The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports
The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports
Assistant Director, Truett Seminary's Faith & Sports Institute
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Abstract
The Spirit of the Game offers a cultural and intellectual history of the Christian athlete movement in the United States, an effort led by American Protestants over the course of the twentieth century to carve out a home within big-time sports. Bridging scholarship on sport history and religious history, it uses sports as a lens for understanding transformations and overlapping communities in American Protestantism, including mainline, evangelical, Southern Baptist, and Black Protestant institutions and leaders. The book begins in the 1920s and traces the story until the twenty-first century. It focuses especially on the formation and development of three major sports ministries—the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Athletes in Action, and Pro Athletes Outreach—showing how those organizations established a lasting religious subculture within the sports industry. It also highlights the ways that conflict over issues like race, pluralism, gender, sexuality, theology, and politics honed the identity of the movement. Ultimately, the book argues that the leaders of the Christian athlete movement came to see sports as a form a middlebrow culture, a place for shaping future generations in a way that protected “traditional” American values while also allowing room for gradual change. In so doing, they turned commercialized athletics from what seemed in the 1920s like a potential rival for cultural authority into a means through which Protestants could maintain influence in a supposedly more secular American society.
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Front Matter
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Introduction: Two National Religions
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1
The Terrific Urge to Win
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2
Unless the Playing Interferes with the Praying
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3
Christian Democracy Is Being Tackled for a Loss
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4
To Be an Athlete Is Different
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5
Scoring Heavily in the South
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6
Call It Sportianity
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7
Doing Sports God’s Way
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8
Jesse Jackson Has Reason to Be Concerned
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Epilogue
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End Matter
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