LIKE almost every other human activity, religion will make its mark at the Rio Olympics. An American evangelist called David Crandall has organised teams of missionaries to propagate his reading of Christianity (one that attaches great importance to the creation story in Genesis) at every Olympics since 1996; in Rio, he has announced, a team of at least 85 people from seven countries will be handing out 250,000 booklets in ten languages. Pope Francis has tweeted his good wishes to all the athletes and sent a particularly warm letter of encouragement to a “refugee team” drawn from the wave of migrants sweeping through Europe. A priest has been named as “father-confessor” to the Russian team. It has been announced that the Olympic village includes a religion space with facilities for followers of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism.
But the hard fact is that religions in the ordinary sense have never been sure how to respond to the Olympics..