to their faith?
• Journalism is empirical, a discipline that requires observation and the testing of facts. How does one materially test something such as faith?
• How do you honestly tell an athlete’s story without talking about the faith that motivates them? Out of that, how can you determine that the motivation is real?

Obviously an athlete’s faith becomes part of the news at times. Pulliam cites Cassius Clay’s transformation into Muhammad Ali as an example of something that is news itself and impossible to ignore.

In all, Pulliam does a good job sketching out some of the general issues concerning the intersection of faith and sports as it pertains to journalism. What I found unsatisfying was her advice on how to navigate the troubles.

If journalists are asking the right motivational questions (why did an athlete retire? why does he do prison ministry?) they might find religion in the answers. When appropriate, it’s the reporter’s responsibility to dig out the underlying story and present it to readers.

While I don’t disagree, her advice should apply to journalism as a whole and at some point is rendered obvious to the daily practitioner. Reporters should always ask deeper and more probing questions. That’s part of the job. While Pulliam constructs a solid argument, I think she leaves out some critical parts and because of it avoids one of those conversations we badly need to have about the relationship between faith and material success.

Speaking as a person of faith who has done some journalism in my time, it’s a whole lot more difficult than simply quoting an athlete or asking a follow-up question. She cites a great quote from Sports Illustrated’s Peter King but at the same time doesn’t really offer a way out of this:

“One of the problems that we have is determining the veracity of a person’s claim that he has just won this game for his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

The thing is, while digging deep is great in practice, having done sports journalism most of the faith encounters I’ve had on the job were of the variety King gets into. Athletes attributing a win, or a strong performance, or something else to God and his influence. While Pulliam doesn’t address this part of the gig in her column, I believe she missed an opportunity in doing so.

There’s a broader cultural argument here for keeping athletes from attributing any type of success to God. Even as a person of faith, I am deeply uncomfortable taking someone’s quotes attributing a victory or well played game to God if I don’t hear similar things said by that athlete in times of failure. The reason for this is that without the necessary context, the journalistic narrative can become such that faith breeds success, and left unchecked a trail of stories in this vein convey an impression in the macro that God only makes winners.

This certainly would be a sentiment that many faith-professing athletes would dispute in the micro, but in the glow of a recent victory the context is easy to lose. And is a locker room or live on-field interview after the game, asking whether they’d give God the glory win or lose, the time and place to gently challenge this lack of context? Most in the audience would probably call that journalistic malpractice on the order of badgering the witness, and that “most” would include me.

It’s easier for us to mentally link Kurt Warner’s success to God’s hand without thinking about the troubling implications of that statement. What of his fellow believers on the other side of the field who just lost the game? What of the Christian quarterback of inferior abilities who toils as a career backup and never has success in a way that would be embraced by an American culture that sees the only two places as first and last? Did God really arrange for him to get all of those concussions he suffered in his career, and where was he then?

There are answers to these questions, of course. But they are answers rooted in faith, and if we talk about success then we ought to talk just as much about failure. I am pretty sure God doesn’t need Kurt Warner to be a successful quarterback to show his greatness, but perhaps only talking faith in terms of athlete success inadvertently becomes The Latest Greatest Proof That God Exists.

So the question I’d ask is whether we should ignore the faith stories of those who fail more than they succeed? We shouldn’t, but then again that isn’t how news is done. News is a collection of the unusual or extraordinary, of “man bites dog” and so forth. We don’t write stories about the guys that finish out of the medals at the Olympics. You won’t see deep coverage on Sunday, even despite a pregame show that starts at breakfast time, of the other 30 teams that didn’t make the Super Bowl.

There’s a simple reason for this: we could produce it, but who would consume it? In America the cycle of sports news coverage is such that we cherish winners and ignore those who lose.

Over time, the overlap of faith and sports can breed some destructive thinking that actually hinders the cause to which these athletes subscribe. You don’t want to say Jesus is only about winners, but that is the subtle linkage made when you allow athletes to make statements attributing their success to God go uncontextualized. And so the journalist faces a pretty brutal choice: badger the witness, or leave it on the cutting room floor.

Pulliam seems to take the view that the journalist who cuts it out is being lazy, or perhaps is uncomfortable with faith to the point where they are paralyzed when confronted with this information. Perhaps that is true with some sports journalists. But I can say with certainty that my decision to cut this material out was the result of deep thought and reflection, and ultimately it was from the desire to be sincere with my audience and be sure to not subtly communicate some untruth with which both I and the athlete would be uncomfortable.

When you add into the mix some of the concerns that Pulliam sums up, about how a journalist really can’t be sure about an athlete’s faith based on direct observation, it becomes more troublesome. I’m not sure Pulliam’s argument truly appreciates what a minefield this is for a journalist interested in both truth and context.

So, instead of Pulliam’s advice I offer my own. I’d take her advice to dig deep on profiles and stories and build on it. Create a new genere of stories, about people who toil in obscurity or don’t find much success in their athletic pursuits. Show me what sustains them when life is tough.

Man-bites-dog has nothing on that, and the information might be so useful you might even call this type of faith/sports mix news. Then when the winners give glory to God on Sunday, we have enough journalistic evidence on the record to show that he cares about the least of those in the sports world too. Even kickers.