Arian Foster is an atheist. All by itself, this is no great shakes: Lots of people don't believe in God, and lots of people do, and the earth spins on its path around the sun, unconcerned with what anyone standing on it thinks.

Foster's declaration is noteworthy, because Arian Foster is a football player, and Arian Foster plays football in Houston, the shiny, platter-sized rodeo buckle on America's Bible Belt. Some pundits suggest that Foster's revelation shakes the image-obsessed, traditional values foundation of the NFL. A Dallas sportswriter opines that once he returns from his groin injury, Foster will find little camaraderie in NFL locker rooms, where pre-game prayers and open expressions of faith are as common as stress fractures and oversized coolers of Gatorade. Others celebrate Foster as an important figure in American sports history, the man who will lead the way in separating our games from God.

Foster is a smart, interesting guy. Defying family traditions and culture – Foster was raised Muslim – to choose another path takes courage, and not a little self-confidence, but it doesn't make him a trailblazer. The Texans all-pro is far from the first high-profile NFL player to announce his atheism: a decade ago, Minnesota Vikings star Robert Smith told an interviewer that he did not believe in God. In a lauded 2006 Sports Illustrated profile of Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinal turned Special Forces soldier who was killed in Afghanistan, writer Gary Smith describes a young man who was intelligent and brave and principled. And atheist.

It seems unlikely that one reasonably successful halfback on a team whose performance is best described as "middling" is going to single-handedly lead the Youth of America into the clutches of humanism, any more than Tim Tebow's public displays of faith sparked a great evangelical revival. Foster, like Tebow, believes what he believes, and those who are sympathetic to his views will hail him. Those who aren't, won't. Heroes are a lot like breakfast cereal, or toothpaste: We like what we like, and we pretty much stick with it.

And what we like generally begins and ends on the playing field. In the '90s, lot of Houston little leaguers mimicked the strange, bow-legged batting stance of Jeff Bagwell, or the banty rooster strut of Craig Biggio. In the '70s, every running back in the state wore a tear-away jersey, just like Earl Campbell. I don't know if any of those aspiring superstars ever considered a conversion to Roman Catholicism, to be like Biggio, or considered going into the hot links business, a la Mr. Campbell. There are apocryphal stories that at the turn of the last century, young boys across the country were lopping off the pointer and pinkie on their pitching hands, in emulation of Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown, the farm machine accident victim turned greatest curveballer in the world, who was leading the Chicago Cubs to two consecutive World Series victories, but I don't know that the youth of today possess that level of commitment.

What makes Foster's announcement interesting is that he has put himself forth as an evangelist for his beliefs. Many football players, among them Smith and Tillman and former NFLer Chris Kluwe, have been honest about their disbelief, but marshaling others to the cause was not part of the package. Foster sees himself as a rallying point for the unbeliever, Christopher Hitchens in hip pads. This could alienate a lot of people, the same way public prayers in end zones do. There are remarkable similarities between the religious zealot and the unbeliever, the Tebow and the anti-Tebow: both claim to know the unknowable, both insist that they walk the one true path, and most of the time, both respond to dissenting voices with some degree of viciousness. Whether it's Bill Maher nastiness or Bible-thumping consignments to hell, it's unpleasant stuff. Is the NFL ready for a secular humanist missionary?

Short of burning Bibles as part of his touchdown celebration, what Arian Foster believes, or doesn't believe, isn't going to matter much, so long as he's producing. An NFL scout once told a radio audience that the only thing he cares about is, "Can the guy play?" "If Jeffrey Dahmer could run a 4.4 forty," he continued, "we would have written the cannibalism thing off as an 'eating disorder.'" As Michael Sam, the first openly gay player to make an NFL training camp, learned, being an icon doesn't matter, if you aren't good enough to play.

Even when we know their frailties, heroes, especially sports heroes, exist outside of reality, mythologized, idealized, their reality defined only by their prowess and their image. Billy Crystal grew up idolizing Mickey Mantle, and even after he came to know Mantle the man, a boozy, womanizing boor, Crystal's view of Mantle the hero was undimmed. I grew up with a huge poster of O.J. Simpson on my bedroom wall, and though I know better, there's a tiny part of me still suspects that Juice is an innocent man, that someone who ran so beautifully couldn't do something so evil. Surely there are some Texans fans out there who are aghast at the thought of rooting for an atheist. If Foster, once healthy, leads the club to the Super Bowl, they'll feel differently: He could be an atheist, a Presbyterian, or a Druid, and no one will care. Principles don't matter in the NFL; results do. A Chronicle sports columnist this week advocated for the Texans signing Ray Rice, the disgraced, girlfriend-beating running back, because, let's be honest, we need him, and that's more important that any self-righteous moral stance about not employing women abusers. Just win, baby.

Four decades ago, Terry Allen lampooned football's false piety in "The Great Joe Bob (a regional tragedy)". Star running back Joe Bob is the "pride of the backfield, the hero of his day...and there ain't nothin' as American or clean." Things go awry. Joe Bob loses his Texas Tech scholarship. He cavorts with loose women, and robs a liquor store. Worse, "he growed his hair and he give up prayer." "No one could understand it," Allen laments, "they just couldn't comprehend it, when the Great Joe Bob went bad." More recently, Ben Fountain's brilliant Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk features a swirling, surreal Thanksgiving halftime show, fireworks and PTSD-suffering Afghan War heroes and booze and beefy rich guys squeezed into expensive Officially Licensed Team Gear, footballs and noise and Destiny's Child, all crammed under the gape-roofed decadence of Texas Stadium. Football is spectacle, nothing more, something loud and shiny to make us feel part of something, even as it parts us from our hard-earned cash. It's Las Vegas in shoulder pads, Gladiator in cleats. If one of the helmeted Hessians on the field is an atheist, so be it. So long as the beer keeps flowing and the home team wins, it doesn't really matter.