Most of you won't know the name Ron Turner, but I'm a fan of his. For the last eight years, Turner's been the football coach for my alma mater and hometown school, the University of Illinois.

During that time, he's been just the sort of man who should be molding the character of his players. He's stressed good grades and good conduct to his players, largely successfully, and disciplined violators when necessary. He's consistently modeled strength and grace under fire, and it's showed: The players have fought hard, even when they've been outmatched, and practically to a man they've testified enthusiastically to the respect and affection they have for him.

Which makes it especially sad that Ron Turner's just been fired.

It's not because he couldn't coach. When he started, he inherited a team so depleted that it lost every game his first season, and he built them to the point that they won the Big Ten in 2001. But for the past couple years, Turner's teams had been losers, going 1-11 last season and 3-8 this year. And losing is the unforgivable sin.

Like almost everyone who followed the team, I could see it coming weeks (if not months) ago. But I'm upset anyway.

I'm not upset with the university's athletic director, who fired Turner only with great reluctance. I know how important football revenue is, and that the loss of fickle "fans" threatens the school's other sports. I know a coach can no longer recruit effectively when rival schools can point to his teams' recent record and tell recruits that the coach they'd come to play for at Illinois may soon be gone. I know that's the way the world works.

But that's just what I am upset with: the way the world works.

It's not just the sports world that finds losing the unforgivable sin; it's American society in general. Our culture is obsessed with winning. You might even say it worships winning.

Take business and professional life (the most obvious example besides sports). While all business folk naturally should seek to compete successfully, a lot of them don't stop with healthy competition. Many work insane hours and demand their employees do the same, to the detriment of their families. A smaller but still sizable number promote a corporate culture that cuts corners (legal and ethical), disdain quality and undermine society's moral foundations whenever they think it'll pay off. (The most sexually blatant material in circulation increasingly comes from advertising.) And if any of this works to increase sales, they'll claim that as validation.

Or take politics. In both parties, it's often not just the leaders but the rank and file who impatiently brush aside candidates who take strong stands on issues, insisting that all that matters is nominating "a candidate who can win" — whether that candidate is John Kerry (who supported the Iraq war, contrary to most Democrats) or Arnold Schwarzenegger (who backs abortion and "gay rights," contrary to most Republicans). Try to talk about actual issues on their merits with the win-at-all-costs crowd in either party and you're liable to be disappointed. Frequently they talk as if winning itself is the greatest merit, and if they achieve an electoral victory, they'll claim that as validation.

Or take, even, the church. While most don't think in terms of beating the competition, many have grown preoccupied with a very worldly measure — numbers, both of people and of dollars. This can go beyond the commendable desire to reach the lost, becoming a fixation on popularity itself. That, in turn, means dumping the controversial or "divisive" stuff from their sermons and Bible studies (less sin talk, more happy talk). Sometimes it even means dumping faithful pastors in the process, as if they'd been called to be not servants of God, but corporate executives obliged to meet sales goals. If the pews and the offering plates are full, these churches see that as validation. And not just any validation; God's validation.

They say "everybody loves a winner," but that's not how God sees things. Scripture spends a lot of time relating and lauding the efforts of people who were crashing failures by conventional standards. Numerous prophets preached warnings to the Israelites, only to be ignored and shunned. John the Baptist was, by most reckonings, what today would be derided as "a loser," with his scruffy clothes and eccentric eating habits and rude denunciations of powerful people (call them "the winners" of their culture), culminating in gruesome beheading. Jesus Himself, in His earthly ministry, gathered a large following but lost a big chunk of it by talking about eating His flesh and drinking His blood, then proceeded to give up His flesh and blood. And for centuries afterward, His followers faced persecution and sometime martyrdom, just as He had told them they would. You could call all these people "good losers." Being good, they were bound to be losers in the sight of an evil world.

We know all this, on some level. But it hasn't really sunk in. Partly, I think, that's because worldly success appeals to the sinful nature which everyone shares. Partly, too, it's because Americans have enjoyed material prosperity for so long. When we've never known anything but "the good life," we just assume it's our birthright — no matter how illogical (to say nothing of unbiblical) that assumption is.

That's one reason we need constant reminders of God's priorities: faithfulness, truth and humility over popularity, wealth and pride. In other times and places (including our own country, at one time) churches were forever warning against the seductions of the world; people had to be continually put on guard against those temptations precisely because the world was continually offering them. Bribes, sexual corruption, vanity: These things were all around us, and if the world said these were the marks of success — of "winners" — then we, like the Christians who came before us, were called to be good losers.

Of course, many of us may never be called to sacrifice the way the martyrs did. (Though you never know; some day, some of us may have to do just that.) And we'd make a great mistake if we came to associate prosperity per se with evil, much less poverty or suffering per sewith virtue. That's what socialists (some of them professed Christians) and communists do, and they end up brewing a witches' cauldron of vices like envy, resentment, hatred and spiritual pride that give the devil a field day.

But for most of us, worldly success makes a far more alluring idol. So it's time to dust off some old clichés, like "winning isn't everything" and "it's not whether you win or lose; it's how you play the game." It's time to turn off the TV and read inspirational tales of the heroic Christian martyrs, or books about spiritual temptations like Pilgrim's Progress and The Screwtape Letters. It's time to do some repenting and praying about the ways we let ourselves get caught up in the culture of "success" every day.

And one more thought while we're at it. If you happen to be a sports fan, it's also time to buy a ticket and go root for your local team even if they're losing a lot. It'll be good for them, and good for you too.