Disagreements remain on what place prayer has in sport

There are signs of faith and prayer everywhere you look in sports these days. The huddle of players kneeling in prayer on the field after every NFL game. Basketball players making the sign of the cross before shooting a free throw. Fingers pointed toward the sky after home runs and touchdowns. Signs for chapel services in baseball clubhouses. Bible study and Christian fellowship groups at high school and college campuses across the country.

"I don't think a relationship with the Lord only occurs in church or only in your own private lives," says Washington basketball coach Lorenzo Romar. "Every moment you walk, you want to live in such a manner that you are acknowledging God's presence. You're trying to be his advocate, his ambassador. I don't think we turn it on and off."

But not everyone is comfortable inviting God into the game. Five years after the Supreme Court reaffirmed a ban on officially sponsored prayer in public schools with a ruling that said students couldn't lead crowds in prayer before football games, the question of who can pray together - and how - is far from settled. A New Jersey high school football coach filed suit against his district two weeks ago, asking for the right to pray with his team before games. Marcus Borden had prayed with his East Brunswick players for years until some parents complained this fall and he was ordered to stop.

The family of a former New Mexico State football player plans to file a federal suit, claiming he was discriminated against because he's Muslim. MuAmmar Ali says he was criticized for reciting a prayer from the Quran instead of the "Our Father" the rest of the team was saying after practice, and was questioned about al-Qaida.

Air Force coach Fisher DeBerry was told last year to remove a banner from the locker room that displayed the "Competitor's Creed," including the lines, "I am a Christian first and last ... I am a member of Team Jesus Christ."

"A lot of these issues are manifestations of things that are good. Mainly, that we have pluralism," says Richard Garnett, a professor of constitutional law at Notre Dame. "We are committed to two different values, government neutrality and the freedom of speech. I wouldn't want to give up one for the other."

Mustafa Ali, MuAmmar Ali's father, used to think society could use more prayer in public arenas. He and some of his co-workers have moments of prayer at work, and neither he nor his son objected when the Aggies ended practice with a prayer. But MuAmmar says he was criticized when he and two other Muslim players held their hands up to their faces and recited the opening chapter of the Quran.

MuAmmar Ali says coach Hal Mumme later called him into his office to ask about al-Qaida. Ali, the team's leading rusher last year, lost his starting job after the season opener and was later dismissed from the team.

A law firm hired by New Mexico State to investigate a grievance filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on Ali's behalf said it found no evidence of religious discrimination. But Ali's father says the family plans to pursue its complaint in a federal suit. A call to New Mexico State was not immediately returned.

"I think prayer is good. I'm actually for more of it, to be honest," Mustafa Ali says. "But I also think in these situations, the person should be able to pray how they want to pray. When you have a prayer that is a set prayer, then you alienate others and make them feel uncomfortable. It isn't as simple as people think it is."

The separation of church and state doesn't prevent public school students from praying while they're at school or participating in school-sponsored activities such as athletics. Equal-access laws have cleared the way for student-led religious groups, as long as they're voluntary.

The Fellowship of Christian Athletes has groups at 8,000 junior high schools, high schools and colleges throughout the country, reaching 350,000 student-athletes, says Dan Britton, FCA's senior vice president of ministry programs. Eighty percent of the groups are in high schools.

Problems arise when an authority figure such as a coach, or the school itself, is involved. In a 2000 ruling that banned students from leading pregame prayers over loudspeakers, the Supreme Court said the Santa Fe, Texas, school district was giving the impression of sponsorship. Students were using school equipment and were under the direction of a faculty member.

"The degree of school involvement makes it clear that the pregame prayers bear the imprint of the state and thus put school-age children who objected in an untenable position," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote.

"I don't know how a student says no," says Anthony Griffin, the attorney who represented the two families who brought the Santa Fe case. "If I'm an athlete and I want to play football, why should I be put in a position of saying, `Coach, I don't want to do this.' Then you're not a team player.

"In team sports there's tremendous pressure to conform," Griffin says. "Having the coach lead the prayer session or encourage the prayer session is nothing more than coercion."

The weird thing for me about prayers in sports is that, constitutional or not, they make very little sense.

What are these folks praying for? Are they praying for their team to win (and, necessarily, for the other team to lose)? How do they know whether God wants them to beat the other team? What hotline do they have that I don't know about?

God might want them to lose. The sport itself, for all we know, might be vile in his sight.

Seems to me that it makes sense, just about, to pray that the game is played fairly and that the best players win; but to pray for God to support the Cowboys over the Broncos seems like a species of insanity. Doesn't he have better things to worry about?

Similarly, it kind of ticks me off when contestants on TV shows suggest that they won because God wanted them to (which happens a surprising amount). When you come across anyone who says that they know what God's thinking, you should use extreme caution!

When Jesus talked about what we should pray for, he says nothing about these kinds of prayers - quite the reverse - he talks about not praying where everyone can see you, about praying that God's will be done on earth, and about praying for your enemies and those that persecute you. I don't see where all these mass public prayers for victory fit in with that.

The prayers prayed at sporting events that I am talking about or in the locker room are prayers for the safety of the players. If you have ever been to a game where this is done, both sides are involved in the prayer. Its not done to show off. When Jesus is talking about praying out loud he is speaking about doing it to get attention of those around you to show how Godly you are. Daniel prayed out loud and broke the law doing it, was sentenced to death by lions, but God saved him and killed his accusers.

That said I would clearly ask God to support the Cowboys over the Broncos if the Cowboys were my team. That doesn't mean he would answer me but I wouldn't be ashamed to do it. I pray for the Seahawks to win and do well, I don't spend all day on it but I have no problem praying it. Some might say God answered my prayers last week against the Giants.

I would rather be hot than warm in Gods eyes. If I follow the word of God, seek his will in my life then he is obligated to be with me. If not that would make him a liar. If the Bible is not true, at least I went for something and didn't wallow around in indecision. I think God will deal properly with me.

I think that folks that get onto the news and on the radio and talk about how God wants there to be prayers at these events ARE doing it to get attention and show how Godly they are." I have no problem with people praying out loud for whatever religion, and they can spend 24 hours a day doing that if they want to. What I'm saying is that some of the things these folks pray for make no sense to me, even if they are constitutional to do.

If God answered your prayers against the Giants, does that mean that he consciously chose to answer No to all the folks who were praying for the Giants? Were they better people or their prayers better prayers? Does he go by quantity? What's the logic? Praying for something that doesn't make much sense one way or the other is not high on my mental scale of sins, but it still baffles me. Like the banner mentioned above says, if you're on "Team Jesus Christ", what does that mean you're saying about the other team?

Or is it simply that the Seahawks outplayed the Giants and that God chose not to have much to do with the outcome?

If God answered your prayers against the Giants, does that mean that he consciously chose to answer No to all the folks who were praying for the Giants? Were they better people or their prayers better prayers? Does he go by quantity? What's the logic? Praying for something that doesn't make much sense one way or the other is not high on my mental scale of sins, but it still baffles me. Like the banner mentioned above says, if you're on "Team Jesus Christ", what does that mean you're saying about the other team? Or is it simply that the Seahawks outplayed the Giants and that God chose not to have much to do with the outcome?

If I were the only person on Earth, God would have sent Jesus to be a sacrifice for me. That said, God answers my prayers and sometimes he doesn't.

I expect God to be for me, I expect to win in all things I do whether work or play and I expect God to be for me. I bless all my customers, my competitors everyone involved in my business because the Bible says so, forget what my mind might think.

As far as the Giants/ Seahawks game goes, when the kicker misses the game winning field goal and then misses two more in overtime. When the Giants out gain the Hawks in most offensive and defensive categories and miss the game winning field goal plus two more in OT and the Hawks hit theirs to win, I choose to thank God for the win. I wont say we got lucky.

I will pray for victory in Iraq and victory for America in whatever we do and I expect God to hear my prayer. I will acknowledge him if he answers it and ask him what happened when he doesn't. Sometimes he answers back sometimes he doesn't and thats his business.

I believe all religion is worthless. Christianity should not be religion, it should be the way it is. I believe there is a God, he sent his son to be a sacrifice for all humanity, to clean all men of their sins toward God. Jesus said there was none righteous, so that tells me I am not righteous because God decides who is righteous, not man. "Good deeds" do not make me righteous, nor does it make Jimmy Carter righteous.The only way to be righteous is to have a cloak of righteousness placed on you when you have faith in Jesus and what was done on the cross.

The reason I mention this is because in your post you were writing about a person being better than the other and sins and those sort of things. I can't consider myself better than another except that I have some faith and that doesn't make me better. I know this though, God definitely chooses sides.

I think the thing is that while God chooses sides, we as humans have no way of knowing what side he chooses. We can presume, using ethics as we understand them, that if God is good he must be on the side that we perceive as being good, but we may be wrong.

What I'm saying is that there is no particular reason to attribute a sports victory to God rather than to the relative efforts and skills of the players. Making God a kind of tribal mascot demeans him.

Iraq is different in scale to a Giants versus Seahawks matchup. But even there, we have no way of knowing for sure what God wants to happen. We can maybe presume from the Bible that he wants peace to happen, but we have no idea how he wants us to get there. Maybe an American victory will make the world more peaceful. Maybe it won't. Can either you or I be sure of the answer?

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