The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports
The Spirit of the Game is an admirable achievement. The history Paul Putz illuminates furthers our understanding of how a particular brand of Protestant Christianity came to dominate religious outreach and ministry in elite American intercollegiate and professional sports in the twentieth century. Putz argues that the emergence of sport ministry organizations such as the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) descends directly from the muscular Christianity movement common in England and the United States from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s. This desire for a “transformed Muscular Christianity” was motivated by a belief that sport needed to balance “nineteenth century values like self-discipline” with more modern “twentieth century values,” such as “consumerism, cooperation, and pluralism” (2).
Putz aims to show that such a balancing act was hard to maintain, and that the legitimate need to “accommodate and adapt” to a pluralistic American sports culture often hid this fact from view (2). Putz attempts to document this balancing act in three primary ways. First, he argues that historians, who tend, in both training and temperament, to endorse (and prefer) secularization theory, have largely overlooked the interplay of religion and American sport; they have “neglected the role of Protestant Christianity in the story” of sport (3). Therefore, the tensions created by trying to integrate big-time sport and Christianity are simply missed for lack of attention. In carefully documenting the development and history of organizations such as the FCA, Putz hopes to “fill this gap” and rouse historians from their slumber (3).
Second, Putz examines the myriad voices involved, including different theological traditions and different class backgrounds, as well as the perspectives of the different races and sexes. These “diverse strands” not only had to balance the tensions between Christianity and big-time sport, but between different understandings of “Protestant identity” as well (4). The solution, all too often, was to water down the message to something akin to moralistic therapeutic deism,1 so as to avoid theological conflict, as well as to deny or ignore the existence of any possible contradictions between faith commitments and big-time athletics (such as Sabbath participation or violence in sports such as football).
Finally, Putz argues that “American pluralism” and “American identity” cannot be fully understood without examining both “sports” and “religion.” Unfortunately, as mentioned previously, most scholars have ignored each of them, and among the few that have looked, even fewer have focused on the interplay between the two. Yet, Putz argues, American identity—especially as regards race issues—was shaped by a “middlebrow” Protestant conception of race relations and civil rights (19). This conception focused on a “colorblind” philosophy and the call to change individual hearts rather than the structures of society.
In the end, Putz argues, American Protestant Christians were desperate to navigate these challenges. Sport was vying with religion for the attention and devotion of Americans. Yet, “by carving out a home within this world” of big-time sports, “the leaders of the Christian athlete movement turned that threat into a vehicle for maintaining their influence in a secularizing society” (6). A key question, following from this thesis, one not directly addressed by Putz, is to what degree the embrace of big-time sports has furthered Christian ends. That is, how often have Christians brought “salt and light” (Matthew 5) to sport and how often has “accommodation” really meant “capitulation”?
Putz structures the book in a generally chronological manner, with themes, such as those mentioned above, entering and exiting as the narrative proceeds. He begins in the 1920s and the “golden age” of sport. Key figures include Amos Alonzo Stagg and Branch Rickey, while key questions included Sabbatarianism. The middle chapters focus on the birth of organized sports ministries in the mid-20th century, particularly the FCA. This includes an in-depth account of Don Mclanen, the founder of the FCA. This history, which includes several of Mclanen’s private letters to other leaders in sport, is the strongest and most interesting section of the book. The final third of the book recounts the rise of “Sportianity” in the 1970s in the wake of the success of sport ministries such as FCA and closes with an analysis of the tensions and contradictions found in race and religion in sport from the 1990s to today. Putz thinks this issue is personified in the differing ways that two kneeling quarterbacks—Tim Tebow and Colin Kaepernick—were treated.
Putz generally succeeds in each of his three main aims. He has shown the importance of Protestant Christianity to American sport in a way that academic historians should be able to understand and appreciate. He has shown how a “big tent” pragmatic philosophy and a desire for access too often resulted in platitudes rather than spiritual depth or prophetic witness. He has shown how American Protestantism interacted with sport to shape and in turn be shaped by the larger culture. As such, his work furthers the growing literature on sport and religion. Nevertheless, his argument is not without weaknesses. Here, I focus on three limitations of the book and its analysis.
First, either the book is mistitled, or the analysis is too narrow. The full title of the book is The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sport, yet the history focuses not on Christianity as such, but on a particular brand of Protestantism. Roman Catholics, for instance, garner almost no attention in Putz’s narrative. Outside brief mentions of Notre Dame football and of the number of Catholic owners in the early NFL, Catholicism is almost completely absent from the text. This is understandable in the sense that Putz is focused on the genesis and growth of Protestant sports ministries, and by the fact that American culture has been dominated by a Protestant ethos since its founding. Nevertheless, this means that the text isn’t about American Christianity so much as it is about American Protestantism.
Second, Putz misses several opportunities for deeper or more nuanced historical and theological analysis. Two prominent examples leap to mind. The first example is the lack of nuance and context in the discussion of Sabbatarianism. There is no discussion of how Sabbatarianism—even if overly strict and legalistic—was theologically rooted in fundamental Christian commandments as regards “idolatry” and “remembering the Sabbath.” Nor is the historical context related to Sabbatarianism, going back to colonial America or to James I in England and the compromise of the “King’s Book of Sports,” examined in the text. I am not a Sabbatarian, and I don’t agree with that perspective’s absolutist and legalistic interpretation of fulfilling the commandments, but in a world where the NCAA basketball tournaments proceed during Holy Week without anyone batting an eye, all serious Christians should be able to see that Sabbatarian concerns (even if not their solutions) were valid.2 Secularism is not neutral, but rather a dissolving agent and a “jealous god.”3 That this issue is not treated with more care is a missed opportunity.
The second example grows out of the first. Puritanism and Calvinistic theological assumptions (related to work and the doctrine of election) are never examined in the text historically or theologically. For instance, Nancy Struna’s excellent book, People of Prowess: Sport, Leisure, and Labor in Early Anglo-America, is never mentioned or cited in the text.4 Yet such influences seem to be an obvious explanation for the all-too-common pressures to win and succeed among American Christian athletes (of all theological traditions). As Putz puts it, in big-time sport, “winning is currency” (24). On a theological level, both implicitly and explicitly, “achievement” and “winning” were easily made into crude—but highly visible—marks of God’s election. In short, Puritanism tempts us to “turn play into work,”5 while Calvinistic theology—again, crudely understood—tempts one to believe that “winning” isn’t simply a “blessing” that God bestows like rain “on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45, NIV) but is rather evidence of special divine favor.
The final limitation of the text is that Putz sometimes seems to succumb to his own thesis about the dangers of accommodation. That is, his careful attempt at dispassionate historical analysis too often slips into carelessly using the assumptions, terms, and mindset of secularism. This creates an analytical double standard where left-wing criticisms are taken at face value and “traditional” (always offered in scare quotes in the text) or right-wing concerns are deconstructed. Examples are numerous. Given space constraints, the aforementioned cases of Tebow and Kaepernick will have to suffice. Tebow’s kneeling is explained as “in some ways . . . a product of an established infrastructure, the next in a long line of athletes who had been shaped and then promoted by Sportianity” (203), while Kaepernick’s kneeling is described as addressing the “ongoing problems of police brutality and racial inequality in America” (204). In other words, Tebow’s origin and motivation are met with cynicism, while the legitimacy of Kaepernick’s protest is taken for granted.
Now, it is perfectly legitimate to apply a critical lens to these issues. Deconstruction has its place. Assumptions should be questioned. Narratives, sources, and evidence should be examined carefully. In fact, as a historian, that is, in some sense, Putz’s primary job. But what is good for one is good for the other. If Tebow’s kneeling can be explained away as the product of right-wing “infrastructure,” then Kaepernick’s kneeling can be explained away as the product of left-wing “agitation” or grievance politics. If Kaepernick’s concern for the problem of “police brutality” is taken uncritically, then Tebow’s “opposition to abortion” should be as well, rather than qualified as “conservative” (204). Too often, such critical fairness is lacking in the text.
Despite these limitations, Putz has illuminated our understanding of the origin and growth of Protestant sport ministries in the United States. Spanning from the 1920s through the 1990s, Putz documents the delicate balance attempted by Protestant sports ministers between affirming “traditional” values and accommodating “modern” concerns. The examination of the birth and growth of the FCA is a particular strength of the text. Though not without problems, The Spirit of the Game is an important addition to the literature, which deepens scholarly understanding of the place of Protestant Christianity in the history of American sports.
Footnotes
- Christian Smith with Melina Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press, 2005).
- See Gilbert Meilaender, “March Madness? Just Say No,” First Things 261 (March 2016): 20–21.
- See Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (Encounter Books, 2016).
- Nancy L. Struna, People of Prowess: Sport, Leisure, and Labor in Early Anglo-America (University of Illinois Press, 1996).
- Gregg Twietmeyer and Tyler Johnson, “The Meritocracy Trap and Kinesiology,” Kinesiology Review 12 (2022): 109–119.
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