Concerning the prayers of Tim Tebow

Moments after the New England Patriots smashed his Denver Broncos, Tim Tebow stood before a wall of reporters and said exactly what anyone who has been paying attention already knew he was going to say. The Patriots, he stressed, "came out and they played well and they executed well and you've got to give them a lot of credit."

Then Tebow interrupted himself to deal with a higher matter: "But before I talk about that, I just want, you know, to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and thank my teammates for the effort that they put forth, not just tonight but this whole season."

Please note one crucial detail in this thanksgiving statement.

In a recent Poll Position survey, 43.3 percent of the respondents said they believed divine intervention played some role in Tebow's roller-coaster season, including that stunning Broncos playoff victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers. Meanwhile, 42.3 percent said God was not helping Tebow out.

This schism is one reason Tebow critics enjoyed asking some obvious questions after the Patriots loss: So what happened? Did God tune out all of Tebow's prayers?

People can laugh all they want, noted the leader of a Denver-area megachurch that has long had its share of Bronco players in the pews. The key is that Tebow -- as is the norm for athletes who are believers -- always offers prayers of thanksgiving after losses, as well as victories.

"If people have been listening to anything that Tim Tebow has been saying, then they know that he never prays to win. He has said that publicly many times," said the Rev. Brad Strait, senior pastor of Cherry Creek Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Englewood.

"The key is that many people who keep commenting on this situation don't know very much about why believers pray. It seems that they think the main reason, or even the only reason, that people pray is to ask God to give them things. ... It's that old Santa Claus equals Jesus thing. You mix all of that up with football and this is what you get."

In this case, what you get is controversy about a hunky missionary kid who continues to confound his critics on and off the playing field. Meanwhile, choirs of Tebow fans -- saith an early January ESPN poll -- have made him the America's most popular athlete.

His life began, of course, in a dangerous pregnancy and his mother's decision to reject doctors' advice to abort provided the hook for a Super Bowl spot in 2010. Tebow's drive to excel in high-school football -- while being home-schooled -- fueled headlines long before his two national championships and Heisman Trophy win as a Florida Gator. Then there was the 2009 press conference in which he cheerfully answered a question about his sex life, pledging to remain chaste until marriage. This put Tebow on the radar of every comic with a microphone.

This recent blast by liberal talk-radio star Mike Malloy hit all the crucial notes.

"Tim Tebow, of course, is a massive irritation," he said. "God, I hate crappy-ass displays of public religiosity, especially, especially, in a sporting event. This to me is vile, just vile, for these fundamentalist Christians to find divine intervention -- in a pass for a football game, in Denver, Colorado? Oh well, it's their religion, not mine."

On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that Tebow doesn't believe God is pulling strings for him, said philosopher Douglas Groothuis of Denver Seminary, where the student body includes Tebow's brother, Peter.

The fact that Tebow gives thanks after a game doesn't imply that he prayed for victory before the kickoff, said Groothuis.

"He always says that he is giving thanks to 'my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,' which says, to me, that he is thanking God for his salvation. Then again, he could be thanking God that he is a professional football player and that he has a national platform. He could be thanking God that he didn't get hurt during the game," he said.

"If you look at this logically, it doesn't make sense for him to thank God after a loss if he has been doing what people seem to think he has been doing -- which is praying to win. ... There's one other point that's important. Tebow isn't cursing God after he loses, that's for sure."

That changing God lobby in DC

Believe it or not, politicians used to be able to assume that when the U.S. Catholic bishops spoke on an issue, that meant that the nation's Catholics had spoken. That was so mid-20th century.

Before long, Catholic liberals -- backed by Playboy's Hugh Hefner and others -- would dare to create a pro-abortion-rights group called Catholics for Free Choice.

Before long, American Catholics would become so divided that traditionalists felt the need to form a group called Priests for Life.

Catholics were not the only believers rocked by the earthquakes of the 1960s and '70s. Evangelicals ventured out into the public square, inspired first by a born-again Democrat from Georgia and then by the Hollywood Republican who promised to defeat him. The Protestant mainline declined and then splintered. Pluralism and globalization tested old coalitions and inspired old ones.

All of this caused radical changes in the nation's capital. The number of organizations engaged in advocacy work linked to religious issues has increased fivefold in four decades -- from 37 in 1970 to at least 211 today.

"No matter how small the group, everyone feels the need to open an office in Washington, D.C., so that their voices can be heard," said political scientist Allen D. Hertzke of the University of Oklahoma, lead researcher for a new study of religious advocacy groups conducted by the Pew Forum for Religion and Public Life. "All of this is evidence of the growing pluralism on the American scene and the fact that religion is playing an even more prominent role in our politics."

According to this survey, Catholics of one stripe or another are behind one out of five (19 percent) of advocacy groups with offices in Washington, D.C., and evangelical Protestants support almost as many (18 percent). While 12 percent of these groups are Jewish, only 8 percent represent the old Protestant mainline. In fact, Muslims support 17 advocacy groups, while the historic mainline churches now have 16.

Hertzke said it's significant that the largest category -- one quarter of the groups studied -- consists either of interfaith groups or organizations that work on religious issues that involve believers in multiple faith traditions. Nearly two-thirds of these groups work on both domestic and foreign issues.

While one church-state lawyer's "advocacy" is often another's "lobbying," 82 percent of the groups in the Pew Forum study operate as nonprofit, tax-exempt organizations. Thus, they focus most of their work on public policy issues broadly defined, as opposed to specific legislation or candidates.

However, the survey's broad definition of "religious advocacy" included "attempts to influence, or urge the public to influence, specific legislation, whether the legislation is before a legislative body, such as the U.S. Congress or any state legislature, or before the public as a referendum, ballot initiative, constitutional amendment or similar measure." It also included "efforts to affect public policy, such as activities aimed at the White House and federal agencies, litigation designed to advance policy goals, and education or mobilization of religious constituencies on particular issues."

It was easy to describe the groups doing this work in the years after World War II. They were "largely denominational," explained Hertzke, each representing a specific body of believers -- Catholics, Jews, Baptists or mainline Protestants, such as Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and others.

By the start of the 1970s, evangelicals were gaining power through the growth of nondenominational groups, educational institutions and media ministries. Then Roe v. Wade changed the shape of American politics -- especially for evangelicals and traditional Catholics. Meanwhile, President Jimmy Carter inspired some Baptists and infuriated others. The ground was moving.

Many of the advocacy groups launched during this period were ecumenical or interfaith, uniting liberal and conservative believers on opposite sides of hot-button social issues. At the same time, some historic churches began to splinter.

In the '90s, religious activism went global in a world transformed by the fall of Soviet Union, digital communications and growing Third World concerns about poverty, human rights, AIDS and religious liberty. Meanwhile, the face of religion in American began to grow more complex before and after 9/11.

"There has definitely been a globalization of religious advocacy work, with all of these trends and issues making their way back to Washington," said Hertzke. As a result, "ecumenical and interfaith work is now normal. We all live and work in the same world, now. Everything is connected."

There's power in the words

White House scribe Michael Gerson's telephone rang with a vengeance after the 2003 State of the Union address and its claim that there is "power, wonder-working power, in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people."

In the age of Google, it was easy to connect this with the gospel hymn "Power in the Blood," which says there is "power, wonder-working power, in the precious blood of the Lamb." Soon, journalists were calling Gerson's West Wing office asking him to underline all the evangelical "code words" hidden in major speeches.

"They're not code words. They're our culture. ... They are literary allusions understood by millions of Americans," Gerson told 24 journalists at a recent Ethics and Public Policy Center seminar in Key West, Fla. "It's not a strategy. It's just the way that I write and the president likes it."

George W. Bush is not speaking in an unknown tongue.

Anyone who studies what presidents -- from George Washington to Bill Clinton -- have said in times of triumph and tragedy knows that faith language is normal. If anything, said Gerson, today's imagery has become more nuanced. It's hard to imagine Bush delivering anything resembling Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1942 address warning that the Nazis yearned to spread their "pagan religion" worldwide, replacing the "Holy Bible and the Cross of Mercy" with the "swastika and the naked sword."

The historical patterns are easy to find. In addition to literary allusions, said Gerson, presidents have consistently used religious language when:

* Offering words of comfort. Presidents cannot face the nation after shocking tragedies and say that "death is the end, life is meaningless and the universe is a vast, empty, echoing void," said Gerson. Instead, they use words similar to Bush's remarks after the space shuttle disaster: "The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth; yet we can pray that all are safely home."

* Praising the influence of faith on efforts to promote justice. Thus, in a 2003 speech on Goree Island, Senegal, Bush bluntly described America's sinful history of slavery. But he added: "In America, enslaved Africans learned the story of the exodus from Egypt and set their own hearts on a promised land of freedom. Enslaved Africans discovered a suffering Savior and found he was more like themselves than their masters."

* Asking citizens to help their neighbors. For Bush, this "faith-based rhetoric" has been closely connected with "compassionate conservatism" and his efforts to allow religious groups to find niches within wider government programs to help the needy.

* Alluding to divine providence in national life. Here, the rhetorical bar has been set especially high by Abraham Lincoln, who insisted that Americans can hope to be on God's side, but cannot claim that God is fighting on their side.

Presidents use religious language in wartime, said Gerson. Nevertheless, critics of the war in Iraq have attacked Bush's consistent use of these words: "Freedom is not America's gift to the world. It is almighty God's gift to all humanity."

The president wrote those words, noted Gerson. Working together, they have tried to emphasize that Bush rejects what scholars call "American exceptionalism" -- the belief that America is uniquely God's instrument in history. The president's stance is best expressed in the 2003 State of the Union address, said Gerson.

"We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone," said Bush. "We do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history."

Those anxious to criticize how the Bush White House has used religious language should dig into the speeches of Woodrow Wilson, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and many other American leaders, said Gerson. Would critics prefer Republicans to limit themselves to the libertarian logic of big business?

"As a writer, I think this attitude would flatten political rhetoric and make it less moving and interesting," he said. "But even more, I think the reality here is that scrubbing public discourse of religious ideas would remove one of the main sources of social justice in our history."