Tim Tebow, a view

From USAToday, applying some culture war hermeneutic to Tim Tebow, and while I’m at it, take a good look at Patton Dodd’s Patheos Press e-book about Tebow:

Tim Tebow’s football credentials are impeccable. A Florida Gator pedigree, aHeisman Trophy winner, twice a BCS national champion, and one of the greatest college football players of all time, he possesses a collegiate resume that Tom Bradycould only dream of. Granted, none of the aforementioned means automatic success in the NFL, but it seems a bit premature to write him off….

Tim Tebow’s football credentials are impeccable. A Florida Gator pedigree, aHeisman Trophy winner, twice a BCS national champion, and one of the greatest college football players of all time, he possesses a collegiate resume that Tom Bradycould only dream of. Granted, none of the aforementioned means automatic success in the NFL, but it seems a bit premature to write him off….

So what gives? Why does even Tebow’s own coaching staff and management offer so little public support?

Jake Plummer, the latest to take pot shots at the embattled Denver quarterback, might have been speaking for anti-Tebowites everywhere when he said in an interview on a Phoenix radio station that he would like Tebow more if he would “shut up” about his faith in Jesus Christ.

And with that little comment, the cat, as they say, was out of the bag.

Plummer said what the commentators wouldn’t say. Their dislike for Tim Tebow is not, as they would have us believe, about his throwing motion or his completion percentage; it’s all about his open professions of faith and his goody-two shoes image. When it comes right down to it, we don’t want heroes who are truly good. We want them to fail the occasional drug test or start a bar fight from time to time. It makes us feel better about ourselves. Tebow, however, doesn’t make us feel better about ourselves. People like him make us feel a little convicted about the things we say and do. So we find a reason to dislike them. Or, when Tebow says that glory goes to God and the credit for a victory goes to his teammates, coaches, and family, we are suspicious. An increasingly jaded culture, we don’t believe that anyone can say such things and really mean them.

So we wait.

We wait for evidence that he really isn’t that good. We hope to see him kick a player on the ground, drop an F-bomb on television, or Tweet pictures of his privates. In the meantime, we always have Penn State’s Jerry Sandusky to make us feel better about ourselves.

Larry Taunton is the director of Fixed Point Foundation and author of The Grace Effect: How the Power of One Life Can Reverse the Corruption of Unbelief.