David French devotes a National Review Online column to the campaign to ensure separation of God and football.

Over at The Nation, sportswriter Dave Zirin has used the spat to applaud those who are “getting God out of football.” He claims that college and pro football are “religious spaces controlled by a very political strain of Christianity, one that demands that its adherents use their athletic platform to praise Jesus at every turn.” Zirin is not alone in his disgust for Christian expression in college and pro athletics. The trolls at the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) have lately made a habit of attacking college football teams’ chaplains, claiming their access to players violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

Essentially, Zirin, the FFRF, and their ilk want big-time sports to be as religion-free as the rest of pop culture. And they’ll seize on the flimsiest pretexts — the fact that stadiums are “funded by the government” or that the “network airwaves are — allegedly — for all of us” — to accomplish their goal.

Thankfully, to get God out of football, the anti-religious crowd would need to get the football players out of football. The same goes for basketball (where Andre Iguodala famously thanked the NBA’s chaplains after being named NBA Finals MVP), baseball, and every other sport that draws its athletes from the vast portion of America that’s still Christian and proud of it.

When one lives in one of the coastal, secular bubbles that generate far more screenwriters and actors than they do cornerbacks and point guards, it’s easy to forget exactly how religious the rest of America is, how they give glory to God for every good and meaningful thing that happens in their lives. As the old saying goes, if Sweden is the least religious nation in the world, and India is the most, then America is often a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes. In the upper echelons of the media and pop culture, that is certainly true. It must come as a bit of a shock to see how the other half lives.