The God Football League

Christianity Today has a series of essays on how how evangelical Christianism has adoped- and co-opted- the images and institutions of sport:

...Variously described by those inside and outside as narcissistic, materialistic, violent, sensationalist, coarse, racist, sexist, brazen, raunchy, hedonistic, body-destroying, and militaristic, big-time sports culture lifts up values in sharp contrast with what Christians for centuries have understood as the embodiment of the gospel. There are simply no easy, straight-faced, intellectually respectable answers for how evangelicals can model the Christian narrative—with its emphases on servanthood, generosity, and self-subordination—while immersed in a culture that thrives on cut-throat competition, partisanship, and Darwinian struggle. If evangelical ethicist R. E. O. White is right to assert that self-absorption is behind all wrong social relationships and, for this reason, self-denial is the first ethical condition of discipleship, then elite athletes immersed in the self-consumed atmosphere of sports, where self-denial is a recipe for competitive disaster, face a fundamental problem.

This is not the only place where the sports ethic pinches the shoe of Christian theology. While the Bible heralds the human body as the apex of creation, the vessel of the indwelling Spirit, and reflective of the Creator's image, a large and expanding body of epidemiological evidence suggests that sports are an agent of its desecration; the latest investigations of Congress and others focus on the relationship between playing professional football and the risk of dementia.