I would like to give all glory to God for hitting this four-team teaser parlay

Something that became a thing in –I dunno, the 1990s maybe? — was the sight of athletes giving thanks and praise to their personal Lord and savior Jesus Christ in postgame television interviews immediately after big wins. I have never seen equivalent praise offered up after a loss, for teaching humility etc., which makes me suspect that American Christianity might contain elements of some vulgar cult of worldly success, inimical as such a thing would be to orthodox theologians.

Here’s an early example of the genre, from January 2000:

I very much enjoyed the interview with Trinidad Chambliss, who is just a great story, after last night’s quite amazing game (relevant portion starts at 2:30 of the video):

Chambliss moves at lighting speed from thanking Jesus Christ for all his own personal success, to giving thanks and praise for how awesome he himself was last night, which he certainly was — he’s also a fantastic sports story, a kid who was playing DII ball last year who is now at the top of the major college game — but which again is rather jarring, if we’re talking about theological coherence, which obviously we are not.

A particularly striking example from the same sport was provided a couple of weeks ago by Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza, who is someone I suspect we’re going to be hearing much much more about in the decades to come, in both football and other contexts (Picture Joel Osteen with an excellent NFL combine score):

Mendoza gave all the glory to God, which in theory sounds a bit more ecumenical, but which obviously has an explicitly evangelical Christian valence in the context of the public performance of faith in the wake of really big victories in America.

All this makes me long to see a Jewish athlete recite the first line of the Shema — “Hear, oh Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One” — in a similar context, or a Muslim reciting this prayer, which seems especially appropriate to anyone with money on the game:

Praise be to Allah who has spared me from what He has afflicted you with and has preferred me greatly over many of those He has created.

(Dua for Gratitude)

I abhor myself and repent (Job 42:6) for these blasphemous utterances, but at the same time the latter two hypotheticals throw some light on how narrowly circumscribed the concept of public religious praise in America, at least in the context of an ecumenical quasi-religious ritual like a Really Big Game. It now strikes me that this all seems like a particularly football-centric practice on the part of evangelical Christians, and I wonder if there’s something about the culture of football in particular that has inspired these by now almost formalized practices of public piety.

Anyway with vice president going around talking about how America is “a Christian nation,” by which he means not just Christianity, but a very specific flavor of Christianity, specifically that performed by the athletes cited in this post, this is a subject of more than trivial interest as we rocket toward ethno-nationalist authoritarianism with a theocratic twist.

ETA: I’m informed that Mendoza goes to Mass almost every day, which is a complicating factor, given that culturally speaking at least this sort of practice of thanking God for the big win is not at all part of traditional American Catholicism, but maybe this is changing as the reactionary integralist Catholicism of fresh convert Vance et al gets hybridized with reactionary evangelical Protestantism.