I don't have any specific comments on any specific currently-hot athletes, since I don't know the first thing about football. But I was thinking yesterday about how rapidly people -- both Christians and secularists -- roll their eyes when a winning athlete exclaims into a microphone, "I want to thank Jesus; I couldn't have done it without him." We all know the immediate sarcastic retorts: Oh, are you saying Jesus made you win and the other team lose? Jesus scored the touchdown for you? So he's for your team and against the other? Why don't you blame him when you lose if you give him credit when you win?

When you actually stop to think about normal human beings and what they naturally do at joyous moments, though, all these bitter little barbs are just plain silly. Nobody pauses in the middle of a spontaneous outpouring of joy to make abstract philosophical statements about causation. For example, athletes are even more likely, as they exult in a win, to say "I want to thank my wife and kids; I couldn't have done it without them."
Nobody ever -- ever! -- mistakes this utterance for some sort of metaphysical claim that the wife's direct involvement was an actual cause of the final score; nobody ever says, "Oh, well, why don't you blame your kids when you lose, if you're going to give them credit when you win?" Everyone is able to parse this as a spontaneous overflow of love for people whose presence in your life and whose compassionate support has made you what you are and helped bring you to this moment.

But put the name of Jesus in the exact same sentence, and people can't parse it anymore. They think the genre of the statement "I'd like to thank Jesus" is not the same as the genre of the statement "I'd like to thank my wife," and read it as some kind of abrupt, abstract philosophical claim about how God does or does not intervene in concrete world events. Even Christians make this mistake, which is odd, since you would think we would know very well how it feels simply to want to tell Jesus "thank you" when good things happen to us.

It reminds me -- and I can't find the source of this quote which I'm sure I'm paraphrasing -- of the idea that mystics tend to get in trouble with ecclesiastical teaching authorities simply because the language of the bedchamber is not the language of the textbook.