At The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, we talk a lot about front porches. It’s the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) place where you can sit down with someone and talk as friends, even if you disagree. It’s a place to explore new ideas and seek to persuade. As Christians we use front porches to share the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The best front porch I know today, at least in the United States, is sports. I don’t have many venues for small talk with my neighbors, let alone a context where we could spend enough time together to explore bigger ideas together. Sports is that front porch for me. How much more so for the athletes themselves, all the way up to the professional level.

I was confirmed in that view as I read the new book The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports by Paul Putz with Oxford University Press. Paul serves as assistant director of Truett Seminary’s Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor University. He does a good job of setting the scene in sports today. Paul writes,

A strong case can be made that there is no public workplace or industry in American culture today with a greater concentration of organized and committed Christians than big-time sports. . . . While many sectors of American public life, including education and entertainment, have tended to move in a more secular direction, in sports the opposite is true. Compared with one hundred years ago, there are far more athletes and coaches today willing to publicly champion Christianity as a formative influence in their lives.

No wonder, then, sports is also the venue for many culture-war disputes. When Tim Tebow knelt to pray, half the country cheered, while the other half jeered. When Colin Kaepernick knelt to protest, the sides reversed. Today, the much-debated NIL (name/image/likeness) revenue sharing has opened surprising new doors for young Christians to foreground their faith. In this interview, Putz explains the significance of this shift in power away from the coaches and schools, toward the players.