Idols or idiots? Why sporting stars cannot bear the weight we place on them

Why it’s wise to know their place, and ours, in the universe.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A professional footballer wearign a red top stands proudly beneath a white and black banner.

Marcus Rashford's Who I Really Am video.

The Players' Tribune.

I wouldn’t know, being a fairly average but enthusiastic player of many sports - but the life of a top footballer must be one of extremes. There are the physical sacrifices to be made in hours in the gym, honing skills in daily training, pushing your body towards fitness, maintaining the tuning of your body so it peaks just at the right time on match day. On the other hand, there is the boredom of afternoons after training with little to do but play FIFA 23 on the X Box, or finding ways to spend the vast amounts of money that comes to the average Premier League footballer.

But perhaps even more, there is the way the public treats you. You swing between idol or idiot pretty quickly. Take Marcus Rashford. Last season, he could not stop scoring - 30 goals in 56 games for Manchester United & England, including three at the World Cup. Confidence was sky high, he was making the runs and finding the positions that enabled him to rack up the goals. This season, it has all changed. He seems listless, lacking in confidence. At the time of writing he has only scored five goals all season, (Erling Haaland has scored 17, Mo Salah 15). Every move or sign of body language is dissected by pundits or on social media, and he is no longer a sure starter for his club – an unheard of possibility last season. And there was the famous bender that he went on in a night out in Belfast a few weeks ago - a sign that something somewhere is wrong.

We have always tried to turn sports stars into idols. George Best was perhaps the first truly global, fully marketed star with a public image, idolised by both football fans and women (at the time, the two groups were much more distinct than they are today). Until, that is, his spectacular fall from grace. Soon after he reached the pinnacle of winning the European Cup with Manchester United in 1968, the descent began. He went out too much, lost his focus, made bad choices, left United and after various haphazard spells with a slew of clubs across the world including Fulham, Stockport County and the San Jose Earthquakes (yes, even them), he become a professional playboy, unable to control his alcoholism, appearing drunk on TV chat shows, being jailed for drunk driving until his tragic early death aged just 59 in 2005.

None of us are capable of taking on the worship of others, because we will always disappoint in the end.

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Graham Tomlin

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The ability to do things we ordinary mortals cannot do inevitably leads us to idolise such people. Crowds perform the lowering of outstretched arms in semi-mock worship. Encomiums are written in the media on the extraordinary talent on display. Hopes are invested that this person will lead their club or country to sporting immortality.

Yet at other times, they are vilified as idiots. The David Beckham Netflix documentary series is a salutary reminder of the astonishingly vindictive public treatment he received after getting sent off playing for England in the World Cup Quarter Final against Argentina in 1998. Perhaps now, with our increased awareness of mental health, the reaction would not be so vile, but the treatment of the England players who missed penalties in the Final of the Euros in 2020 warns us against too much complacency.

If you’ve ever met a sports star in the flesh and spent any time talking to them (I’ve met a few) what strikes you is how ordinary they are. They may be shy, awkward, embarrassed - a bit like the rest of us, They may be able to perform physical feats that you can’t do, but I bet there are things you can do that they can’t, and that they wish they could do. Your talents may not be so much in demand and not attract as much financial reward, but just like you, they have their fears, anxieties, weaknesses and quirks. As we learnt from Netflix, David Beckham can’t go to bed without cleaning every surface in the kitchen and having his shirts lined up in colour co-ordinated rows.

Sports stars are neither idols nor idiots. They are people. People who enjoy praise, so that it can go to their heads, but get hurt when they read vile things said about them. None of us are capable of taking on the worship of others, because we will always disappoint in the end. It is why Christian faith is so insistent on the danger of idolatry in all forms – taking something created by God and making it into a god. Theologian James KA Smith warns of the danger for a culture that has given up on God: "it is precisely when your ultimate conviction is that there is no eternal that you are most prone to absolutize the temporal." As St Augustine put it, paganised cultures tend to take created things and turn them into idols, and idols always disappoint, or even worse enslave.

A vital part of Christian wisdom has always been to know our place within the universe – that we are called to the dignity of taking responsibility for, exercising a kind of benign dominion over the rest of creation, looking after it and caring for it on behalf of the Creator. Yet at the same time, we are ‘a little lower than the angels’ and certainly less than God. We are not self-created, free to rise as high as we can, aiming for the stars.

On my regular journey into London some while ago, I used to pass a primary school that promised prospective parents that with the help of their teachers, there was ‘no limit to what your child can achieve’. It’s that kind of empty rhetoric that is so dangerous – it is bound to lead to a sense of disappointment when your beloved offspring doesn’t become a hot-shot lawyer, a brain surgeon, a wealthy banker or a sporting hero, but ends up serving behind a till in Tescos, or nursing the sick in a hospital, even though these jobs are just as valuable and essential for society as the better-paid ones. However gifted we are, there are things we cannot do, and will never do. All of us are frail vessels, with remarkable abilities, whether physical, social or intellectual, with the capacity for extraordinary acts of love and compassion, yet also liable to give into temptation to lie, cheat, or steal, as likely to let down our friends as much as to be loyal to them.

Knowing our place in the world would stop us exalting our sporting heroes too high, or lambasting them as so low – raising them to heaven, or sending them to hell – that was never our job but God’s. It would restore them as not idols or idiots but people – loved sinners if you like – with a high calling and remarkable abilities, yet with moral frailties and feebleness at the same time – just like us.

Explainer

Creed

Weirdness

1 May 2024

4 min read

Those unexpected angel stories

Shedding a strange light on a disenchanted world.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

An almost abstract image with overlays of colour over a group of people standing.

Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

Unlike Robbie Williams, who sings about them, sometimes I preach about angels. When I do something always happens – people start telling me their own angel stories.

There was the one a soldier friend told me. During an army climbing expedition to Mount Kenya, one of his team had fallen to his death from a sheer rock face. Caught up in the drama of the moment, my friend found himself stuck on a ledge, unable to move up or down, paralyzed by fear and frustration. Suddenly, in an inaccessible part of the world, where they had seen no-one for days, on a mountain where they were the only registered group present, a climber appeared out of nowhere, moved onto the ledge where he was standing, tied a rope into his harness, lowered him down the rockface to safety before disappearing up the face never to be seen again.

Or the story of a pastor who got into trouble in an airport. A stranger walked by and asked if he could help, and remarkably fixed a seemingly intractable problem. The grateful passenger took a selfie of himself and the stranger, but when he looked at the phone later on, there was a picture of himself, grinning into the camera, with his arms around… nothing.

Why do so many stubbornly believe in angelic beings, when a materialist view of the world laughs scornfully at the idea as a bit of pre-modern superstition?

These are not just modern stories. In the second century, a young man called Justin from Asia Minor was working his way through the various schools of Greek philosophy. One day, he was walking along the beach at Ephesus, wondering, as young people have always done, about the meaning of life in general and his own life in particular, when a mysterious old man came alongside and joined him in conversation. As they walked together, the old man spoke about the philosophers and how none of them were quite able to answer the deepest mysteries of life. He advised Justin to read the Old Testament prophets, before disappearing into the distance. Justin did so, became a Christian and went on to become one of the greatest early theologians of the Church and one of its early martyrs for the faith – hence the name he is remembered by today - Justin Martyr.

Was it an angel? Or a real, yet mysterious old man? Are angels real? And if so, what is the point of them? Surveys tell us that 30 per cent of British people believe in angels. In the USA that figure rises to 70 per cent. Why do so many stubbornly believe in angelic beings, when a materialist view of the world laughs scornfully at the idea as a bit of pre-modern superstition? After all, the cynic might say all these stories can be explained - these were just ordinary people who turned up unexpectedly.

The encounter opened the eyes of the person in the story to another realm, a world unseen yet just as real as the seen.

The word angelos in Greek simply means messenger – and it can mean either a human or an angelic one. In the Bible, angels don’t usually appear with glowing white clothing and wings sprouting from their shoulder blades. When they come to people with a message, they often appear in the guise of ordinary people. In fact, it’s often hard to tell whether you have been visited by an angel or just another human.

The point, therefore, is not so much about the angels, but about the message that they bring. They tend to turn up when there is something particularly important to announce, something like the birth of Jesus, when an angel appears to the young Mary to tell her the news that she will give birth to the Son of God, her, and then quite a few of them turn up to sing to the shepherds, an indication that something big was happening.

In each of the stories above, the encounter opened the eyes of the person in the story to another realm, a world unseen yet just as real as the seen. An inexplicable encounter with what just might have been an angel has the capacity to open our eyes to the fact that the world is bigger than we often assume – that as Hamlet says to his dull, practically minded friend: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

The Nicene Creed, the classic summary of Christian faith, speaks of God as the ‘Creator of all things seen and unseen’. We are all used to what we can see, yet some of us only have space in our world for things that can be seen, touched or measured. Yet there are surely those unseen realities – things we cannot see or measure, like love, compassion, holiness, miracles, God and - yes – angels.

A random sermon on angels elicits hushed stories that people feel almost embarrassed to speak. Such mysterious experiences are far more common than we realise, as Dan Kim points out elsewhere on this site. Yet these experiences are not an end in themselves but are perhaps a way of God getting our attention when we refuse to listen to more ordinary approaches. These experiences open our eyes to a dimension of reality that is as real, if not as visible as the one we deal with every day – and become a gateway to a journey of discovery of an unseen world alongside the seen, that sheds a strange but welcoming new light onto a disenchanted world.