From The Church Impotent – The Feminization of Christianity by Leon J. Podles, pages 168-170.

THE PLAYING FIELDS

Agonistic masculine play was the origin of civilization. In the modern world, sports are the emotional center of countless men. Sports are a traditional means to attain masculinity. The athlete is the one who faces and overcomes challenges and thereby escapes human limitations. The Greeks honored the transfiguration of the athlete: Pindar's odes celebrated the divinity that clothed the victor in the games. In modern America, the coach is the mentor who brings boys into manhood. He teaches them to endure pain, develop self-discipline, work as a team, and give themselves to others, and often (a sure sign of his initiatory role) instructs them in the mysteries of sexuality. Why athletic coaches (rather than, say, biology teachers) should be thought the appropriate teacher for sex education is a mystery from a pedagogical perspective, but entirely comprehensible if sports is the primary way a boy becomes a man.

Because sports provide an initiation into masculinity, they can easily become a religion. Sports are often the way the boy puts away the soft, sheltering world of the mother and her femininity and enters the world of challenge and danger that makes him a man. Sports helped men be transformed and reborn: "In its pretense toward regenerative functions, it approximated a religious sensibility for men, albeit material and secular." Team sports develop masculinity; they are "the civilized substitute for war" and sublimate male aggression into channels less harmful than crime. They develop the virtue of comradeship, and teammates in sports like football become "blood brothers, men who assemble together to undertake dangerous exploits under conditions of duress and threat." Michael Messner quotes a former high school athlete: "I'd say that most of my meaningful relationships have started through sports and have been maintained through sports. There's nothing so strong, to form that bond, as sports. Just like in war too - there are no closer friends than guys who are in the same foxhole together trying to stay alive. You know, hardship breeds friendship, breeds intense familiarity. . . . You have to endure something together, sweat together, bleed together, cry together. Sports provide that."

Masculinity as Religion

Sports form character, "manly straightforward character, a scorn of lying and meanness, habits of obedience and command, and fear less courage." For modern men, team sports are more transforming than religion because they provide a greater escape from the self. Paul Jones, a Dulwich boy who was killed in World War I, claimed that in the attempts to develop team spirit, "Religion has failed, intellect has failed, art has failed, science has failed. It is clear why: because each of these has laid emphasis on man's selfish side; the saving of his own soul, the cultivation of his own mind, the pleasing of his own senses. But your sportman joins the Colours because in his games he has felt the real spirit of unselfishness, and has become accustomed to give all for a body to whose service he is sworn."

Sports on this view are a better school of charity than religion, for the ultimate test of charity is the willingness to die in war. Not only were wars won, but souls were saved on the playing fields of England.

A player who is "in form" has had a form descend on him as if from above; he is in "a state of grace. It is as if some transcendental power had given the player his blessing." Although most players and spectators would not seriously call sports a religion, it nevertheless functions as one for them. It is "a secular means for tapping transcendental sources and powers, or restoring some fleeting contact with the sacred, or testing whether the gods are on your side or not." Michael Novak regards sports as a natural religion. Charles Prebish also thinks "sport is religion for growing numbers of Americans." Religion enables man to transcend the secular, ordinary word; sports are the main way that many men attain this transcendence, whether directly as an athlete or vicariously as a spectator. In both cases, "the individual goes beyond his or her own ego bonds." As Howard Slusher says, "Within the movements of the athlete a wonderful mystery of life is present, a mystical experience that is too close to the religious to call it anything else." The dancer becomes the dance, and the athlete becomes the sport. He is transfigured; he may have a peak experience and the form may shine through him to the spectator, who sees the glory of transfigured being. Novak writes from his own experience of sport: "Athletic achievement, like the achievements of the heroes and gods of Greece, is the momentary attainment of perfect form-as though there were, hidden away from mortal eyes, a perfect way to execute a play, and suddenly a player or team has found it and sneaked a demonstration down to earth. A great play is a revelation. The curtains of ordinary life part, and perfection flashes for an instant before the eye. "

A strong agonistic element dominates all types of sports. The agon or struggle may be with another team or another individual or it may be with nature and the limitations of the athlete's own body. This contest distinguishes sports from art and perhaps explains why men tend to regard art as trivial and unworthy of masculine attention, even though ballet may be more physically demanding than even baseball or gymnastics. Pain is an inescapable part of sports and distinguishes it from the mere game (which art seems to be for most men). For the athlete, "true fulfillment arises in the confrontation and overcoming of self, not in fantasy but through pain and agony and the realization of life at a far greater and deeper level. "

The mountain climber Maurice Herzog claimed that "in overstepping our limitations, in touching the extreme boundaries of man's world, we have come to know something of its true splendor. In my worst moments of anguish, I seemed to discover the deep significance of existence which till then I had been unaware." Sports functions as the religion of many men in Western culture because it reveals the meaning of life.

This is not the same as Sportianity, as some deride the combination of sports and evangelical Protestantism in movements like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Billy Sunday, baseball player turned evangelist, had no doubts about the nature of his religion: it was Christianity (in a muscular, aggressive form) and not baseball. For Christian athletes, sports are but a means to evangelize for their true religion, Christianity. Sports can, like any human activity, be consecrated to God, although the competitive nature of sports creates some problems for Christian athletes. Yet Pope John Paul II, a dedicated sportsman, thinks that competition itself can be a good.