Porn star Mia Khalifa fends off NFL ‘man of God,’ and everybody loses

The relationship between sports and religion has always made me uncomfortable.

When an athlete tells reporters after a game that God wanted his team to win, I cringe, mostly because the God I envision couldn’t care less about winners and losers. He cares about His team, which would be everybody.

In 2012, a poll showed that 43 percent of Americans believed divine intervention played a role in Tim Tebow’s success. And what did they believe when Tebow turned out to be an awful NFL quarterback? That God messed with Tebow’s throwing motion for purposes known only to Him? Perhaps, though I’m sticking with the idea that the man wasn’t built to play the position. He might go on to do a lot for the world, but not for the NFL.

This brings me in a roundabout way to Duke Williams, a safety for the Buffalo Bills. Williams finds himself in a very awkward situation, thanks to social media, which seems to specialize in making people do dumb things. Williams has been sending direct messages via Twitter to porn star Mia Khalifa. Unlike a tweet that goes to a person’s followers, direct messages are meant to be personal communications between two people. Except that Khalifa outed him to her 649,000 followers.

Among his messages over the last five months were appeals for her to come to Las Vegas and Miami to meet him. She had consistently ignored him. Until Tuesday, when she took a screenshot of his direct messages and posted them.

So what’s the big deal? These days, an athlete interested in a porn star is almost a cliché. And Williams is single.

The big deal are the very first words he used to describe himself on his Twitter account.

“A man of God.’’

Hey, we’re all sinners. I am, you are and Williams is. But why oh why do so many men of God say one thing and do another? And, more to the point, why do they do it so publicly?