Diana Butler Bass is all emotional over sport today.
April 5 was a remarkable day for sports — especially sports and religion. With baseball’s opening day, Tiger Woods’ spiritual transformation, and the miraculous NCAA championship game, one only needed to watch American sports to see that the national soul is alive and well.
Soulfulness? Really?
How united was America Monday? Some watched basketball (like me), some watched golf (yawn), and some watched baseball (meh). This strikes me more as peaceful division and the satisfaction of individual preferences, not anything having to do with heritage or solidarity.
Why is this community/solidarity concept so important to you anyway? We have another community, the church, which has nothing to do with sport, or tribalism (nationalism), or classism, etc. America is not united, nor need it be! With a minimal agreement to get along with each other and through voluntary exchange we each have greater opportunity to pursue our individual goals. When solidarity is pushed too hard those individual goals are prohibited in order to force the group’s goals.
I don’t know why you are reaching for a touchy-feely kind of experience here.
And America does not have a soul. Each human being has a soul. For some reason, that which you are searching for through community, God has preferred to give to us through individuals.
The only legitimate community is when the individuals subsume their own preferences to another. This can be a national ethos, a government, or a club, in each of these cases it is idolatry. Instead we need to subsume ourselves under Christ, and Christ alone. There is no room for these other communal attachments for the Christian.