Marcus Rashford is keeping Christianity in the British limelight
To find religious activity among the nation’s young, look to Afro-Caribbean athletes.
Britain these days is usually cited as a deeply unpromising territory for conventional Christian belief, and especially among the young. It is startling, then, to see just how boldly that faith is displayed by some of the country’s most admired young people, and above all in sports.
The prize example is 24-year-old Marcus Rashford, a wildly popular soccer player for Manchester United: according to ESPN, his present transfer value is around $200 million. His life story fits so well into classic tales of Christian faith that it almost seems too good to be true. His mother, Melanie Maynard, who is of Afro-Caribbean origin, raised a large family through extraordinary hard work and self-denial, which often left her going hungry to feed her children. Like many of her Caribbean-born generation, she is a devout Christian believer.
As Marcus became a superstar in the late 2010s, he repeatedly used his fame and his new wealth to support fundamental causes that spoke directly to his experience, namely, fighting child poverty and arranging meal programs for poor children. Those efforts were redoubled during the 2020 lockdown, when so many children were cut off from free school meals. Some estimate that 4 million children were being fed by charities orchestrated, publicized, or directly funded by Rashford. He has been equally active in child literacy causes and in feeding the homeless.
