Politics and part-time patriotism

Throughout our history, Americans have often (though certainly not always) striven to build a wall, or at least a fence, to separate church from state. Even as a devout Christian, I recognize the potential pitfalls of too deeply intertwining the two. Additionally, formally integrating church and state would give rise to myriad religious dilemmas, some of which would be very contentious. For example, if our government were to adopt Christianity as our national religion, which denomination would prevail? Presbyterian? Methodism? Baptist? If Baptist, which version thereof? Should we be Calvinistic or Arminian? (Christian nationalists seem ill-prepared to answer such thorny queries.) By contrast, there has never been a period in which we have had even a perfunctory separation of politics from sports — never an era in which sports were unsoiled by the realities of the “outside” world. Indeed, a certain amount of politics is “baked in” vis-à-vis athletic competitions. For example, the man who we know as Jim Thorpe could not simply enjoy the fruits of being the greatest athlete of the early 20th century because he was Native American (a term that is fraught). Thorpe won multiple Olympic medals on behalf of the U.S. in 1912 — a...