Discipline and Debauchery: From the 2024 Olympics to the Christian Walk

When I played soccer in college, we began the season with a week-long training camp. We got up before the sun. For two hours, we ran laps, practiced footwork, and honed skills. That was all before breakfast. After resting for a few hours, we did it all over again. It wasn’t fun — some mornings I’d wake up wishing to be anywhere else — but it did make me a better soccer player. The benefit of training and discipline is in the fruit it produces.

The benefits of training and discipline are readily apparent in the Olympics. “The Olympics represent excellence, the competition of the very best athletes from around the world,” Family Research Council Senior Fellow Meg Kilgannon told The Washington Stand. “They must spend hours each day training, adopt nutritional programs that maximize health and performance, and at the same time devote much of their day to study, career, or family.”

Olympians from many countries, including the U.S., must prove they are the best athletes in Olympic trials, before they even have a chance to compete in the main event. To win the ultimate prizes (medals), Olympic athletes must be the best of the best. Any mistake, any lapse in concentration, any personal immoderation, any deviation from their training program could cost them their shot at glory.

If Olympians are marked by discipline, the opening ceremony to the 2024 Olympics was marked by debauchery. Performers in drag staged a blasphemous mockery of “The Last Supper,” as depicted in Leonardo Da Vinci’s iconic painting. Defenders of the performance claimed it recreated a different painting, “The Feast of the Gods” by Jan Hermansz van Bijlert, which itself mimics Da Vinci’s Last Supper. They pointed to one actor depicting the Greco-Roman god of fertility, wine, and revelry, Dionysus/Bacchus.

In other words, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins summarized, “The idea was to create a big, pagan party in line with the gods of Mount Olympus.” As if that made the display of debauchery any less offensive to Christians, parents with children, or — what few have mentioned — the Olympic athletes themselves. “The opulence and decadence of the performance are a direct contrast to the daily discipline Olympic athletes must practice,” Kilgannon observed.

Here is a clear contrast between two ways to live — with discipline or with debauchery. “Christians should strive to be as disciplined and devoted to God as these athletes are to their training,” said Kilgannon.

This is exactly what the New Testament writers exhort Christians to do. “At one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord,” Paul instructs the church in Ephesus, after warning them to participate in sexual immorality or impurity. “Walk as children of light … and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:8,10). He continues, “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. … And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:15-18).

In fact, Paul employs an Olympic athlete’s training as a model for the Christian life (back then, Olympic winners won laurel wreaths not gold medals). “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it,” he told the Corinthian church. “Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified” (1 Corinthians 9:24-27). He uses a similar but briefer image in 2 Timothy 2:5 and Philippians 3:13-14.

The point is, the Christian life is hard work, at least as strenuous as the physical training endured by the toughest Olympic athletes, but far more rewarding. “Train yourself for godliness,” Paul exhorted Timothy, “for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come” (1 Timothy 4:7-8).

Self-discipline in pursuing holiness produces two results for Christians. On one hand, it transforms them into the image of Jesus, for “Christ did not please himself” but came to save sinners (Romans 15:3).

On the other hand, it earns them the hatred and scorn of the world. “Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin,” writes Peter. “For the time that is past suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry. With respect to this they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you” (1 Peter 4:1-5).

Indeed, sometimes worldly debauchery seems specifically designed as an anti-Christian statement. “This very edgy entertainment was intentional. … Even in the torch relay … they had three people dressed in drag. And so there’s a clear moral agenda that I think the organizers were purposely trying to advance,” argued David Closson, director of Family Research Council’s Center for Biblical Worldview on “Washington Watch.”

Ultimately, however, such open displays of wickedness are not so much anti-Christian as they are anti-Christ. The nations and their rulers still plot “against the Lord and against his Anointed” to rebel against his moral laws (Psalm 2:1-3). “God was mocked,” declared Perkins. “His name was subject to reproach. And that’s what this was. This wasn’t about Christians. It was about God, about Jesus Christ.”

This is why Christians are upset — the world is mocking someone we love. But it should also comfort us because we can rest assured that God will ensure the honor of his own name.

So, “instead of our immediate response being outrage — and it is outrageous — it should be introspective first, asking the question, ‘Lord, have we, through our conduct as the church, opened it up to this attack?’” Perkins suggested. “More than anger, we need to be talking about repentance.”

“For far too long, a lot of Christian leaders and just people in the pews have been okay with kind of seeing church and seeing their faith as a Sunday morning activity, but not something that should define their identity that they take with them 24/7,” Closson agreed. “When you have fewer and fewer people that actually hold a biblical worldview … orthodox Christian teaching … increasingly seems subversive, and dangerous, and perhaps something that’s appropriate to ridicule.”

Again, Christians can take comfort because Jesus predicted exactly this situation. “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you,” he said. “If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you” (John 15:18-19). Yet Christians are called to bear witness to the goodness and love of Jesus, even though the world hates us for it (John 15:27).

“Displays of pathetic debauchery like the opening ceremony should remind us of our duty to God and the need for us to offer our lives in humility for the greater glory of God,” implored Kilgannon. We see this even from the disciplined Olympic athletes themselves. After winning a bronze medal in skateboarding, Brazilian teenager Rayssa Leal signed, “Jesus is the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6), so that the message would reach even more people than if she had spoken those words.

“So often,” said Kilgannon, “we see beautiful witnesses of athlete’s faith, their gratitude to God for the gift of their abilities, and the blessing of the opportunity to strive to perfect them for the glory of God.”