Reggie White's Evolving Faith

What ESPN's new documentary gets right about the "Minister of Defense"—and what it overlooks

When I was growing up as an evangelical pastor’s kid in the 1990s, there wasn’t a bigger name in the Christian athlete space than Reggie White. I still remember watching him win the Super Bowl in 1997 and then, in the glare of the postgame spotlight, thank Jesus Christ.

For evangelical kids like me, struggling to reconcile our religious identities with our love for the “secular” activity of sports, White offered proof that the two could go together.

So when ESPN released its new 30 for 30 documentary in December, Minister of Defense, I was immediately intrigued. What would it say about White’s faith? How would it explain his shifting religious beliefs, which left many evangelical sports ministry leaders surprised and confused?

I have a section in my book that analyzes White as a religious figure in the 1990s. A few thoughts about the film, based on what I’ve found in my research, are below.

What I Liked

This is a sports documentary, and it includes plenty of game footage to help viewers understand White’s greatness. An impressive array of NFL dignitaries give their respects, too, from coaches like Bill Bellicheck and Joe Gibbs to players like Bruce Smith and Cris Carter.

If you grew up watching Reggie White, you’ll be reminded of his dominance. If you didn’t, you’ll get to see what made him an all-time great.

The film also takes White’s faith seriously; it’s a central thread throughout. Viewers learn about the role of the church in White’s early life: how he was formed and shaped by the Black Baptist tradition, becoming a preacher when he was seventeen. "Once he decided that he wanted to be a minister,” one family member says, “he lived his life, day-to-day, after the word of God."

While White is depicted as a showman who drew inspiration from professional wrestling and Muhammad Ali, his integrity and consistency come through, too. His wife, Sara, and his son, Jeremy, are featured heavily, and their love for White is evident.

The film also makes it clear that White did not only talk about Jesus when the cameras were on. Viewers get a sense that White’s faith was essential to his identity, always at the forefront of his mind, infusing his whole life.

“I've never met a player,” sports journalist Andrea Kramer says in one scene, “who was more genuine in his religious beliefs than Reggie White.”

Of course, there was another side to White’s religion. His conviction that the Bible spoke clearly against homosexuality—and his willingness to say so, loudly—was a frequent source of conflict and controversy.

The filmmakers try to address White’s statements on sexuality in a relatively fair and nuanced way. Journalist LZ Granderson is given substantial air time to share his perspective as a gay Black man; he describes the feeling of being targeted by White’s words. “You stick to sports, Reggie’s incredible,” Granderson says. “You get away from the field, Reggie's a little more complicated.”

At the same time, plenty of voices highlight White’s sincerity and his care and concern for people around him. The Reggie White that comes through is complicated and complex, but largely sympathetic.

Racial Justice Activism

While the film is solid throughout, there are two things I wish it could have explored more.

First, although White’s racial justice activism is briefly highlighted, it focuses mainly on White’s response to a cluster of Black church burnings across the South in 1996. It does not dig into the more pointed comments White made about racism—comments that would likely get White accused of CRT today.

In his 1997 book, In The Trenches, White spoke extensively about racism. He presented himself as “not liberal, not conservative” and sought to chart a path forward that relied less on government intervention and more on creating economic opportunities for Black communities.

At the same time, White saw racism as a systemic issue, tracing it back to America’s founding. “Blacks in America are hurt and angry because the laws of America seem to be rigged against us,” he wrote. “Most people don't realize the U.S. Constitution was not written for black people. As originally written and ratified, the U.S. Constitution deems me to be three-fifths of a human being.”

White argued that the inequalities of the past continued in the present. He cited policing in particular, where “the laws are designed to put more black men in prison than any other class.”

White also encouraged a greater awareness of Black history and the history of race in America. “The system gives us one month out of the year,” he lamented “and it's the shortest month of the year. Black history should not be black history, it should be American history.”

Declaring that “it's time to kick racism's tail,” he called on the church to do more. “It is also important for us as Christians to see the role the church played, both its tragic participation in justifying slavery and its positive role in the abolition movement,” he wrote. He urged Christians to follow the example of Jesus, a poor man “from the ghetto” who battled racism in his day.

In 1997, White reprised some of the themes from his book when he delivered a talk to a predominantly Black high school in Knoxville. “There's a lot of focus on you all and a lot of that focus is on putting you in jail,” White reportedly said. “That's why police harass a bunch of you guys, because they want you to snap.”

When reports of White’s comments made it to Green Bay, the city’s newspapers were filled for weeks with criticism of the defensive end—this, even though White was at the height of his popularity, having just delivered a Super Bowl victory.

One police officer wrote in to complain that White “has judged me by the color of my uniform. How hypocritical.” A local man argued that Black men were actually “underpoliced” and that they were too willing to wallow “in the slop of victimhood.” Still another reader wondered if he knew Reggie White at all. “This is a quote I would expect from someone like rap singers Ice T or Snoop Doggy Dog, certainly not Reggie White.”

White’s discussion of racism was overshadowed the next year by clumsy and awkward comments he made to the Wisconsin state legislature. Attempting to highlight the positive contributions that all racial groups brought to American society, he instead trafficked in racial stereotypes.

Even so, his advocacy for racial justice in the 1990s strikes me as an intriguing theme worthy of more exploration. It offers a window into the broader evangelical racial reconciliation movement, led by organizations like Promise Keepers, which gained momentum in the 1990s. And it was a precursor to the more organized expressions of Black athlete activism that would emerge in the 2010s.

White’s Religious Evolution

There’s one more reason White’s concern for racial justice would be worth exploring: I think it helps to explain White’s evolving religious views, a theme the filmmakers emphasize but do not really analyze.

The filmmakers want to make White’s faith palatable to the sensibilities of a mainstream, college-educated American audience in 2024. Put another way, they don’t want to define White by his comments on LGBTQ issues. To do this, they focus heavily on an interview White gave to the NFL Network in 2004, just before he died.

In that interview, White looks back at his work as a preacher in evangelical spaces and expresses regret. “I've been a preacher for 21 years,” he says. But he was “more of a motivational speaker than a teacher of the word” because he had not been “a student of Scripture.”

He says he felt used by evangelical communities that put him on a pedestal as a religious expert simply because of his success on the field. “When I look on it now, most people who asked me to speak at their churches, only wanted me to speak because I played football,” he explains. “In many respects, I've been prostituted.”

White goes on to explain his feeling of shock when he began to study Hebrew and realized that things he believed about the Bible might not be true. “I've realized over the centuries that church leaders have used fear tactics to keep people under control,” he claims. “There's a lot of things that I preached about, that I couldn't prove.”

In White’s mind, the sermons and talks he used to give to churches no longer represented what he believed. “When I look on it now, I misled people,” he laments. Instead of preaching and speaking in public about his faith, he planned to spend his time in retirement studying the Bible. “I’ve got to sit down and get it right,” White concludes.

For the filmmakers, White’s repudiation of his earlier evangelical views offers a chance to present him as a person on his way to an affirming and accepting progressive faith.

But what views did White have in mind when he said that he “misled” people? And why was White so intent on studying Hebrew?

The filmmakers explain this in part by interviewing Nehemiah Gordon, one of the people who taught Hebrew to White. It’s not mentioned in the film, but Gordon is a Karaite Jew and a scholar/entrepreneur who has built up a personal ministry to Christians by claiming to hold a “secret” that church leaders have tried to hide: the gospel of Matthew, he argues, was originally written in Hebrew, and its true meaning (as well as the meaning of the Tanakh—the Hebrew Bible) can only be understood by reading the texts in their original language.

From what I can tell, White never fully rejected his Christian views about Jesus. But he was strongly influenced by at least two ideas held by many Karaite Jews and taught by Gordon.

First was the belief that only the written Torah is from God and is authoritative for religious practice. “The Torah is the perfect word of God revealed through Moses,” is how Gordon explains it. The oral Torah, represented by the Talmud, is rejected as man-made and based on human interpretation.

Building on this, while Karaite Jews do not believe that Jesus is the Messiah, many see him in a sympathetic light, arguing that he rejected the authority of the rabbinical interpretations put forward by the Pharisees and instead encouraged people to follow the original, authoritative source from God: the written Torah. When Reggie White talked about religious leaders using “fear tactics” to keep people under control, he was drawing on these ideas from Gordon.

Second is the idea that each individual person has a responsibility to read the Hebrew Tanakh and interpret its plain meaning for themself, and then practice what it says. This is one reason White became so passionate about studying and reading Hebrew. It’s also why he began to adopt some Jewish practices in his own life. “What God needed from me more than anything,” he says in the 2004 interview, “was a way of living, more than what I was saying.”

There is an element of both fundamentalism and freedom here. On the one hand, White was empowered to read the Bible in the Hebrew language for himself and come to a personal conviction on what it says and how it should be followed. On the other hand, White was taught that the vast majority of Jewish and Christian people have gotten things wrong and that a strict set of rules and guidelines set down in the Torah must be practiced in the present.

While Nehemiah Gordon is interviewed for the documentary, there is little discussion of the broader context of his beliefs and ministry. There is also no mention of the man who connected Reggie White to Gordon in the first place: a Black NFL chaplain named Keith Johnson.

In the 1990s Johnson was a Methodist pastor leading a prominent interracial congregation in Minneapolis. He became friends with Minnesota Vikings coach Dennis Green and wide receiver Cris Carter, and eventually decided to leave behind his pastoral ministry to work full-time in sports ministry, serving as the Vikings chaplain.

There’s a racial dimension to this story that I explore more in my book. The cliff notes version is that, like Reggie White in the 1990s, Johnson and Carter believed that more needed to be done about racism in society. They also felt that Black leadership was not valued in evangelical sports ministry spaces. So they teamed up to form a new Black-led sports ministry organization called CAUSE: Christian Athletes United for Spiritual Empowerment.

Along with retreats and events that featured Black gospel musicians like Kirk Franklin and pastors like T.D. Jakes, CAUSE focused on outreach and uplift efforts within Black communities. Reggie White got involved early on, with Johnson serving as an important mentor. “It's composed mostly of pro football players who are black,” Reggie White explained when discussing CAUSE in 1999. “Our goal is to spearhead these spiritual changes in America and to invigorate the black faithful.”

By the early 2000s, CAUSE lost steam. Keith Johnson’s role had been tied to support from Dennis Green and Cris Carter; when they left the Vikings, Johnson did too. In the process, Johnson turned his attention to a new interest: tours to Israel and exploring the Hebrew roots of the Bible, which is how he got connected with Nehemiah Gordon. To this day, Johnson and Gordon continue to work together, presenting themselves as an interfaith team encouraging Christians to recover the Hebrew roots of their faith—and to discover what Christian leaders have been trying to hide.

It was Keith Johnson, in the early 2000s, who introduced the recently-retired Reggie White to Gordon. Gordon and Johnson convinced White that what he had been taught to believe about Christianity was based on man-made tradition and that he needed to uncover the “true” source of his faith by reading sources in the original Hebrew.

None of this context is explained or explored in the documentary. Instead, White’s evolving religious views are presented as a potential journey towards progressive enlightenment.

“I don't want to put words in his mouth,” Jeremy White says. “But I do know that he would continue to have that growth mindset. And in having that growth mindset, there would be more gray area.”

I found myself deeply moved by the way Jeremy talked about his father. Although I remain within the evangelical tradition of my upbringing, Reggie White’s desire to seek the truth is admirable, and so is his willingness to question ideas that he previously held. I came away from the documentary with a deeper respect for White as a football player and a human being.

But while the documentary presents White’s religious pivot as an inspiration, I also see tragic elements. It’s hard not to feel that rather than breaking free from religious groups that wanted to use White’s fame to build up their own platforms, he had switched over to a new religious leader who claimed to hold the “secret” truth—and who seemed eager to use White’s story to advance his own ministry.

Ultimately, then, while I appreciated the filmmakers’ attempts to present White as a person of complexity, it too often felt that they wanted White to fit into their own box. The Minister of Defense gestures and hints in the direction of nuance, but it does not truly explore and analyze White’s evolving faith—and the broader contexts in which it developed.