Are youth sports quietly replacing church in American life?
Sports analyst Danny Kanell recently shined a light on this question when he suggested that youth games shouldn’t start before 9 a.m. on Sundays — and maybe shouldn’t be occurring on Sundays at all.
“He’s got two young daughters that are potential volleyball stars. And Sunday morning, Danny put out a video over X that complained about, ‘Man, what am I doing at 7:30 in the morning?’” BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock comments, before playing the clip.
“We need to save youth sports. We need to save parents from youth sports, because I’m here at a volleyball tournament and it is 7:40 on a Sunday. We need to enforce some laws that you cannot start youth sports games on the weekends before 9:00 a.m.,” Kanell began.
“And how about no sports on Sundays? How about that one? Let’s put those laws into effect,” he added.
“I’m in full agreement with Danny,” Anthony Walker tells Whitlock. “I have seen, over my lifetime, sports just invade family life. And when I look at the scriptures … the scriptures tell us in Acts chapter 2 that they all who believe were together. They had all things in common. They fellowshipped together. They broke bread from house to house together. They were real community together.”
“And that was what was primary, you know, their families and the church community was primary, and everything else is secondary. We now live in a situation where we’re trying to squeeze in the family time. We’re trying to squeeze in the fellowship and worship time,” he continues.
“I actually think that’s the attitude we should all take,” T.J. Moe agrees.
“In fact, America used to take this as a whole. You know, going back … from the beginning of our founding till about 1960, we had something called blue laws, where you couldn’t go in and go shopping for anything that was nonessential because we believed in the Lord’s day,” Moe explains.
And when it comes to sports, it’s not just parents and their kids whose Sundays are being hijacked.
“Sunday is now NFL day. It is not the Lord’s day in America, and I think that is destructive and awful,” Moe adds.
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