Tebow’s Testimony

Each one of us has received a special gift in proportion to what Christ has given … He appointed some to be apostles, others to be prophets, others to be evangelists, others to be pastors and teachers.

–Ephesians 4: 7 and 11

And he appointed yet others, it turns out, to be quarterbacks. Tim Tebow has always wanted two things: to be right with Jesus in heaven and to lead a football team to glory on the field. When he was 6 years old, in the early 1990s, he began to worry about going to hell. He wanted to accept Jesus as his personal Saviour–the Evangelical key to salvation. But when he went to his father, who was a missionary and preacher, he found himself frustrated by questions his father asked him about the Gospel–questions posed, Tebow recalls, “to make sure I was not taking this decision lightly.” Finally, young Tebow went to his mother. “I want to ask Jesus to come into my heart,” he told her. “I’m ready to be saved. I tried with Dad, but he’s just too hard.” Mother and son prayed together, and the confession of faith was made. To celebrate, the family went to Epcot.

A consummately American story: the fear of death, the hope of heaven and a trip to Disney. This season, with each cliff-hanging win or dismal loss for the Denver Broncos, Tebow, an active, professing Evangelical Christian, has used his gifts and his position as quarterback to create a powerful 21st century witness for Jesus. There is nothing new about the strange intersection of Christianity and football: fans waved JOHN 3: 16 placards long before Tebow etched the citation in his eye black. The re-enactment of the ancient rituals of pain and victory, of comebacks and upsets, has always evoked biblical stories like that of David and Goliath. What is new and what makes Tebow an intriguing figure–no matter how the Broncos do in the playoffs they just barely made–is the scale and scope of his witness. With Billy Graham on the cool side of the mountain and George W. Bush living quietly in Dallas, Tebow is perhaps the most significant Evangelical Christian in the country. Depending on your point of view, his rise is a thoroughly American story of honest conviction or of ostentatious piety, of faith and family or of aggressive sectarianism.

Tebow’s witness is the latest chapter in a decades-old Evangelical movement to transform America. Drawing on images from the Gospel of Matthew, leaders from theologian Francis Schaeffer to Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ to televangelist Jerry Falwell have summoned believers to be ministers of “salt and light.” The common shorthand is “You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world.” To be salt is to be engaged in the world, confronting the culture; to be light is to preach the Gospel message, winning souls and building churches. Tebow’s Baptist missionary father Bob is very much a part of this Evangelical movement. On the day the senior Tebow began to pray for a son, he was showing The Jesus Film–a Bill Bright creation–to potential converts in the Philippines.

Tebow’s personal story is mythic. His mother was advised to seek an abortion early in her pregnancy with Tim. It has become part of Tebow lore that when he was safely delivered, despite a barely attached placenta, doctors called it a miracle. Like his four siblings, Tebow was homeschooled. No TV until they had memorized Scripture; no discussing their many sports victories unless someone asked about them. Through high school and college, he divided his time between football and ministry. He was so hotly recruited in high school, he was the subject of an ESPN documentary called “The Chosen One.” At the University of Florida, he led fellow students in weekly Bible studies; preached in prisons, schools and hospitals; ushered the team to a national championship; and won the Heisman Trophy.

With the Broncos this year, he led the team to a series of dazzling fourth-quarter victories before ending the regular season with three consecutive losses. The run of last-minute triumphs catapulted Tebow to even broader fame beyond the world of sports. At the 2010 National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, Tebow offered the closing prayer: “Thank you for bringing together so many people that have a platform to influence people for you.” Platform is a big word with Tebow: it comes up again and again in his public remarks and in his memoir Through My Eyes. Tebow is onto something. The preaching of the Gospel–the living of the Gospel–is moving from pulpit to platform, from church to culture. The next Billy Graham, if there could be such a thing, may come not from the ranks of traditional preachers or ministers but from sports or entertainment. If the measure of evangelistic activity is the number of eyes and ears one reaches, then Tebow is possibly a much more influential Christian messenger than any active Protestant cleric. When Tebow put JOHN 3: 16 in his eye black during a University of Florida game, he set off 92 million Google searches for the Scripture reference. His Twitter feed–full of Bible verses and his signature symbol, GB2 (God Bless + Go Broncos = GB[superscript 2])–spreads an Evangelical message to some 800,000 followers, as his Facebook page does to 1.3 million subscribers.

And no matter what happens in the playoffs, he is now a verb. To Tebow is to get down on one knee and start praying even if everyone else around you is doing something completely different. People have Tebowed at weddings and on Afghan mountaintops. In December four Long Island high school students were suspended after 40 other students joined them in Tebowing on campus. (Administration officials deemed it a safety hazard.)

There is also the inevitable backlash. The like-minded (or like-cultured) adore him. Bill Maher and Saturday Night Live don’t. Maher tweeted “Wow, Jesus just f—ed #TimTebow bad! And on Xmas Eve!” after the Broncos lost to Buffalo last month. SNL put on a sketch featuring Jesus pleading with the Broncos to “meet me halfway out there.” Within moments, the Fox News Channel and the usual conservative suspects fired back, and so on and so on, world without end. A self-described virgin, Tebow inspired an Orlando radio station to launch a “Get Tebow Laid” campaign. Between the “I Hate Tim Tebow” Facebook pages and Tebowhaters.com the hostility toward Tebow’s overt religiosity is viral.

This cultural Passion play of red-state piety and blue-state scorn is at once familiar and dispiriting. If Christians like Tebow are going to bear witness so publicly, then they ought not to be surprised when they are talked about in ways that require them to turn the other cheek. To insist that criticism of Tebow–even vulgar criticism–is evidence that American culture is hostile to Christianity is wrongheaded. At the same time, secularists who take shots at believers need to remember that the American tradition of religious liberty protects those who profess a faith as well as those who do not. I sometimes wonder whether we are the new Greeks and Trojans, perpetuating a long war more out of habit than necessity.

Jesus never played football and is not known to have ever worked out. (He didn’t even swim, preferring to walk on water.) The perennial appeal of sports to deeply believing Christians, though, is undeniable. Part of the reason for this affinity may lie in the sense of drama that religion and sports share. For athletes, life is to be lived before an audience, according to precise rules and prescribed ritual. The rush of performance–especially of a victorious performance–is thrilling and transporting in the way religious feeling can be, taking the believer-athlete out of the ordinary world to a different, higher plane.

A favorite verse of Tebow’s will serve him well in the brutal world of football: “Forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead,” writes St. Paul, “I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of Christ Jesus.” Whenever and however the Broncos’ postseason ends, their young quarterback has already given us a glimpse of what lies ahead for Evangelical Christianity and for America.