Tim Tebow and a Culture of Fear

I am no football fan.  Football, even at the high school level is too violent a sport for me to watch without trepidation.  My typical involvement in any football contest is to decide which team has the best logo on their helmets (the Rams are great, the Dolphins aren’t), or how I feel about the color combinations on the uniforms (the 49er’s are good, the Bear’s aren’t).   With this casual attitude toward the sport I had to ask my niece what she meant when she said her two year old son was, “Tebowing.”

            Between my niece’s boy and the popular interest in this football player who has the temerity to pray in the open I have become interested in Mr. Tebow, his team and the intense controversy surrounding him.  

Tim Tebow is the quarterback for the Denver Broncos.  He is also a Heisman Trophy winner from the University of Florida.  He is tough.  His junior year in high school he played the entire second half of a game with a broken fibula, including a 29 yard touchdown.  He has been honored by high school, college, and national organizations.  He is good at what he does.  

            He is also, by birth and training, a devout Christian.  While still in college he set up an organization to fund an orphanage in the Philippines (where he was born and did missionary work for three years prior to college), a hospital in Florida and trips to Disneyland for disadvantaged children.  The Tim Tebow Foundation that he set up upon graduation from college is expanding on this work.  He appears to be a good person.  Why is that a problem? 

            Tonight I watched him and his team lose to the Patriots.  He played hard, took his lumps and, in the end, walked across the field and congratulated the winners.  His face said he took the loss hard, but he took it in the stride of a seasoned athlete.   He prayed, as he always does, on the field.

Tim Tebow prays as easily as some football players curse.  Yet the cursing doesn’t meet with rancor, derision and skeptical disdain.  I am absolutely amazed that when someone is profane, rude, or coarse no one ever asks whether they are really sincere in their profanity.  They are never accused of trying to convert others to their coarse ways.  But let someone wear their religion on their sleeve and there has to be some ulterior motive.  Why the hatefulness?  Personally, I think it is fear.

If a good person can succeed it is harder for others to rationalize their bad behavior with the childish, “well, everybody does it.”  I have grown weary of the number of professional athletes who flaunt their profligate lifestyle.  They use the f-word as a mark of punctuation, father endless children out of wedlock after binges of drinking and drugs, topped off with yet one more tattoo.  [Does anyone ever get one of those things sober?]  Why is one of these miscreants a better alternative than a man with good manners, personal ethics and a true faith?  Clearly they are not.  But there are lots of people in sports, entertainment and the media who seem to take perverse pleasure in a Tebow loss.  Do they really think that his life style is so great a threat to their’s that he must be stopped, quashed or at least discouraged? 

Tebow is a fine man.  I would like more of him in the world.  But then, I don’t live my life afraid, ashamed or in need of external justification. 

Don’t be afraid, and keep the faith.