The Spirit of the Game
American Christianity and Big-Time Sports
By Paul Putz
Oxford University Press, 280 pages, $29.99
Christian athletes’ post-game testimonies have become so commonplace as to border on the banal. “I just want to give God the glory.” “I must first thank my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.” Or in the mantra of Riley Leonard, an evangelical Christian quarterback who recently led Notre Dame to the national championship game, “Jesus Blessed!” What Paul Putz achieves in The Spirit of the Game is narrating the history behind this prominent Christian athlete subculture that cuts against the secular grain of so much of modern American pop culture.
Picking up the story after World War I, Putz narrates the reconciliation of Protestant Christianity with men’s collegiate and professional baseball, football, and basketball. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, what Putz calls “middlebrow” Protestant leaders adopted an “optimistic, big-tent” approach to Christianity and sports. After the fierce conflicts of the Muscular Christian era (1880-1915), when many Christian leaders publicly opposed sports’ professionalization, commercialization, and undermining of the Sunday sabbath, the middlebrow advocates made peace with big-time sport. Furthermore, prominent figures like baseball executive Branch Rickey and football coach Alonzo Amos Stagg looked to bring Christian influence into sports-based institutions rather than simply bring sportsmen to church.
Early Christian athlete ministries adopted a therapeutic approach designed to serve the spiritual needs of Christian athletes. Well-versed in modern currents of Protestant theology, Putz notes the influence of Keswick spirituality with its call for dedicated Christians who would “surrender their lives to Christ.” In keeping with the public theology of mainline Protestantism, groups like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) also looked to “fight for the soul of America,” whether in the anti-communist 1950s or within the resurgent Southern Christian conservativism of the 1970s and 1980s.
Putz should also be credited for highlighting the centrality of race throughout the modern history of Christian sports fellowships. Rickey is most famous for recruiting Jackie Robinson to integrate Major League Baseball in 1947 (Robinson’s deep Christian convictions were sometimes forgotten). In this sense, Rickey represented an interracial current that ran deep within the “inclusive religious nationalism” of groups like the FCA.
At the same time, Putz notes how white Christian leaders remained far more comfortable with color-blind “booster/builders” than race-conscious “wreckers”; Black athletes had a place at the table so long as they didn’t start speaking out on structural racial injustices within sports or American society. Such strains resurfaced in the 1990s when Black NFL star and Christian pastor Reggie White drew ire for speaking out on police brutality. And as Putz notes in the epilogue, this tension remains the subtext for the very different evangelical reactions to the “kneeling” football rituals of Tim Tebow and Colin Kaepernick.
The subtitle of the book, American Christianity and Big-Time Sports, implies a large-tent approach to the religion. In actuality, “American Christianity” refers to mainline Protestants and evangelicals. Putz admits his de-emphasis of Roman Catholics. As one who has written extensively on this very tradition, however, I think this was a missed opportunity. Namely, how exactly did the FCA, Athletes in Action, or Baseball Chapel engage Catholics? It’s impressive that the FCA invited a Catholic chaplain, Fr. Donald Cleary, to join in the 1950s, and Catholics like Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach were prominent FCA advocates in the 1970s. This story of Protestant-Catholic cooperation (and tension) within FCA and other Christian athlete ministries deserves much more attention than it receives here. Such analysis might even help explain why Riley Leonard feels so at home at Notre Dame.
Whatever this lacuna, however, The Spirit of the Game is a gem of a book — eloquently written, analytically balanced, and meticulously sourced. If you are looking for one book to explain the remarkable growth of the Christian “Sportianity” subculture, this is it.
J.J. (Jay) Carney is professor of theology and African studies and directs the Christian Spirituality Program at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.
