Editor’s note: The full version of this editorial was originally published in the May 18 Gazette in Colorado Springs.
Football coaches are football coaches: we don’t expect them to be political science professors. But we still have to take issue with some of the comments made by Florida State football coach Bobby Bowden at a recent meeting of the Southern Colorado Fellowship of Christian Athletes.
Bowden, in defending Air Force Academy football coach Fisher DeBerry against accusations that he helped contribute to a climate of religious intolerance at the school by turning coaching sessions into revival meetings, said the following: “Fisher is fighting a heck of a battle over here at your academy (with) the U.S. government. He’s fighting a heck of a battle because he happens to be a Christian, and he wants his boys to be saved.” Later Bowden said: “The coach has a responsibility to these boys to try to influence their spiritual life, their physical life and their academic life. … We know we’re going to get challenged on it, but that’s what we believe in. I ain’t gonna back down.”
These comments reflect a mind-set we find troubling, quite frankly. We have no problem with either man’s religious convictions, or their sharing those ideas and values with student athletes in the appropriate context. But when these coaches are employed by schools partially or fully funded by taxpayers, the game has rules everyone must follow, whatever their win-loss record. Character development is part of a coach’s job; preaching, proselytizing and pressuring athletes to pray (even if it’s for a game-winning field goal) is not, at least at a public school.
To portray DeBerry as a martyr being persecuted by “the government” for his religious beliefs, as Bowden did, is inflammatory and wrong-headed. It’s also likely to hand ammunition to the rabid secularists who are using an extreme reading of the Constitution’s “establishment” clause to purge all religion from the public square. Now, they’ll be better able to paint DeBerry and other school officials as obstinate zealots who still don’t get it.
There are lines at public schools, just as there are lines on the football gridiron, that are wrong to cross. Respecting those limits shouldn’t be portrayed as “backing down.”
