I always find it interesting when professional athletes who are also Christian start talking about their faith. Sometimes they dedicate a win or offer praise to God for a victory for their team as if God has a vested interest in the outcome. I’m pretty sure God has better things to do than rooting for one team to win, even if I don’t. The idea that God is orchestrating who wins and who loses is theologically silly. So is the idea that someone is a gifted athlete because of their faith. I once heard former Major League baseball player Daniel Murphy respond to a reporter who asked about his hitting prowess with, “That’s not me, that’s Jesus,” or words to that effect. I don’t Jesus is the reason anyone can hit a major league slider.

What really gives me pause though is when these athletes start weaponizing the Bible particularly related to culture war issues. This happens a lot when teams host a Pride night event. I’ve heard of Russian hockey players refusing to wear Pride themed team apparel due their Russian Orthodox beliefs. Never mind that the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church has sanctioned Putin’s war against Ukraine despite Christ’s teachings of nonviolence. It’s the gays that Christians have to watch out for apparently according to these Orthodox Christians.

Baseball season is in full swing when Pride month comes around and so there are often Major League baseball players who object to their team’s Pride night celebrations and uniforms. One of the go to moves for evangelicals and fundamentalists is their performative attempts to “take back the rainbow” from the LGBTQIA community by citing Genesis 9:12-16. This passage is about God’s post-flood promise to never wipe humanity off the face of the Earth with a flood. Never mind that the flood story is not literally true and that it has nothing whatsoever to do with human sexuality.

Clayton Kershaw wrote those verses on his hat during a Pride night game last season. This season, multiple pitchers from the San Francisco Giants did so as well in protest of the event and to proclaim their faith in God. Landen Roupp, JT Brubaker, and Ryan Walker all put it on their Pride night caps. Roupp has said that he did it because, “It’s just what I stand for. I believe in God. It’s something I believe in and I stand firm in that.” “Thankfully we live in a country where we have the freedom to believe what we want.” Roupp is correct about freedom of religion. He is free to believe that even if it’s utterly nonsensical to conflate the Genesis flood narrative with Pride night.

These multimillionaire athletes are choosing to weaponize the Bible by putting those verses on their hats. They are tacitly saying that LGBTQIA people are not welcome in society, that they are sinful, and that God hates them. They are using a completely unrelated biblical passage to bolster their view and in so doing are showing a lack of compassion, a hugely selective reading of the Bible, and a whole lot of unintentional irony and cognitive dissonance. Allow me to elaborate.

The percentage of the bible that is read homophobically by conservative Christians is quite small. There are only a handful of passages among the over 31,100 verses of the Bible that these Christians point to in the mistaken belief that they say that being LGBTQIA is a sin. They do not, but it’s well nigh impossible to convince them because these conservative Christians are so committed to their certitude and therefore scholarly evidence often won’t convince them. Thus they wallow in their ignorance and bigotry while engaging in performative expressions of their faith.

By contrast, the Bible is replete with passages about the evils perpetuated by the wealthy against the poor and politically powerless. It is unambiguous about the dangers of accumulating or even desiring to accumulate wealth. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible often denounced the wealthy and powerful for the ways in which they flaunted their wealth. Jesus was crystal clear that the rich would find it difficult to enter the kingdom of God and even told a rich young man to sell everything he owned and to give all of the proceeds to the poor. Ananias and Sapphira found out the hard way what the punishment was for hoarding money instead of sharing it equally with the community. The author of 1 Timothy famously stated that believers should be content with food and shelter because the love of money is the root of all evil.

Perhaps these wealthy athletes missed the memo about how the Bible treats wealth. Clayton Kershaw for example made hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of his excellent career. At times, his average salary was over $30 million per season. JT Brubaker has made over $14 million so far during his career. Landen Roupp and Ryan Walker earn a paltry $810,000 per year, which is just above the Major League minimum. Both are multimillionaires. Even those on the lower end of the pay scale are wealthy, even by American standards, with average U.S. household income being roughly ten times less what Roupp and Walker’s salaries are this season. 1

I have no doubt that the ballplayers I’ve mentioned above are sincere in their faith. I do wonder how they can square their sincerely held beliefs in the Bible with the exorbitant amounts of money they earn for playing a game.2 They have to completely ignore everything the Bible says about wealth to justify making and hoarding that much money. Kershaw could have given away every penny of his $50 million worth of signing bonuses and still been a very wealthy man who would never need to work again and he’s only 38. That sounds a lot like storing up treasures on earth to me.

I wonder if Kershaw cares at all about how hard people like him are making it for LGBTQIA to simply exist. Do these players care that their LGBTQIA fans feel alienated by these actions? Do they make any attempt to engage biblical scholarship? Do they ever take the time to listen to LGBTQIA people? Do they know that there are faithful Christians who are gay, lesbian, Trans, intersex, and asexual? I doubt it, but they’ll likely continue with their performative expressions of faith. I hope they repent of their bigotry and their hoarding of wealth, but I won’t hold my breath…

1

By way of comparison, I have a Master’s degree, have authored three highly regarded books, contributed a chapter to a fourth, am a contributor to a weekly segment on a national radio show, co-host an award winning podcast, and write multiple short form pieces every week. My current total income is less than $50,000/year.

2

I am a lifelong sports fan. That said, the money they make is often obscene.