Jul 29, 2025

Are We Too Invested in Sports?

What would it look like to rein in and re-orient our love of sports, such that it becomes part of our worship of the one true God?

How much of your time, money, and attention has been allocated to sports? For me, it’s a lot. Sports have been a part of every season of my life. For years, I would play sports year-round, whether it was in the backyard, on high school teams, or briefly in college. As a kid, I printed the Cubs schedule and watched all the games we got on TV, and I pretended to be each player in the lineup while playing wiffleball with my brothers. These days, I rarely miss a Packers game and even follow a year-round Packers podcast about roster construction and player performance.

There’s something captivating about sports. It’s enchanting, maybe even engrossing. So we play, and we train to play better. We coach and recruit. We watch. We hope and dream. We celebrate and mourn. It’s something to talk about. It’s something to bet on.[1] There’s something about sports that resonates with who we are.

The sports industry is huge and multifaceted, but a conservative estimate puts it over $400 billion a year, or around 1.5% of the US economy.[2] If you look down on any American city from a plane, you can see the footprint of sports: courts, fields, and stadiums are as noticeable as skyscrapers or clusters of houses and cars. From the outside, it looks absurd. How do I explain the rules of football, why an NFL quarterback makes $60 million, or why people watch these three-hour games, to someone uninitiated?

We could condemn sports as frivolous or corrupt, or we could (unconsciously) condone idolatry. But we need “neither blind celebration nor debilitating suspicion.”[3] The path forward then is to ask: What would it look like to rein in and re-orient our love of sports, such that it becomes part of our worship of the one true God?

We can glorify God in sports, not just because watching and playing them is useful for some other purpose, but because doing so is rightly enjoyable and reflects our identity as creative and created image-bearers. But to avoid excess or corruption in our engagements with sports, Christians need Biblical wisdom, the Holy Spirit, and each other to discern where our participation should be reframed, reformed, or rejected altogether.

Reframing

“The city streets will be filled with boys and girls playing there” (Zechariah 8:5).

Reframing means thinking differently—Christianly—about sports. Sports are regulated, physical contests that serve their own ends,[4] and a form of play.[5] We create an imaginary, set-apart world with different time, space, and rules where we pursue artificial objectives. It’s unnecessary and unproductive, yet often enjoyable and meaningful.

There are plenty of benefits to playing or watching sports. The church has often sought to harness sports for instrumental purposes, like physical health, military training, character building, stress relief, distraction from temptations to sin, or evangelism.[6] But reducing sport to its side benefits is like reducing sex to a form of exercise.

Sport is how we distill and dramatize competition in a playful way. Many goals in life are unclear and pursued in mundane ways over long stretches of time. People are a mix of good and bad, and we don’t always know which side to root for. In sports, we get clear sides, a clear process, a clear objective, and a clear winner within a few hours. Sport allows us to celebrate who we are as creative creatures, to play together, wrestle with an opponent, taste victory, and swallow defeat in an imaginary world. It brings together cooperation and competition—fundamental aspects of society—in a tangible way. We jump in because we love it, and we jump out with lessons we can apply as we press on toward the Kingdom through obstacles and opposition.[7]

Sport allows us to celebrate who we are as creative creatures, to play together, wrestle with an opponent, taste victory, and swallow defeat in an imaginary world. It brings together cooperation and competition—fundamental aspects of society—in a tangible way.

Lincoln Harvey describes sport as a “liturgical celebration of contingency.” As image-bearers of a God who created freely, not out of necessity, we love to make beautifully unnecessary things. As finite creatures, we love to celebrate the way we make things and struggle toward a goal within our limits.[8] Our play can reflect God’s playfulness in creation and point forward to the playful delight we’ll experience in the eschaton. Play is both intrinsically good (as an aesthetic expression) and instrumentally valuable (as a means of formation).[9]

Reforming

"Neither be idle in the means, nor make an idol of the means" (William Secker).

Reforming means engaging in sports Christianly, individually and structurally. Christians will always be tempted to a prosperity gospel or asceticism. In the prosperity gospel, Jesus is a means to worldly ends, like health, wealth, pleasure, or fame. In asceticism, following Jesus requires completely abandoning worldly goods. To watch or play sports Christianly is to reject both. We don’t forsake earthly things or pursue them as ultimate; instead, we use earthly things for heavenly purposes.

Playing Christianly isn’t about enlisting God to help us win and then publicly thanking Him for it. Of course, we owe any success to His grace, but praying for victory or claiming that following Jesus makes us better at sports quickly becomes a type of prosperity gospel. As Christians, our faith should motivate us to do our best, but it won’t magically improve our jump shot. It might lead us to prioritize athletic success less than the world does and hold us back from a “win at all costs” mindset.

One key to engaging in sports Christianly is reining it in so it doesn’t become bigger than it should. It’s the cardinal virtue of temperance. If we put God first, we’ll save space in our time, budgets, and thoughts for more important things like church, devotions, work, school, family, and friends. The imaginary world of the game is beautiful, but I can’t let a Packers loss ruin my day. Trying to beat your opponent is appropriate, but hating them or seeing them as an opponent off the court betrays our call to love our enemies. The potential for malice, tribalism, and discord in sports has historically troubled many Christians.

As an economist, I think a lot about optimal allocation of limited resources. As a Christian, I recognize these decisions as a matter of stewardship. So how much should we allocate to sports? Economics suggests a rule for “how much?” questions: invest a little more if the benefit of doing so exceeds the cost, and invest a little less if the cost saved exceeds the benefit lost. There’s always an opportunity cost: a $300 ticket to an NFL game could’ve been given to the poor, and an hour spent watching Sportscenter could’ve been spent reading the Bible. For some, like the Puritans, this principle could lead to a negative view of sports. But sport is a gift from a God of abundance. This is where we need wisdom, the Holy Spirit, and each other to discern how much is too much. We need spiritual imagination to see where investing a little more or a little less in sports could better conform us to the call of Christ.

The second key to engaging in sports Christianly is re-orienting how we watch and play. 800 years ago, Jacque de Vitry said jousting tournaments lured Christians into all seven deadly sins: pride, envy, anger, avarice, gluttony, sloth, and lust.[10] These temptations beset us in modern sports too. Sports culture isn’t a neutral canvas on which we can display Christian virtues; it’s a gravitational force we enter. Sports create immense rewards and tempt people to greed and ethical compromise in pursuit of success. Doing the right thing might not always help us win, but those points of divergence are where the most credible signals of our true allegiance are found.[11] Christians can reform sports alongside non-Christians,[12] but Christian institutions especially must foster sports cultures that help us think and act Christianly in sports.[13]

Playing Christianly means acknowledging God’s provision, playing for the love of the game, loving teammates and opponents, and subordinating the sphere of sport to the Kingdom of Christ.

Rejecting

“Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them” (Ephesians 5:11).

Rejecting means knowing where to draw the line—and walking away when necessary. While sports bring us together, teams and leagues create a conditional form of belonging, and that belonging can come at a high cost. Competition naturally selects for not just talent, but also obsession and moral flexibility. Without the proper safeguards, the race to the top becomes a race to the bottom. Sometimes we can sacrifice a competitive edge and stay in the game, but sometimes we can’t. What happens when all the other team doctors clear players to play through concussions, when you can’t win a bike race without blood doping, or when making the travel team means skipping church every weekend?

Looking to history, we can learn from times when the church has rightly rejected or withdrawn from sports. For the early church, Greek and Roman events were abhorrently violent, licentious, and laden with explicit idolatry. Later on, chariot races, jousting tournaments, and Shrovetide football reeked of similar problems even when sprinkled with Christian symbols, and many church leaders appropriately opposed participation in these events.[14] Even today, violence remains an attraction in sports like boxing and UFC, while spectacles like the Super Bowl exalt provocative performers in the name of entertainment.[15] As Christians, we must be willing to abstain from practices that devalue and intentionally harm our fellow image bearers.

...if the cost of belonging in the world of sports is our morals, our concern for others, or our commitment to church, the price is too steep.

It would be great if we could dial back the competitiveness of youth sports, which has somehow become a $40 billion industry, and cancel games that conflict with Sunday worship. But sometimes we just have to pull our kids from the team. As Christians, we must be willing to step back when participation in sports undermines our formation in Christ.

While I can’t tell you exactly where to draw the lines, I challenge you to consider this: if the cost of belonging in the world of sports is our morals, our concern for others, or our commitment to church, the price is too steep. If we’re never willing to drop out or stop watching, Christians will never be salt and light in sports.

Avoiding Idolatry

To avoid idolizing sports, we guard our hearts and orient them toward an all-consuming love for God and a selfless love for others. We watch what captures our affections, pray “search me and try me,” and meditate on God’s character and work as revealed in Scripture and creation. We help each other discern the cultural forces shaping us. It will always be tempting to make a god of sports, even when we claim to be using sports to glorify God. But when Christians think about sports differently, participate differently, and are willing to walk away when necessary, Christ is glorified.

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References:

[1] Predicting outcomes is fun, but sports betting is quite dangerous. Hollenbeck, Brett and Larsen, Poet and Proserpio, Davide, The Financial Consequences of Legalized Sports Gambling (July 23, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4903302

[2] Milano, M., & Chelladurai, P. (2011). Gross domestic sport product: The size of the sport industry in the United States. Journal of Sport management, 25(1), 24-35.

[3] Harvey, L. (2015). A Brief Theology of Sport. SCM Press.

[4] Allen Guttmann’s definition, from Harvey, p. 70. Roger Callois classifies play into four key ingredients that a game will incorporate in varying proportions: mimicry, thrill, skill, and chance. (Harvey, p. 71)

[5] Johan Huizinga said “[Play is] a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life… but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained from it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner.” Harvey, p. 69.

[6] Sport in church history is summarized well by Hoffman, S. J. (2010). Good game: Christianity and the culture of sports. Baylor University Press, and Harvey, L. (2015). A Brief Theology of Sport. SCM Press.

[7] Paul famously drew athletic analogies in verses like Philippians 3:14 “ I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus,” or Hebrews 12:1 “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us…”

[8] The key role of limits in the human struggle underlies the economic aspect of life (making the most of limited resources). https://dooy.info/economic.htm.... It explains why Superman was boring without kryptonite and soccer would be boring if you could use your hands.

[9] In Herman Dooyeweerd’s framework of modal aspects, play is part of the aesthetic aspect (harmonizing, enjoying, playing, beautifying), and the way play shapes us individually and culturally brings in the formative aspect (deliberate creative shaping and developing of things with an end in mind). https://dooy.info/aesthetic.html, https://dooy.info/formative.ht...

[10] Jacque de Vitry said knights committed all seven deadly sins: “pride, because of their desire for praise; envy, because they resented greater praise for other tourneyers; anger, because they struck out when tempers became frayed in the sport; avarice, because they desired other knights’ horses and equipment…; gluttony, because of the attendant feasting; sloth, because of the reaction to defeat in combat; and lust, because of the desire to please loose women by wearing their favorite colors in the lists.” Hoffman, p. 52.

[11] In economics, a credible signal is an action costly enough that it’s only worth taking if you are you who say you are.

[12] For example, the Champions of Character program is one good attempt to help promote character-building and ethical behavior in NAIA college athletics, as noted by Hoffman, S. J. (2010). Good game: Christianity and the culture of sports.

[13]The Defender Way” is how Dordt University articulates its framework for trying to do this. It should not be coincidental that “the pursuit of championships” is listed fourth, behind goals for spiritual formation, character formation, and academic formation.

[14] Hoffman, S. J. (2010). Good game: Christianity and the culture of sports, pp. 49-56.

[15] While I disagree with aspects of his critique, one Christian sociology professor has noted the aspects of sin and idolatry visible in the Super Bowl. Vos, M.S. (2024, February 7). One square inch we won’t concede: Super Bowl, Christians, and secular liturgies, Part I. Christian Scholar’s Review.

About the Author

Joshua Hollinger

Dr. Joshua Hollinger serves as assistant professor of economics at Dordt University. His research interests include labor economics, economics of education, and sports economics.

In addition to teaching courses in economics, Dr. Hollinger hosts ECONversations, a monthly discussion event for students, faculty, and staff.

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