19/12/2024

Sport and the Church - 3

Throughout history, every generation  has had to face its threats. In the 19th century, The Industrial Revolution, like nowadays global warming, was seen as a threat to health. Thus, throughout Europe and the USA wise - including Christian - minds looked for ways to improve physical health. Exercises and sport as well as going to the seaside to get clean air and a swim  - called by some as ‘vitalism’ - came into 19th  century lives. 

Athleticism took centre stage in Victorian public schools. Organised games were introduced in part to counteract the effect of less wholesome leisure activities of public schoolboys such as stone throwing , poaching, bird nesting and at Marlborough, beating frogs to death. But also, against a general background of vandalism and indiscipline, it was a potent means of social control, character forming and improving physical fitness.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a movement called Muscular Christianity, characterized by a belief in patriotic duty, discipline, self-sacrifice,  masculinity, and the moral and physical beauty of athleticism, was born in England. This movement aimed at helping Christians pay more attention to their bodies and give more value to the physical world. It seems to have been a “necessary correction” as Protestant Christians began rejecting a dualistic theology that pitted the physical (bad) and spiritual (good) against one another. Of course, it was not without its flaws. Muscular Christianity’s early critics, joked that it “redefined a saint as one who can walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours.”

In schools, it is most often associated with English author Thomas Hughes (1822-96) and his 1857 novel Tom Brown's School Days, as well as writers Charles Kingsley (1819-75)and Ralph Connor (1860-1937). American President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1910) was raised in a household that practised Muscular Christianity and was a prominent adherent to the movement.

Some say that Muscular Christianity can be traced back to Paul the Apostle, who used athletic metaphors to describe the challenges of a Christian life. However, the explicit advocacy of sport and exercise in Christianity did not appear until 1762, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau's(1712-78) Emile described physical education as important for the formation of moral character.

With little recreational time – exhausted workers on long hours (the 8-hour day, only six days a week was still a dream) – meant that it was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that sport gradually moved out of the wings into the floodlit stage. 

But society was changing. Bank Holidays appeared in 1871. Trade Union muscle developed. Nutrition in cities improved. Leisure-time seeped down into an increasing number of lives. 

When Baron de Coubertin came up with his 1894 idea of’ Olympic Games’ not all the clergy were convinced. The idea - citius, altius, fortius: faster, higher, stronger - smacked on pre-Christian paganism; even though these came from the Dominican  Henri Louis Rémy Didon, OP (1840 – 1900), a writer,educator, and a promoter of youth sports.

In the USA, many Protestant Christians in the 18th and early 19th centuries saw sport as a dangerous leisure activity likely to distract Christians from church and tempt them with vices like gambling, alcohol, womanizing, and violence. Many states passed laws banning the playing of sports on Sundays, demonstrating the idea that sport contradicted and perhaps undermined Christian priorities. So, what changed? How did the United States move from its  stance of seeing religion and sport as contradictory to a stance of seeing religion and sport as compatible, perhaps even mutually beneficial?

One answer to this question is the migration of Muscular Christianity to the USA. 

In the USA, the Industrial Revolution is bracketed by the end of the Civil War (1865) and the end of WWI (1919). It’s the period of the industrial revolution. The ushering in of the industrial revolution shortened the work week, brought people into closer proximity, and lessened the demands of physical labour.  Optimism burgeoned. Everything would be made quicker, better, cheaper. 

All of those factors gave Christians more time and more energy that needed to be expended. People had time on their hands and money to spend. In the history of sport, the industrial revolution is a significant inflection point. It paved the way for sport to become more than play or military training, or even resting of the mind. It became a structured and organized business.

There, in the USA, many Jews and Catholics embraced sports in order to demonstrate  - to the dominant Protestant establishment - that they were capable of becoming fully American. 

For example, Jews developed institutions such as the Young Men’s Hebrew Association modelled on muscular Christianity’s YMCA. Through these activities, American Jews sought to negotiate between preserving their values of intellectualism and community while concurrently engaging in the embodied and often individualistic project of sports. 

However, Anti-Semitism got boosted by the Black Sox Scandal of 1919,a Major League Baseball game-fixing scandal in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of throwing the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for money from a gambling syndicate led by Arnold Rothstein (1882-1928). 

Prominent Americans like Henry Ford (1863-1947) blamed the Jewish gamblers who organized the thrown World Series more than the players who participated in it. Ford – a friend of Adolf Hitler! - publicly argued that Jews were ruining America by undermining America’s pastime of baseball. 

YMCA, originally called the’Young Men's Christian Association’,  founded on 6 June 1844 by George Williams (1821-1905) in London, aimed to put Christian values into practice by developing a healthy "body, mind, and spirit". Williams, a worker in the drapery trade in London, concerned about the welfare of his fellow workers, started a prayer and bible study group which evolved into the YMCA.

In the USA, Dr.Luther Gulick (1865-1918), an early leader of the YMCA, believed the gym could be a place of spiritual formation. Eager to learn under Gulick’s tutelage, James Naismith, a Canadian-American (1861-1939) moved to Springfield, IL in 1890 and joined Gulick at the YMCA. Gulick asked Naismith to create a new game that would be void of the violence and roughness that existed in most games at the time. In 1891, Naismith came up with the sport of basketball.

The poet Juvenal, born 55CE, wrote Mens sana in corpore sano. However, it was applied to sport for the first time by John Hulley (1832-75) as a motto for his ‘Liverpool Athletics Club’ in 1861.

Following the adoption of the Sheffield rules and formation of The Football Association in England, a number of churches founded football clubs. Everton Football Club was founded in 1879 at St. Domingo's Methodist Church.  Rev Ben Swift Chambers (1845-1901) was an advocate of Muscular Christianity, encouraging healthy minds and healthy bodies. Their Goodison Park ground has a church partially within the perimeter and as such do not play early matches on Sunday to avoid clashing with the services of the church.

In the same year, Fulham St Andrew's Church Sunday School F.C. - to later become Fulham F.C. - was founded by members of the nearby Church of England church for members of the Sunday school with the same focus as Everton of advocating Muscular Christianity.

In November 1880, St. Mark's Anglican Church in West Gorton, inspired by the same ideology and to win young men back to the church, set up a football team which later became Manchester City F.C. 

St. Mary's Church, Southampton set up a team in 1885, which later became Southampton Football Club. 

On 6 November 1887, the Celtic Football Club was founded at the Catholic St. Mary's Church Hall in Calton as a way to fight poverty in East Glasgow. Their Glasgow neighbours Rangers F.C. later became associated with the Protestant section of Glasgow which led to the Old Firm rivalry, which has been the centre of several sectarian incidents between Scotland's Protestants and Catholics.

London-based Arsenal F.C. moved to Arsenal Stadium in 1913 on ground leased from St John's College of Divinity. The lease conditions stated that there would be no matches played on holy days and no "intoxicating liqueur" would be sold at the stadium. However, these stipulations were dropped after Arsenal bought the ground outright in 1925.

In Northern Ireland, Christianity plays a strong part of life in football. Until 2008, due to Sabbatarianism of the Protestant majority and also due to the Sunday Observance Act 1695 playing football was banned on Sunday, including the Northern Ireland national football team. 

The Belfast club, Linfield F.C., even now maintains its ban on playing on Sundays.

The ongoing question of whether or not sports should be played on Sunday continues to be a significant theological priority that did not come closer to a resolution. The nuanced discussion around the Sunday Sabbath included theology, geographic location, race, and class. World War I was even a significant factor in the Sabbath discussion because “compared to the dangers of war, Sunday sport seemed innocuous” .

In case you wondered, when Cambridge United met Oldham Athletic at the Abbey Stadium in the FA Cup on  6th January 1974,we saw the first-ever professional football match played on a Sunday.

As a seminarian he had taken part in sports and later – as the archbishop of Venice – he used to donate prizes to the champions of the gondoliers’ regattas.

Elected Pope in 1903, Pius X(1835-1914) soon invited members of the Roman Gymnastic Society to perform in his presence in the Vatican gardens; stating that exercising one’s body helped a person to develop desirable virtues - and to adhere to the faith. 

Though Pope St Pius X was the first pontiff to focus his speeches and writings on sport, the idea of sports as a way to keep people of all ages linked to the Church and away from trouble long predates St. Pius X. When St Philip Neri (1515-95) first came to Rome from Florence, he found it to be ‘a city full of crime and danger.’ One of the ways in which he hoped to evangelize the city of  Rome was by reaching out to young adults through games and sports.

Pope St Pius X’s attitude towards sports stems from his years as a parish priest – a rarity in papal CVs. He used to organize games of bocce - a game similar to lawn bowling but played on a long narrow usually dirt court - in the courtyard of his parish for men who had attended Sunday Mass. He knew that the men would otherwise go to the local bar, drink and play cards,  while if he presented them with an alternative, they would remain outdoors, doing  something healthy, and be home – and sober – for Sunday lunch.

In February of 1905 Pope St. Pius X  met with Baron Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937), the father of modern Olympics, who wanted the support of the Catholic Church for Rome’s 1908 Olympic Games. ( These, due to the financial problems generated in 1908 by Mount Etna eruption and earthquake, were transferred to London.) There are no records of this meeting in the Vatican archives,  yet there is correspondence between Coubertin and Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val (1865-1930),  and the baron had made an annotation in his dairy marking that “he’d met with the pontiff”.

As a result, in 1905 the Vatican hosted  a major international gymnastics event during which the pope gave a speech that is considered to be ‘the first Vatican manifesto on sport’ “I admire and bless from my heart all your games and pastimes, gymnastics, cycling, mountaineering, boating, running, walks, competitions, contests and academies, to which you devote yourselves. Because the material exercises of  the body will admirably influence the exercises of the spirit; because these entertainments, while requiring work, will remove you from idleness, which is the father  of vices; and because finally the same friendly competitions will be in you as  an image of  emulation in the exercise of virtue.”

Pope St Pius X  made it clear that “Sport is not only a form of entertainment, but also - and above all I would say - a tool to communicate values that promote the good that is in humans and help build a more peaceful and fraternal society.”

North of The Alps, Orel ("eagle" in Czech), a Moravia-based Czech youth movement and gymnastics organization  emerged in 1896–1909 as the Catholic Church-supported competitor of an earlier Czech sport movement Sokol (‘Hawk’ or ‘Falcon’ founded 1862), which had  turned more nationalistic and rather anti-Catholic. The Orel movement, defining itself as "Christian sport organization", still exists and currently has about 19,000 members. Since 1921, it is a member of  FICEP (Fédération Internationale Catholique d'Education Physique et sportive).

A similar organization with the same name appeared in Slovenia and Croatia, where it successfully competed with the local Sokol movement. However, it was dissolved in the early 1930s by the government of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

FISEC (Fédération Internationale Sportive de l'Enseignement Catholique) was born in 1948, in Brussels, with membership of the United Kingdom, Belgium and France.  The Netherlands and  Switzerland joined in 1948,  Spain in 1952. It was born from the desire of its promotors to draw the attention of the public opinion to the growing importance of physical activity and sport and to encourage the decision makers in education - especially in Catholic education - to give these activities ample scope in the education of young people across the PIES – the physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual components of their lives. 

Ever since 1972, the collaboration between the organizers of the female and male Games became closer and resulted in the establishment of mixed Games in 1980. 

The Cold War’s influence over this era is significant. With the rise of the Soviet Union, there was a heightened desire to prioritize a Christian American identity. As youth sports took off, coaching opportunities sprung up, and sports were adopted to generate an American way of life. As Americans leveraged faith and sport as an antidote to "godless Communism," we began to see  mass evangelism through sports take root.

One of the key figures leading this evangelistic charge was Billy Graham (1918-2018) who quickly caught on to the benefits of using the testimonies of sports figures to call attention to the gospel. Athletes were a marketing tool, selling the product of Jesus to the masses. Following the lead of Billy Graham, sports ministries began to emerge during this era through pioneers like Don McClanen, and his “Fellowship of Christian Athletes”(FCA) in 1954 and David Hannah, with his “Athletes In Action”(AIA) in 1966. It is the sports ministry ofCruMinistries, formerly known as Campus Crusade for Christ. It is dedicated to spreading “the message of Jesus Christ to the sports world and to contribute to the further excellence of athletic competition.”

Thanks to St Pius X and the USA evangelicals, sport and spirituality became firm friends; a friendship that would blossom under popes St John Paul II (1920-2005) and our current pontiff, Francis (born 1936).

The revolt of the black athlete is probably more ideological than theological, but it’s a hinge moment in this conversation on race and sport as well. This revolt was based on the belief that black involvement in sports was not enough. There was more that needed to be done. And this helped lead to the second wave of the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King Jr.(1929-68) and Malcolm X(1925-65) – both assassinated! - were key influential figures in the movement. The rise of sport ministries, led by white protestants and funded largely by white protestants, were slow to assimilate, not wanting to “rock the boat” with their support base through involvement in racial activism - even if it was non-violent.

In many ways, the life of Jackie Robinson personified the cultural story of faith, race, and sports for Christian black athletes during this era. Like many before him, he saw involvement in sports as the win and believed in being humble and turning the other cheek. By the time of the black athlete revolt, Jackie Robinson (1919-72), though no longer playing baseball, believed in nonviolent activism (like MLK), not merely playing, was the correct posture for black Christian athletes.