This presentation will discuss our original research, which was a critical comparative media analysis of how religiosity is articulated with respect to Kaepernick and Tebow. Our analysis of these findings contributes to the literature in two key ways. First, we hope to complicate a “reaction thesis” commonly used as a primary explanation for Tebow’s rise as well as for the virulence of criticism directed at Kaepernick. While forms of cultural backlash are certainly a part of these cultural dynamics, we offer an explanation which underlines how these mediated narratives are (re)articulations of century old racisms, borne out in the public discourses of sport and religion in the United States. That is we do not view these recent (re)articulations as “emergent” but instead as “residual”—employing established racialized discourses and strategies in the formation of a contemporary “racial project” (Omi & Winant, 2015). Second, we show how the different media framings of these two athletes are racially charged and laden with notions of proper forms of religiosity. We argue that the racialized frames of athlete and religious subject combine in the Kaepernick/Tebow discourse to continue the boundary work of a WASP-inflected American civil religion.