On Sunday morning, it was revealed that Dick’s Sporting Goods appeared to be banning Christian phrases from their customizable merchandise.
They eventually gave in to the indignant masses, but not without trying to hide the public outrage.
The story begins with Owala water bottles.
Up until Sunday, Dick’s allowed their customers to personalize the trendy water bottle with any word or phrase — within reason. As would be expected, neither profanity nor calls to violence were allowed.
But when a Christian man logged onto the site, he uncovered a dramatic double standard.
Words like “atheist,” “satanic,” “prophet muhammad,” “quran,” “allahu akbar,” and “groomer” were all approved. When he typed in “God,” however, the censor was triggered and a notification appeared that read “this word is not allowed.” The same was true of “Jesus” and “bible.”
Dick’s Sporting Goods bans customized thermals for Christians, but allows them for Satanists, Atheists, Muslims, and pedos pic.twitter.com/7OMy7dNUl5
— Josh Seiter (@josh_seiter) September 27, 2026
Would you shop at Dick’s Sporting Goods?
When the public backlash inevitably came, Dick’s refused to apologize. Instead, they silently reversed their anti-Christian policy and began deleting social media comments criticizing their viewpoint discrimination.
Dick’s Sporting Goods has deleted hundreds of these comments from their Instagram page rather than just apologize for discriminating, and fixing the problem. Would be a shame if this went viral pic.twitter.com/PXxppkF61c
— Josh Seiter (@josh_seiter) September 27, 2026
As of today, you can order a water bottle labeled “Jesus” or “Bible.” Christians, however, don’t seem too eager to patronize a business that seems to hate them.
While many indignant social media comments have been taken down by Dick’s, new ones keep popping up — even on completely unrelated content.
The top 50 comments on an Instagram post advertising game day apparel had nothing to do with school spirit swag. Rather, as of Monday evening, they all spoke about the customization controversy.
One user wrote, “What happened? Now we’re definitely not gonna shop with yall. JESUS IS KING.” Another quipped, “Cant wait for my Trans groomer bottle coming in soon since I couldnt get a Jesus one.”
Fact check: you can order a “trans groomer” water bottle. Who knows why you’d need one, but apparently Dick’s doesn’t have a problem with that message — just ones about Christ.
Perhaps most ominous, however, was the wordless comment with multiple emojis showing a line graph dropping — a reference to the Dick’s stock price.
Despite this user’s prediction, Dick’s has not seen a significant drop in market value or sales — at least not over the past few days. For the past couple of months, their recent purchase, Foot Locker, has been bleeding them dry.
This precarious financial situation might have made company leadership more risk-averse, but it appears that the threat of a Christian boycott was sufficient to drive change.
There are two important factors at work in this story.
First: Left-wing corporate America still hates Christianity. This censorship of Christian customization is nothing new. The same thing happened with, among many other companies, Coca Cola, Kraft Heinz, and the WNBA. Big shocker on that last one.
Second: Christian conservatives have significant economic power. Our beautiful free market system lets us vote with our dollar, hurt companies that hate our values, and remind big city, liberal executives that true Americans aren’t playing games with censorship.
They might try to control the words on the bottle, but we control the bottom line. If big business wants to play politics with our faith, we’ll make sure they pay the price.
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