Today, I read an online sports article that questioned why so many people hate Tim Tebow. As of about 6 pm CDT today, there were over 60 pages of comments to this article, which was one of the bigger library of comments that I've seen for a sports post. At ten posts per page, that's over 600 comments on this one post.
The author brought up a couple of good questions that are integrally related to the intersection of religion and American culture. First, would those who mocked Tebow on the field last weekend by "Tebowing" have gotten a free pass if they had insulted someone of another faith? It's a valid question. Perhaps political correctness is only important when dealing with minority religious faiths? (I would argue that this is the case.)
Secondly, why do people pick on Tebow specifically, when other Christian athletes have no problem showing their Christianity? People seem to want this guy to fail miserably. From all accounts Tebow is a nice guy. Nice guys usually don't play well in pop culture. Perhaps that has something to do with it. He is not a top-ranked QB at this point and he may never get there, but there was a great deal of hype about him coming out of college as a first-round draft pick.
We live in a culture in which faith is supposed to be fenced off into the "personal", rather than the public arena. Regardless, would people be allowed to get by with joking about someone's Buddhism in this manner? I'm not really offended, but it sets a bit of a double standard, don't you think?
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