Faith on Display at Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas

When the Kansas City Chiefs square off against the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday for Super Bowl LVIII, viewers will no doubt be treated to a gratuitous number of camera shots of Taylor Swift in the stadium as well as a nail-biter of a game, assuming oddsmakers are correct.

Perhaps less predictable, though, is that the 100 million Americans who are expected to tune in for the big game might also be served a healthy portion of Christianity.

It might start prior to the game with Patrick Mahomes who, if the Chiefs quarterback sticks to the tradition he laid out in a video for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, will head to one of the goalposts and pray, "Whatever happens, win or lose, success or failure, that I'm glorifying Him."

His opposing quarterback for the 49ers will be Brock Purdy, who is equally public about his Christian faith. Hence, when his team was down by 17 points at halftime to the Detroit Lions in the NFC Championship Game, he told reporters later that he prayed: "All right God; You've taken me here and, win or lose, I'm going to glorify You."

And when the 49ers completed their come-from-behind victory that put them in the Super Bowl, it was in no small part due to safety Tashaun Gipson, who caused Lions running back Jahmyr Gibbs to fumble near his own end zone when the game was on the line. "It's just God; without Him, this wouldn't be possible," Gipson told a reporter after the game.

Sharp-eyed viewers might also catch a glimpse of the lower-leg tattoo Mahomes sports of a man walking up a staircase toward a cross, which he said he got before last year's Super Bowl in honor of the story of Eutychus in Acts 20:7-12, about a young man who appears dead until the Apostle Paul throws himself on top of him. Mahomes said the story suggests "being half in and half out on God" and that it convinced him "to be fully in."

For those who object to the mixing of football with Christianity, don't expect a reprieve during commercials, as the folks behind the "He Gets Us" campaign will, for the second consecutive Super Bowl, run ads that promote Jesus.

For this year's Super Bowl at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, He Gets Us has partnered with LV Reach and the Salvation Army to serve hot meals and hand out groceries to the poor who live in the area. They'll do so on a miniature football field built in a nearby parking lot.

"The big game is in Vegas for the first time ever and we want to make it accessible to people in underserved communities," said Jason Vanderground, a He Gets Us spokesman.

During the soon-to-end season, He Gets Us partnered with four NFL teams, the Chiefs, Dallas Cowboys, Los Angeles Chargers and Indianapolis Colts. Some players in Las Vegas ahead of the game helping with the He Gets Us campaign include a couple of wide receivers, Brandin Cooks for the Cowboys and Michael Pittman for the Colts, along with Cowboys cornerback Stephon Gilmore.

Cooks told Newsweek the first time he saw the words "He Gets Us" appear on digital signage at AT&T Stadium where the Cowboys play was during a game while in a huddle. Later, "Jesus left it all on the field," also popped up on stadium screens.

"It's inspiring, especially in Jerry's world," he said, referring to the Cowboys's stadium, built by owner Jerry Jones. "It's one of the biggest platforms in sports, and this is what's being displayed. That's beyond incredible."

Cooks, whose nickname is "The Archer," said that among the ways he praises God and Jesus on game day is with his touchdown celebration where he pretends to shoot an arrow with a bow.

The celebration is an homage to Psalms 144:6, which reads: "Send forth lightning and scatter the enemy; shoot your arrows and rout them."

He told Newsweek that when he was in his third season and was with the Saints, the NFL warned he'd be fined for breaking a rule against celebrating violence. NFL bureaucrats "had no clue what it was about," and even after he explained its meaning to them, they didn't back down, so he suspended his mock-shooting of an arrow for a season and a half before reintroducing it without controversy.

He Gets Us will also be in Downtown Las Vegas on Fremont Street with a 15-foot tall replica of a football helmet made of flowers; they'll hand out two flowers to each passerby, giving them instructions to please keep one and hand the other to a stranger.

Unlike a year ago, He Gets Us is now managed by a new organization dubbed, Come Near, led by CEO Ken Caldwell, the former chief marketing officer for fast-food giants Wendy's and Domino's Pizza.

This time around, a He Gets Us ad will appear in the first quarter of the Super Bowl and in the second half, and both will focus on loving one's neighbor and respecting their differences.

If history is a guide, the ads will generate controversy. Last year, for example, New York Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: "Something tells me Jesus would *not* spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign," and CNN featured a segment whereby a commentator said the ads were "strategically developed by right-wing evangelicals to rope people in with inclusive-sounding messaging."

But long before He Gets Us, the NFL promoted Christianity, as NFL cameras typically can't escape images of players pointing to Heaven after scoring, kneeling in prayer in the end zone, giving "glory to God" during interviews or showing top kicker Justin Tucker making the sign of the cross before attempting a field goal.

More than 35 percent of NFL players are evangelical, about 10 percentage points higher than the nationwide average, the Institute for Faith & Freedom reported in 2018.

Benjamin Watson, who won a Super Bowl with Tom Brady and the New England Patriots during his 16 years playing tight end in the NFL, told Newsweek that players don't usually use the term "evangelical," preferring to describe themselves as "followers of Jesus."

One reason NFL players might embrace their faith so fervently (and publicly) is that they're aware of the God-given physical traits they've been blessed with, says Watson. Also, the NFL makes it easy to share their Christianity with others.

"It's a much more free place than most of corporate America. I never felt like I was on an Island, unable to speak about my faith," he told Newsweek.

One of the fondest memories of his career, he said, was baptizing two of his New Orleans Saints teammates in the facility's rehabilitation pool. "You can't do that working at Facebook or Home Depot," he quipped.

Among those who are sometimes accused of objecting to NFL players giving glory to God and Jesus are the media outlets who interview them, the latest incident occurring after the Houston Texans beat the Cleveland Browns in the first round of this year's playoffs.

"First of all, I just want to give all glory and praise to my lord and savior, Jesus Christ," Texans quarterback CJ Stroud told an NBC reporter after the game, before also praising the fans and the city his team represents.

But when NBC posted the interview on one of its X (previously Twitter) accounts, it stripped out the first sentence where Stroud mentions Jesus.

NBC, which didn't respond to Newsweek's request for comment, faced backlash online, including from some commentators at OutKick, a conservative sports network.

Former pro wrestler Tyrus, a Fox News contributor and host of OutKick's Maintaining with Tyrus, told Newsweek that he's not religious but he objects to overzealous gatekeepers in the mainstream media.

"So-called journalists only want to tell the story of athletes or people who follow their narratives," he said. "So it's really more about the death of journalism and integrity and the beginnings of Marxist censorship."

Jason Bivins, a professor of religion and philosophy at North Carolina State University and self-described "rabid football fan," said it's inevitable that some secularists will "gripe on social media" when they hear someone like Stroud praise Jesus on live TV and, on the flip side, it's also inevitable that some "ardent religionists" will complain when the remark is removed in editing.

Jason Romano of Sports Spectrum, an outlet that explores the intersection of sports and faith, says he has interviewed about 500 current and former NFL players and coaches, including quarterbacks like Purdy, Kirk Cousins, Kurt Warner, Ben Roethlisberger and Nick Foles, about their faith.

Romano speculates that mainstream outlets prone to editing out references players make to their Christianity might not be so quick to censor references to Islam or other faiths. "There's something about the name 'Jesus' that makes them fear the feedback," said Romano, who spent 17 years with ESPN before joining Sports Spectrum.

While he said there's a definite uptick in NFL players mentioning God and Jesus, some of it is owed to social media, which wasn't available to them three decades ago, but he also says that former quarterback Tim Tebow and former coach Tony Dungy opened up the floodgates.

"They were like, 'Hey, if faith is the most important thing in your life, wear that as a badge of honor.' So now it seems to be more prominent than ever before."

While the NFL has frowned on religious proselytizing and political messaging, rules have been relaxed so that nowadays Black Lives Matter and other social justice verbiage is often displayed on uniforms and in stadiums.

Along those lines, at this year's Super Bowl, both the National Anthem ("The Star-Spangled Banner") and the Black National Anthem ("Lift Every Voice and Sing") will be performed, a decision liberals largely hail as inclusive but many conservatives are calling divisive.

But just as the NFL is more willing to engage in culture wars, it is also more open to expressions of religion—though only by way of individual players, coaches and team owners. An example of the latter is Clark Hunt, the CEO, chairman and partial owner of the Chiefs who is an outspoken Christian and is an advocate of He Gets Us.

"I don't think any of this moves the needle on fandom one bit," said Bivins. "Even years back when Tim Tebow explicitly embraced anti-choice politics in an interview, people complained but didn't stop watching."

Every one of the 32 NFL teams has a chaplain, Romano notes, and one, Johnny Shelton of the Baltimore Ravens, was recently profiled on the Today show, where he said he hosts Bible studies for three separate groups: players, coaches and significant others.

He also said he does a "prayer walk" around the perimeter of the field before each practice session and the last thing the team does before taking the field is pray. Once a month, he said, the chaplains from each team gather for a Zoom call.

There's also something called, "Meet Me at the 50" where, after each game, players from both teams gather at the 50-yard line for a short prayer. Sometimes there's as few as five, sometimes as many as 30, Watson told Newsweek. He also said that Meet Me at the 50 was one of the things he most looked forward to each game, and Cooks agrees.

"Every game, win or lose, I'm there," Cooks told Newsweek. "It's by His grace I'm able to play at this level so it's another way for me to be able to give Him glory on a high platform."