A playoff loss has ended the season for Denver’s professional football team but the national conversation on religion sparked by its most famous player quarterback Tim Tebow is far from over and it holds relevance for us too. A college phenom adjudged unlikely to succeed in the big leagues his dazzling 11^th-hour plays led his team to a string of stunning victories over much stronger teams.

What has made this young man one of the most talked-about athletes in decades is his devout religiosity and open pride in his Christian faith. After winning plays he points heavenward and prays on-field and his post-game interviews invariably begin and end with thanks to G-d. His celebrity has given rise to endless discussion in the pundit class about things like the propriety of mixing religion and sports.

But some of the punditry has been laced with subtle derision and although there’s no lack of bias against religion in the media it seems to me that something else is at play here. Tebow represents a powerful threat to secular society for the simple reason that he unwittingly calls its bluff. His personal example rebuts the lip service that society offers to the pursuit of a life well lived.

Ask members of the secular elites what life is all about and the answer will undoubtedly be to live lives of meaning and become the best human beings possible. But talk is cheap as they say and in reality we find precious little serious conversation in society about character refinement about living for the sake of the other about ultimate meaning.

There are exceptional individuals to be sure but the notion of infusing every moment of life with pursuit of goodness and meaning is largely a foreign one in modern secular society. Social justice the more global the cause the better may be very much in vogue but numerous studies show religious communities far outstripping secular ones in charitable giving and volunteerism. Is there a steady stream of books lectures and organizations in general society dedicated to the bettering of interpersonal relationships and character traits akin to that found in Orthodox communities? If there is I’ve somehow missed it.

But not only are secular moderns focused on far more trivial pursuits they often lavish those interests with a gravitas and fervor that can only be described as religious-like. Life abounds with examples of this exalting of the inconsequential but a prominent one is the hallowed place accorded pro sports in our society. And among sports none is more so than football with the devotions of an otherwise rational adult populace of bankers and butchers professors and truckers reaching fever pitch at this time each year when the annual championship game turns the nation into a veritable cathedral of the athletic faithful.

Along comes a bright-eyed earnest 24-year-old Tim Tebow who stresses at every opportunity that football is just a game and that G-d doesn’t really care who wins or loses — and in so doing he unwittingly calls uncomfortable attention to the modern emperor’s lack of clothes. And he doesn’t just talk the talk; he backs it up by placing good works at the center of his life spending a great deal of time volunteering for a variety of causes and encouraging his teammates to follow his lead. The Wall Street Journal reported that while at college his philanthropic example of starting a charity that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars “reshaped campus culture and for a time volunteering actually became fashionable.”

But more important than the good he’s done is the attitude he conveys — that it is this part of his life not his athletic stardom which really matters. As the Journal notes:

[After one victory] Mr. Tebow was asked by a reporter to name something memorable that had been said to him in the wake of the extraordinary win. “I’ll tell you one thing that happened during the week that I remember” he said. Mr. Tebow proceeded to talk about spending time with a young leukemia patient from Florida who had just been transferred to hospice care and about how delighted Mr. Tebow was to say the kid’s name on television and to let him know that someone cared.

Tebow’s implicit challenge to society finds a parallel in the challenge that Orthodox Jewish society at its best — emphasizing material modesty and spiritual striving —presents to the surrounding culture. Yonoson Rosenblum once made this incisive observation about Israeli society:

$$c$$Chareidim have refused to accept the basic assumption of yuppie culture: Success or failure in life is measured by the accumulation of money and toys. It is not their poverty that grates so much but their refusal to be miserable about it. They are hated because they refuse to admit they are life’s losers. By forgoing so much of what others consider necessities they have ruined the game by devaluing the prize. $$c$$

When we actualize the Torah’s ideals our focus on maximal meaning is the strongest possible challenge to the modern preoccupation with the trivial. But I wonder: as the years go by are we posing less and less of a challenge?

 WHEN GOOD NEWS IS NO NEWS As Ron Coleman describes in his column this week the Supreme Court has ruled that government may not interfere with the choices religious communities make regarding the hiring and firing of their clergy and religious teachers. Professor Rick Garnett a leading authority on the First Amendment’s religion clauses called this “one of the most important church-state decisions in decades” and a “resounding win for religious liberty in America.”

The 9-0 vote spanning the ideological spectrum from right to left was a rarity for a religion case. And there was an equally surprising unity among Jewish groups in support of the winning position with the vanishingly rare scenario of Agudath Israel and the Orthodox Union weighing in on the same side as heterodox Jewish groups and the American Jewish Committee.

In taking the losing side the Obama Justice Department broke with its usual ideological allies on the religious left. But what’s more the president’s lawyers argued against the very existence of a “ministerial exemption” for religious organizations which Professor Garnett described as “an extreme view — one that no other court and few scholars and experts had embraced — and they convinced no one.” Indeed legal commentator Ed Whelan noted that the administration’s position was “even more hostile to the ministerial exemption than the amicus brief filed by the [longtime church-state absolutists at] Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the ACLU.”

But from reading the secular Jewish media you’d never know just how extreme a stance President Obama’s lawyers had adopted against Constitutional protection for religious communities. There was a brief Jewish Telegraphic Agency story on the decision that made no mention of the administration’s involvement. Some papers ran the JTA item and some didn’t but none featured any editorial or opinion pieces about one of the most significant religion cases in decades.

Contrast that with another story that broke the same week that of Mr. Obama’s appointment of Jack Lew a shomer Shabbos Jew as his chief of staff. Whether this bodes well for the Jewish community is a separate question: Lew is a devoted and effective public servant but I believe there’s some cause for concern that Obama has chosen an observant Jew as a top aide just as he embarks on what will undoubtedly be one of the most fiercely waged election campaigns in memory in which his strategy is to wage class warfare that pits segments of the country against each other and the so-called 99 percent against “Wall Street bankers.”

Yet the secular Jewish press devoted far more coverage to the Lew story than to the Supreme Court case. Indeed it was delightfully ironic to see the secular Jewish papers adopt the kind of subtly admiring tone regarding Lew that other Orthodox Jews rarely merit in their pages. Lew’s elevation is certainly Jewishly newsworthy but not unprecedented — it was President Reagan who was the first US president to have a Jewish chief of staff.

But of course this is no mystery: The Lew appointment ostensibly reflects well on Mr. Obama; the Supreme Court case which is a truly positive development for the Jewish community reflects very poorly on the president so … move along nothing to see here.

Just last week I got a reminder of the extent to which the Court’s decisions in religion cases have real-life consequences for our community. In a conversation with several of the dynamic young askanim at the Orthodox Union I learned that its NCSY division runs kiruv programs in hundreds of public schools across the country.

During the time I was privileged to serve as an attorney with Agudath Israel of America I co-authored an amicus brief in Good News Club v. Milford arguing for the right of religious student groups to use public school facilities after school hours. Although the Court affirmed that right back in 2001 it was only last week that I learned that the ruling has also resulted in very good news for the Jews as well.