Ben Johnson, Role Model?

Patriotism is a mixed blessing for the Christian. I relearned this when I watched the Seoul Olympics on TV a few months ago. I relearned it especially while watching the men’s 100-meter finals, the race where Canada’s Ben Johnson was pitted against America’s Carl Lewis, not just for a gold medal but for the informal title of “World’s Fastest Man.” Despite the fact that as a Christian my primary identification is with the church universal and not with any nation-state, I found I really wanted the gold to go to my Canadian compatriot.

Picture, then, my satisfaction when Johnson not only won the race, but broke the 9.8-second barrier as well. The world’s fastest man was a black immigrant Canadian, and I, a Canadian living in America, had watched live coverage of the historic event.

So what was my reaction two days later when I learned that Ben Johnson’s post-race urine sample had tested positive for drugs and that he would be stripped of his title? Regret, yes; disappointment, yes. But in the end I am too much of a Calvinist to exempt my own compatriots from the effects of pervasive depravity. And as I read detailed postmortems of the scandal, I could only grieve over the way greed and subterfuge had produced only losers in this sad business. Even Carl Lewis must feel that his belated victory is, at best, a Pyhrric one.

There is an old blues song whose refrain goes, “Nobody knows you when you’re down and out.” That’s quite true. As one Canadian magazine put it, only the story of the scandal has any sales value for Johnson now. But it’s also true, though the song doesn’t say it, that everyone wants to know you when you’re up and in. And it’s clear that many people stood to gain from Ben Johnson’s success, so much so that we may never know whether he took steroids knowingly or unknowingly, or how much time, money, and subterfuge went into masking them—in the end unsuccessfully.

Can anything redemptive come out of such a mess? I have a hope that someone from Ben Johnson’s entourage will come down with a case of old-fashioned foxhole religion. When the Watergate scandal broke in 1974, and everyone involved was frantically engaged in damage control, a Christian legislator quietly slipped Charles Colson a copy of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. The seed fell on fertile ground: having nowhere to look but up, Colson turned to God.

“Foxhole religion,” the press called it, and predicted it wouldn’t last beyond the royalties someone would pay for Colson’s life story. But while in prison Colson learned firsthand about the despair and cynicism of “forgotten men” behind bars. After his release he realized that he, too, couldn’t just forget them. Fourteen years later Prison Fellowship, which Colson founded, is an international agency involved in prison evangelism and efforts aimed at reforming the penal system.

So my word to Ben Johnson and company—in case any of them are hearing a still, small voice from God—is simply this: There is nothing shameful about foxhole religion, as long as you take it out of the foxhole and let it bear fruit. Is it impossible to imagine a Ben Johnson, four years hence, more involved in the Special Olympics than the Summer Olympics? Role modeling a life of service to the Canadian children who still stand around his home chanting, “We love Ben”? Or serving on the Canadian government Commission for Fair Play (a body formed to work against escalating violence in hockey and to reverse the win-at-all-costs attitude that threatens to eclipse skill, camaraderie, and honesty in every other sport)?

With God all things are possible. And if Ben Johnson responded to God’s call, he would be my brother three times over: first, as a fellow Canadian; second—and more basically—in what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “the solidarity of sin” that affects us all, and because of which none of us dares throw stones at another; and third, and most happily, he would be my brother in Christ in the family of God, which knows no national boundaries. And indeed, a welcome addition to the family.

MARY STEWART VAN LEEUWEN

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