In April 2019, the following image started to make the rounds on Imgur, with the original poster claiming in the caption that “the elders at my brother-in-law’s church” (Christian Life International, or CLI) unwittingly produced a lewd shirt for its softball team:
The user claimed:
[Christian Life International “elders”] thought “CLI” (Christian Life International) alone wouldn’t signify a church, so they added the cross. Magnificent.
The same image proved popular on Facebook and an iteration of the post also made it to Reddit’s r/crappydesign:
On Twitter, a tweet featuring the same image shared three days after the original post accrued tens of thousands of likes and thousands of retweets:
By April 22 2019, the story made it to blogs like Barstool Sports — but every post repeated the unsourced story that had initially appeared on Imgur several days before.
A search for “Christian Life International softball” suspiciously turned up nearly nothing but links to the image and its description, and we have so far found no evidence that anyone had made the slightest attempt to verify the claim before repeating it on blogs and across social media. We were also unable to find mention of a Christian Life International softball team on CLI’s official Instagram, Facebook or Twitter pages, and a search of their entire website returned no results for the word “softball” at all. If CLI had a softball team, it was a well-kept secret.
In other words, one completely unsubstantiated claim on Imgur about an embarrassing Christian Life International softball shirt formed the basis of every iteration of the rumor on social media and blogs. We found no information indicating anyone had checked the story with anyone affiliated with CLI at all, nor any information indicating the church had a softball team. We contacted Christian Life International via phone and email, but have not yet received a response.