My phone rang midafternoon on Election Day. Georgia, 2022.
“Hey man!” The voice was upbeat, jovial, and friendly, the kind of voice that usually bears bad news or needs a favor.
Was this voice going to ask me to drive people to the polls? Make one last push for Warnock? Sign up for ballot-curing? Or had Herschel … done something?
“So, look.” the voice went on. “I want to follow up on that coach’s questionnaire.”
Right! This was not a political call. This was Clay (not his real name), the guy in charge of my twin 8-year-old girls’ youth basketball league. I had signed up to coach their team, and I’d filled out a questionnaire—yes, I remembered—and now I also remembered that the questionnaire had been … odd.
In partisan times, in a purple state, in America, it can be hard to tell when things will get weird. Was this phone call going to get weird?
Maybe!
The basketball program was, after all, run by the Southern Baptist church. And I, not a Southern Baptist, had volunteered to coach the team. So, maybe I should have been able to tell things were going to go a little sideways.
But civic engagement sometimes requires what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called a willing suspension of disbelief, or what his fellow Romantic John Keats described as a willingness to accept—”without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”—“uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts.” That’s “negative capability.” At the very least, being “involved in the community” requires a little willingness to compromise short-term uneasiness for potential long-term good, and vice versa. As a parent, this feeling can be especially acute.
The rockabilly barber, for example, is great with kids, yes, but does he seem just a little xenophobic? Long term, would the possible acquisition of replacement-theory brainworms render haircuts, however nice, irrelevant? Yes. Time to strive after fact and reason. New barber.
Or, another example: The youth basketball program seems great, but will it require a person—me, for example—to pledge fidelity to Jesus Christ, Lord and savior? Is that compromise, long term, a bad one?
Growing up in Iowa, and now living in Georgia, I’ve been conditioned to accept that community activities—food drives, AA meetings, charity 5ks—are all likely going to have churches involved. That’s just life in a low-tax–low-service state. Reaching after something different would make you very irritable, very quickly. Especially when it comes to youth sports.
As Linda Flanagan explains in her excellent book Take Back the Game, community funding for parks and programs cratered after the 2008 recession, accelerating the trend of private enterprise and “special interests”—like Disney or the Catholic Youth Organization—taking over things similar to what we used to call Little League. And so if, in addition to being a philanthropic jogger, you’re also a parent who wants your kids involved in theater, music, dance, or sports—and especially if you don’t want to pay thousands of dollars for the chichi privatized versions of these things—then you’re probably going to have to consider abiding in the mystery of the local ecumenical options.
An October 2022 Pew Research poll showed that 45 percent of Americans think the country should be a “Christian nation,” and many of the country’s favorite charities are “Christian.” But Pew’s research has also shown that fewer and fewer people in America are actually attending church. There’s a gap there, where people kinda sorta have a Christian vibe, but they haven’t been sold on the full program just yet. Some evangelicals clearly see this gap as a growth opportunity. And certain evangelical groups hope they can bridge the gap through community programs like youth sports. It seems to be working. Church-based youth sports are a multimillion-dollar business across the country. In my case, the sports program that ran the 8-year-old league, Upward Sports, was successfully recruiting new members into the fold … and also making bank. Their total reported assets in 2021 amounted to $53 million.
I didn’t know any of this when I signed my kids up to play. I hadn’t thought it through. I had not done any irritable reaching after fact and reason. I was bumbling into the matrix of Evangelical Christian Capitalist Enterprises. I didn’t think I’d signed up for that program; I just thought we might be able to learn how to box out and rebound.
Which would be good, because after COVID hit, there had been a—to put it generously—gap in my kids’ athletic development. They had been happy to not be in PE, pleased to not have to be in any youth sports at all. They could just dance in the living room and chase their brother around the yard for exercise. No problem!
But once things opened back up, it felt like they were a few steps back in terms of gross motor skills, that their coordination was a little bit off, that their spatial awareness was a little fluky. They were kinda klutzy and physically timid, prone to weeping and running away from round objects traveling through the air. Or on the ground. They’d make very determined faces and set off to run “fast” and then huff and puff across the yard with arms and legs pinwheeling in all directions.
My wife and I would look at each other. What the …?
I felt like I’d maybe let them down as a parent during lockdown, that I should make an extra effort now to get them back on athletic-development track. I’d coached my son’s baseball, after all. Was I being sexist? Conforming to shitty gender and social norms? Dammit!
But it’s hard to make up for any lost time in youth activities. It seems like everyone’s in private lessons, year-round training programs, certified advanced global assessment workshops, etc., etc., etc. COVID, somehow, did not seem to slow down any of this.
Clearly, we would have to suspend some judgment, be OK with uncertainty, become a little capital-R Romantic.
Luckily, we got the twins into a laid-back soccer league, and they’d steadily improved. They learned the rules of the game and how to take a ball to the forehead or a kick to the ankle without bursting into (too many) tears. Almost all the other parents had the same we’re-not-trying-for-scholarships-here attitude that my wife and I had, and the league focused on development, “growth mindsets,” and, mostly, having fun.
When these soccer parents said we should get the girls into this other basketball program, I said sure. The other parents said this program was like soccer, though it was a little more “conservative.” That was concerning, but when Clay, this youth pastor and sports commissioner guy, asked if I wanted to coach, I thought, better me than some rando Baptist man—and so I said yes.
But as soon as I said it, I started to see signs I’d made an error. The first sign was that the league was run from the Baptist church across the street from the county Republican Party headquarters.
The second sign was that when I went to the initial coaching meeting, Clay said the coaches would need to incorporate “devotions” into every practice—five minutes of mandated, scripted prayer to help the players “develop spiritually.”
The third sign was the coach’s questionnaire, which asked me to check a box “Y” or “N” if I had made my commitment to Christ, and then, in the space provided, “Explain my personal relationship with Jesus.”
So, look. I do strive to have faith in something larger than myself. I think, you know, stuff might be real. But I’m a little like the father of French writer Emanuel Carrère, who, when he tried to go to a Protestant service, lamented, “In Latin, you can’t hear how silly it is.” I think, on one hand, evangelical Christianity is a branch of fantastical LARPing, but, on the other hand, live and let live. On the third hand, though, the evangelical project can be actively harmful. A friend of mine whose values I aspire to and whose good works leave me in awe said, when I mentioned I might let the girls play in this league, “Those people are evil.” “Those people” being Southern Baptists.
In the abstract, I get it. I know that evangelicals, led by the most strident Southern Baptists, fuel some of the most hateful ideologies in this country—the anti-abortion zealotry that argues if a 9-year-old girl is raped, it’s part of God’s plan; the anti-LGBTQ crusade that drives people to shoot up gathering places like Club Q in Colorado Springs; the antisemitism that leads congregations on the furthest fringe down Holocaust-denying rabbit holes on YouTube. That’s evil. But I can’t fully come to the conclusion that all Southern Baptist evangelicals themselves are evil, because people I love and respect grew up Southern Baptist, and some still are Southern Baptists, and, you know, SERENITY NOW!
As for me, I have a very small, minor, everyday belief that extracurricular activities like sports can be good. I have faith that the scrambling of caste that community activities can provide—the mixing of race, class, religion, gender, ethnicity—can make it so that being like what everyone else is won’t feel like destiny for a kid. But the short-term compromise you make for this participation is that in states like Georgia, these extracurricular activities mean churches. Often, churches with values a progressive person might oppose. That I do oppose.
Anyway, on Election Day, my phone rang.
“Yeah, so,” Clay the youth pastor was saying, “on the form, where it says, ‘Please explain your personal relationship with Jesus Christ … ’ ”
I could hear him rustling the paper. He had my questionnaire right there with him.
“You wrote, let’s see, you wrote: ‘Thanks. It’s personal.’ ”
Had I reached my limit? Would I be willing to compromise my belief that the Christian right had degraded this country’s institutions and culture to a degree that was actively, daily harming—if not outright destroying—millions of lives? Just to … what? Play basketball?
“Yeah, so,” he went on, “I wanted to see if you might want to elaborate on that a little bit.”
“Are you saying,” I said, still hoping I could pass without escalating the conflict to the breaking point, “your program requires participants to pledge themselves for Jesus?”
“Oh gosh no!” he said, “No, no, no. But I guess I do have to ask again—have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and savior?”
And so there it was. This was the bargain—you can have a low-cost, skills-based, development-focused youth sports experience … but only if you’ll pledge your devotion to Jesus Christ.
I felt my heart sink. I couldn’t do it. I told him I wouldn’t.
“But will your kids be participating in our program?” he asked.
That’s, of course, the bigger, more concerning question. Because, later that day, right-wing Republican Brian Kemp won my state’s governor’s election. And, still, almost half the country believes this should be a Christian nation. Churches still make millions from filling this gap in community spaces made by “starve-the-beast” GOP tax policies.
Ultimately, my kids will have to decide on their own, as they get older, if they’ll want to participate in this type of program. When I asked them about this one, they said, “The coaches have to pray with the kids?” and then they busted out laughing. That was an easy no. But there will be compromises with their values they’ll have to make. As they grow, they’ll have to decide what things make them willing to suspend their own disbelief.
