God's New Team

I've been a Golden St Warriors fan decades longer than Mark Jackson's been their head coach.

I'll be a Warriors fan after he's gone.

But it's his theology that counts.  Whether its crediting a win to his god or having his wife pray over Stephen Curry's ankle, this year's Warriors team is the latest professional sports organization to publicly dedicate itself Christian, and it does so around the personality of its pastor-coach, "if I can use John Wooden's seven steps, then why can't I use Christ's words?"

Well, one reason is no one suggests that Wooden influences the outcome of games from beyond the grave.  If a coach said that, he'd be laughed out of the league.

10 members of the Warriors roster apparently regularly attend team chapel service; Jackson is apparently of the mind that his evangelizing would be effective even with non-Christians; rookie Harrison Barnes said "nobody feels uncomfortable" with the approach.

Well, they're both wrong.

I went from jubilant to deflated in the course of that thirty second video clip late last night.  I'm not on Mark Jackson's team, in every possible sense; and that's the message the Warriors are sending to me.

And maybe that doesn't matter.  Unlike when I didn't want to say the Pledge of Allegiance in school because of the words "under god" I'm not forced to be a Warriors fan (although, given how many seasons of desperate losing I've been around to endure, what else would explain my remaining with GSW?) In a country filled with increasingly emboldened theocrats, I'm not a kid stuck an a school assembly centered around "God's plan for sexual purity" whose principal tries to get her college acceptance revoked when she complains or a teacher fired for being gay.  My concerns should be at the bottom of the queue.

But damn, you know?  You finally get a good Warriors team and they have a No Atheists Allowed Sign up at Oracle Arena.