Elevation Sunday, the Sunday service at the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo, is packed with families, rodeo fans and cowboys past and present. Everyone shows up at a quarter to 11, all boots and crisp shirts and black hats on the second story of the South Point Casino in Las Vegas.

Downstairs: NFL bets, free white Russians at the roulette wheels, $13.95 steak platters for breakfast and waitresses showcasing backsides vacuum-packed into black tights.

Upstairs: little boys with snazzy belt buckles, free Cowboy Bibles and a five-piece band covering U2's "Elevation." (Relevant sample lyric: "High and high in the sky / you make me feel like I can fly / so high / elevation.")

This cowboy gathering is open to anyone, but it happens to be a bull rider, Chance Smart, who opens the morning with an invocation. He's a 22-year-old skinny kid from Mississippi, earnest, so loyal to the word of God that last year he tithed 10 percent of the $94,000 he pocketed at the WNFR to his church -- then figured whatever 10 accomplished, 20 would multiply, and doubled his donation to more than $18,000.

When he greets the crowd, he explains that he grew up in the relatively stodgy environment of a Baptist church.

"When I got married," he says, "I went to a Pentecostal church, and they were jumping around and screaming 'Hallelujah,' and I thought, 'These people are crazy.'"

Eventually he came around to the feeling that praise should feel spontaneous, physical, vocal.

"If something moves you this morning," he says, "just scream out 'Hallelujah' and 'Praise God.' Amen?

"Let's practice," he says, then shouts: "Jesus is Lord!"

The crowd replies: "Hallelujah!"

"Jesus is Lord!" Smart repeats.

"Hallelujah!"

On the big screens flanking the stage come a testimonial: another bull rider. This is Kanin Asay, who dang near got the life stomped out of him two summers ago. The bull broke his rib, broke his face, ripped his ears, obliterated his spleen and left him hospitalized and riddled with tubes, stuck in bed with only a Bible to read.

That Asay came back to finish second in the world standings in the same season, and was back in the WNFR again a year later is borderline astonishing, even for a sport in which broken bones and concussions are commonplace.

"This wasn't an injury that could have been only career-ending; it could have been life-threatening, easily," Asay says on the video. "And by the grace of God, I'm still here, and by the grace of God I'm riding a lot sooner than a lot of people and doctors thought I would be. It's just a miracle how fast God healed me."

The crowd nods and, a moment later as the testimony concludes, applauds.

Asay was back on a practice bull eight weeks after having his spleen stomped out. Now that calls for a hallelujah!

If there are indeed no atheists in foxholes, as the old adage says, then it's perhaps equally difficult to find them at rodeos.

Some of the most pious fellows you care to meet rope calves, wrestle steer and lash themselves to spastic broncos. But even among this crowd, it's hard to match the fervent intensity of those who make their living on the backs of bucking bulls.

They earn their bread by placing themselves at the mercy of a force stronger than their own. Almost to a man, they've suffered some debilitating or disfiguring accident in the arena, or come just a hairsbreadth from having a 1,500-pound animal stomp its hoof into their exposed skull.

It's enough to spur a man to ask for something, anything, to watch over him in the ring.

And enough to strengthen his beliefs once he comes out of the other side in one piece.

"When I walk into those doors of the Thomas & Mack [Center], in a sense I'm risking my life," says Cord McCoy, a veteran of the Professional Bull Riders' Built Ford Tough Series. "In another way, it makes you think about what you do, make sure you love it, and even think about eternity."

PBR rider Wiley Peterson, 29, says bull riding has amplified his faith. For the native of Fort Hall, Idaho, bull riding is a microcosm of life and a lesson in releasing the illusion of power.

"You have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, comfortable with being out of control," he says. "But it's all about surrendering to God and not saying, 'OK, God, this is what we're going to do, I'm in control.' You've just got to let go and say, 'I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm going to go for it.'"

Of course, you could replace the word "God" in Peterson's statement with "Bodacious" or "Voodoo Child" or "Copperhead Slinger" or any of the other bulls. In the arena, the bull is all-giving and all-destroying. Its raw, brute nature is as likely to bring a man glory and riches as inflict upon him a limp or early death.

And lest you think it's a stretch to equate the divine with a bovine, consider the bull's recurring presence in myth and religions of the world. It wasn't by accident, for instance, that in Exodus, during Moses' absence on Mount Sinai, the Israelites worshipped a golden calf.

Of course, that's also what got them into trouble. [NEXT PAGE]

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