In the third episode of the interminable, nine-part Pulisic docuseries, its subject, Christian Pulisic, sits down at a dining table, pink orchids blooming behind him.
“It is what time?” a friend asks him, holding a camera in Pulisic’s face.
“Bible time,” Pulisic answers, thumbing through the good book with a pencil perched between his fingers, a notepad turned to a fresh blank page poised beside it. The ever-present cross dangles from his necklace.
Pulisic’s faith was not a revelation. He has posted pictures of underlined passages in his Bible on Instagram, too.
His fellow United States men’s national team star Weston McKennie’s Instagram bio consists of just four words: “All glory to God.” In his profile picture, McKennie points two index fingers up at the sky, his cross-shaped diamond earrings secured to his lobes.
Defender Chris Richards, meanwhile, has also been outspoken about his faith. He once shared that he and 10 or so fellow Crystal Palace players pray together before games, and conduct Bible study.
When goalkeeper Matt Freese joined the USMNT, the devout Catholic mentioned in an off-handed comment that he had already met Pulisic in a Bible study session.
The team’s head coach, Mauricio Pochettino, is Catholic and almost always wears a bracelet depicting a patron saint. When he took over Espanyol in his first managerial gig in 2009, Pochettino hiked the 7.5 miles up to the Montserrat religious shrine outside Barcelona to pray for the club to be saved from relegation (it worked).
At the last World Cup, the USMNT’s roster included Walker Zimmerman, the son of a pastor who used his platform to proclaim his own faith; Yunus Musah, a Muslim who fasted even on match-days during Ramadan; and DeAndre Yedlin, a practicing Buddhist who led several teammates in barefoot post-match meditations out on the pitch after every game in Qatar.
This all represents a rather radical change in the team’s public engagement with religion, or really with personal beliefs of any kind.
Although demographics suggest that at least some national team stars of the past would have been religious, hardly any were ever vocal about it. Clint Dempsey seems to have given a single interview about his faith to Sports Spectrum, a religious media outlet, around the 2014 World Cup. (Sports Spectrum, as it happens, also recorded a recent podcast on faith with surprise World Cup roster omission Tanner Tessmann.) Tim Howard was a member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, but very rarely spoke about his beliefs publicly. Jozy Altidore said late in his career that he was “raised as a Jehovah’s Witness” but didn’t elaborate further. Landon Donovan appears to be an atheist.
Other than that, few of the national team’s main characters ever went there. To this day, we don’t really know whether Cobi Jones was a believer, or Tab Ramos, or Alexi Lalas, or Marcelo Balboa. Or Michael Bradley and DaMarcus Beasley, for that matter. Not that we had any right to know, either, if they didn’t care to share.
The contrast is nonetheless remarkable.
And the bit that must be acknowledged is that, while these things are unconnected, the USMNT opening up about their religious beliefs is happening to the backdrop of a governing party that trades, when convenient, on demonstrative religiosity. The Trump administration has empowered Christian nationalists and openly seeks to remake a nation that is constitutionally free in its practice of religion to an overtly Christian one.
The national team’s leading players’ proclamations on their religious beliefs seem to be sincere. They are very much doing it in, well, good faith. But it also signals that they are joining a generation of professional American athletes who feel freer to express their views than several decades’ worth of their predecessors did.
A professional athlete making religion a visible part of their public persona is hardly new. But it is something of a departure on a national team, where the rules of public engagement are inherently different. US Soccer once banned kneeling during the national anthem – before scrapping its own ban three years later when the political winds had turned – on the argument that doing so in your nation’s colors is different than protesting under your franchise’s banner. Likewise, leveraging the visibility afforded by a World Cup to evangelize muddies the waters of a kind of national sporting neutrality.
In some cases, this sort of thing has gone wrong and rankled the public, like when Team USA performed its weird and unprovoked embrace of militarism at the World Baseball Classic, which turned them into the only un-fun team in the tournament.
But it may also be argued that the team’s stars feeling sufficiently confident to be their fullest selves during their big turn in the spotlight is a positive. This generation of US players has been largely indifferent to doing media that could display how interesting and well-spoken so many of its leading members actually are. In the absence of much exposure, it has even been suggested that this team is unlikable.
Whatever the case, when the nation gets to know its men’s national team better in the coming weeks, it will learn more about their convictions than any incarnation before.
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Leander Schaerlaeckens is the author of The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out now. He teaches at Marist University.
