Taking sides with Dylan on the God question

It’s not often you’ll see it written here, so enjoy it while you can: Bob Dylan was on to something when he wrote With God On Our Side.

If you are a fan of overrated troubadours from the mid-60s, a field with plenty of candidates jostling for attention, you probably know the song, which lists participants in various wars and asks how the winners could claim divine support if their defeated opponents claimed the same.

You can probably see where we’re going.

Elite sport, despite being competitive in tooth and claw, has a surprisingly high number of true believers, given that concepts such as turning the other cheek and letting the meek inherit the earth are the last things you’d imagine occupying the mind of an elite athlete.

But in America, for instance, Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow, the son of evangelical Christians, has been front and centre as a result of his strong religious beliefs.

In a chat last week with the great American sportswriter Bob Lipsyte — yes, you know name-dropping when you see it — he made the canny comparison between Muhammad Ali, excoriated for his Nation of Islam beliefs in the 60s, and Tebow, whose beliefs have also been the focus of some controversy, though not of the same magnitude.

(Tebow ‘takes a knee’, in the parlance, and prays on the field after games, but even in the more secular 2010s, that’s not going to have the same impact as Ali’s conversion did in the 60s). Still, the religious quarterback got us thinking. About religion and sport. And the possibility of an Irish Tebow: Tadhg Ó Tiabhach.

We picked up the phone.

“The first thing is that Tebow is probably too ostentatious for Irish tastes,” says David Quinn.

“You’ve got to put it in context — Americans can be quite showy. Being honest, that kind of display would probably stick in the craw for Irish people, and even in America you’ll have some who like it and some people who don’t.”

Quinn, a well-known religious commentator and director of the Iona Institute, which promotes marriage and religion in society, is correct there.

Dublin Gaelic footballer Ger Brennan, for instance, is involved in preparations for this year’s Eucharistic Congress, travelling the country to give talks to groups in various dioceses. Ulster and Ireland wing/centre Andrew Trimble also has strong religious beliefs. But neither are inclined to put those beliefs on display when they’re on the field of play.

How would David Quinn do with our most piercing puzzle, though? If both teams or participants are praying to God before a game or contest, and only one wins, doesn’t that prove that God is on one side but not on the other?

“That’s a fair question,” says Quinn.

“It’s one people often raise — if one team is praying to God to win and so is the other, why should one team in particular win? Something people don’t take on board is that both teams are also praying to do well, just as people pray to do well in examinations and so on. That’s perfectly legitimate, to pray to excel in what you’re doing. But the idea that God is on one team’s side rather than the other’s is just crazy.”

These religious displays, though — should believers refrain from them in case they offend those not of the same beliefs? “I don’t go along with that,” says Quinn. “I think that once you start with that you’re on the road to putting religion in the closet. You’d end up like the Victorians, who draped cloth over the legs of their pianos to stop people thinking about sex, supposedly. Again, I think you’ve got to go back to context. If a player steps out on the football field and blesses himself, or blesses himself after scoring a goal, then I don’t think anyone would have any problem with that. It’s not ostentatious at all. Then again, if you look at the World Cup, you’ll often see a Brazilian football player take off his jersey after scoring a goal and show off a t-shirt with ‘I belong to Jesus’ or something similar on it. A lot of them are evangelical Christians.

“The question you’d need to ask is whether people here would be accepting of an Irish player doing something as ostentatious as that. You’re all the way back to context, and the case of Tim Tebow, and what’s appropriate in America and what’s appropriate here.”

A fair point. We’ve seen more GAA players commemorate the passing of Michael Jackson with an under-jersey t-shirt than saying they belong to Jesus.

If somebody pays a reverent under-garment tribute to Bob Dylan this year, though, we had nothing to do with it.

Honest to God.

* [e-mail] Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx