The Spirit of the Game
American Christianity and Big-Time Sports
Paul Emory Putz, who directs Baylor University’s Faith and Sports Institute, has spoken of his appreciation for the faith-forming, character-building influence the Fellowship of Christian Athletes had on his life when he played high school basketball in Nebraska. In The Spirit of the Game, Putz magnifies that personal appreciation into a wide-ranging historical study aimed at showing the evolution of the Christian athlete movement in America through the 20th century and into the present day.
An ancestor of muscular Christianity in America, the Young Men’s Christian Association began in London in 1844, rooted in the conviction that vigorous physical recreation and competitive sports were as vital to the development of Christian men as spiritual and intellectual training. In 1889, Luther Gulick, a director at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, wrote that “by means of the physical, men are brought under the influence of the spiritual . . . and it is the spiritual that teaches men that their bodies are sacred to noble ends.” Two years later, one of Gulick’s graduate students, James Naismith, designed a game he called “basket ball” as a Christian recreation.
After World War I, college football and professional baseball spread across the American cultural landscape, supported by increasing attention from developing media: newspapers, magazines, newsreels, and radio. Amos Alonzo Stagg, a University of Chicago football coach, and Branch Rickey, a Major League Baseball player and team executive, planted seeds of what would become a cultural garden of Christian morality and virtue within the expansive fields of American sports. Stagg, a Yale college football player who was Naismith’s classmate at the YMCA training school and later became a coach and cultural influencer, translated the muscular Christian movement of 19th-century England to American college playing fields. As part of his Christian practice, Rickey refused to play or coach baseball games on Sunday.
