The Word Was Made Flesh: the Male Body in Sports Evangelism

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THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH: THE MALE BODY IN SPORTS EVANGELISM

A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

by Scott D. Strednak Singer December 2016

Examining Committee Members:

Dr. Rebecca Alpert, Advisory Chair, Department of Religion Dr. Laura Levitt, Department of Religion Dr. Terry Rey, Department of Religion Dr. David Harrington Watt, Department of History Dr. Michael Sachs, External Member, Department of Kinesiology

Scott Donald Strednak Singer

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ABSTRACT

This dissertation explores the functions of athletic male bodies within sports evangelism. I argue that the production of the male body within sports evangelism – both physical and symbolic - plays an integral part in the mission of Christian athletes by using the body as a medium for conveying religious messages about masculinity to young men. I focus upon sports evangelism as both entertainment spectacle and as a performance of masculinity, the commercialization of evangelism in the contemporary United States, legitimated violence as religious expression, and the paradoxical relationship between bodily improvement and bodily harm within sports. I begin with a review of the sports and religion literature, identifying common themes and shortcomings, with particular regard to how Christian athletes supplement their oral ministrations with physical action. Following this, I offer a very broad survey the role of sports as socializing institutions within Western Christian history, culminating in the 20th century transition from an athletic culture driven primarily by participation to one primarily driven by consumption and spectatorship. The remaining chapters are case studies of how sports ministries and evangelical athletes have championed particular political positions from the 1980s to the present. I conclude by discussing the limits of these performances of masculinity, highlighting how masculinist fantasies of power and Christian identity in sports evangelism support conservative Christian political practices and ideologies, inscribed on the bodies of participants.

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To Katie, with whom I’ve found my home, and in whom I’ve met my match.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Projects of this length are, inevitably, the product of many caring people. Those who helped this work come into being remind me that the generosity of family, friends, colleagues, and strangers is the fundamental building block of any successes in my professional world. If God is found in other people, then the spark of divinity burns a little brighter in these souls.

I cannot adequately state my gratitude for the tireless efforts of Rebecca Alpert, whose candid guidance and support as my doctoral advisor has been of incalculable value. Thank you for encouraging me to explore this topic and for helping to professionalize the religion and sports subfield. I am also endebted to Laura Levitt, Terry

Rey, and David Harrington Watt for their work as my examiners and as members of my dissertation committee. Though he may not know it, Terry’s being barefoot in his office the day we met helped solidify my decision to come to Temple. For all of her brilliant wisdom, career advice, and writing help, Laura also provided some much needed personal guidance. David was gracious enough to serve as an examiner and to join my dissertation committee when he had no obligation to do so. And thank you to Dr. Michael

Sachs for agreeing to be an outside reader. Thanks to you all for your challenges and encouragements along the way.

The religion and sports research community has been supportive of this work over the years. The members of the AAR Religion, Sport and Play group deserve special recognition, not least of which because they heard most of the body chapters in draft form and offered constructive feedback and questions. I’ve looked forward to seeing Annie

v Blazer, Art Remillard, and Eric Bain-Selbo every November since the group began. Eric also provided me the chance to present some of these ideas to the religious studies senior seminar at Western Kentucky University in my hometown of Bowling Green, KY. Even though we haven’t met in person, Adam Park’s work on Christian mixed martial arts, and the dozens of emails we’ve sent back and forth over the past three years, have helped me structure my own thoughts on the subject. I’d also like to thank Nancy Heisey and

Provost Fred Kniss at Eastern Mennonite University for inviting me to present these findings as part of EMU’s colloquium series. Lastly, this work would never have happened without W. David Hall’s “Basketball as Religion” class at Centre College.

I am extraordinarily blessed with good friends and family. My graduate study program would not have been possible were it not for my parents’ generous giving of time, resources, and love. My colleagues and friends at Temple University contributed many good ideas and conversations that made thinking through this work more pleasant, especially Jesse Brenner, Kin Cheung, Amy Defibaugh, Ed Godfrey, Holly Gorman,

Mohamed Hassan, Yarekh Hernandez, Brett Krutzsch, Beth and Kime Lawson, Vincent and Amy Moulton, and Adam Valerio. I’d also like to say thank you for the love you all showed while I recovered from surgery. To Vinnie and Amy, thank you for letting me stay with you while I took my exams. And to Linda Jenkins, thank you for all that you’ve done for me, for the other students, and for the faculty of the department.

I am very grateful for Marilyn Mattingly at the Interlibrary Loan Office of Warren

County Public Library in Bowling Green, KY, the staff of Helm-Cravens Library at

WKU, and the staff of Samuel Paley Library at Temple University for their help in tracking down obscure titles. I’d also like to say a special thank you to the congregation

vi of Franklin Presbyterian Church, the students and staff of the Simpson County Literacy

Center, and the students and staff of Southcentral Kentucky Community and Technical

College for their support over the years.

Every day, my gratitude begins and ends with Katie Strednak Singer, without whose love and support I would be lost. I’m looking forward to the hours we can spend together now that this is over. Thank you for loving me through it anyway, even though sports will always be whateverball to you.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ABSTRACT...... iii

DEDICATION...... iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... v

CHAPTERS

1. SKIN IN THE GAME ...... 1

Review of Relevant Literature...... 7

Sport and Religious Identity ...... 9

Sport and Christianity ...... 13

Sports Evangelism and the Body ...... 20

Christian Ethics and Sports Evangelism...... 24

Contribution to the Field...... 32

2. PROSCRIPTIONS AND PROHIBITIONS: THE MALE BODY IN

CHRISTIAN SPORTS DISCOURSE ...... 38

Pagan Sporting Culture and Early Christianity...... 40

The Ambiguity of the Body and the Dangers of Sport Spectacles………………...45

Selective Adoption of Sport and Games in the Middle Ages ...... 52

The Protestant Male Body in Leisure and Labor...... 59

Manliness and Social Reform in the Muscular Christian Movement...... 65

The Muscular Christian Male Body in America...... 68

Sports Evangelism in the Age of Mass Culture...... 80

viii Sport and Conservative Christian Anxiety in the mid-20th Century...... 92

Transition to Case Studies ...... 96

3. FROM MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY TO HARD BODY CHRISTIANITY:

MORAL MUSCLE DURING THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION ...... 99

The Age of the Spectacular...... 103

Masculinity in the Action Cinema and Youth Programming ...... 105

Desiring Real Men ...... 113

Bodybuilding Jesus...... 115

Sanctifying Destruction and Individual Determination ...... 118

Hard Bodies and Sex Appeal ...... 122

The Twilight of Hard Body Christianity...... 126

4. SEXY ABSTINENCE: SPORTS EVANGELISM AND SEXUAL ETHICS

IN THE NEW MILLENIUM ...... 134

Evangelicals, Sexual Ethics, and the Campaign for Abstinence ...... 136

A.C. Green, Rap Music, and Abstinence Committed Bears...... 140

Selling a Sexually Active Virginity ...... 146

Lolo Jones, Evangelical Cover Girl...... 149

Tim Tebow, Evangelical Underwear Model...... 161

Jones, Tebow, and Gender Expectations ...... 173

Abstinence and the Unmarried Evangelical Athlete...... 175

5. VIOLENT MEN OF GOD: CHRISTIAN WARRIORS AND MIXED

MARTIAL ARTS MINISTRIES...... 178

Androcentric Entertainment and the Men Missing from the Pews...... 181

ix The Growth of Christian Martial Arts Ministries ...... 186

Christian Warriors in Post 9/11 America...... 190

MMA Jesus...... 197

Teaching Evangelical Masculinity in MMA ...... 199

Stylizations of the Body – MMA Aesthetics...... 202

The Body as Weapon...... 207

The Sacrifice of the Athletic Male Body ...... 210

The Psychosocial Function of Christian MMA ...... 213

6. CONCLUSION...... 217

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 229

x CHAPTER 1 – SKIN IN THE GAME

Rather than counting how often each muscleman prays, goes to church, people they’ve forgiven or amends they’ve made, an emcee for a travelling strength ministry introduces each athlete through a quantification of their height, the circumferences of their biceps and chest, how much they can bench press, and the number of national and international bodybuilding or karate championships they’ve won. Each participant displays the raw power of their physique in school and church assemblies across the country, bending rebar and smashing bricks in the name of God Almighty. Although

Jesus tells his followers in Matthew 11:29 that he is “gentle and lowly in heart,” that his

“yoke is easy” and his “burden is light,” these bodybuilders follow a Christ for whom size matters and prefers heavy lifting.1 A successful weekend of evangelism is not measured in the improved quality of the audience members’ souls, but in the number of souls saved and dollars raised.2

1 I’ve opted to use the New King James translation of scriptures. The various versions of the King James translation are the most popular among America’s Christian population, with a recent survey showing that over 55% of respondents claimed the KJV/NKJV as their preferred translation. Phillip Goff, Arthur E. Farnsley II, Peter J. Thuesen, “The Bible in American Life,” Indianapolis: Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis, March 6th, 2014. Accessed June 18th, 2016: http://www.raac.iupui.edu/files/2713/9413/8354/Bible_in_American_Life_Report_March_6_2014.pdf

2 No single definition of evangelical, evangelicalism, or evangelism can adequately convey the diversity application of such terms within and outside distinct religious communities. While Nazarenes, Baptists, Pentecostals, Ammonites, Missouri Synod Lutherans, fundamentalists, pietists, charismatics, and a host of African-American Protestant communities have been lumped together under the evangelical umbrella, such groups are not in universal agreement on matters of doctrine, denominationalism, the Christian relationship with the state or popular culture, intellectual or political ideologies, social issues, or eschatology. Nor have scholars of evangelicalism agreed upon a definition. While many employ some version of David Bebbington’s fourfold formula of Biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism, and activism, they rarely agree upon the meaning of these terms, just as their subjects of study employ them differently within their own inter- and intra-denominational quarrels. Few would suggest that “evangelical” and “evangelism” meant the same thing for Martin Luther when he described his reform movement as the “evangelishe kirche” as they did in the era of the travelling road ministries of George Whitefield and 1 While growing up in an evangelical Christian culture known for its calls to modesty and decorum, athlete evangelists Lori “Lolo” Jones and Ryan Hall bare all for

ESPN: The Magazine’s “Body Issue.” Lori Jones, well known for her commitment to remaining abstinent before marriage as well as her athletic achievements, is prominently featured in the “Bodies We Want” section, highlighting her erotic appeal. Elsewhere, fellow abstinence-committed athlete Tim Tebow shows off his body in underwear advertisements for Jockey International. Despite earning money for showing their skin,

Jones and Tebow are lifted up within the evangelical community as shining examples of principled morality amid a sports culture rife with sexual misconduct.

Back on television, professional mixed martial artists Jon Jones and Vitor Belfort demonstrate their mastery of the art of inducing pain before thousands of screaming fans at the 152nd Ultimate Fighting Championship, all while claiming the faith of the “Prince of Peace.” With their finely honed, mostly naked bodies glistening from sweat and a liberal application of lubricants, the men do battle with one another on pay-per-view.

Each bears a tattoo of Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Although Belfort had nearly snapped Jones’s right arm, Jones ignores the painful cries of his own body, fighting through the pain and emerging victorious.

Jonathan Edwards. Nor did they have the same meaning for the Billy Graham’s neo-evangelicals, who intentionally described themselves as such to distances themselves from their fundamentalist forefathers, and against whom later neo-conservative fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell would define themselves. Evangelicalism is, as Christian Smith argued, a heterogeneous sect of Christianity whose history is marked by as much “mutual antagonism and distance” as “cooperation and solidarity.” Consequently, defining who counts as an “evangelical” is also a project marked by frequent contradiction, one complicated by a multinational history of groups divided by racial, ethnic, linguistic, creedal, denominational, and political distinctions. I try to highlight these differences throughout this work, while also acknowledging the overarching emphasis sports ministries place upon “evangelical” ideals like biblicentricism, the development of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and witnessing to the world (or in this case, being witnessed). David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s-1980s (London, UK: Unwin Hyman Ltd.: 1989); Christian Smith, Christian America?: What Evangelicals Really Want (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 14. 2 After the fight is over, the combatants embrace one another, raise their arms to the sky, and collectively give the glory to Jesus.

It is easy to see how these displays might seem paradoxical, even hypocritical, to a casual observer. There is no end to the number of newspaper and scholarly articles, blogs, and social media posts fixated on these contradictions. How can a person claim to be a follower of the lowly itinerant teacher who charged his followers to love one another and turn the other cheek, and, at the same time, willfully knee another person in the face?

How can two young Southern Baptists, raised in the heyday of evangelical abstinence campaigns, brand themselves as paragons of sexual restraint while simultaneously taking money to pose in the buff? Where do Christian bodybuilders get the idea that a theatrical display of their brute strength is the best means through which to spread the faith of a

Christ who rebuked his followers for demanding “signs and wonders” of his power (John

4:48)? How do such athlete evangelists reconcile a sports evangelism culture fixated upon bodily perfection – physical, aesthetic, erotic – with a faith grounded in the broken, tattered, and abused body of Jesus? How do Christian athletes use their temporal and fleeting bodies as a vessel through which they can promote a faith presented as eternal and immutable? Why are these displays of virility and violence permitted, or even encouraged, within contemporary American evangelical culture?

This research project attempts to make sense of these paradoxes in sports evangelism. The pages that follow explore how and why such displays of athletes’ bodies make sense within the historical contexts and political anxieties of American evangelicalism. Through close readings of images of male Christian athletes’ bodies on display (in pamphlets and advertisements, on televisions, billboards, in newspapers, in

3 stage performances, in magazines, and online) and close readings of supporting textual materials (secular and religious newspapers, sermons, sports evangelism promotional literature, social media comments, evangelical parental advice books, sex education curriculums, biographies of evangelical athletes ghost-written by evangelical authors and produced by evangelical publishing houses) I offer three case studies of evangelical athletes using their bodies in service to their faith. I argue that the production of the male body within sports evangelism – both physical and symbolic – plays an integral part in the mission of Christian athletes by using the body as a medium for conveying religious messages about masculinity to young men. I focus upon sports evangelism as both entertainment spectacle and as a performance of masculinity. I also attended to the commercialization of evangelism in the contemporary United States, legitimated violence as religious expression, and the paradoxical relationship between bodily improvement and bodily harm within sports. Although each chapter considers a different aspect of the male body in sports evangelism, each examines the production of such bodies – through rigorous physical training, asceticism, pharmacological enhancement, and theatricality – and investigates how such displays respond to particular political anxieties related to issues of gender, national security, and national identity.

Chapter Two is very broad survey of the role of sports as socializing institutions within Western Christian history, culminating in the 20th century transition from an athletic culture driven primarily by participation to one driven by consumption and spectatorship. The subsequent chapters are case studies of how sports ministries and athlete evangelists have championed particular political positions from the 1980s to the present. Chapter Three examines The Power Team, a Christian weight-lifting troupe that

4 embodied that power of God (and America) amid Cold War politics and in the fashion of the defining cultural product of the decade – the action film. Chapter Four highlights how

Christian athletes utilized the social and cultural capital of their positions and the sexual capital of their finely sculpted bodies to further evangelical abstinence campaigns in the

1990s and 2000s. In chapter Five, I begin by contextualizing the 21st century rise of

Christian mixed martial arts ministries amid the war on terror and gender anxieties within

American evangelicalism. Then, I discuss how cage fighting offers both a psychological separation from national effeminacy and serves as a crucible through men are physically and mentally inculcated with the type of “warrior” masculinity deemed necessary for the church’s (and the nation’s) survival. I conclude by discussing the limits of these performances of masculinity, highlighting how masculinist fantasies of power and

Christian identity in sports evangelism support conservative Christian political practices and ideologies, inscribed on the bodies of participants.

I believe sports to be a worthy arena of study for religious studies scholars for several reasons. Professional athletics are an area of public life where the boundaries between the sacred and secular disappear and where religious authority can be given to those who have not undergone formal religious training nor affiliated with any particular denomination. As a multi-billion dollar industry built upon the bodily labor of highly publicized athletes, and often at great physical costs to themselves, sports are a part of

American culture which informs many Americans’ value systems, provides a source of mythological narratives, symbols, and rituals that strengthen social cohesion and group

5 formation. As such, research in this area “can help us learn more about widespread perceptions of religion, and the role religion plays in the everyday lives of people.”3

Furthermore, religious sentiment is shaped by a variety of sources, both within and outside formal religious institutions. Professional athletes, musicians, artists, and other celebrities are cultural producers, some of whom claim to have knowledge of divinity and use their social influence to carry out the work they believe they are called to do. These are lay ministers to the world, who have a much broader audience than most of the men and women behind the pulpit on Sunday morning. Their religious work dissolves the sacred/secular dichotomy. Any person in the public sphere making religious claims is also caught up in a struggle for legitimacy – to be perceived by the public as being an authentic source of religious knowledge. This is also true for evangelists operating within the world of sports. Their evangelism, and its reception by the various publics, can tell us much about religious belief in contemporary American life, especially how religious communities have responded, and contributed to, the apparent dissolution of religious legitimacy in contemporary culture.4 It also reveals how American evangelical leadership has justified its critical yet often exploitative relationship with American entertainment. Lastly, sports evangelism challenges the traditional text-book definition of

Christianity as a strictly, or even primarily, orthodoxical faith by emphasizing the radical immanence of embodied religious experience and the centrality of orthopraxy in the faith lives of many athletes.

3 Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey H Mahan, eds. Religion and Popular Culture in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 2.

4 Especially as a more and more Americans are reporting abandoning traditional “religious” institutions of worship in favor of a diffuse, individualized, and nebulously defined “spirituality.” See Gregory Smith and Alan Cooperman, “The factors driving the growth of religious ‘nones’ in the U.S.” Pew Research Center, September 14, 2016. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/14/the-factors- driving-the-growth-of-religious-nones-in-the-u-s/ 6 Review of Relevant Literature

The number of academic works concerning the relationship between religion and sport has increasingly expanded over the past forty years. The next few pages briefly summarize field trends before highlighting the gaps in this literature that my research addresses.

The Relationship Between Religion and Sports

Emerging out of the 1960s research on civil religion in American life, the majority of early scholars examined the formal overlap between professional sports and institutional (high-church) Christian traditions.5 A generation later, another group of researchers, influenced by Talal Asad’s critique of definitional practices but still using definitional categories laid out by Mircea Eliade and Emile Durkheim, began to favor psycho-social approaches to understanding the religious work sports can play in the lives of participants and spectators.6 Concurrently, other scholars who were upset with the

5 For example, in the 1970s, sociologist Harry Edwards and Catholic theologian Michael Novak showed that sports have all of the standard trappings of Christian religious institutions. Sports have their saints (hall of famers), codes of behavior (rule books), patriarchs who determine the orthodox style of play (owners’ boards), enforcers of these codes (referees), shrines (halls of fame), houses of worship (stadia), relics (memorabilia), and devotees (fans). Harry Edwards, Sociology of Sport (Homewood: Dorsey Press, 1973); Michael Novak, The Joy of Sports: End Zones, Bases, Baskets, Balls and the Consecration of the American Spirit (New York: Basic Books, 1976).

6 Charles Prebish, David Chidester, and Joseph Price were among the leading voices of the late 1980s and early 1990s emphasizing the religious ways sports oriented followers in time and space and provided them with a sense of community and belonging. Charles Prebish, “‘Heavenly Father, Divine Goalie’: Sport as Religion,” The Antioch Review, Vol. 42, No. 3 (1984): 306-318; David Chidester, “The Church of Baseball, the Fetish of Coca-Cola, and the Potlatch of Rock ‘n’ Roll: Theoretical Models for the Study of Religion in Popular Culture,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 64, Is. 4 (1996): 743-765; From Season to Season: Sport as American Religion, ed. Joseph Price (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2001). More recently, Eric Bain-Selbo explored the religious significance of college football in the American south by offering a Marxist critique of the ways the sport placates Southerners into accepting the unjust and unequal distribution of capital and political power that perpetuates institutional poverty and racism below the Mason-Dixon. Eric Bain-Selbo, Game Day and God: Football, Faith, and Politics in the American South (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2009).

7 blurring of the boundaries separating sport from religion insisted on the deployment of substantive definitions of religion.7 Rather than watching the advocates for formalist, functionalist, and substantive definitions of religion continue to go at one another round after round, Tara Magdalinski and Timothy Chandler have rightly suggested that “the relationship between cultural institutions requires a nuanced approach [that] explores more than cursory structural comparisons” and “suggest that focussing [sic] merely on whether sport can be considered a religion obscures the complexity of this relationship.”8

Instead they believe the most fruitful research avenues are those that investigate how and why religious communities (especially Christian communities) utilize sports and to what ends.

Recently, researchers have become more attentive to the reality that the definition of sport employed matters just as much as the definition of religion. Historically most research has made assumptions about what qualifies as sport, namely athletic competitions broadcast for consumption by large audiences, be they at the high school,

7 Robert Higgs and Joan Chandler were among the earliest to decry this trend within scholarship. Others, particularly theologians and philosophers, have added their voices to the chorus demanding that scholars not blur the lines between the sacred, or the holy, and the secular. As Higgs put it, “When [sport and play] appear to take on the raiments [sic] of traditional religion, then heresy, we may conclude, is afoot in the land.” While that blurring is part and parcel of religious studies, it is understandable why those who belong to confessional traditions which demand sole allegiance to one faith (like Christianity) would wish to prevent the possible apostasy of being faithful to sport as well. Robert J. Higgs, God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995), 21. See also Robert J. Higgs, Laurel and Thorn: the Athlete in American Literature (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1981); Robert J. Higgs, “Muscular Christianity, Holy Play, and Spiritual Exercises: Confusion about Christ in Sports and Religion,” Arete: The Journal of Sports Literature, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1983): 59-85; Joan Chandler, “Sport is Not a Religion,” in Sport and Religion, ed. Shirl J. Hoffman (Champaign: Human Kinetics, 1992): 55-61; Robert J. Higgs and Michael Braswell, An Unholy Alliance: The Sacred and Modern Sports (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2004); Cornel Sandvoss, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption (Malden: Polity Press, 2005).

8 Tara Magdalinski &Timothy Chandler, With God on their Side: Sports in the Service of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1-2.

8 collegiate, or professional level.9 While mediation and institutionalization have become a significant part of the most popular sports in America, they are not essential parts of what makes an event a sport. Rebecca Alpert correctly notes that such a view of sports eliminates non-physical forms of competition (such as chess or poker), favors competition over cooperation, and assigns greater value to those (normally male) bodies which can impose physicality (high musculature, lower body-fat percentage, height) as a substitute for skill.10 Sports sociologist David Andrews has instead suggested that the definition of sport ought to be expanded, interpreting it as “a necessarily malleable collective noun suggesting the diversity and complexity of what are temporally and spatially contingent expressions of physical culture.”11 Because making definitions tends to operate as an act of exclusion, I prefer those like Andrews’s which, like the more expansive definitions of religion, tend to exclude less of what they ought to include.

Sport and Religious Identity

Religious groups have adopted sports for a variety of purposes. Most frequently, religious communities have used sport as a means of identity negotiation and to establish themselves at the center of American life. Over the past 150 years, participation in competitive athletics has served as a means through which religious minorities have presented themselves as authentic Americans in direct contradiction to Protestant nativist prejudices. Julie Byrne’s O God of Players details how the national success of the

9 Annie Blazer, among others, highlights this issue in her review of the field. Annie Blazer, “Religion and sports in America,” Religion Compass 6 (2012): 287-297.

10 Rebecca Alpert, Religion and Sports: An Introduction and Case Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 8-9.

11 David Andrews, Sport-Commerce-Culture: Essays on Sport in Late Capitalist America (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 11. 9 women’s basketball program at Immaculata College on the outskirts of Philadelphia helped raise the public profile of Catholic women and helped the players develop their identities as women. In the process, the team helped the school develop its public identity as a center of higher learning, a (momentary) athletic powerhouse, and as an institution in which the nation’s Catholic minority could take tremendous pride.12 The story echoed the legacy of Notre Dame’s football program in the early 20th century, which itself was a place where Catholic men could prove their manhood on a national stage. Oral Roberts was also eager to tap into the public relations power of college athletics, for they offered

“one of the greatest opportunities for Christian witness, without which millions of people might never be reached.”13 Having an athletic department also provided Oral Roberts

University with instantaneous national advertising and put Pentecostalism on the sports pages. The fundamentalist leader Jerry Falwell picked up on this when he was building his own collegiate institution at Liberty University, where he hoped the sports program would do for fundamentalists what Brigham Young University had done for Mormons and what Notre Dame had done for Catholics.14 Athletic participation has given Christian minorities a chance to demonstrate their all-Americaness.

Sports have also been an arena wherein religious groups have challenged gender stereotypes or have otherwise addressed gender anxieties. Gender studies scholars have shown that leading figures of America’s white middle class Protestant establishment in the 19th century began adopting sports as a means to combat the perceived social ills of

12 Julie Byrne, O God of Players: The Story of the Immaculata Mighty Macs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

13 Granville Oral Roberts, Oral Roberts University, 1965-1983: “True to a Heavenly Vision” (New York: Newcomen Society, 1983), 15.

14 See Price, From Season to Season, 23. 10 their era. These included anxieties concerning urban decay, the degenerative effects of managerial labor, the restlessness of youth, an influx of Roman Catholics from Eastern and Southern Europe, and the prevalent presumption that Protestant Christianity was given over to the feminine sentimentality.15 In the 1920s, both Jewish and Catholic men turned to boxing in the urban centers of the United States, especially Chicago and New

York, as a means to demonstrate their toughness. Steven Riess, Gerald Gems, and Allen

Bodner have shown that participation in boxing also served the practical purpose of helping Jewish and Catholic boys to fend off attacks from nativist Protestant Americans and from other minority groups living in the cities.16 Two generations later, Malcolm X framed Muhammad Ali as the embodiment of masculinity for the Nation of Islam, suggesting that his upcoming bout with Sonny Liston was no less than “the Cross and the

Crescent fighting in the prize ring.”17 These examples show that sports participation has been one of the most consistent means through which religious communities and leaders have both challenged and conformed to normative archetypes of masculinity – often defined through virility and violence.

15 For an examination of the gender anxieties common at this time, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Betty DeBerg, Ungodly Women: Gender and the First Wave of American Fundamentalism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990); Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977); R. Marie Griffith, Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). For how sports were used to combat these anxieties, see Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Tony Ladd and James Mathisen, Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of American Sport (Ada: Baker Books, 1999); Donald Hall, Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

16 Steven Riess, “A Fighting Chance: The Jewish-American Boxing Experience, 1890-1940,” American Jewish History , Vol. 74, No. 3 (1985): 211-254; Gerald Gems, “The Politics of Boxing: Resistance, Religion, and Working Class Assimilation,” International Sports Journal Vol. 8, No. 1 (2004): 89-103; Allen Bodner, When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport (Westport: Praeger Press,1997).

17 Quoted in Maureen Smith, “Muhammad Speaks and Muhammad Ali: Intersections of the Nation of Islam and sport in the 1960s,” in Magdalinksi and Chandler, With God On Their Side, 181. 11 Meanwhile, emerging research on religion and sports pays more attention to the ways in which women’s participation also challenges gender stereotypes about normative femininity in different cultures. Linda Borish examines Jewish women’s sporting lives in late-19th and early-20th century America, and Chie Ikkai recovers some of the lost history of women’s sumo wrestling in Japan, this despite the traditional ban on female participation in the sport.18 Scholarly analyses of Islamic women and sports are also steadily increasing. Wirdati Radzi’s ethnographic study of young female Muslim athletes from Southeast Asia has reveals some of the institutional and cultural challenges these women face, particularly in their attempts to compete at the highest international levels.19

A recent anthology edited by Tansin Benn, Getrud Pfister, and Haifaa Jawad analyzes how Muslim women’s participation in sports fits within or contests prevailing sentiments about modesty, physical education, competition, and veiling in Middle-eastern and North

American societies.20 Most recently, Annie Blazer’s ethnographic account of women in evangelical sports ministries explores how participants negotiated gender and sexual identity through athletics, and how evangelical engagement with popular culture has unexpected and unintended consequences for organizers, supporters, and players.21 These works touch upon some of the most common concerns of the field: the implications of

18 Linda Borish, “Women, Sport, and American Jewish Identity in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in Chandler and Magdalinski, With God on Their Side, 71-98; Chie Ikkai, “Women’s Sumo Wrestling in Japan,” International Journal of Sport and Health Science, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2003): 178- 181.

19 Wirdati Mohammad Radzi, Muslim Women and Sports in the Malay World: The Crossroads of Modernity and Faith (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2006).

20 Tansin Benn, Gertrud Pfister, and Haifaa Jawad, eds., Muslim Women and Sport (New York: Routledge, 2010).

21 Annie Blazer, Playing For God: Evangelical Women and the Unintended Consequences of Sports Ministry (New York: New York University Press, 2015).

12 gender in sports participation, modesty and morality, the intersection of religion, politics, and popular culture, and the place of physical culture within religious traditions.

Sport and Christianity

Most scholarship on religion and sport within the North American context has focused on Christianity, particularly its Protestant forms. A full synopsis of this larger field is beyond the scope of this review.22 However, as a prelude to the analysis that follows, I want to highlight the most prominent trends and subjects of this field.

Most scholarly works treating the relationship between Christianity and Sport in

North America begin with muscular Christianity in Victorian England. Initially, muscular

Christianity meant “a Christian commitment to health and manliness.”23 First developed by the novelist Thomas Hughes in works like Tom Brown’s School Days and Tom Brown at Oxford, and later adopted by the Anglican cleric Charles Kingsley, the earliest iteration of the movement was intentionally fashioned to counteract the perceived effeminacy of the religious enterprise generally and Anglican ministers in particular. Highly influenced by the Christian socialism of F.D. Maurice, the writings of Thomas Carlyle, the heavy- handed governance of Rugby headmaster Thomas Arnold, and the poetry of Samuel

Taylor Coleridge, Hughes and Kingsley began promulgating the belief that the cure for sentimentality in the church and degeneracy in the cities was the return of a robust

22 Nick Watson and Andrew Parker have conducted one of the best holistic reviews: “Sport and Christianity: Mapping the Field,” in Sport and Christianity: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Nick Watson and Andrew Parker (New York: Routledge, 2013), 9-88.

23 Putney, Muscular Christianity, 2.

13 manliness, a term synonymous with both physical and moral strength.24 This manliness,

Kingsley concluded, was central feature of Christ’s divinity, arguing that a proper image of the Lord ought to reveal “the true prowess, the true valour, the true chivalry, the true glory, [and] the true manhood” of Jesus.25

Victorianists have highlighted the most common themes of this Protestant movement. Vance Norman notes that muscular Christianity was a partial rebuke of the ascetic otherworldliness associated with Anglican Evangelical and Puseyite religion, which Kingsley considered modern day Manicheanisms.26 Donald Hall has drawn attention to Victorian muscular Christian metaphors of the male body as a substitute for social, national, and religious groups.27 Others have addressed the muscular Christian valorization of sporting violence in preparing English youth for their posts throughout the empire.28 Examining the impact of the movement on broader English society, Nancy Fix

Anderson has suggested that while Victorian bourgeois values were promoted through sport, it also inadvertently had the effect of undermining those values, providing greater

24 Cf. Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

25 Charles Kingsley, David: Four Sermons Preached Before the University of Cambridge (London: MacMillan and Co., 1865), 61.

26 Cf. Vance, Sinews of the Spirit, 29-35. Puseyite refers to the Anglican tradition associated with Edward Pusey, a professor of Hebrew at Christ Church, Oxford and early member of the Oxford Movement. Manichaeism was a dualistic, Gnostic Christian tradition named after the Persian bishop, Mani, who blended early Christian traditions with Zoroastrianism, espousing the belief that the spiritual and material worlds were locked in struggle, with the spiritual world on the side of goodness and light and the material on the side of evil and darkness.

27 Hall, Muscular Christianity, 3-16.

28 David Rosen, “The Volcano and the Cathedral: Muscular Christianity and the Origins of Primal Manliness,” in Hall, Muscular Christianity, 17-44; David Faulkner, “The confidence man: empire and deconstruction of muscular Christianity in The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” in Hall, Muscular Christianity, 175-193; Peter van der Veer, “Moral Muscle: Masculinity and Its Religious Uses,” in Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 83-105.

14 opportunities for women, lower class men, and colonized peoples to challenge middle- class Protestant men’s normative assumptions about their own superiority.29 From the outset, English muscular Christianity was tied to the institutional Anglican Church, the education system, urban reform movements, and the military.

Like other developments in English society, the muscular Christian movement quickly travelled across the pond, where similar issues troubled an elite and influential segment of ministers and lay leaders in the Northeast.30 Historians of Victorian era masculinity in America like Gail Bederman, Clifford Putney, Michael Kimmel, and

Anthony Rotundo tend to agree that late nineteenth and early twentieth century middle- class White Protestant men perceived a number of challenges to their status as cultural leaders. Non-Protestant immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, the women’s rights movement, and the economic and social shifts that accompanied rapid industrialization and urbanization were among the most prominent factors contributing to their sense of unease.31 Such anxieties were exacerbated by the perception that the number of men within America’s churches had declined significantly over the past century. However, Ann Douglas and Ann Braude have, respectively, demonstrated that

29 Nancy Fix Anderson, The Sporting Life: Victorian Sports and Games (Santa Barbara: Praeger Press, 2010).

30 Although American Protestant lay leaders weren’t plagued by the same imperial anxieties as their English contemporaries, they certainly shared concerns about maintaining gender distinctions and asserting classist, racial, and religious superiority over others, manifested in discourses valorizing white male bodies and advocating that they be subjected to rigorous athletic conditioning in order to prepare them for saving both society and Protestant Christianity.

31 Putney, Muscular Christianity; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization; Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996); Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993). Historians Betty DeBerg and Stephen Riess also emphasize that these anxieties led to greater efforts to shore up gender distinctions between the sexes. DeBerg, Ungodly Women; Stephen Riess, “Sport and the Redefinition of American Middle-class Masculinity, 1840-1900,” in Major Problems in American Sport History: Documents and Essays, ed. Stephen Riess (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 186-198.

15 such fears were misplaced, as women had almost always outnumbered men in church and that the proportions have been relatively consistent since the mid 19th century.32 Under the presumption that such challenges required manly men to meet them, muscular

Christians called for participation in competitive sport and athletic training to respond to these issues.

Scholarship focusing on the American element of muscular Christian history has tended to gravitate towards the institutionalization of the movement in schools and in boys work groups. Influential educational theorists like the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, revivalist minister Dwight L. Moody, and Dr. Luther Gulick advocated for the development of a physical education curriculum that would complement the work being done in the classrooms.33 David Macleod and Clifford Putney have noted that Young

Men’s Christian Association, the Boy Scouts of America, and other boys work organizations were Christianized alternatives to the normal entertainments and vices of city life. They also provided homosocial environments where boys could become trained by men in the arts of manhood, safe from the corrupting influences of women. However, as John Gustav-Wrathall notes, places that apotheosized manliness and men’s bodies like the YMCA were also frequently places were men met one another for sexual pleasure, negating the assumption common among muscular Christian leaders that physical activity curbed sexual appetites.34 The development of these institutions across Northeastern and

32 Douglas, Feminization of American Culture; Ann Braude, “Women’s religious history is American religious history,” in Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Thomas Tweed and Laurie Maffly- Kipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 87-107.

33 See Ladd and Mathisen, Muscular Christianity, 60-64.

34 John Gustav-Wrathall, Take the Young Stranger by the Hand: Same-sex Relations and the YMCA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

16 Midwestern cities, coupled with educational trends favoring the incorporation of physical activity into the curricula, demonstrates the widespread approval of muscular Christian enterprises in late 19th and early 20th century America.

There is a general scholarly consensus that by the end of the Great War, muscular

Christianity had more or less secularized and had fallen out of favor with New England’s ecclesial elite. There are several reasons for this. Historian Jonathan Ebel notes that the war “forced men to reconsider the mythic millennial efficacy of the masculine man with which they were so familiar… According to a great many, strength, skill, goodness, wisdom, pluck, vigor and industry played no part”35 in determining who would survive.

All those muscles, all those visible inscriptions of manliness, were absolutely useless when surrounded by a cloud of mustard gas. Back home, baseball player turned preacher

Billy Sunday reached the height of his popularity due in part to his demonization of the professional sporting culture which had given him his fame. By this time the YMCA had dropped the evangelical requirement for membership, and would eventually do away with

Bible study altogether. The ascendancy of Niebuhrian neo-orthodoxy within Protestant circles and its diminished view of human nature supplanted progressive era assumptions about humanity’s capacity for bringing about the Kingdom on earth.36 All of these contributed to muscular Christianity’s fall from grace.

35 Jonathan Ebel, Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 67.

36 For a summary of the decline of muscular Christianity within mainline Protestantism, see Putney, Muscular Christianity. Dominic Erdozain, provides statistics on the decline of attendance at YMCA bible studies in late 19th century England during this period. Dominic Erdozain, The Problem of Pleasure: Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion (Suffolk, England: Boydell Press, 2010) 220-223.

17 By the 1940s, the leaders of the nascent new evangelical movement sought to reestablish their political and theological commitments at the center of American public life. Athletics proved to be a major component of this overall strategy, capitalizing on the achievements of Christian athletes in efforts to attract audiences. As a speaker on a Youth for Christ circuit, Billy Graham quickly established himself as the national face of the movement through his innovative programming and adept use of the newest technologies and advertising methods of his generation, including inviting prominent athletes to be guest-speakers at his rallies. Athletes in Action, David Hannah’s offshoot ministry of Bill

Bright’s Campus Crusade for Christ, was one of the first fulltime organizations devoted to attracting athletes to evangelicalism and then turning them back into the world to proselytize for the faith. In 1954, the Eastern Oklahoma A&M basketball coach Don

McClanen founded the Fellowship of Christian Athletes as a secondary school form of what Hannah’s organization was doing at UCLA. Seeing the success of these organizations, Oral Roberts established an athletics program at his university in order to raise the public stature of his ministry. The old underlying ideological justification of mixing faith and sport - a means to create and sustain a robust, manly Christianity in the midst of a perceived crisis of masculinity – had largely been replaced by a concern for what professional athletics had to offer as a tool of evangelism.37 To this day, the use of sports as a means of evangelism has been a central thesis in conservative Christian apologetics for the integration of the faith and physical culture.

37 For a quick synopsis of why this transition within American evangelicalism occurred, see Shirl J. Hoffman, “Harvesting Souls in the Stadium: The Rise of Sports Evangelism,” in Watson and Parker, Sport and Christianity, 131-149.

18 In the past seventy years, no religious community has been more successful at utilizing the mass appeal of sports than evangelical Christians. This is evident from the dozens of evangelical sports ministries that now exist at both the professional and amateur levels, and from the unprecedented access ministers in those organizations have to the players, coaches, and athletic trainers of sports teams.38 It is also evident in the number of professional athletes who have publicly stated their evangelical heritage, utilizing their prominence on the national stage to raise the public profile of their faith, to espouse their theological and moral beliefs, and endorse political candidates. These figures can even turn a profit doing so.39 Correlated with the prominence of evangelical

Christians in sports, the majority of texts covering late 20th century sports evangelism in

America cover evangelical sports ministries, players, and coaches. Shirl J. Hoffman,

William J. Baker, Robert (Jack) Higgs, James Mathisen, Tony Ladd, and Tom

Krattenmaker are among the more notable names in this subfield.40 While these authors have done an excellent job charting the history of the relationship between Christianity

38 No complete count of all such organizations currently exists. One major issue is that many local sports ministries are often formed and dissolved quickly, even as they may sometimes affiliate themselves with larger, more durable organizations like the AIA, FCA, YMCA, or the Association of Church Sports and Recreation Ministries.

39 There are over a dozen websites where churches and other groups can contract Christian athletes to come and speak at public events. Most are promotional agencies that have contact information for the agents of various athletes, coaches, and other sports luminaries. Among the more interesting names, Ray Lewis’s services can be purchased at a starting price of $50,000. Lewis, a former linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens, was also charged with murder in the deaths of two men in Atlanta in early 2000. The charges were dropped when Lewis turned state’s witness against his two co-defendants.

40 Shirl J. Hoffman, Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010); William Baker, Playing with God: Religion and Modern Sport (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Robert J. Higgs and Michael Braswell, An Unholy Alliance: The Sacred and Modern Sports (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2004); Tony Ladd and James Mathisen, Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of American Sport (Ada: Baker Books, 1999); Tom Krattenmaker, Onward Christian Athletes: Turning Ballparks into Pulpits and Players into Preachers (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010).

19 and sport, there are a few elements of sports evangelism which I believe deserve further scrutiny.

Sports Evangelism and the Body

Although embodiment is a prominent concern in sports history, gender studies, and religious studies, there have been few works on Christianity and sports that address the centrality of the body as the site where religious practices are acted out or the object upon which beliefs are projected. Perhaps this absence is due to the ambivalent place of flesh throughout Christian intellectual history, an idea that Alois Koch, Shirl Hoffman, and Victor Pfitzner, respectively, have covered extensively elsewhere.41 When embodiment is addressed, it is normally brought up within the context of ethical concerns about how sporting violence violates the perceived Christian commitment to the sanctity of human bodies.42 I’ll return to the ethical argument in a moment. For now I want to explain why I believe that the critical lens of Christianity and sport scholarship must go beyond this and why a deeper look is beneficial to the field.

First, arguing about the orthodox view of specific bodily practices and processes – strenuous physical exertion, sexual embrace, physical violence, over-exertion, asceticism, etc. - tends to dismiss the nuances among the various opinions Christians have regarding

41 Alois Koch, “Biblical and Patristic Foundations for Sports,” in Sport and Christianity: A Sign of the Times in the Light of Faith, ed. Kevin Lixey, Christoph Hübenthal, and Dietmar Mieth (Pittsboro: Catholic University Press of America, 2012) 81-103; Shirl J. Hoffman, Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010); Victor Pfitzner, Paul and the Agon Motif: Traditional Athletic Imagery in the Pauline Literature (Leiden, Germany: E.J. Brill, 1967); Victor Pfitzner, “We are the Champions! Origins and Developments of the Image of God’s Athletes,” in Sport and Spirituality: An Exercise in Everyday Theology, ed. by Gordon Preece and Rob Hess, (Adelaide: ATF Press, 2006), 49-69.

42 For example, see The Image of God in the Human Body: Essays on Christianity and Sports, ed. Donald Lee Deardorff II and John White (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). 20 these subjects. Debates about the proper view of ascetic activities, bodily injury, modesty, and glorification of the flesh are found so consistently throughout the history of the

Christianity-sport relationship precisely because Christian communities respond to them in diverse manners. What is required instead is an examination of why and how different

Christian groups respond to these practices in the ways that they do, paying careful attention to how individuals and groups police and authorize certain bodily practices, evaluate particular bodily configurations, and legitimate and sanctify presumptions about gender through participation in sports and through sports evangelism. Such research helps dispel the illusion of a unified Christian attitude toward embodiment.

Secondly, bodily activities and processes are gendered within common discourse, framing Christian interpretations of embodiment within patriarchal systems that positively value certain bodily practices and body types over others. To study how a particular Christian group tends to interpret embodiment as an existential reality, interpret their own bodies, and interpret the bodies of others is to study how power structures are reinforced within faith communities. Given the demographics of leadership within evangelicalism, these power structures typically reinforce white male supremacy and value white male bodies over other bodies, perpetuating a religious culture wherein whites are a majority and males lay claim the dominance over women in both the church and the home. Being among the most visible and dramatic locations wherein bodies struggle against one another for supremacy, sports have an obvious utility for communities wishing to reinforce unequal gender dynamics.43

43 Even with the caveat that sports often operate as a cultural proving ground for women and people of color to contest assertions of white male dominance. 21 Third, sports ministries and actors have used human bodies as props, texts, and other material goods as supplements to their missionary work. This has been a central facet of sports evangelism, one that underscores its theatrical nature (and often, artificial and commercial bend). Early muscular Christians knew full well the powerful pedagogical work bodies could perform when put on display for public consumption.

YMCA officials found that the best local publicity for their efforts was keeping their boys physically active in view of the public, advertising images of gym-short clad boys engaged in various physical activities in local newspapers in order assure viewers that Y programs safely channeled boyish energy.44 Participation in competitive athletics has been a means attracting possible proselytization targets and demonstrating the skill of

Christian athletes since the Cambridge Seven cricket team first took their talents to China in 1885 as part of the pan-Protestant China Inland Mission.45 During the progressive era, some church leaders suggested that if the church wanted to draw in men then Christ himself had to become more muscular and virile. As evangelist Warren Conant put it,

“Hard-fisted men who are used to giving and taking hard knocks… are not likely to be impressed or attracted by a feminine Christ.”46 Thirty years later, Billy Graham began inviting Olympic stars to be guest speakers at his Youth for Christ rallies, notably asking long-distance runner Gil Dodds to demonstrate his superior speed by racing against the clock in the sports venues where the rallies were held. In short, Christian communities have put athletic men’s bodies on display and capitalized on the athletic prowess of those

44 David Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 172.

45 See Ladd and Mathisen, Muscular Christianity, 22-47.

46 Robert Warren Conant, The Virility of Christ: A New View, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The Author, 1915), 92-93. For more on masculine images of Christ in American history, see David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 22 bodies in order to attract audiences. In the process they have inscribed upon men’s bodies a type of godliness, making muscle and sinew the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace.

There are several reasons why this topic should be further explored. The use of bodies as material texts by religious communities – in advertisements, in performances, as main attractions to some other evangelizing event – contradicts normative understandings about Christian imperatives towards modesty and injunctions against the glorification of the flesh. While some might argue that such self-glorifying displays are anathema to the faith, they are nevertheless displays performed by Christians who have justified putting their bodies on display for the world to see. Witnessing to the faith is a two-way street. This research explores how such displays and demonstrations fit within the worldview of the Christian athletes whose bodies are displayed and the ministers who authorize these spectacles, especially as they relate to efforts to reach young men.

These displays also reveal that the production of the athletic male body as an object to be gazed upon is a process integrally tied to theatricality and commercialism.

They reveal the extent to which Christian groups have adopted and selectively authorized the best recruitment and advertising practices of popular culture. Although some

Christianity and sports scholars have been critical of this trend, the reality is that adoption and adaptation of mass advertisement and entertainment have been staples of Christian evangelism since George Whitefield.47 Such uses of the tools, rhetoric, and narrative styles of mass culture serve as further evidence that the boundaries between religious and

47 Cf. Robert Higgs, God in the Stadium; Shirl Hoffman, “Touchdowns and Slam Dunks for Jesus,” in Hoffman, Good Game, 219-238; William Baker, “Making a Pitch for Jesus,” in William Baker, Playing with God: Religion and Modern Sport (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 193-217. I cover this topic in greater depth in the next chapter. 23 secular culture are porous at best. Sports evangelists’ justifications for these selective adaptations of consumer culture and for glorifying the flesh to attract audiences illuminate the complexities of life for faith communities who believe themselves to be confined to the world but admonished to not be a part of it. Assessing the justifications for appropriating advertising techniques and the criteria used to that end reveals the primary concerns within sports evangelism.

Because athletic men’s bodies have played a prominent role in evangelism efforts, and because discourses of the body are integrally tied to systems of power, I believe that the scholarship on sports and evangelism can greatly benefit from the study of bodies within sport. To make new inroads here, the research must move beyond the standard conclusions reached by ethical considerations of the sports-Christianity relationship.

Christian Ethics and Sports Evangelism

One of the most persistent themes in the study of the relationship between

Christianity and sport has been the disconnect some scholars perceive between the ethics of the faith and the professional obligations of sports. Yet as Annie Blazer has pointed out, the general conclusion of these works has yet to move beyond Frank Deford’s initial criticism that the increased prominence of Christianity within sport has yet to address the ethical contradictions of combining them.48 What remains is a stagnant consensus:

Christian athletes have failed to make sports conform to the higher moral standards of the faith, particularly regarding the uses and abuses of human bodies.

48 Annie Blazer, “Religion and sports in America,” Religion Compass, Vol. 6, No. 5 (2012): 287- 97, accessed June 18th, 2016, doi:10.1111/j.1749-8171.2012.00347.x.; Cf. Frank Deford, “Religion and Sport,” Sports Illustrated, April 19th 1976, 88-102.

24 Though not every author who takes this position identifies as an evangelical

Christian, many who make this criticism belong to that broad tradition. Allen Guttmann suggests that sport and religion can be incompatible when the ethical dictates of the latter interfere with the professional dictates of the former.49 Taking a declensionist view of history, William Baker laments “Sport, in brief, has lost the moral compass that for more than a century taught American to honor boundaries, play by the rules, and work together for a common good.”50 Journalist Tom Krattenmaker suggests the public “is not always well served by the shape and form of religion in pro sports.”51 Shirl J. Hoffman provides a succinct version of this argument: the consequences of “not being willing to wrestle with the difficult task of understanding sport and its relationship to faith [is that] evangelicals have lost their influence in the world of big-time sports.”52 Hoffman’s final conclusion is that this has led to the creation of a theology of sport that stifles the prophetic voice, the adoption of the negative ethics of sport over those of traditional

Christianity, and a failure to mine sport for the theological richness it offers. Such is the general criticism of sports evangelism.

The notion that there is an obvious disconnect between the tenets of Christian faith and those of sport is found in other works as well. Nick Watson and Andrew Parker are hesitant to agree with the notion that “modern-day advocates of muscular Christian ideals often uncritically adopt tenets of contemporary sporting culture that have little, if

49 Allen Guttmann, From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 18-26.

50 Baker, Playing With God, 257.

51 Tom Krattenmaker, Onward Christian Athletes: Turning Ballparks into Pulpits and Players into Preachers (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010), 8.

52 Hoffman, Good Game, 13.

25 any, affinity with the gospel of Christ.”53 Instead they chose to see such pro-sport and amateur para-church ministries as a form of what theologian and United Church of Christ minister Walter Bruggeman’s called a “local tradition,” juxtaposed against the “empire,” wherein religious communities minister to those in dark places. Watson and Parker contend that while these ministries often refrain from critiquing or working to change the culture of professional athletics, they nevertheless exist as necessary outposts of Christian civilization in an otherwise hostile and imperialistic culture.54 Although such a position is not unreasonable, it ought be noted that, though based on the writings of more liberal theologians like Brueggemann, Jim Wallis, William Stringfellow, and Jacques Ellul, this argument is still quite similar to the conclusions of Robert Higgs, Shirl Hoffman, William

Baker, and others who take the more critical view.

One of the topics that I will address throughout this work is that such juxtapositions between “the ethics of Christianity” and “the professional obligations of sport” are not as incompatible as they may seem, especially as they relate to bodily practices. To state this most clearly, and to serve as an introduction to why I investigate certain topics later, let me draw attention to some troublesome assumptions about the relationship between Christianity and sports that these arguments frequently contain and how they relate to discourses on embodiment.

The first problem is the double standard imposed on Christian athletes, who are simultaneously charged with obeying the rules of sport and its culture of deference to

53 Watson and Parker, Sport and Christianity, 24.

54 In the case of ministries for professional athletes, like Baseball Chapel, ProSports Outreach, etc., to be critical of their host groups’ ethical shortcomings is to risk a loss of access. Losing access to players would jeopardize the one of the missions of such ministries: turning highly publicized athletes into spokespersons for particular interpretations of Christianity.

26 authority while also being charged to rebuke the ethical violations indemic to professional athletics. Such critiques of Christ athletes conforming to sports culture, rather than challenging its norms, is often written through criticism of bodily practices.

For example, Hoffman claims that athletes who believe that the cause of the gospel is advanced through withinstanding pain, laying tough hits on opponents, and transcending wimpy bodies and flabby flesh “project a twisted and tortured image of the faith.”55

Although use of performance enhancing supplements is widespread in professional sports, William Baker argues that “the use of anabolic steroids for the improvement of athletic performance is both illegal and immoral,”56 a designation that suggests Christians ought to hold themselves to a higher and standard and not use them. Citing a general shift in attitudes towards embodiment, self-denial, and asceticism, Hoffman notes that the ancient church and modern realm of sports couldn’t be further apart from one another.

Gone are the days of the desert fathers whose self-flagellation had a spiritual purpose.

Instead we are greeted by a “cultus aerobicus” in which bread and water have been supplanted by high-protein drinks and low-carb diets.57 In other words, Christian athletes continually fail to go against the grain and change sport culture for the better.

However, doing so would place Christian athletes within an impossible paradox.

The imperative to change sport culture to conform with the tenets of faith (at least as these authors interpret those tenets) runs contrary to the reality that sport is a world which encourages self-subjugation to rules and authority figures. This is true for those rules

55 Hoffman, Good Game, 228.

56 Baker, Playing With God, 259; See also Tracy J. Trothen, “The technoscience enhancement debate in sports: What’s religion got to do with it?” in Sport and Christianity: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Nick Watson and Andrew Parker (New York: Routledge, 2013), 207-224.

57 Hoffman, Good Game, 168.

27 which are written down in the guidelines referees use to judge the way the games are played, but it is equally true for those unwritten regulations which govern social interactions within sport culture. Brian Pronger addressed this issue by noting that athletes are under immense social pressure, at both the professional and amateur levels, to conform to rather than challenge the status quo. “The spirit of sport is one of playing by the rules… Questioning the rules is not part of the game – which means athletes are frequently reluctant to challenge the unwritten rules… To see things from another perspective is a kind of failure, a failure to play by the rules.”58 The willingness to sacrifice one’s body to make a play, to lay a hard hit in football instead of a soft one, to participate with all one’s might, and to subject oneself to rigorous training and physical endangerment, including the use of PEDs, are commonsensical, normalized behaviors, actions, and attitudes within sport; i.e., the unwritten rules. Criticizing Christian athletes for not challenging the cultures of sport while also valorizing sport’s pedagogical effect of inculcating a disposition towards rule obedience and deference to authority creates a bizarre double-bind. After all, “anyone who competes as an athlete does not receive the victor’s crown except by competing according to the rules” (2 Tim. 2:3-5).

The second problem with juxtaposing the ethics of Christianity with those of sport is that the two are not mutually exclusive. Hoffman provides a good example of this false dichotomy: “When sport is harnessed to the evangelical enterprise, evangelicals become as much endorsers of the myths reinforced by popular sports as they do of the Christian

58 Brian Pronger, The Arena of Masculinity: Homosexuality and the Meaning of Sex (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 10. Pronger’s research dealt with compulsory heterosexuality in sport cultures, however his observations can be extended to other normative behaviors to which individuals in social groups are psychologically, even economically, compelled to perform.

28 gospel.”59 The trouble with Hoffman’s assessment is that it posits “the myths reinforced by popular sports” and those of “the Christian gospel” as distinct when they are actually viewpoints generated by and operating within the same cultural milieu. These are not mutually exclusive; rather, they are integrally related to one another.60 Furthermore, as sociologist Harry Edwards argued, since the social values infused into sport typically have their roots in the religious institutions of their societies, values found in sport are

“more supplemental and complementary than contradictory to established religious doctrines.”61 To recognize the symbiotic nature of the relationship between these institutions (and the values expressed within them) is to take a nuanced view of

Christians’ participation in sport, even those sports which many confessing Christians claim to be antithetical to the message of peace, love, and tolerance ascribed to Jesus in the canonical gospels.

In the pages that follow, I demonstrate the frequent overlap between the ethical systems found in Christian history and those found within sport cultures. From basketball inventor James Naismith to sociologist Harry Edwards, many have noted that participation in sport can have the positive educational benefits of teaching a desire for fair play, altruism, strength, loyalty, and tenacity, along with cooperation towards a common goal, sacrifice of personal ambition for the good of the team, and deference of

59 Shirl J. Hoffman, “Evangelicalism and the Revitalization of Religious Ritual in Sport,” in Sport and Religion, ed. Shirl J. Hoffman (Champaign: Human Kinetics, 1992), 121.

60 This is aptly demonstrated in Steven Overman, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Sport: How Calvinism and capitalism shaped America’s games (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2011).

61 Edwards, Sociology of Sport, 90.

29 individual liberty to rules governing behavior (the social contract in a microcosm).62 This overlap is readily apparent regarding embodiment within the relationship between

Christianity and sports. Restrictive dietary habits, self-starvation, subjecting one’s body to torment in pursuit of a higher goal, strenuous over-exertion in pursuit of euphoric experiences, and toiling on in spite of the agonies of the flesh are virtues and dispositions grounded in religious practice as much as in sport culture. Church fathers like Tertullian,

Philo, Augustine of Hippo, Aquinas, and John Chrysostom are on record extolling the virtues of such practices, often in refutation of Gnostic dualisms, even as their other writings often included tirades against sport spectatorship.63 Similarly, hard work and perseverance are virtues extolled in numerous U.S. institutions, including its sports and faith communities.

Yet the most troubling aspect of this dichotomization between the perceived negative and injurious ethics of sport and the perceived positive, life-affirming ethics of

Christianity is that it ignores the faith’s darker historical moments. The theologies, doctrines, and politics of various Christian communities have substantially contributed to the authorization and sanctification of injurious behavior. Emblematic of this position are the words of Robert Higgs and Michael Braswell:

Sports are about the chosen ones, those who are able to make the team – the fit, the able, and the talented. All religions at their best are about caring for the unchosen, the rejects, those who don’t qualify for any team. At their worst, religions are like sports, business, universities, and politics,

62 Edwards, Sociology of Sport; S. Scarpa and A.N. Carraro, “Does Christianity Demean the Body and Deny the Value of Sport? – A Provocative Thesis,” Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2011): 110-123.

63 See Koch, “Biblical and Patristic Foundations for Sport,” 81-103; Pfitzner, “We are the Champions,” 49-64; Scarpa and Carraro, “Does Christianity Demean the Body?,” 110-123; Hoffman, Good Game, 23-46; John M. Carter, Sports and Pastimes of the Middle Ages (Columbus: Brentwood University Press, 1984).

30 more interested in counting sheep than in feeding them, more interested in sales, enrollment figures, and votes. The emphasis is upon expanding flocks rather than attending to lost sheep.64

Suggesting that sports cannot be religious or taken as religions because sports are nasty, brutish, and violent is a disingenuous reading of religious history. Joseph Price correctly notes that “not all religions adopt and encourage humanistic, pacifistic, and compassionate values, so the critique of sports on the grounds that they promote violence, bodily abuse, and an aggressive competitive spirit does not, of itself, separate sport from established religious traditions.”65 Furthermore (and this gets more at the religious tradition Higgs and Braswell have in mind) adherents of the Christian faith have unquestionably promoted violence against others and violence against one’s own personhood on behalf of the faith. Violence is not an aberration of faith; violence exists at the very heart of Christianity. It is a religion born of an act of horrific violence and whose dissemination throughout the world often accompanied the colonialist and imperialist subjugation of native populations. The Crusades, the Inquisition, and the forced conversion of Native Americans, heinous though they were, were also acts of evangelism, demonstrating that exercises of force and coercion have been key elements in efforts to expand the Kingdom of God. The widely disseminated accounts of the fidelity of the martyrs, who ignored the cries of their bodies for the sake of their spirits, also operated evangelistically, raising the public profile of the nascent Christian faith in antiquity. Inflicted, received, enacted, and threatened, violence has played a significant

64 Robert Higgs and Michael Braswell, An Unholy Alliance: The Sacred and Modern Sports (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2004), 236.

65 Joseph Price, “An American Apotheosis: Sports as Popular Religion,” in Religion and Popular Culture in America, 2nd edition, ed. Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey H. Mahan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 208. 31 role in the advancement of Christendom from Calvary to the modern world. Serious researchers should not so casually dismiss this legacy when considering the relationship between the ethics of sport and those of established religious institutions. The next chapter specifically addresses this issue by highlighting how religious actors have justified the incorporation and encouragement of sports participation for militaristic purposes.

Contribution to the Field

My goal in this dissertation is to call attention to the role that the body plays as a material object within sports evangelism. Many works on the relationship between religion and sports pay attention to the spoken words of evangelical athletes, and rightly so; however, this is to miss a large portion of the evangelistic work an athlete does. Fans watching sports at home might hear a minute long testimony to Jesus following the end of a game; however, that is not the way the evangelizing athlete and the audience member spend most of their time interacting. Although professions of faith are necessary for the audience to identify the athlete as a Christian, they are not sufficient. The vast majority of the interaction between an athlete and audience is built upon watching the athlete in action. This is not only true of “on the court” actions, but also in the visual symbolism of an athlete’s genuflections, looking up to the sky, crossing oneself, pre- or post-contest prayers (both individually and with the team), modifying the body with Christian-themed tattoos, decorating it with Christian-themed jewelry and clothing, and other manners of display. I believe that the bodily acts of sports evangelists do just as much as, if not more than, the spoken word to convey religious messages to those who witness it. Many

32 ascribe to St. Francis of Assisi, “Wherever you go, preach the gospel, and if necessary, use words.” I believe that sports evangelists embody this principle. While many sports figures have become prominent spokespersons for evangelical Christianity – Tim Tebow being among the most recent – other athlete evangelists have sought success not through their eloquence, but through displays of the contours and powers of their bodies. Reading men’s bodies at work in sports evangelism will reveal an important part of the religious content such evangelists hope to convey.

Sports evangelism is primarily a visual relationship between athletes and spectators. When discussing masculine identity, the realities of this visual relationship become even more important. Most Americans will never possess the sort of finely sculpted bodies fetishized in American commercial culture, in superhero comic books, in action cinema, and in the evangelical sports culture which draws from them. Racist and sexist exclusionary practices, combined with economic and social realities, often work to exclude individuals and from having access to the gyms and other training facilities necessary for the production of prime athletic bodies. Even for those men who do have access to these facilities and who are encouraged to use them, most will never achieve the hyperlean physique deified in American popular culture. For those who do have the time, energy, and financial resources to sculpt their bodies into visible symbols of their conformity to this hegemonic concept of masculine identity, even their bodies will eventually age and decay. The potential erotic, cultural, and economic capital of such bodies depends upon their rarity, the degree of difficulty involved in attaining them, and the near impossibility of maintaining their peak condition for more than a few years. For most men, athletic bodies are objects which are seen, not occupied. Our entire sporting

33 culture, especially at the professional, commercialized level, depends upon this visual relationship between athletes and male spectators. As Pierre Bourdieu notes, men’s

“whole upbringing prepares them rather to enter the game vicariously, that is, in a position that is both external and subordinate,”66 compared to those men who actually do battle themselves.

Evangelical sports culture also testifies to the primacy of the visual element. Dave

Hannah, who founded Athletes in Action in order to spread the gospel among college athletes in the 1950s, determined that a “society looking up to athletes as heroes must find heroes looking up to God.”67 Wes Neal, the influential bodybuilder-turned- theologian, explained why athletes are respected as theological actors despite a lack of professional training. This is because athletes are familiar objects. People listen to the athlete “not because he is an expert on the subject, but because they have a familiarity with him. They have either seen him in action or read about him. That platform can be used to share the good news of Jesus Christ.”68 Phrases like “looking up to athletes,” and

“seeing athletes in action,” just as surely as words like “spectator” and “spectacle,” draw attention to the visual dimension of sports evangelism.

Other evangelical literature on masculinity emphasize the belief that seeing is the primary epistemological sense for boys. In Raising Real Men, parenting advice authors

Hal and Melanie White contend, “What we admire, we tend to become… Boys learn so

66 Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 78.

67 Quoted in Randall Balmer, “Athletes in Action,” Encyclopedia of Evangelism (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2004), 41-42.

68 Wes Neal, The Handbook of Athletic Perfection: A Training Manual for Christian Athletes, 3rd edition (Grand Island: Cross Training Publishing, 1998 [1975]), ii. The grammatical issues are present in the original.

34 much by example, observation and role-playing, we need to make sure they have the right kind of patterns for them to follow, to judge their actions by, to think about.”69 The White family encourage parents to seek out models of acceptable masculinity in television and movies “because men tend to be very visual.”70 The authors also prefer that these models embody the manly virtues of “competitiveness, aggression, a desire for adventure…independent spirit, heroism, courage, [and] fortitude,”71 characteristics many coaches hope their players will embody as well. In What A Son Need’s From His Mom,

Cheri Fuller tells her readers that “role models [are] the most persuasive, positive tool you have to impart values”72 and lifts up sports figures like Chuck Colson, Tim Tebow, and Robert Griffin III in the same sentence as Noah, Joseph, Moses, Daniel, and Joshua as archetypes of the kind of masculinity to which boys ought to aspire. Author Rick

Johnson echoes these sentiments: “Boys become men by watching men, by standing close to men. Manhood is a ritual passed from generation to generation with precious few words spoken.”73 Furthermore, because “males are visual creatures,”74 Johnson counsels parents that boys should learn masculinity by watching sports and action movies. If

69 Hal and Melanie White, Raising Real Men: Surviving, Teaching, and Appreciating Boys (Smithfield: Great Waters Press, 2010), 30.

70 Ibid, 35.

71 Ibid, 27.

72 Cheri Fuller, What A Son Needs From His Mom (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 2013).

73 Rick Johnson, That’s My Son: How Moms Can Influence Boys to Become Men of Character (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2005), 155. His preferred list of films includes The Jackie Robinson Story, Remember the Titans, Hoosiers, Rudy, Master and Commander, Gladiator, The Last Samurai, The Last of the Mohicans, Lonesome Dove, The Patriot, We Were Soldiers, and “the granddaddy of all guy movies, Braveheart.” With the exception of the first two films, Johnson’s leading men are white. With the exception of Hoosiers and Rudy, his heroes have few romantic interests and are gifted at killing people.

74 Ibid.

35 masculinity is being taught through images of men being manly, and if evangelical men’s self-image draws from these displays, then such images must be taken seriously.

A related issue worth examining is the production of masculinity within these traditions. On many levels, the parts of sports evangelism I examine are arenas of gender performativity as well as entertainment spectacle. Judith Butler has suggested that gender is “the apparatus by which the production and normalization of masculine and feminine take place along with the interstitial forms of hormonal, chromosomal, psychic, and performative [actions] that gender assumes.”75 How gender is portrayed and policed within sports evangelism is worthy of attention because it reveals the connections between its masculinist underpinnings and their violent outcomes upon the body as an object onto which gender is cast. The ascetic tradition within Christian thought provides a theological support for a sports culture of self-denial, one which presumes bodily suffering to be the wellspring of victory. Christian bodybuilders injecting steroids to become more muscular enact a certain violence to their own flesh in their quest to become a more effective medium of evangelism by becoming more “manly.”76 Mixed martial artists are abused in sparring practice in order to rise above that suffering when it happens on fight night. Meanwhile, their fans sport t-shirts reminding the fighter that

“Jesus Didn’t Tap.” In this culture, to be manly is to suffer and, often, to cause the suffering of others.

Assessing the ways in which men’s bodies are produced, displayed, and interpreted within sports evangelism yields critical insights into the construction of

75 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge Press, 2004), 42.

76 This is still the case even after women’s professional bodybuilding competitions challenged androcentric assumptions about the relationship between musculature and gender identity. See chapter Three for a more detailed analysis of the presumptions underlying the equation of muscles and masculinity. 36 Christian masculine identities in the modern world. It also reveals the strategies used to assuage the anxieties of being spiritual creatures trapped in material forms, identify the particular types of bodies which are valued or devalued, negotiate the place of physical culture in spiritual life, and combine Christianity and popular culture to attract men to the faith. The research that follows focuses on how Christian athletes used their bodies to support their oral ministrations, revealing how men’s bodies are invested with symbolic capital and given theological significance by sports evangelists. How and why this is so is the subject of this work.

37 CHAPTER 2 - PROSCRIPTIONS AND PROHIBITIONS: THE MALE BODY IN

CHRISTIAN SPORTS DISCOURSE

The extent to which ecclesial authorities have permitted Christians to participate in sport, either as contestants or spectators, has historically been proportional to sport’s usefulness in producing and attracting Christian men with characteristics and dispositions deemed suitable to fulfilling the goals those authorities have had for the church.

Sometimes prohibiting sport as vices which sapped men’s bodies of vital energy which could rightly be spent in more profitable pursuits, sometimes proscribing them as activities which prepared bodies for the rigors of the work of the kingdom of God, clerics and lay leaders have produced a range of opinions on the place of sport in Christian life.

Yet even as they have been divided about what that role may be, a persistent preoccupation with the tutelage of male children and the Christianization of male adults found in the letters, sermons, theological treatises, advice books, education manuals, philosophical tracts, and evangelistic materials discussing sport reveals that Christian thinkers have often conceived of sports’ utility in terms of their role as socializing institutions for males and as conditioning regimens which shape their bodies.

Christian theologians, psychologists, philosophers, and novelists came to adopt particular forms of strenuous activity because they believed these produced the external

(physical) and internal (mental) qualities best suited to achieving the hopes they had for their societies. As I will make clear in this chapter, the types of sports deemed suitable for

Christian men have most consistently been those whose training produced healthy male

38 bodies – sturdy, hard, muscled, and capable of enduring hardship.77 Although some clerics were weary of the glorification of the flesh they perceived in athletic culture, few were opposed to the idea that a healthy body was preferable to a sickly one. But what those bodies were to be used for was an ongoing matter of debate, as were the types of athletic contests sanctioned for training men to do that work.

Yet athletics were not only integrated into Christian life because they could aid in regulating bodily health; numerous church luminaries also presumed that sports were institutions which instilled internal dispositions in both participants and spectators.

Church leaders often weighed the relative benefit or harm of competing in sports or consuming them as spectacle in terms of their socializing function and passed judgment on the psychological (dispositional) effects they believed sports produced. At the macro level, sports are among the most effective superstructures of patriarchal societies, serving to stratify men in relation to women (through celebrating male physical characteristics), in relation to one another (through competition), and in relation to larger social groups

(teams, cities, and nations). At the individual level, athletic competitions were recognized as instilling sets of values and traits – aggressiveness, group-orientation, self-sacrifice,

77 Given the primacy of men in the leadership of the institutions which have had the strongest historical ties to sport – the school and the military – the vast majority of the extant records concerning the role of sport in Christian life have spoken of the topic as one for and about men. Though bishops, clerics, popes, and social reformers were not of one mind concerning sports participation or spectatorship, they frequently couched their arguments for or against them in terms of how beneficial or detrimental sport could be for men’s bodies or what effect sport could have upon the body of Christ as a whole. These writers frequently presumed that male bodies were the ones most often participating in sport and presumed that it was men who eagerly consumed these events. Having long been ideologically tied to divinity through the incarnation and temporal power through culture, male bodies were the ideological focus of Christian sport discourses and the primary visual objects of athletic entertainments.

39 perseverance, etc. – which were variously interpreted as either good or bad.78 Either worried that the church culture would suffer from an influx of aggressiveness more suitable for the gladiatorial arena or troubled by the prospect of losing that aggressive edge necessary for the protection of the faith from threats internal and external, ecclesial and lay figures recognized that sport shaped mind as well as body.

In this chapter I take a look at the place of sport in Western Christian history, drawing attention to events and debates which best highlight the centrality of these concerns in Christian sport discourses. I have decided to address particular moments when church leaders authorized Christians to participate or prohibited from participating in or consume sport spectacles through appeals to their socializing, pedagogical potential, their evangelistic uses, or through reference to how athletics shaped both the individual body and the body politic of the church. This focuses the analytical lenses by limiting the scope of the project to a manageable set of materials and helps to frame the case studies that follow. Alternately cast as a nefarious drain on human life and spirit, or as a preparatory apparatus for the creation of a physically and mentally well-conditioned church body, sport has generated significant debate in church history.

Pagan Sporting Culture and Early Christianity

Early Christian interpretations of sport were grounded in Hellenistic culture because the city-states in which Christianity first flourished had already incorporated athletics into the primary institutions of citizenship. Hellenic gymnasia, the all-male schools for boys from well-to-do families found across the Mediterranean, were not

78 Harry Edwards presents this functional model, noting that for many societies sport serves as an institution which instills and validates values necessary for the preservation of the status quo. Harry Edwards, Sociology of Sport (Homewood: Dorsey Press, 1973), 268-273. 40 merely institutions in which boys were trained in the intellectual fields; they were part of a larger socialization regime which aided in the internalization of gender roles. Gymnasia curricula were designed to attend to the paideia of free-born boys, the full cultural training necessary for their successful integration into the systems of the city-state.

Beyond lessons in rhetoric, mathematics, and philosophy, boys were also expected to participate in physical activities that prepared them for the rigors of warfare. Wrestling, javelin tossing, and pankration (a forerunner to mixed martial arts) kept boys in good physical health while also preparing them for battle. That training in sport was a core aspect of the paideia of boys in the gymnasium was the historical result of political conditions of the city-state. Thus very early on, the athletic training deemed suitable for the children of regional elites was tied to militarism, political allegiance, and masculine identity.79

Gymnasia boys were also taught implicit lessons regarding their bodies and how they were to interact with the bodies of others. As the name implies, gymanasia, from the root word gymnos (naked), were places wherein bodies were displayed. Students and trainers most often competed in the nude, frequently rubbed with oil.80 Many contests put boys and men in direct contact with one another’s bodies, pressing skin to skin in

79 See Donald G. Kyle, Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World, 2nd edition (Malden: Wiley- Blackwell, 2015); Mark Golden, Sport and Society in Ancient Greece (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

80 There are numerous theories for why athletes oiled themselves before training or competing. Stephen Miller points out that it could have been part of an effort to limber up the muscles, prevent fluid loss, produce a glistening body which appeared more aesthetically desirable, or as a religious exercise of consecrating one’s body to a deity. Stephen Miller, Ancient Greek Athletics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 15. This is also the same anointing process the St. Perpetua undergoes in the vision she has the night before she is executed in the arena. Perpetua sees herself transformed into a man, rubbed down with oil by angelic attendants, shortly before she is to do battle in a gladiatorial contest against Satan himself.

41 compromising poses.81 While far from tender, such embraces required a level of intimacy with other men’s bodies that was culturally acceptable within the confines of the gymnasium. From the euphoria of physical exertion to the pains inflicted in combat, such sports enabled boys to experience a range of physical responses both pleasurable and uncomfortable in the presence of other males of their social class. Boys in gymnasia were taught that well-trained bodies were valuable and praiseworthy, as they were also taught that such bodies were properly related to one another through exercises of force and domination.82

Such homosocial athletic centers enabled same-sex erotic encounters. This homoeroticism reinforced Greek gender hierarchies and bonded younger generations to older ones. This homoerotic element was also reinforced through gymnasia religious practice. Statues of Eros have been found among gymnasia ruins, suggesting that these were places wherein love both erotic and filial was meant to flourish.83 It is also evident that some adult men went to the gymnasia specifically for the purposes of entering into competition with young naked boys. The Greek statesman Aeschines (d. 314BCE) recorded that Athenian law prohibited most adult men from entering the gymnasia and punished the gymnasiarch who “fails to keep such a person out” with “the penalties

81 For examples from Greek art, please visit the following links. The Wrestlers, Uffizi Museum, Italy: http://msa.maryland.gov/msa/speccol/sc1500/sc1545/apc_website/images/70_0011.jpg; An amphora depicting a pankration struggle: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5b/Pankration_Met_06.1021.49.jpg/500px- Pankration_Met_06.1021.49.jpg.

82 Plato notes that sometimes spectators competed with one another for the affection of combatants in the wrestling arenas (palaestrae) and that, in turn, the combatants competed with one another for the affections of these influential older men. Symposium 180C-188F, Phaedrus, 231-4, 238F-241E. Cf. Nick Fisher, “Athletics and Sexuality,” in A companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities, ed. by Thomas K. Hubbard (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2014), 244-264.

83 Thomas F. Scanlon, Eros and Greek Athletics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

42 prescribed for the seduction of free-born youth.”84 At the very least, that the law was passed suggests that the legislative body was aware that gymnasia were centers of such activities, either consensual or coercive.

Gymnasia culture contained other elements which reinforced the centrality of physical and mental maleness. Aside from these lessons in competition, gymnasia were also cultural centers wherein men would gather with other men for company and entertainment. Gymnasia bathhouses were places where men gathered in the nude to discuss politics, make business deals, to meet up with acquaintances, and occasionally rendezvous with lovers. In other words, the affairs of politics and commerce (arenas of public life also intimately tied to maleness) were frequently conducted in homosocial institutions that placed a premium on the masculine and displays of the male body.

The aesthetic elevation of the male body found in the schools of the city-states was reflected elsewhere in Greek society but especially in the Panhellenic games held in honor of the gods. While the Olympics held in honor of Zeus were the best known contests, other sacred sport contests were held in honor of Apollo (Pythian games at

Delphi), and in honor of Poseidon (Isthmian games at Corinth). Artistically, statues and mosaics of these male deities reinforced their power through emphasizing their musculature. Not coincidently, the artists who recorded these games on amphora depicted athletes whose bodies looked much like those of the gods whom the games honored.

Frequently, such statues and amphora also included depictions of the genitals of the contestants or deities. Visually represented in muscles and often inscribed in beardedness,

84 Aeschines, Against Timarchus, trans. Charles Darwin Adams (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1919), I.12. Classical paiderastia, translated roughly as “pederasty,” was a crime of aristocracy. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0002:speech=1:section=12&highlight= gymnasium. 43 maleness was a preoccupation of the artists who produced the surviving artifacts of Greek athletic culture.

This was the male-centric Greek sporting culture into which Christianity was born, amid Paul’s missionary work in Asia Minor and the Grecian city-states which functioned as the regional capitals of the Roman Empire. Although Roman sporting culture featured some substantial differences from its Grecian forbearer, most notably in the violent excesses of gladiatorial contests, both communities united sport with worship and celebrated displays of masculine superiority as exemplified through hardship and victory. The first century Roman poet Juvenal advised his fellow (free-born male) Roman citizens to beg of the gods “a sound mind in a sound body,” exemplified by a heart that

“can endure any kind of toil,” and a mind which thought well of “the woes and hard labors of Hercules.”85 For Romans and Greeks, the superior man was a physically strong free-born male who did not shirk military duty, resist the allure of competition, or fear dangerous labor.86 This combination of sound body and sound mind was of obvious use to societies whose independence from imperial powers or ability to regulate their imperial provinces depended upon military force. This was the athletic culture that permeated the areas where Gentile Christianity first flourished.

As Gentiles entered the Jesus movement that first arose among apocalyptic Jewish groups, they brought with them pagan customs which would die hard. Greek and Roman sports cultures were highly eroticized and violent, imbricated with pagan religious

85 Juvenal, Satires, trans. G.G. Ramsay (New York: Putnam,1928), X.356.

86 Myles McDonnell draws attention to linguistic bridge between manliness and militarism present since the middle republican era. The Latin for man, vir, is the root of virtus, meaning “manliness,” but one that connoted a manliness which was found in courageous military action. Myles A. McDonnell, Roman Manliness: Virtus and the Roman Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

44 worship, the civil state, and the military. Shirl Hoffmann notes that while Gentile athletic culture contained many elements anathematic to proto-Christian culture (self- aggrandizement, aggression, etc.), it is “naïve to imagine that [initiants’] conversions brought swift and sweeping changes in their view of sports.”87 Over the next few centuries, church leadership continued to issue prohibitions curtailing their parishioners’ participation in and spectatorship of sport. That these prohibitions were repeatedly issued is a testament to how pervasive and entrenched pagan athletic culture was in early

Christian societies.

The Ambiguity of the Body and the Dangers of Sport Spectacles

As the early Jesus movement began to incorporate a greater number of well- educated pagans, the most prominent spokesmen against Christian involvement in pagan sport referenced the writings of pagan philosophers in their critiques. Yet even those philosophers, who criticized the increasing professionalization of gymnasia athletics, often appropriated athletic language in order to describe nobler pursuits in a familiar cultural language.88 For Plato the true agon (contest) was an internal struggle between the rational demands of the soul and the base desires of the flesh. Stoic philosophers like

Seneca and Plutarch routinely denounced popular entertainments like the games and the racetrack, remarking that the only legitimate and noble contest was the pursuit of self-

87 Shirl J. Hoffman, Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), 24.

88 See Heather L. Reid, Athletics and Philosophy in the Ancient World: Contests of Virture (New York: Routledge, 2011).

45 control amid the whims of fate.89 The Greek root for asceticism, ascesis, was initially a term which referred to the rigorous training regimen of athletes, well before it began to appear in philosophical and religious tracts.90 By the mid-first century CE, Paul’s adoption of agonistic imagery throughout the epistles had already had a substantial legacy in the Hellenized world.91 While concepts like agon, ascesis, and arête connected the struggles of the physical body with the spirit, some pagan philosophers and early

Christian commentators began to divorce these terms from their origins in physical culture.

Greek philosophical dualism also greatly influenced how early church fathers framed the relationship between body and soul. Plato’s juxtaposition the immortal and honorable soul against the temporal and corrupt flesh resonated with many patristic leaders. Basil of Caesarea wrote, “Whoever does not want to bury himself in the mud of sensual desire must despise the body in general.”92 The Neo-Platonist Origen of

Alexandria reasoned that souls became trapped in flesh in a manner of degrees the further away they fell from God.93 Ambrose of Milan suggested that the soul seeks “to escape

89 Victor C. Pfitzner, “We are the Champions! Origins and Developments of the Image of God’s Athletes,” in Sport and Spirituality, ed. Gordon Preece and Rob Hess (Adelaide: ATF Press, 2006), 49-64.

90 See Sport and Religion, ed. Shirl J. Hoffman (Champaign: Human Kinetics, 1992).

91 Terms like agon, agones, and arête are frequently invoked by Paul as metaphors of Christian life and the struggles of the faith. Victor C. Pfitzner, “Was St. Paul a Sports Enthusiast? Realism and Rhetorical in Pauline Athletic Metaphors,” in Sport and Christianity: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Nick Watson and Andrew Parker (London: Routledge, 2013), 89-111.

92 Quoted in Alois Koch, “Biblical and Patristic Foundations for Sports,” in Sport and Christianity: A Sign of the Times in the Light of Faith, ed. Kevin Lixey, Christoph Hübenthal, and Dietmar Mieth (Pittsboro: Catholic University Press of America, 2012), 91.

93 Origen, On First Principles, 2.8.3, trans. A. Tripolitis, The Doctrine of the Soul in the Thought of Plotinus and Origen (New York: Libra, 1978), 106.

46 from this prison of the body.”94 However, body-positive language is also frequently present in patristic literature written against the various Gnostic movements which competed for dominance in Asia Minor and North Africa. The homilies and writings of

Tertullian in Carthage, Cyril in Jerusalem, and John Chrysostom in Constantinople contain multiple passages that speak highly of the flesh as a thing of the Creator.95 The uncertain place of the body found in the extant ecclesial literature of both Latin and

Greek speaking regions exhibits the difficulties church leaders experienced as they attempted to honor the legacy of the martyrs while simultaneously discrediting the several Gnostic traditions proliferating around the Mediterranean.96

While early church leaders continued to debate the relation of body and soul, they were virtually united in their condemnation of spectacles as equally injurious to the souls of spectators as the events themselves were to the bodies of participants. Even church fathers with a generally positive view of the body chastised the popular entertainments in which those bodies were displayed. John Chrysostom’s On the Holy Martyrs began with the lament that his community was more interested in the “unnatural spectacles” of the theatre (where gladiatorial contests were sometimes held) and the racetrack, wherein

94 Quoted in Koch, “Biblical and Patristic Foundations for Sports,” 92.

95 Ibid.

96 Platonic dualism survived well beyond this era. The 15th century theologian Desiderius Erasmus’s On the Contempt of the World claimed, “The body is earthly, wild, slow, mortal, diseased, ignoble; the soul on the other hand is heavenly, subtle, divine, immortal and noble.” Such attitudes are well rooted in official Christian doctrine and have their biblical basis in the Pauline literature. Desiderius Erasmus, Contemptus Mundi, trans. D. Stanley Eitzen and George H. Sage, “Sport and Religion,” in Religion and Sport: The Meeting of Sacred and Profane, ed. Charles Prebish (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1993), 85.

47 there is “devilish pageantry,” where “demons leap” and there is a “loss of souls.”97

Tertullian singled out the hippodrome as a “spectacle [that] drives out sound morality and invites childish factiousness.”98 Theodore of Mopsuestia advised spiritual novices to turn away from “the circus, the racecourse, the contests of athletes… which the Devil introduced into the world under the pretext of amusement, and through which he leads the souls of men into perdition.”99 One of the more revealing records concerning the dangers of sport spectacle is that of Augustine in his Confessions. His friend Alypius had

“been inveigled (deceived) into the madness of the gladiatorial games,” until Augustine succeeded in convincing his friend to turn away from them. But Alypius, dragged back to the games in Rome by his friends, eventually backslid. After hearing the roar of the crowd cheering that a combatant fell, Alypius’s soul “fell more miserably than did that gladiator at whose fall the shout was raised.”100 Augustine’s horror was not solely that the games were exceptionally violent, but that the violence of the spectacle powerfully altered the disposition of his friend from a man with an “excellent mind” to one

“delighted in that evil struggle” and blood drunk.101 Augustine’s emphases in recounting this event suggests that he, like other church leaders, were less concerned with the

97 John Chrysostom, On the Holy Martyrs, 1, in ‘Let Us Die that We May Live’: Greek homilies on Christian martyrs from Asia Minor, Palestine and Syria, ed. Johan Leemans, et al. (New York: Routledge Press, 2003), 117.

98 Quoted in Shirl J. Hoffman, “Harvesting Souls in the Stadium: The Rise of Sports Evangelism,” in Sport and Christianity: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Nick Watson and Andrew Parker (New York: Routledge, 2013), 131.

99 Ibid.

100 Augustine, Confessions, VI.viii, trans. John K. Ryan (New York: Image Books, 1960).

101 Ibid.

48 dangers these contests posed for the lives of the participants than for the threats they posed for the souls of the men and women in the stands.

Church leaders spoke of popular entertainments in such derogatory terms for other reasons, not least of which was that many sports festivals in antiquity were held in honor of pagan gods or pagan rulers who were subsequently deified. However, ecclesial leaders also denounced these entertainments because they competed for the attention of parishioners. The yearly paneguris, or martyr’s festival, was as much a social occasion as a spiritual one. People could mingle freely with others whom they might rarely encounter in daily life, clerics from the region would gather and discuss ecclesial politics, and the martyria (relics) would be displayed and paraded around town. In homilies for these events, bishops occasionally infused sport language, consecrating the martyrs as God’s true athletes (for they had won the true prize, athlon).102 Considering the population influx which accompanied these celebrations, the presence of games and theatrical entertainments was to be expected. John Chrysostom and other preachers in antiquity competed with the theatre, the hippodrome, and the coliseums for the attention of the cities during these festivals. A modern Christian cleric feeling the pressure to end Sunday services before a noon kick-off understands John Chrysostom’s plight.

Competing ideologies of Christian masculinity in late Antiquity further complicated the relationship between institutional church and sport. As Matthew Kuefler has persuasively argued, masculinity in late Roman society (200-450) underwent a series of shifts, eventually favoring emerging Christian conceptions of masculinity at the

102 See Koch, “Biblical and Patristic Foundations for Sports.”

49 expense of traditional Roman definitions.103 Whereas Roman culture had historically privileged military success in its formation of masculine identity, the empire itself was facing immanent military threats from which it was ill-prepared to defend itself.

Achieving victory over an opponent, on the battlefield or in the arena, was an increasingly rare opportunity for men to prove their manliness. Kuefler suggests that as

Christianity became the dominant religion throughout the Roman Empire, ecclesial leaders began to show ambivalence towards military service, reflecting differing ideals of

Christian masculinity. While military identity was a sign of Roman manliness, the orthodox model of Christian manliness was built around patientia (from the root patiri

‘to endure, suffer, submit to’). Thus early church leaders looked to the martyrs as their sources of inspiration, not to military victors. Tertullian called this patientia “the height of virtue and manliness.”104 Christian men of the latter centuries of the Western Roman

Empire lived somewhere between these poles of Roman militarism and Christian victimhood.

The combination of a generally apocalyptic vision of the future, the legacy of martyrdom, the prevalence of Neo-Platonic and Stoic philosophy in early Christian thought, a general derisiveness toward pagan culture, the jealousy some ecclesiastics showed toward the popularity of pagan spectacles, and an outright rejection of pagan religiosity powerfully influenced Christian orthodoxy regarding sport. Yet despite the wishes of these luminaries, gladiatorial matches, chariot races, wrestling matches,

103 Matthew Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

104 Quoted in Matthew Kuefler, “Soldiers of Christ: Christian Masculinity and Militarism in Late Antiquity,” in Men and Masculinities in Christianity and Judaism: A Critical Reader, ed. Björn Krondorfer (London: Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd., 2009), p. 242.

50 pankration, and other pagan events continued to draw Christian audiences. In the church, martyrs were valorized for their willful disregard for their bodies, and worship rituals venerated their remains as the material artifacts of past hierophanies. Yet nearby, the veneration of athletic heroes, whose living bodies were also prominently displayed, continued strongly in stadia and hippodromes across the Mediterranean. While many church fathers found these forms of worship antithetical to one another, it appears that much of the laity had little issue with participating in both.

Despite the increasing Christianization of the Roman Empire, the gladiatorial games were not officially abolished until Honorius’s imperial decree of 404. Even then, the bans were less a matter of increased morality among the citizenry and more a matter of shrinking imperial coffers. The spectacles were a pricey affair, and the depleted shell of western Roman government was unable to enslave the war captives who were the bulk stock of the spectacles. In time, both ecclesial and political power were consolidated at

Byzantium and the administrative elements of the Western empire crumbled. Cities like

Rome and Athens, once proud centers of pagan athletic festivals and lavish spectacles, fell to successive waves of attacks from barbarian tribes. The athletic and entertainment cultures for which the Greeks and Romans had been known did not meet their end because of ecclesial pressure, but because of financial hardship and political expediency.

Alaric’s hordes had a much greater role in the demise of pagan culture than ever did the church fathers.

51 Selective Adoption of Sport and Games in the Middle Ages

Mediterranean urban spectacles were not easily adapted to the rural environs of

Brittania, Gallia, or Germania. What presence pagan track and field events and gladiatorial games had in these areas previously disappeared along with the imperial administrators following the destruction of Rome. Filling the vacuum were the numerous ballgames that had pre-dated the Roman presence. Like the sports of the Romans, these ballgames had their origins in religious rites of the people of Gaul and Germania. During the Middle Ages of Western Europe (c. 400-1500), monks, nuns, priests, and bishops began a process of selectively adapting and incorporating many of these in response to the shifting needs of the church, including the conversion of native heathen populations and the defense of church property from aggressors.

In Gaul, ballgames of various sorts were organized by clerical leaders in order to alleviate the boredom of monastic life and to aid in preparation for battle. Around 465,

Sidonius Apollinaris of Clermont (a head monk who would eventually become bishop) ended worship by organizing a two-team ballgame wherein the teams played a combination of keep-away, dodgeball, and football. Contestants from one side would try to throw the ball over the heads of opposite teams, or hit them with the balls, or charge their opponents, who in turn tried to catch or dodge the balls while also parrying advancing attacks. In the words of the bishop, the game helped rid him of “that sluggishness which inevitably results from my sedentary occupation.”105 The monks (and possibly nuns) in attendance played rough, as Apollinaris also recorded that participants sometimes suffered from internal inflammation, shortness of breath, and sharp pains in

105 Quoted in William J. Baker, Sports in the Western World (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982), 44.

52 the sides, apparently the result of being pelted with the ball or from being tackled by the other team.106 That religious orders played such a rough game suggests that local ecclesial leaders found merit in the danger. Competitive games like this provided monks and nuns with opportunities to improve their stamina and quickness of reflexes while also testing one another’s pain thresholds. Yet the game was also a physical training exercise for the rigors of combat. Shortly after his appointment to the post (c. 471), Apollinaris organized the city’s defenses against the advancing army of the Visigoth king Euric. In a time of close-quarters combat, Apollinaris trained men and women under his command to dodge advancing attackers and projectiles, as well as how to land attacks of their own.

Such skills were obviously useful, even as Euric’s army eventually conquered Clermont and imprisoned Apollinaris.

Elsewhere in northern Europe, regional ball games were incorporated into worship in an effort to convince recent converts to attend church more frequently. In

Germania in the 4th and 5th centuries, monks introduced kegels, a form of competitive bowling using wooden balls to knock over a target(s), into the halls of German monasteries and into worship, infusing the game with a Christianized sacred significance.107 Monks would set a club upright on one side of the sanctuary and would have parishioners roll balls at the target. Priests instructed neophytes that the target

(called a heathen) represented “the devil” and that if a bowler had knocked it down that their soul would be cleansed of sins.108 If they missed, they’d have to try harder. This

106 Apollinaris, Epistula, V.xvii, trans. O.M. Dalton (1915) vol. 2, pp. 48-78. Accessed August 21, 2016, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/pearse/morefathers/files/sidonius_letters_05book5.htm.

107 A kegel was the club that monks carried with them for protection.

108 See Baker, Sports in the Western World, 44. 53 strategy of selective integration of leisure activities may have successfully aided the monks in their proselytizing mission among the Germanic peoples.

As the church began to expand its influence into territories which had previously been under Roman occupation, influential figures began to struggle with how best to integrate new cultures and customs into the fold. Conversion targets had their own rituals, customs, and recreations, institutions which had the power of perseverance. In 601, Pope

Gregory advised church missionaries to integrate these into regional church practices, changing them “from the worship of devils to the service of the true God.”109 Thus indigenous ballgames, some of which had originated in local fertility cults, made their way into Roman Christianity and were often celebrated in conjunction with Easter.

According to sports historian Robert Henderson, entrenched pagan customs like the fertility ball games were adopted or otherwise incorporated into Church practice if they could not be uprooted.110 So far as the evangelists were concerned, the destruction of heathen culture was an impractical goal. Rather, missionaries on the frontiers of northern

Gaul found that selective adaptation of local customs and rituals was a more effective strategy for the long-term growth of the body of Christ. Just as heathen sacred spaces were converted into Christian temples, so too had some heathen rites been converted into

Christian ritual.

For the sports of the ruling classes of High medieval society, ecclesial responses reflected the changing political situations of the monastic communities. As the monasteries and nunneries increasingly came under the protection of local rulers,

109 Quoted in Robert W. Henderson, Ball, Bat, and Bishop: The Origin of Ball Games (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 34.

110 Ibid. 54 ecclesial leaders began to renegotiate their stances on certain sporting practices. Initially prone to prohibit Christian participation in more violent sports which local lords championed, many clerics begrudgingly began to permit parishioners to participate in competitions whose militaristic elements were more readily apparent. Hunting for sport, hawking, archery, jousting, and stone throwing – techniques of murder – were initially denounced by many clerics, but overall taken as part of social life in a feudal kingdom which needed soldiers to survive. Singled out for church remonstration were the tournaments. Papal prohibitions against these festivities were issued at the Councils of

Clermont (1130), Reims (1131), the Second Lateran (1139), the Synod of Reims (1148), and the Third Lateran (1179). Historian Richard Kauper suggests that “in clerical eyes these mock wars imperiled soul as well as body, encouraged pride, occasioned the risk of homicide, and, in a more general sense, deflected martial energies better spent on crusade.”111 Yet these prohibitions did little to stop those who had participated in the tournaments prior to taking their monastic vows from participating in them again. This was especially the case where former knights began taking over the bishopric, bringing their love of the tournaments with them to their offices. Odo, the 11th century bishop of

Bayeux, encouraged monks under his command to train in these activities, finding them well suited to his political agenda and to that of his half-brother, William the

Conqueror.112

111 Richard W. Kauper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1999), 80.

112 John Marshall Carter, “Sport, War, and the Three Orders of Feudal Society: 700-1300,” Military Affairs, 49 (1985): 132-139. Of course, falconry was a skill largely divorced from physicality.

55 Following the medieval church’s pattern of selective authorization, clerical prohibitions of the tournaments eventually gave way to popular sentiment. Yet ultimately the decision to permit tournaments was a utilitarian one. Tournaments provided a place to recruit and train knights for the crusades and engendered popular support for knighthood.

The church also benefitted from the evangelism of religious knights and the offertory revenue that flowed into the coffers of parishes which hosted such contests.113 Bernard of

Clairvaux, himself the son of a knight, said that like the Crusades, the tournaments attracted “the mighty men of valour,”114 men whose martial exploits could best be put toward pushing back Muslim populations from Spain and Eastern Europe. In keeping with similar moments before and after the medieval era, ecclesial figures legitimated sporting contests they had previously discouraged when those contests’ financial and evangelistic potential could be demonstrated. Thus sports were rationalized for their militaristic value and as tests of masculine courage. Infused with evangelism, militarism, money, and ideals of masculinity, the medieval tournament became a standard example of the pattern of rebuke and selective authorization that defines much of the history of the

Christian-sport relationship.

As the Middle Ages continued, church parishes, monasteries, and nunneries increasingly began to subsidize physical exercise by providing both time and space for community members to play at their games. Church leadership offered sporting opportunities by providing time and space for lawful recreation. By organizing time into

113 Hoffman, Good Game, 50-55.

114 St. Bernard, Letters of St. Bernard, 405, 452, trans. Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades: 1095-1588 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 167. In whipping up popular support for the crusades, Bernard proclaimed “Show yourself in the fight. If Christ recognizes you in battle he will recognize you… on the Last Day.” Quoted in G.R. Evans, Bernard of Clairvaux (New York: Oxford University Press), 24.

56 a series of Sunday reprieves from labor, recurrent saints holidays, and seasonal holy days such as Shrove Tuesday, Easter, the end of the harvest, and Christmas, church leadership gave official blessing to leisure, something which regional lords had come to accept as a necessary outlet for peasant energies not consumed by labor. Churchyards and cloisters were frequently the largest expanses of land in a village, making them ideal homes for some communal leisure activities. Games requiring large tracks of land, such as tennis or football, were organized largely on church property, often played on Sunday afternoons following services.

Often times peasant sports were viewed as a necessary distraction from labor. Yet competitive ballgames, particularly those between small communities like parishes, also provided opportunities through which laborers could demonstrate their superiority over the men of their neighboring communities. At Derby, England, Shrove Tuesday football games (using a stuffed pig’s bladder) were highly anticipated events which provided the opportunity to earn communal bragging rights. The peasant parishes of St. Peter’s and All

Saints competed with one another in a game with few rules and no limits on the number of participants. Each parish’s team would try to kick, carry, or throw the ball toward the opponent’s goal in each parish, separated by three miles of township, all of which constituted the field of play.115 Drunk with the pre-Lenten festival spirit (and not a little alcohol), team members were often brutally violent toward one another, sometimes going so far as to kill competitors.116 The town’s women, children, and men too old to participate often sat on hillsides to watch the game unfold, making it a community-wide

115 For a sketch of a mob football match, please visit the following: https://verbalisti.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/mob-football-in-england.jpg;

116 Baker, Sports in the Western World, 48; Henderson, Ball, Bat, Bishop, 79-82.

57 spectator sport as well. In front of those on-lookers, men competed in an often violent and unregulated spectacle in displays of masculine strength and endurance, not solely their own, but also that of the parish itself.

Not every cleric approved of the game, and some offered cautious warning against the damage football could cause to both body and soul. For example, in 1440 the

Bishop of Tréguier denounced la soule (a French equivalent) as a pernicious game which engendered “bad feeling, ill will, and animosity” under the auspices of recreation, and subsequently threatened participants with excommunication.117 Both French and English clerics attempted to have the game banned because of the damage frequently caused to church property. Other bans on the sport were issued by heads of state in favor of sports better adapted to militaristic purposes, such as archery. In any event, prohibitions issued from pulpit or throne did seemingly little to curb the popularity of the sport even if it might have curbed participation.118 Another reason for the persistence of the games despite the official bans was that local parish leaders had incentives to perpetuate them.

The games played on parochial lands, including Shrove Tuesday matches, brought many potential donors to villages, and the funds raised during the festivals which accompanied the contests were among the largest sources of revenue for the village parishes.119 Thus local priests were not necessarily inclined to obey their superiors.

117 Quoted in Edward Brooke-Hitching, Fox Tossing and Other Forgotten and Dangerous Sports, Pastimes, and Games (New York: Touchstone, 2015), 151.

118 See Derek Birley, Sport and the Making of Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 26-47.

119 See Hoffman, Good Game, 62.

58 The Protestant Male Body in Leisure and Labor

The medieval Christian trend favoring athletic contests with clear utilitarian purposes continued well into the Reformation era. For many of the Reformers, sport and recreation were illegitimate if autotelic (done for the sake of itself). Games were primarily permissible to the extent that they shaped the bodies of the participants and prepared them for something better. Yet some activities were permitted by continental reformers solely on the grounds that they were the popular pastimes of the people. Swiss theologian Ulrich Zwingli authorized sport and games in youth education so long as they served to train body and mind. Running, jumping, wrestling, stone throwing and shot put were permitted because they were popular among the Swiss ancestors and because “they

[were] very useful for some purposes.”120 Luther seemed to approve of these activities insofar as they provided an alternative to drinking and licentiousness, sins which corrupted the body as well as the soul.121 Yet in his personal life Luther also apparently enjoyed the simple pleasure of a game of bowling (kegels) with friends. While Luther retained the old monastic view of the game as an exercise in which he was metaphorically striking the devil, he also enjoyed the jesting of his bowling partners when he would miss the targets and took his own turn at calling them out.122 And John

Calvin, though suspicious of idle-running and other activities without much purpose, himself threw darts, played the ring-tossing game of quoits, and bowled, all of which

120 Ulrich Zwingli, The Christian Education of Youth, trans. Alcide Reichenbach (Collegeville: Thompson Brothers, 1899), 91. https://archive.org/details/christianeducati00zwin

121 Luther: “The ultimate objective [of sports] is to keep us from lapsing into other activities - drinking, wenching, gambling…” Quoted in Hoffman, Good Game, 74.

122 Baker, Playing With God, 15; Ewald Plass, This is Luther: A Character Study (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1948), 37-38.

59 were pastimes which had historically been popular in Geneva.123 Thus the utilitarian standard for evaluating the legitimacy of entertainments was met by an equally strong desire to legitimate those activities in which the reformers themselves took pleasure.

This utilitarian standard was enforced more strongly in other Protestant territories, most notably in England. The issue of Sabbatarianism had become increasingly polemical since the reign of Elizabeth, and the relationship of the Sabbath to bodily health was at the center of these debates. Puritans and Anglicans tended to agree that one principle aim of the Sabbath was the restoration of the body in preparation for labor. Puritan Philip

Stubbes argued that Sunday rest was partially ordained in order that “every Christian man might repose himself from corporeal labour,” without which “there is not anything durable, or able to continue long.”124 For this Stubbes argued that the games and entertainments which had traditionally followed Sunday worship ought to be banned in the kingdom. While many Anglicans agreed that this was the purpose of the Sabbath, they often asserted that traditional forms of recreation aided in the process. King James’s

1618 Book of Sports insisted that “lawful recreations and honest exercises” ought not be curtailed on Sunday in part because they reinvigorated the body. By official decree, men and women were not to be denied running, leaping, fencing, vaulting, wrestling, or dancing. King James was also keen on the utility of sport and games as a safety valve of social energy. He observed, “if these times were taken from them, the meaner (read: rougher, less socially respectable) sort that labour hard all week should have no

123 Hoffman, Good Game, 76.

124 Quoted in Heasim Sul, “The King’s Book of Sports: The Nature of Leisure in Modern England,” International Journal of the History of Sport 17 (2000): 168.

60 recreations at all to refresh their spirits.”125 In the king’s autocratic state, bodily exercise and games were commendable for preventing idleness. The political usefulness of sport as a mechanism of social control, and the economic utility of an occupied and physically productive citizenry, greatly influenced the official licensure of particular sports in Stuart

England.

English colonizers, steeped in a sporting culture with a preference for activities which aided in the performance of labor, brought this utilitarian approach with them to the Americas. Nearly every colony passed some Sabbatarian law, and colonial ministers from William Bradford to Cotton Mather spoke out against idle play, especially on religious holidays. Certainly part of their protests was to distance their communities from the pagan and Catholic influence they perceived in the games played on holy days, such as Shrove Tuesday football matches.126 Holy time was to be protected from the worldly affair of sport. A 17th century writer in the Congregationalist New Englander lamented the misplaced energies of his fellow pilgrims: “Let us all remember that we were sent into this world, not for sport and amusement, but for labor; not to enjoy and please ourselves, but to serve and glorify God, and be useful to our fellow men.”127 The 1739

Resolution of the Annual Meeting of the Society of Friends humbly beseeched the youth to avoid the frivolity of the “wicked pastimes with which this age aboundeth” as contrary

125 Quoted in Sul, “The King’s Book of Sports,” 169.

126 See Thomas L. Altherr, Sport in North America: A Documentary History, Vol. 1, Part I – Sports in the Colonial Era, 1618-1783, ed. Thomas Altherr, et al. (Gulf Breeze: Academic International Press, 1977), xxxviii-xli; 4-12.

127 Quoted in Eitzen and Sage, “Sport and Religion,” 88.

61 to the doctrine of the gospel.128 Max Weber succinctly summed up the philosophical undercurrent of Protestantism when he said that, for Protestants, “Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins.”129 That labor was preferable to leisure in the minds of many Protestant theologians necessarily meant that leisure pursuits had to be justified on the grounds that they better prepared one to perform laborious tasks.

However, the sporting culture of Southern colonial America was different. The lack of a centralized religious authority to police recreation led to a less restrictive approach toward many pastimes. In the Anglican Chesapeake region, plantation owners, royal governors, and others of the gentry class held contests in targeting, wrestling, running, and cudgeling among themselves. The games and their prizes – swords, rifles, boots, saddles, and money – continued to valorize those contests whose martial utility and hence masculinity was self-evident.130 These games also provided a space wherein the landed gentlemen could display their conformity to an elite standard of masculinity increasingly (but not completely) removed from manual labor while retaining significant emphasis upon physical prowess. However, the creation of unofficial competition tiers within these games based upon social status curtailed the possibilities for lower-class males to upstage their wealthier neighbors.131 By the 18th century, the landed gentry had

128 Resolution of the Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends, c. 1739, in Society of Friends, The Book of Discipline Agreed on by the Yearly-Meeting of Friends for New-England (Providence: John Carter, 1785), 135. In Altherr, Sports in North America, Vol. 1, part I, 16-17.

129 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Routledge Press, 2005 [1930]), 147.

130 See Nancy Struna, People of Prowess: Sport, Leisure, and Labor in Early Anglo-America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 114-115.

131 These tiers operated like weight classes in boxing. While designed ostensibly for the protection of competitors on the lower end of the register, the tiers also prevent smaller competitors from embarrassing larger opponents. The social tier ranking system of some Southern sports operated similarly, preventing poor men, indentured servants, and slaves from besting the men of Southern aristocracy. 62 developed its own more genteel forms of lower-class contests, replacing cudgeling and gouging (a no-holds barred competition which frequently ended with competitors ripping eachother’s eyes out or ears off, or biting off a nose) with the more formalized boxing and dueling. These contests were popularly construed as tests of one’s internal grit, framed as a superior substitute for brute force.132 These divisions of participants and contests by social status aided in snuffing out the games’ subversive potential in the colonial era.

The colonial and Revolutionary periods also provided more sporting opportunities for males than females. Of course women were occasional participants in games of sustenance such as hunting and fishing, swam, or played less demanding sports like badminton. Ezra Stiles, President of Yale, noted that women competed in spinning matches, and other sources point to footraces for articles of clothing.133 Despite these and similar scant references, sport (at least competitively) was most often considered a masculine provenance. Few primary sources from the period mention female spectators.134 Less reputable women may have been found in the taverns where blood sport exhibitions took place, but moral women were expected and implored to avoid such places. Cultural norms often curtailed women’s participation in strenuous athletic

132 Gouging is among the most brutal of sports of human history. One British historian surveying post-Revolutionary America describes the fighting strategy thusly: “The delicate and entertaining diversion, with propriety called gouging, is thus performed. When two boxers are wearied with fighting and bruising each other, they come, as it is called, to close quarters, and each endeavours to twist his fore- fingers in the ear-locks of his antagonist. When these are fast clenched, the thumbs are extended each way to the nose, and the eyes gently turned out of their sockets. The victor, for his expertness, receives shouts of applause from the sportive throng; while his poor eyeless antagonist is laughed at for his misfortune.” Eneas Mackenzie, An Historical, Topographical, and Descriptive View of the United States of America, and of Upper and Lower Canada, 2nd ed. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Mackenzie and Dent, 1819), 241-242. In Altherr, Sport in North America, Vol. 1, Part II, Sports in the New Republic, 1784-1820, 128.

133 Stiles, quoted in Altherr, Sport in North America, Vol. 1, Part I, 19.

134 Altherr, Sport in North America, Vol. 1, Part I, xli.

63 activities, and religious norms of modesty often prevented them from being spectators at events wherein male bodies might be prominently displayed.

The prohibitions against excessive leisure in recreation raised by the Reformers reappeared at the dawn of America’ first Great Awakening. The great evangelist George

Whitefield criticized what defenders called their “innocent diversions” and what

Whitefield called “contrary to the whole tenor of the Gospel of Christ.”135 Dancing, the theater, and other such diversions were anathema to Whitefield. Yet, as biographer Harry

Stout has amply demonstrated, Whitefield’s disdain for such frivolities often came from his familiarity with them, particularly the theater, whose techniques and trappings he adopted with skill, paving the way for future evangelists to co-opt popular culture toward missiological ends.136 Despite Whitefield’s unprecedented influence and success as an itinerant preacher in the colonies, such diversions remained popular throughout the 18th century. So long as sport and games could be shown to be healthful or otherwise purposeful, they would have a place in American life. Essayist Joseph Lathrop’s c. 1786 apology on the subject is representative of popular sentiment: “Diversions well chosen, not only afford present refreshment to body and mind, but contribute to the heath and vigour of both, and consequently increase our happiness and usefulness.”137 The desire to balance recreation with labor persisted well beyond the revolutionary period, and would frame much of what was to develop within Victorian American physical culture.

135 Quoted in Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1977), 145.

136 Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1991).

137 Joseph Lathrop, A Miscellaneous Collection of Original Pieces. Poetical, Moral and Entertaining (Springfield: John Russell, 1786), 53. In Altherr, Sport in North America, Vol. 1, Part II, 5.

64 Manliness and Social Reform in the Muscular Christian Movement

As I discussed earlier in the introduction, the genesis of English muscular

Christianity was partially a response to a perceived ‘crisis of masculinity’ in the Victorian era. In reaction to growing fears of effeminacy within the Anglican Church, concern for the deplorable health conditions of the rapidly expanding centers of industrial urbanization, anxieties regarding an ever-increasing immigrant population and the degenerative effects of managerial labor, first generation muscular Christians like

Kingsley and Hughes argued that the sons of Britain’s Protestant middle-class should be raised in a manner that would make them robust men of faith who had the physical and moral strength to respond to these several crises and who could be successfully integrated into Britain’s imperial operations.138

It is impossible to over-estimate how important the physical body was for this generation. As Hall notes, the sexually and racially charged “anxieties evident in muscular Christian texts” were “often manifested through images of the body as a site of socio-political conflict.”139 Synecdochically, the bodies of young white middle-class males represented the body politic in muscular Christian literature. Thus the development of strong bodies became a central component of a middle-class Anglophone strategy for attaining and retaining dominance of the public sphere amid an ever-changing social landscape. The pedagogical structure in which these young men would grow into the

138 For a discussion of these various anxieties, particularly as they related to gender, racial, religious, and economic concerns, see Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Donald Hall, Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

139 Hall, Muscular Christianity, i.

65 leaders of tomorrow was physical activity, especially the socializing activities of competitive athletics.

For early muscular Christians, boys’ physical training was the regimen which led to manliness, morality, health, and patriotism. For muscular Christians, the spirit was not made flesh, “the flesh [was] made spirit.”140 Prominent in Victorian physiognomy was the belief that a person’s character followed from their physical condition, a belief that reinforced racial and gender hierarchies already present in English society and legitimated racist and sexist sentiments. Sport was the training ground for all the life lessons middle-class Anglo-Saxon English boys would need in order to fulfill their destiny as masters of the world. Kingsley stated this plainly:

Games conduce not merely to physical but to moral health; that in the playing fields boys acquire virtues which no books can give them; not merely daring and endurance, but, better still, temper, self-restraint, fairness, honour, unenvious approbation of another’s success, and all that ‘give and take’ of life.141

The Christianization of such lower-class sports like boxing would also have the added bonus of attracting others to the faith, if they were framed appropriately.142 By asserting the manliness of Anglicanism and Anglicanism’s approval of manly activities,

140 Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 224.

141 Charles Kingsley, Health and Education, 2nd edition (New York: Macmillan and Company, 1887), 86.

142 By Christianization, I mean the attempts to make the games safer through the institution of new regulations and safety equipment. The rules and customs governing boxing, for example, had to undergo significant revision before they were deemed acceptable for middle-class boys. Published in 1867, the rules established by John Douglas, ninth Marquess of Queensberry, became the standard still employed today. These rules limited the time of the match (which previously could have been indefinite or to the point of death), the three-minute round with a one minute break, and the mandatory use of gloves. These were considered significant advances in making boxing acceptable to the aristocratic (and eventually, middle) classes of England. The “Christianization” of boxing in some ways reflects the attempts to Christianize the medieval tournament through the development of the round-tipped and shatter-prone lance, which theoretically led to less combatants being gouged.

66 Kingsley hoped to attract those rougher men who were presumed to be otherwise beyond the church’s reach. He also suggested that such games produced the best type of male bodies, ones which working class men doing the heavy lifting of the factories already possessed. As one Kingsley scholar noted, the preacher believed “Physical strength, courage and health,” were “attractive, valuable, and useful in themselves and in the eyes of God.”143 Such beliefs led Kingsley to espouse a theology of the body which elevated the muscularity and rough hands of working class men.

The physical ability to violently exert one’s will over an opponent became a central facet of the type of masculinity these men had in mind. Hughes and Carlyle were advocates of those recreations which channeled boyish rambunctiousness into disciplined martial skill, especially boxing. Having a violent disposition, properly guided, was something they considered innate to true manliness. Carlyle believed “Man is created to fight; he is perhaps best of all definable as a born soldier; his life ‘a battle and a march’ under the right General.”144 Hughes concurred, adding “From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is… the real, highest, honest business, of every son of man.”145 The belief that manliness involved fighting for a good cause under the direction of God simultaneously tied the muscular Christian movement to British imperialism and to the faith’s historic legacy of authorizing violence and violent recreations when it became politically expedient.

143 Vance, Sinews of the Spirit, 105.

144 Quoted in David Rosen, “The Volcano and the Cathedral: Muscular Christianity and the Origins of Primal Manliness,” in Hall, Muscular Christianity, 17-44.

145 Ibid. Note Hughes’s use of the “son of man” epitath. This refence to Jesus, Hughes implies, also applies to “real” men of violence. 67 Boxing, which had in the early 19th century been viewed with derision as a rough and tumble low-class activity, began to gain a level of social respectability as the century progressed. Hughes advocated that boxing should be incorporated into the curricula of

English boarding schools and workingmen’s colleges as a useful Christian sport. By training boys in the art of self-defense, by conditioning their physical bodies as well as their mettle, and by providing a simple dramatic schema through which boys could be socialized toward one another, boxing was a crucible through which young men were conditioned for the hierarchical structures of English society: the imperial army, the industrialized and bureaucratized economy, and the Anglican church.146 So widespread was this belief in Victorian England that many public schools and slum missions also established boxing programs in the hopes of teaching boys and adult males inner control and how “to act like a gentleman.”147 Thus both educators and reformers within and outside the muscular Christian movement thought that the future of church, state, and society were absolutely dependent upon the careful nurturing of young boys into robust men of the faith whose bodies were capable of doing the hard labor (and sometimes violent actions) required of both the King of England and the King of Heaven.

The Muscular Christian Male Body in America

By 1880, America’s Northeastern Protestant establishment had begun to adopt some of the English muscular Christian philosophy, adapted to the issues of the region.

146 See Nancy Fix Anderson, The Sporting Life: Victorian Sports and Games (Santa Barbara: Praeger Press, 2010), 82-85.

147 A.B. Cooper, quoted in John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture (Philadelphia: Open University, 2002), 43.

68 Sabbatarian divisions among the Congregationalists continued into the 20th century, violent sports continued to be shunned, and the gambling and drinking often accompanying sport spectacles continued to cast a sinful shadow upon certain aspects of sport culture. And yet, an increasing number of ecclesial luminaries began to make room for sport in American Christian life. As other Christian leaders had done in the past, those of the late Victorian era increasingly adopted established and emerging forms of athletics under the presumption that sport could serve utilitarian purposes.

However, that is not to suggest that muscular Christianity in America became a carbon copy of its English ancestor. One of the most interesting turns within the development of the American strand of muscular Christian thought was its adoption of the entertainment spirit of the frontier revival.148 Evangelists in the 19th century presented their faith in ways that made it interesting and spellbinding for those who would hear them speak. Revival meetings led by circuit-riding itinerants provided an opportunity for the dispersed peoples of the American frontier communities to gather together to worship, sing popular hymns, and even dance, making the meetings social events as much as worship events.

As the frontier headed westward, much of the revivalist spirit of the camp meetings moved into the cities, where reforms like Charles G. Finney and Lyman

Beecher sought to provide for the souls of the young men who comprised the labor class of industrializing America. Finney defended his innovative methods as “necessary from

148 To be “evangelical” in the 19th century often meant that attested to the individual’s need for a dramatic, personal experience of the salvation of Jesus Christ, often juxtaposed against the strict Calvinist doctrine of predestination. See Donald W. Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1976).

69 time to time to awaken attention and bring the gospel to bear upon the public mind.”149

Beecher, sharing a similar anxiety about the need to provide innovative means of converting urban male youth, looked across the pond for inspiration. The Young Men’s

Christian Association, created in London, England in 1844, came to Boston,

Massachusetts in 1851 thanks largely to the efforts of Beecher, who like his British counterpart George Williams, wanted to provide a place where young men could commune with one another in an active, sanctified environment rather than the taverns and brothels.150

Popular appeal, already a hallmark of revivalism by the post-bellum period, was one the driving factors in the spread of early American muscular Christian enterprises.

Businessman Dwight L. Moody, who brought sales and advertising techniques to urban mass evangelism, used his promotional skills to push the YMCA among Chicago’s youth in the 1850s, eventually becoming president of the Chicago chapter and a regular speaker at YMCA conventions.151 By the end of the century, nearly 77% of all American

YMCA’s had established gymnasium facilities, which were initially built to compete with those facilities which were attached to taverns.152 It seemed evident to YMCA committee

149 Quoted in Joel Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 126.

150 See David Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and the Forerunners, 1870-1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); Tony Ladd and James Mathisen, Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of American Sport (Ada: Baker Books, 1999), 32-38.

151 In 1879, Moody turned down the opportunity to become the national president of the YMCA, claiming that he could not give the job the full effort it deserved while also attending to his other ministries. See Carpenter, Revive Us Again, 126; Ladd and Mathisen, Muscular Christianity, 33-35.

152 Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy, 73-74.

70 members that, if they were going to compete with the city’s centers of vice, they would need to make their own institutions equally as entertaining.

American Muscular Christianity also drew inspiriation from the progressive and utopian visions of middle-class social reformers, buttressed by a postmillennialist attitude which called for the salvation of society itself. The American Red Cross, the Salvation

Army, the Boy Scouts of America, and the American Temperance League were the

Gilded Age children of early and mid-19th century social reform movements such as

William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist efforts and the labors of the early suffragists.

In most of these organizations, the healthy (and usually white male) body was a central ideological concept upon which hopes were fixed. Muscular Christians were not alone in this. As historian Clifford Putney has noted, “many nineteenth-century reformers, first in England, then in America, expressed faith in the power of strenuous activity to overcome the perceived moral defects of urbanization, cultural pluralism, and white-collar work.”153 Manly strength, wrought through physical recreation and athletic competition, was intrinsically linked to social reform in the minds of many reformers and social gospellers, including Dwight L. Moody, Luther Gulick, Josiah Strong, Washington

Gladden, Walter Rauschenbusch, and James Naismith.154 Saving the world of today was a strenuous job that called for Christian men who lived a strenuous life. The maintenance of the general physique of the race required a religion of the body, one which upheld bodily exercise as a means to acquire the physical form necessary for real social work.

Bicycling, gymnastics, rowing, and even the pugilistic arts were now more than pastimes

153 Putney, Muscular Christianity, 45.

154 See Ladd and Mathisen, Muscular Christianity, 32-38; 48-59. Also, Putney, Muscular Christianity, 39-44.

71 – they were the training regimen of a generation of young men (and more than a few women) whose ultimate goal was the production of bodies fit to tackle their society’s most pressing social concerns, interpreted through a white Protestant middle-class lens.

Whereas middle-class boys were encouraged to increase their physical and spiritual manhood through rough sports of football and boxing, middle class women were often steered away from such activities by physical culturalists. While the work of God’s kingdom required strong men with defined musculature, it also required women whose bodies were physically fit to produce offspring. Thus, early American muscular

Christians often prohibited the “fairer” sex from taking part in combat or contact sports for fear of damaging their reproductive organs or which might result in them developing an unwomanly figure. In keeping with the gender binaries of physical culture, women were also ushered towards less strenuous exercises like bodily calisthenics, leisurely bicycling, doubles tennis, and six player basketball. Such activities promoted weight loss without building large amounts of muscle. This division that steered men toward exercises that aided in bulking up and women toward exercises which aided in slimming down has remained an integral part of an American physical culture in which gender and sexual identity are policed through socially prescribing athletic activities, reflecting sex- segregated and classist standards of beauty.

Generally speaking, the structural elements and customs of sport made it a natural venue through which to improve society. Varda Burstyn notes that “as a master narrative of masculinity, sport was able to provide points of identification, masculine regroupment, and symbolic affirmation in a social landscape with constantly changing gender, class,

72 racial, and ethnic relations.”155 The Victorian presumption of the separate spheres of the sexes effectively kept large numbers of women from participating in public activities and from those physical activities deemed too rigorous for their bodies. Ideologically and institutionally, the first organizers of sport effectively ensured that the types of physically activities they would orchestrate and champion would be sex-segregated. It is small wonder that Protestant leaders in U.S. urban communities, deeply concerned with winning the hearts of men, integrated physical activity as a central strategy in their efforts to masculinize an Anglo-Protestant culture they believe had lapsed into effeminacy.

The development of muscular Christianity within the United States was explicitly tied to the education and rearing of young men. In the eyes of many Protestant leaders, physical activity aided mind and soul as much as the body. Influential educational theorists like psychologist G. Stanley Hall and Dr. Luther Gulick advocated for the development of a physical education curriculum that would complement the work being done in the classrooms, identifying physical education as a necessary corollary to mental and moral education. This theory was not new within American culture. Oberlin College, founded by a pair of Presbyterian ministers in 1833, had long advocated for the importance of the physiological training of its students. Influenced by the manual labor schools made popular by Theodore Weld, Oberlin leaders (including the school’s second president, Charles G. Finney) insisted that students’ studies be supplemented by four hours of physical labor, partially to support themselves financially, but primarily to maintain health, living out the college’s motto, “Learning and Labor.”156 G. Stanley Hall

155 Varda Burstyn, The Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics, and the Culture of Sport (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 120.

156 See Ladd and Mathisen, Muscular Christianity, 29-31; Dayton, Evangelical Heritage, 42. 73 aptly summed up his faith in athletics, proclaiming that they supplied “ a splendid motive against all errors and vices which weaken or corrupt the body.”157 Others concerned with the bodies of young men emphasized the importance of exercise to proper gender socialization in different ways. In the second edition of his popular advice book, The

Young Man’s Friend (1865), Daniel Eddy informed parents that, “What mud sills are to a building, muscular development is to manhood.”158 Preacher Moses Coit Tyler similarly affirmed the direct relation between body and soul thusly: “It is as truly a man’s moral duty to have a good digestion, and sweet breath, and strong arms, and stalwart legs, and an erect bearing... as it is to read his Bible, or say his prayers, or love his neighbor as himself.’’159 A widespread philosophy, Anthony Rotundo suggests that the preoccupation with body type and size found in letters and diaries of young men from the era reflect an obsession which he likened to “a Puritan tracing the progress of his soul to grace.”160

Many revivalist churchmen, abolitionists, urban reformers, psychologists and a bevy of other social workers, accompanied by young men themselves, thus shared a common belief in the saving grace of physical exertion.

This trend was reflected institutionally across the nation in a variety of “boys work” organizations. David Macleod and Clifford Putney have noted that the Young

Men’s Christian Association and the Boy Scouts of America were Christianized alternatives to the normal entertainments and vices of city life, especially two other urban

157 Quoted in Steven Overman, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Sport: How Calvinism and capitalism shaped America’s games (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2011), 165.

158 Quoted in Rotundo, American Manhood, 222-223.

159 Quoted in Baker, Playing With God, 37-38.

160 Rotundo, American Manhood, 223.

74 socializing venues, the brothel and the tavern. “Character building agencies,” according to Macleod, were middle-class men’s responses to “concerns about teenage boys of their own social class,” and those which thrived were those which “most faithfully expressed middle-class values and concerns.”161 Duty, hard work, and integrity, values also integral to sport, were taught as the values integral to middle-class Americanism and

Protestantism. These organizations successfully blended patriotism, the spirit of the urban revival, middle-class male anxieties, and Victorian physical culture into formidable and international institutions which advertised their ability to create robust and attractive men for a robust and attractive faith.162 Inter-denominationally, the Men and Religion Forward

Movement (1911-1912) gathered the institutional support of Protestant denominational brotherhoods, the Gideons, the International Sunday School Committee, and YMCAs across the nation to aid them in their attempts to remasculinize Protestantism by bridging the gender gap in church work and attendance.163 Such organizations serve as evidence of the diversity of muscular Christian influence in turn of the century American history.

These attempts to bolster the manliness of boys and the church itself were accompanied by efforts to masculinize the image of Christ. Protestant clerics and laymen in America criticized common images of Christ found in Victorian homes as kitschy and

161 Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy, xiv.

162 Macleod notes that “the best local publicity involved keeping the boys visibly active, thereby demonstrating that boys’ work built masculinity and kept adolescents safely occupied; as presented for public admiration, the boys were to appear bustling and energetic, not passive and effeminate.” Building Character, 172. John Gustav-Wrathall also documents how YMCA’s homosocial environs helped to foster a budding homosexual culture in the cities. John Gustav-Wrathall, Take the Young Stranger by the Hand: Same-sex Relations and the YMCA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

163 Gail Bederman, “The Women Have Had Charge of the Church Work Long Enough’: The Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911-1912 and the Masculinization of Middle-Class Protestantism,” American Quarterly 41 (1989): 432-465.

75 overly effeminate.164 Best-selling author Bruce Barton expressed his perplexion at such images saying:

A physical weakling! Where did they get that idea? Jesus pushed a plane and swung an adze; he was a successful carpenter. He slept out doors and spent his days walking around his favorite lake. His muscles were so strong that when he drove the money-changers out, nobody dared to oppose him!165

Counteracting the prevalence of such images, muscular Christians and theologians sympathetic to the movement began to produce works stressing a reverse imago Dei, a

God made in their image. Hughes’s The Manliness of Christ (1880), Robert Warren

Conant’s The Manly Christ: A New View (1904) and second edition The Virility of Christ

(1915), Harry Emerson Fosdick’s The Manhood of the Master (1911), Jason Pierce’s The

Masculine Power of Christ (1912), Bouck White’s The Call of the Carpenter (1913), and

Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows (1924) presented versions of Jesus more palatable to their sensibilities than those effete, sickly, pale, and thin Christs they so frequently saw in the stained-glass windows of their churches. These works provided literary and artistic alternatives which easily fit within the framework of muscular

Christianity, alternatives which their creators hoped would attract men who had a healthy respect for violence and the use of force.166

164 In the chapter “Christian Kitsch and the Rhetoric of Bad Taste”, Colleen McDannell “explores how categories of gender are used to distinguish art from kitsch and to masculinize Christianity,” successfully arguing that, “art was given characteristics that Western culture defines as masculine: strength, power, nobility. Kitsch became associated with stereotypical feminine qualities: sentimentality, superficiality, and intimacy.” Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 164.

165 Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956 [1924]) prologue, n.p.n.

166 One unintentional consequence of the muscular Christian re-masculinization of Jesus was that their iconography was eventually appropriated by the Ku Klux Klan, among other fraternal orders. As a 1924 edition their national newspaper, Searchlight, put it, the Klan also sought to depict Jesus as “the 76 Like their English counterparts, American muscular Christian leaders championed some violent forms of physical exertion which were taboo but which they viewed as necessary crucibles for boys to healthily develop as men. Some like Bruce Barton believed that the valorization of righteous violence, violence rightly understood, was a pre-existent component of the Christianity of young boys:

Who of us does not remember the fine thrill of appreciation with which he welcomed Samson into his list of heroes – and David? They were regular men’s men: we knew how they felt and what they struggled against. When they killed a lion or a giant, or wiped out an army, they had our admiration, every bit of it. There were real flesh and blood men and we liked them.167

In other words, it was presumed that healthy, well-socialized boys had an innate taste for and infatuation with violence from a young age. G. Stanley Hall, in his capacity as a prominent psychologist, insisted that boyish energy would inevitably lead city boys along the treacherous path to hooliganism and gang activity if not given a proper channel for release. Considering it the safer alternative, Hall advised that young men take up boxing, which he claimed was a gentlemanly sport appropriate for middle-class boys. In defense of Hall’s position, the Episcopal Bishop Samuel Fallows also publicly argued that boxing was an environment in which boys could express their violent “inherited proclivities,” without which they would not develop the strong bodies and internal dispositions necessary to do moral battle.168 Pugilism was, in the words of YMCA Boys’ Secretary

Edgar Robinson, “positive righteousness physically expressed.”169

unflinching, accomplishing, achieving Christ, because he was the purposeful, steadfast, determined Christ.” Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 196.

167 Bruce Barton, A Young Man’s Jesus (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1914), ix-xi.

168 Quoted in Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 100.

169 Quoted in Putney, Muscular Christianity, 170. 77 Other leaders maintained their opposition to boxing and other contact sports. The concurrent rise of professionalization and urbanization had also led to a resurrection of sport as a public spectacle, and numerous educators, psychologists, and clerics expressed their anxiousness concerning what effects a steady diet of the images and tales of violent spectacles might engender in the audience. Dudley Sargent, one of the most prominent champions of physical education of his era, lamented that increased media attention was only abetting the moral decline he perceived in professionalized sport. “When a newspaper devotes three columns of its valuable space to a detailed report of a ‘fistic encounter,’ and a few editorial lines to moralizing upon it, a hundred will read the report where one will read the homily.”170 Sargent and others observed that the simultaneous increase of professionalization and publicity of sport was often accompanied by an increased level of violence in the contests as well as increase in the extent to which spectators viewed this as a measure of a worthy match. Nevertheless, such activities found friends in the pulpits and schoolyards across the Northeast and Midwest.

This zeal for violent sport fed into the muscular Christian support for the Great

War, which provided, in the eyes of many Protestant leaders, an “opportunity to redeem the world by force.”171 Though not every muscular Christian was hawkish (for instance,

Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch were known for their pacifism), many believed that the war against the Germans was a moment for collective righteousness wherein Christian men could engage in virtuous violence befitting their faith. War elevated those “male virtues” which Hall and others believed were stifled by mothers and

170 Dudley Sargent, Title Unknown, The American Journal of Social Science 20 (1884), 87-90. Quoted in Altheer, Sports in North America, Vol. 5 – Sports Organized, 1880-1920, 35.

171 Putney, Muscular Christianity, 162.

78 sisters in the home.172 Furthermore, the Great War also marked the first large-scale government effort to regulate the bodily health of American males. Compulsory military service and training turned artisans, bakers, and factory laborers into able-bodied men of soldiery. Basic training was an orchestrated government effort to purge flabbiness and brittleness from male bodies. In theory, these men armed with moral muscle could fight what YMCA missionary Sherwood Eddy called “a war to end war, to protect womanhood, [and] to destroy militarism and autocracy.”173 Fighting, rightly understood and rightly carried out, was the responsibility of every Christian male during this time of tribulation.

By the end of the Great War, muscular Christianity had fallen out of favor with church leaders, at least in Protestant New England. The realities of trench warfare refuted much of muscular Christianity’s linkage between muscle, moral health, and God’s favor.

The experiences of the doughboys resoundingly confirmed that physical fitness and large muscles were not synonymous with moral health, and the harsh tutelage of trench warfare demonstrated that neither muscles nor morals could save an individual from the ingenious, horrific methods of murder developed in continental Europe. Even though the

Inter-Allied Games organized following the war’s end carried the hope that peace could be promoted through “an athletic program shot with ideal of American democracy, virtuous manhood, and Christianity,”174 that muscular Christian message had lost currency among most soldiers as they returned home. Although the assumption of white

172 Putney, Muscular Christianity, 162-194.

173 Quoted in Putney, Muscular Christianity, 192.

174 Seth Dowland, “War, sports, and the construction of masculinity in American Christianity,” Religion Compass 5 (2011), 355.

79 male physical superiority over minorities persists long afterwards, African American Jack

Johnson’s boxing victories over Bob Fitzsimmons (1907) and Jim Jeffries (1910) had already undermined that racist sentiment. By the 1920s, boxing had fallen out of favor among middle-class Protestants, increasingly becoming a sport dominated by African-

American, Irish Catholic immigrant, and second generation urban Jewish men. Baseball’s

1919 Chicago “Black Sox” scandal, wherein members of the team were accused of intentionally throwing the World Series for money, was a sensationalized rebuttal of the belief that participation in sport enhanced morality.175 As Niebuhrian neo-orthodox theology came into vogue in liberal Protestant circles, and as more apocalypse-oriented

Anglo-American Protestants came to question the ultimate efficacy of human reform efforts, the progress era’s faith in the salvific capabilities of Christianized men withered.

Sports Evangelism in the Age of Mass Culture

The period from the 1920s through the mid-1940s was a time of significant change within American Protestant physical culture. Muscular Christianity’s commitment to improving moral and physical well-being through rigorous programs designed to create robust men of the faith, which had been the ideological support for Christian athletics, had fallen out of vogue. Furthermore, the social welfare and urban renewal programs that had preceded and those that were born of the muscular Christian impulse were increasingly secularized. And yet, despite a growing suspicion of human reform efforts among conservative Protestants, many were “still haunted by the idea that they

175 Many American Christians blamed the Jewish immigrant community of having a hand in rigging the World Series. See Michael Alexander, Jazz Age Jews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 48-54. 80 still had a responsible social role to play”176 in reshaping American society. And, even though the events of the Great War spurred speculation about the immanent apocalypse among “radical evangelicals”177 and early fundamentalists, they did not wholly abandon their desires to reform the nation through individual, pietistic solutions to social problems.178

What this required was not the wholesale rejection of modernity, but rather a selective retooling of evangelism. Douglas Abrams suggests that, while fundamentalists were resolutely antimodernist in their theology and frequently derisive of secular entertainment content, they “responded less resolutely to key features of technology, urbanization, efficiency, bureaucracy, mass-marketing, and leisure.”179 That is to say, the spirit of revivalism and urban renewal, present in muscular Christian enterprises of the late 19th century, was refashioned to accommodate changes in American popular culture and technology.

No one better demonstrated this than baseball player Billy Sunday. Sunday “came to embody a new version of the muscular Christian tradition which increasingly viewed

176 Joel Carpenter, Revive Us Again, 118.

177 Matthew Avery Sutton suggests that “radical evangelicals” is a more specific term referring to “those from both the Wesleyan holiness and Higher Life reformed traditions who, in the post-Civil War period, aggressively integrated apocalyptic ideas into their faith.” Sutton uses this to distinguish between the historically specific movement of early American fundamentalism in period from 1910-1940, defining fundamentalists as “the network of white, Anglo-American radical evangelicals who in the 1910s established a distinct, definable, interdenominational apocalyptic movement.” Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), x.

178 After the Great War, many theologically conservative Protestants chastised President Wilson’s involvement with the League of Nations, the remnants of the social gospel movement, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal policies as fruitless efforts to redeem the world through social engineering. See Carpenter, Revive Us Again, 118; Sutton, American Apocalypse, 232-262.

179 Douglas Carl Abrams, Selling the Old-Time Religion: American Fundamentalists and Mass Culture, 1920-1940 (Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2001), 1-2.

81 sport simply as a means to the end of religious conversation and, secondarily, as a means for the enhancement of a cultural idea of masculinity.”180 He also modeled an advertising strategy that would become the template for evangelical Protestants’ engagement of sports for another century. Once called “the most advertised man in the religious world,”

Sunday use his fame to attract audiences that would hear his message blending patriotism, masculinity, and morality.181 Breaking with the predominant earlier muscular

Christian interpretation, Sunday believed that baseball itself was not inherently moral. In fact his personal experience suggested that the life of a professional athlete was anything but moral, filled with smoking, drinking, gambling, and loose women. But that did not mean baseball was useless for a Christian. For Sunday, his baseball career’s greatest purpose was as a means to garner audiences to hear his prayer: “Lord, save us from off- handed, flabby-cheeked, brittle-boned, weak-kneed, thin-skinned, pliable, plastic, spineless, effeminate, sissified, three-carat Christianity.”182 Like other muscular

Christians before him, Sunday framed the fate of the faith in gendered language that framed physical shortcomings as anathema to Christian manhood. His diatribes against

“hog-jowled, weasel-eyed, sponge-columned, mush-fisted, jelly-spined, four-flushing

Christians”183 fit squarely within muscular Christianity’s gender anxieties, particularly the perceived effeminacy of the church-going male.

180 Ladd and Mathisen, Muscular Christianity, 82.

181 See Amy DeRogatis, “Gender,” in Themes in American Religion and Culture, ed. Philip Goff and Paul Harvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 197-226.

182 Quoted in DeRogatis, “Gender,” 217.

183 Quoted in Marshall Frady, Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979), 212.

82 Despite Sunday’s deft use of advertising techniques pioneered by older urban evangelists like Dwight Moody, Sunday himself was quite critical of the mass media revolution from which he profited. Yet even though many fundamentalists and evangelicals shared Sunday’s suspicion of popular entertainment and distanced themselves from damnable frivolities, they also adapted the modes of communication that transmitted them. Recognizing that new technological innovations could become powerful allies for particular causes, religious groups used the tools of mass communication (particularly radio and television) as effective media for reaching large audiences. In some ways, they were, perhaps, compelled to do so. Mass communication brought mass entertainment, which had the potential for mass distraction. Joel Carpenter notes that in the first half of the twentieth century, evangelists who desired citywide revivalism like that of the second Great Awakening) no longer competed with just their target demographics’ familial and work obligations or the social vices of drinking and prostitution in local taverns and brothels; revivalists also competed for their time, money, and attention with leisure pursuits of movies, sports, automobile trips, and radio shows.

American evangelists of all stripes began using the narrative forms and technology of popular culture to reinvigorate revivalism for a new century.184

The radio, as both a medium of communication and a source of nightly entertainment, was the first major technological innovation since the printing press to be widely used for the expressed purpose of religious instruction. The Venerable Archbishop

Fulton Sheen and Father Charles Coughlin (New York Catholics), Aimee Semple

McPherson (a Los Angeles Pentecostal), Charles Fuller (Baptist), and Carl McIntire (a

184 Carpenter, Revive Us Again, 124-125.

83 Pennsylvania Fundamentalist) utilized the then largely unregulated airwaves to disseminate messages of cultural conservativism to listeners. Douglas Abrams’s observation about fundamentalists during the interwar period can be fruitfully extended to the others mentioned here, “they often adapted the forms of mass culture but rejected the substance,” subsequently authorizing and legitimating marketing strategies such as mass advertising.185

Among these, McPherson’s preacher style was unmatched, both for its reach and unabashed interweaving of entertainment with the “old time religion.” Combining

Hollywood pizzazz with the Pentecostal emphasis on the dramatic works of the Spirit,

McPherson’s ministry at the Angelus Temple in Los Angeles attracted everyone from wealthy celebrities to stage workers to migrant farmers who lived on the city’s outskirts.

A contentious and polarizing figure, McPherson successfully blended “mass marketing and theatrical entertainments with a comforting message,” and in the process showed that

“there was no such thing as bad publicity.”186 McPherson’s theatrical style and message imitated older evangelicals like Whitefield, simultaneously condemning the content of the popular media while also shrewdly adapting it for her ministry.187 Pulling from

Hollywood and Radio City, McPherson’s ministerial style demonstrated “that the

185 Abrams, Selling the Old-Time Religion, 1-2; See also Tona J. Hangen, Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion, and Popular Culture in America (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 186 Paul Harvey, “Proselytization,” in Themes in Religion and American Culture, 39-61, 58.

187 In this regard McPherson was not unlike Pentecostals of a generation earlier, who “distinguished their own affairs, which were spiritually purposeful, from the others, which were merely occasions for entertainment.” Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 129.

84 traditional faith could be jazzed up with the help of the most up-to-date technologies,”188 suited for a generation raised on mass media entertainment.

Though McPherson had little issue appropriating elements of mass entertainment to suit her needs, she was also keen to acknowledge that the leisures of worldly culture led to perdition. Sports entertainment too figured among the adversaries competing for the attention of potential converts. Speaking to a group of would be evangelists,

McPherson cautioned, “Remember you have competition… There are movies and the boxing-galleries and the bowling alleys… beat the old devil at his game [using] every means you can at your disposal to get the message over.”189 Sister Aimee’s admonition against the devils of sport, leisure, and cinema (along with the standard exhortations against drinking, smoking, and dancing) were common fare among those Christians who felt ostracized from the secularized form of American mass culture developing after the

Great War.

The question facing many fundamentalists and evangelicals in the post-War era was a matter of just how involved they would be in American politics. As I said earlier, despite widespread suspicion of human reform efforts, this did not mean that revivalist

Christians had become apolitical. George Marsden has suggested that “evangelicalism is especially vigorous when it is closely connected with the cultural mainstream yet maintains a sense of being culturally embattled against it.”190 Evangelical adaptations in the 1940s and 1950s certainly give testimony to this idea of productive antagonism.

188 Matthew Avery Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 278.

189 Quoted in Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson, 76.

190 George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006 [1980]), 255. 85 Seeking to reestablish their political and theological commitments at the center of

American public life, evangelical leadership aimed to save the nation from its own moral laxity. Carl Henry called on the pietist majority to reclaim their place as arbiters of the national conscience, in support of a larger social and political agenda opposed to New

Deal reforms in favor of pietistic-conversionist social solutions.191 If the nation had systemic social issues, the mass conversion of souls would be the first step in alleviating them. The leaders of the National Association of Evangelicals for United Action (est.

1942), including J. Elwin Wright, Billy Graham, Charles Fuller, and Harold John

Ockenga, hoped to position evangelicals as the guardians of the national soul. That meant they would have to engage American popular culture, popular entertainment, and mass media in ways that would put the “Old Time Faith” of revivalist Protestantism back into vogue.192

Athletics proved to be a major component of this plan. Picking up the mantle of

Billy Sunday, some evangelical athletes of the World War II period used the fame they had won through athletic achievement to influence the moral compass and religious beliefs of their audiences. More than anyone else, Billy Graham was keenly aware of the

191 Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 233.

192 Why muscular Christianity died out in liberal Protestantism only to be resurrected by the neoevangelicals of Billy Graham and Dave Hannah a generation later is interesting in its own right. How Pentecostalism’s growing influence on American Protestantism, and it’s peculiar high anthropology and emphasis on mastering the external through conditioning the internal, shaped the body theology of early evangelistic athletic programs in the 1940s and 1950s would be a worthy research project. To this we might also add how those programs incorporated, fought against, and otherwise tethered back and forth with the mind-over-matter pop-psychology then promoted by Norman Vincent Peale that was so clearly present and diffuse throughout American middle-class culture in the post-war era. Whereas R. Marie Griffith has expounded on these influences for women’s health ministries, the vast majority of research on men’s athletic ministries has largely been silent on this topic. R. Marie Griffith, Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

86 attractive potential of sport, making it an integral part of his marketing strategy to attract possible converts across the nation, and eventually, the world.

A travelling spokesperson for the evangelical enterprise Youth For Christ (YFC),

Billy Graham was part of a generation of conservative Protestants who perceived the reach athletes could have and their possible impact on the Great Commission. The value of “sports appeal” was not lost on the young itinerant preacher. After all, the sports pages were among the most popular of segments of the dailies, especially among male readers, and newspapermen depended upon this segment for profit margins.193 Those who wrote syndicated sports columns were, as The Nation suggested in 1935, “the men who make

America’s gods.”194 Graham, an astute observer of mass media trends, benefited greatly from the cult of athletic celebrity promulgated and perpetuated by national sport coverage.

Like so many others of his era, Graham’s ministries frequently aimed to bring young people into the evangelical Protestant fold. Evangelical youth movements had already led the way in using stadia as churches during the 1940s, often with a patriotic overtone. Jack Wyrtzen’s Word of Life ministry had drawn 20,000 people to Madison

Square Garden for a Victory Rally on April 1, 1944. At a 1945 Memorial Day celebration, YFC brought 70,000 people to Chicago’s Soldier Field.195 While patriotism ran high throughout the country, YFC events also sold the message that evangelicals were

193 Douglas Owen Baldwin records that at least one survey from the 1930s found that nearly 80% of male respondents read at least some portion of the sports page. The importance of the segment was also reflected in the increased number of job positions for sportswriters in the industry. Sports in North America, Volume 8 – Sports and the Depression, 1930-1940, ed. Douglas Owen Baldwin (Gulf Breeze: Academic International Press, 1992), xvi.

194 Quoted in Baldwin, Sports in North America, Vol. 8, xv.

195 Carpenter, Revive Us Again, 161.

87 among the leading voices of patriotism and American exceptionalism.196 In the words of

Harold Ockenga, “God pinned His last hope on America” in the war against fascism.197

Merging revivalist Christianity with all-American patriotic overtures, evangelical youth events of WWII blazed the trail that would be follow by successive generations of evangelists who would also wed evangelicalism to nationalist sentiment.

In order to attract larger and larger crowds to both his YFC rallies and his various crusades, Graham frequently enlisted the help of celebrity athletes who shared many of his theological convictions.198 As Graham later recalled, “We used every modern means to catch the attention of the unconverted – and then we punched them right between the eyes with the Gospel.”199 Long distance runner Gil Dodds, collegiate boxing champion

Bob Finley, and track star Louis Zamperini were frequent guests on Graham’s stages.

Adding their names to his promotional materials was one of several means Graham employed to attract the un-churched.200 Zamperini, who had run for the United States in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, was also a veteran of the Pacific theatre, and had survived for two years a POW under the Japanese. Zamperini’s subsequent bouts with alcoholism

196 See Sutton, American Apocalypse, 263-266.

197 Quoted in Sutton, American Apocalypse, 263.

198 This followed a pattern of celebrity endorsement exploited even in the era of George Whitefield, who used to promote his relationship with Benjamin Franklin on flyers disseminated in advance of his frontier revivals. See Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991.

199 Quoted in Ladd and Mathisen, Muscular Christianity, 113.

200 Ibid.

88 and rage, followed by his conversion at a Graham rally in 1949, made for a powerful story of Christian redemption and overcoming in the face of advertised.201

From time to time, Gil Dodds, himself a part-time preacher nicknamed “The

Flying Parson,” was asked to run laps before the show, simultaneously providing a little of the entertainment for which revivalist Christianity is known while also demonstrating what made Dodds an authority on the subject he was about to speak upon. Muscular

Christian philosophy presumed that an outwardly healthy and active body was both a means and sign of an inward moral health, a visible manifestation of godliness, as it were.202 This suggested that Dodds ability to run farther and faster than any other man meant that he possessed great spiritual knowledge. In line with muscular Christians before him, the lay pastor spoke his message plainly: “It takes a man to be a Christian. So be a man!”203 It was also a message that Graham and other sports evangelists would repeat throughout the rest of the 20th century.

The 1940s and 1950s also witnessed an institutional reengagement between

Protestantism and sport. At the Helsinki Olympics in 1952, Bob Richards, an ordained minister of the Church of the Brethren, won the gold medal in pole vaulting, beating out the newly invited representatives of the officially atheist USSR. The “Vaulting Vicar,” who would go on to become a Wheaties Cereal cover model and a one-time presidential candidate, was the first among many of Billy Sunday’s evangelist successors to turn

201 Steve Chawkins and Keith Thursby, “Louis Zamperini dies at 97; Olympic track star and WWII hero,” Los Angeles Times, July 3, 2014.

202 Perhaps this ran both ways. Louis Zamperini found athleticism in Graham’s preaching, saying that Graham struck him “more like an athlete than a man of God.” Quoted in Frady, Billy Graham, 196.

203 Gilbert Dodds, “I Run For Christ!” Quoted in Mel Larson, Gil Dodds, The Flying Parson (Chicago: The Evangelical Beacon, 1945), p. 96.

89 athletic success into a promising career endorsing secular products while also publicly promoting his theological beliefs.204 Back stateside, others took note of Graham’s successes integrating athletics into his promotional campaigns and soon followed suit by creating a variety of sports ministries to appeal to various niche markets, many of which focused on recruiting young men. In 1952, former Taylor University basketball coach

Don Odle founded Venture for Victory (VV), an international ministry which promoted basketball games in East Asia as a means to attract audiences for the evangelical messages the players would deliver.205 Bill Bright’s youth movement, the Campus

Crusade for Christ (CCC), adopted sport and sport figures as one in a series of strategies for attracting collegians to evangelical Christianity. While Bright focused his attention on the whole student body, his assistant Dave Hannah founded Athletes in Action (AIA) in order to proselytize among student athletes at the collegiate level. Stating his goals bluntly, Hannah hoped that if he could convert them he could convert their fans, for

“society looking up to athletes as heroes must find heroes looking up to God.”206

Concurrent with this development in higher education, the Fellowship of

Christian Athletes (FCA), a secondary school equivalent, was founded by Eastern OK

A&M coach Don McClanen in 1954. Seeing other evangelists’ successful use of sports culture, Pentecostal preacher Oral Roberts soon brought collegiate athletics to his

204 Richards was the presidential candidate for the newly-formed Populist Party in 1984, garnering just over 66,000 votes nationally. A far-right group, the Popular Party’s next candidate for the presidency was David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and one-time member of the Louisiana State Legislature.

205 Although the concept of an international basketball ministry became associated with Athletes in Action, Odle had beaten them to the punch by several years. Jessica Rousselow-Winquist and Alan H. Winquist, Coach Odle’s Full Court Press – Taylor University and Sports Evangelism (Upland: Taylor University Press, 2001).

206 Quoted in Randall Balmer, “Athletes in Action,” Encyclopedia of Evangelism (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2004), 41-42. 90 university’s campus. His university would eventually come to require that all students successfully pass a health and physical education credit during every semester in which they were enrolled. John Tubera has noted that the devotion of funds toward athletic programs at Christian universities like Oral Roberts University and Liberty “can be viewed as a discursive apparatus that aligned a strong athletic program with a strong

Christian faith… produc[ing] in a subconscious way, a truth that equated Christianity as strong and attractive.”207 It also produced advertising revenue for the universities, brought them national and international recognition, and featured their banners on nationally televised football and basketball games. Like older revivalist Christians, men like Graham, Hannah, McClanen, Roberts, and Falwell were willing to denounce mass culture generally but were more than eager to imitate it when it could aid in the Great

Commission.208

In only a matter of a few decades, muscular Christianity re-emerged as a significant strand of Protestant thought in America, albeit with a significantly more conservative constituency than its late Victorian predecessor. Organizations like AIA,

FCA, Sports Outreach America, and Pro Athletes Outreach catered to the spiritual needs of athletes.209 All the while, they also used the cultural capital those athletes accumulated and the powerfully attractive and entertaining aspects of sport competitions to reach

207 John Tubera, “A Foucauldian Analysis of Religion and Sexuality Within Sport” (Master’s Thesis, California State University, 2011), 138-139.

208 Matthew 28:18-20, Jesus’s reported final words to the disciples: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you to the very end of the age.”

209 Although complete count of all such organizations does not currently exist, The Association of Church Sports and Recreation Ministers does provide links to a collection of organizations based in the United States at: http://www.csrm.org/ministries.html. 91 larger audiences of possible converts. Its evangelistic potential had been the very thing which had redeemed sport within conservative Protestantism during the mid-20th century.

Sport and Conservative Christian Anxieties in the mid-20th Century

Sports’ importance within conservative American Protestantism has come and gone in waves, though generally the subject has received more interest in periods of social instability within the larger cultural milieu. Although the 1950s had its share of societal ills and political divisions, it was a decade of remarkable cultural stability compared to the decades which immediately followed it. As social cohesion began to break down, due in no small part to the demands of women, racial, ethnic, and religious minorities for a seat at the table of American life, more and more middle-class American

Protestant men began to turn to sport for some reaffirming sign of their centrality in and dominance over American culture. At the same time, changes within sport cultures opened new opportunities for racial minorities and women to challenge the primacy of the white male as athletic exemplar. Christians espousing a conservative form of the faith tended to resist social changes, particularly those which threatened to destabilize the racial and gender order which preserved middle-class white male social hegemony. This resistance was played out in responses to changes within American sporting culture as well, but also through the medium of popular culture and through politics.

The turbulence of the 1960s brought by the civil rights movement, anti-war protests, Woodstock, shifting attitudes toward sexual morality and recreational drug use, and many other changes which some perceived as the harbingers of the end of American civilization, was in some sense assuaged by the rise of prominent Christian athletes who

92 served as staunch advocates for what they perceived to be the traditional American way of life and moral living. Graham would later suggest that sport was a means through which America could save itself from the many vices of that era. “The Bible says leisure and lying around are morally dangerous…. Sports keep us busy; athletes, you notice, don’t take drugs…. There are probably more really committed Christians in sports, both collegiate and professional than in any other occupation in America.”210 Throughout the

1960s Graham continued to do his part in making them as famous for being conservative

Christians as they were for being athletes.

The simple gospel espoused by white evangelical athletes had particular cultural resonance in the theologically and politically conservative South. As William Baker has noted, the on-the-field successes of white males like NFL players Bill Wade and Fran

Tarkenton and basketball legends Bill Bradley and Bob Pettit were “glittering antidotes to black-power salutes,” a reference to John Carlos’s and Tommie Smith’s gesture of civil disobedience at the 1968 Olympic podium.211 Concurrently, the high morality associated with some conservative Christian athletes was a welcome refresher in an age of changing moral standards. Bill Glass, a bruising defensive end for the Cleveland Browns, spent his off-seasons at Southwestern Seminary and stumping for Graham. Speaking at one of

Graham’s urban crusades in 1965, Glass assured the mostly teenage crowd of 31,000 that most athletes were “clean-living family men” and that quite a few were “fine

Christians.”212 Men like Glass and Green Bay Packers quarterback Bart Starr exemplified

210 Billy Graham, “Are Sports Good for the Soul?” Newsweek, January 11, 1971, 52.

211 Baker, Playing With God, 201.

212 “Glass Speaks to 31,000 at Graham Rally,” The Washington Post, September 1, 1965.

93 a cherished form of white Christian masculinity which many traditionalists applauded in contrast to the moral licentiousness of less reputable characters like the loudmouthed and philandering New York Jets quarterback, “Broadway” Joe Namath.213

Few men better embodied all the characteristics which the clean-cut style was supposed to signify than Tom Landry. Landry’s career as the head coach of the Dallas

Cowboys spanned 29 years, making him a stalwart of Sunday television. With a face like granite, suit and tie, and an ever-present fedora, Landry’s visage became one of the most recognizable images in American life and served as a model of the form of masculinity which many white American men hoped their sons would emulate, looking to Landry as a moral exemplar in troubled times. A combat veteran of WWII, a Sunday school teacher, a lifelong advocate for the FCA, and an occasional guest speaker at Graham’s urban crusades, Landry was a no-nonsense father figure whose constant presence in national media helped assure other traditionalists that they had not been totally edged out of

American public life.214

This era also witnessed some significantly changes in gender and sexual dynamics in national politics. The late 1960s and 1970s featured the second wave of the feminist movement, the failed attempt to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, the development of the pill, and the landmark legislation of Roe v. Wade. Women were increasingly

213 So legendary was the piety, morality, and character of Bart Starr, that the NFL, in conjunction with sport ministry Athletes in Action, eventually created an award in his honor which recognizes those athletes who put faith and fame to work, generally for Jesus. While not specifying that the award must go to a Christian with evangelical theological commitments, most award winners have generally fit that frame, including Reggie White, Anthony Munoz, Mike Singletary, Kurt Warner, and Drew Brees.

214 Hoping that Landry’s coaching successes would inspire boys to follow in his footsteps, Spire Christian Comics authors Billy Zeoli and Al Hartley published an illustrated biography of Landry that lauded his patriotism, clean living, and his religious commitments. Billy Zeoli and Al Hartley, Tom Landry and the Dallas Cowboys (Spire Christian Comics, 1973).

94 advocating for their rights to contribute to the economy in roles beyond that of homemaker and child-bearer, for sexual autonomy, and for authority over their own bodies. Concurrently, the passage of Title IX legislation – which, among other regulations, required that schools receiving federal aid provide equal opportunities for athletic participation and scholarships for women, and equal treatment of male and female teams – began to tear down the barriers that had preserved sport as one of the last unspoiled bastions of masculinity in American culture.215 Unsurprisingly some Christian educators were upset by the changing of the status quo. Dallin Oaks, president of

Brigham Young University, insisted that the new rules “infringe[d] upon religious freedom,” and the board of trustees pledged that their institution would not comply with those elements which they believed “interfered with the teaching and practice of moral principles.”216 The trustees of the non-denominational Christian Hillsdale College resolved “that Hillsdale College, will, to the extent of its meager resources and with the help of God, resist by all legal means” those parts of Title IX regulations to which they objected. Religious institutions were not the only ones upset by the changes Title IX required. Earl Cheit, Dean-elect of the University of California at Berkeley, protested what he considered the unnecessary bureaucratization of higher education, while administrators nationally fretted loudly about the fiscal implications.217

While these developments were changing the face of college athletics, other national sporting events undermined presumptions about masculine superiority. Billy

215 Although Title IX is a relatively small segment of the 1972 United States Education Amendments (initially designed to protect against sex discrimination in higher education), it has since become one of the law’s most well-known elements.

216 “Mormon College Challenges U.S. Sex Bias Rules.” Los Angeles Times, October 18, 1975.

217 “Another Campus Rebellion.” Chicago Tribune, November 18, 1975.

95 Jean King’s tennis victory over former men’s champion Bobby Riggs in 1973’s “Battle of the Sexes” disproved the assumption that men were inherently better at sports than women.218 By 1980, the International Federation of Body Builders (IFBB) created the first professional competition for female weightlifters, crowning Rachel McLish the world’s first Ms. Olympia.219 Competitive athletics, which had once been legitimated by male psychologists, church reformers, and educators as a means through which to turn boys into men, was now making room for an emerging and thriving culture of women’s sports. The expansions in these sports confronted more Americans with the reality that some of the traditional physical signals of masculine gender – high muscle mass, exceptional muscle tone, and the stench of sweat – were neither innate to the male form nor foreign to the female sex. These changes contributed to a significant backlash among

Americans who believed that changing gender and sexual dynamics had progressed too far and too fast.

Transition to Case Studies

In this chapter thus far, I’ve highlighted the centrality of the male body in

Christian sports discourses and how various figures, institutions, and theological movements encouraged or curtailed Christian men’s participation in and consumption of

218 Riggs was fully cognizant of his role of a heel in this match, seeing it as an opportunity to make a little money by playing to the national discussion regarding men’s and women’s athletic prowess. How much of this was acting is a matter of debate among sport historians. See Selena Roberts, A Necessary Spectacle: Billie Jean King, Bobby Riggs, and the Tennis Match that Leveled the Game (New York: Crown Publishing, 2005).

219 It should be noted that the creation of professional competitions for female bodybuilders did not signal any kind of parity within that sport. The judging standards applied to female competitors required that entrants simultaneously increase muscle mass and definition while also retaining traditional signifiers of femininity (large breasts, long and well-kept hair, make-up, high heels, etc.). For more on this subject, see Maria Lowe, Women of Steel: Female Bodybuilders and the Struggle for Self Definition (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 96 sport over the past several millennia. Ecclesial authorization and adaptation of sports culture were most often justified on the grounds that sports aided in attracting men to the faith, and that they could instill in Christian men the characteristics and dispositions that influential figures deemed appropriate and necessary for the faith. By the middle of the

1970s, the American muscular Christian movement had waxed and waned for over a century. Initially a Protestant movement concerned with instilling health and manliness in the northeastern urban communities of the late 19th century, muscular Christianity had been transformed by fundamentalist and evangelical Christians into a strategy for recruiting youth, and particularly young men, to the faith. By the mid-1950s, the muscular Christian movement was integrally tied to evangelical Protestantism, carrying with it evangelicalism’s traditional views concerning gender roles, presumed connections between physical sex and gender identity, the relationship between body type and moral character, and the utilitarian view of popular culture as merely a means through which to attract an audience.

Yet this trend toward using sport as means of attracting potential converts left a sour taste in the mouths of many. In the mocking words of Sports Illustrated writer Frank

Deford, the muscular Christian movement had devolved into “Sportianity,” a locker room religion bent on capitalizing upon the star power of athletes to win over souls for Christ without challenging those athletes to live up to the ethical dictates of the faith.220 Even prominent sports evangelists like body-builder Wes Neal had begun to question whether or not Christianity had been relegated to a secondary concern within the ministries he

220 Frank Deford, “Religion and Sport,” Sports Illustrated, April 19, 1976, 88-102.

97 served.221 Despite these concerns from within and outside evangelical sporting culture, the emphasis on star power recruitment had remained strong throughout most of the mid- century.

As I also noted at the end of the chapter, the late seventies was a period of social unrest during which presumptions about the inherent strength and superiority of the white male athletic body had increasingly come under attack. In the fields of Vietnam, thin communists (male and female) had outfought white and black American young men. The rising prominence of people of color within professional sports disrupted cultural fantasies about the superior athletic prowess of white men. Lastly, Title IX increased women’s opportunites to publicly display their athletic capabilities, calling into question preconceived notions about sex and sport. The racial and sexual presumptions that had fueled much muscular Christian sentiment in the United States were slowly eroding.

The following chapters explore what happened next. The main theme of this dissertation is the role of the male body within sports evangelism, particularly how sports evangelists have used their bodies to supplement oral ministrations. These case studies provide glimpses into how they have done so in relation to a series of gender and sexual anxieties over the course of the past forty years in late 20th and early 21st century United

States. The first chapter covers the political significance of the athletic “hard body” during the late 1970s and 1980s. The second details the male body on display in the

Christian abstinence movement. The final case study looks at how recent trends within sports evangelism have re-asserted the violent character of the athletic male body as a source of pride and identity for white evangelical Christians in the war on terror.

221 Annie Blazer, Playing For God: Evangelical Women and the Unintended Consequences of Sports Ministry (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 77-78. 98 CHAPTER 3 - FROM MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY TO HARD BODY

CHRISTIANITY: MORAL MUSCLE DURING THE REAGAN

ADMINISTRATION

The glory of young men is their strength… - Proverbs 20:29

Your athletic abilities, along with all other abilities, can be weapons for God’s use…. Have you ever thought of yourself as a weapon? The world in which we live is a battlefield for the war between God and Satan… Weapons are instruments used to bring about victory for one side against another. That’s how God desires you to view the members of your body which includes your athletic abilities…. The battlefield where this war is waged between God and Satan is your home, school, athletic arena, etc. – Wes Neal, The Handbook of Athletic Perfection

For many Americans, the 1960s and 1970s were decades of turmoil, marked by the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and

Malcolm X. Soldiers returning from the jungles of the Vietnam War came home to a largely hostile public. The Watergate scandal and the subsequent resignation of President

Richard Nixon contributed to widespread disillusionment with the federal government.

Oil-producing nations flexed their political muscle, initiating an energy crisis that rocked the economy. A 1979 Gallup poll found that just 19% of American respondents felt satisfied with the way things were going in the country.222 What President Jimmy Carter had called a “crisis of confidence” was perceived by many Americans as an indictment of

Carter’s policies, characterized as a softheaded liberalism defined by weak foreign

222 A recent Pew Research Foundation article on public trust in government summarizes public opinion polling from the era thusly: “In 1979, Gallup found just 19% of Americans satisfied with the way things were going in the country, and public trust in government was at 29% that year. By the spring of 1980, the Reuters/University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index fell to an all-time low of 54, and trust in government slipped further to 25%. Both satisfaction and consumer confidence grew over the course of Ronald Reagan’s presidency and trust in government rebounded somewhat. But all these measure fell again in the 1990s as economic problems worsened.” “Distrust, Discontent, Anger and Partisan Rancor,” April 18, 2010. http://www.people-press.org/2010/04/18/section-1-trust-in-government-1958-2010/.

99 policy. As one Time Magazine correspondent put it, Carter “made Americans feel two things they are not used to feeling, and will not abide. He made them feel puny and he made them feel insecure.”223 Lastly, the American people experienced collective humiliation as Iran held hostage some fifty-two of their fellow citizens for 444 days. The

American spirit, it seemed, was groaning under the weight of these domestic and international disturbances. As the next decade rolled on, it became increasingly clear a wide swath of the public yearned for a resilient, masculine image of the nation.

At the same time, the late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed seismic shifts in physical and popular culture. Title IX had fundamentally altered the landscape of college athletics, racial minorities began to occupy a larger share of the positions in professional sports, the number of gyms and gym memberships began to skyrocket, and Arnold

Schwarzenegger became a household figure – catapulted to superstardom on a wave of rising infatuation with the hypermuscular male body and its most prominent vehicle of display: the big budget, big muscles, and big explosions action film. Undoubtedly, the

1970s and 1980s were an era in which physical, commercial, and popular culture blended into one another.

The hypermuscular physique, which had previously flourished in the marginalized entertainments of vaudeville and the comic book, achieved the status of the masculine ideal for many Americans at a time of uncertainty and national self-doubt. As sociologist

Ruud Stokvis has noted, the late seventies was a period in which “bodybuilding became fashionable, and unlike other fashions that after a short time fade away, it found

223 Roger Rosenblatt, "Out of the Past, Fresh Choices for the Future," Time, January 15, 1981, 13. Emphasis added.

100 favourable and fertile conditions for its continuation, further diffusion and popularity.”224

Why this was the case, and how it relates to sports evangelism, is the focus of this chapter.

As I showed in the previous chapter, sports evangelists have historically adapted to shifting social and political circumstances in order to produce and attract men with physical and dispositional qualities deemed suitable to tackle the most pressing issues of the faith in a manner which conformed to the times. Adapting message to media, mid-19th century English muscular Christians promoted the notion through the novels of Charles

Kingsley. Turn of the century American muscular Christians sought to build up the physical body of Jesus in images of the manly Christ and to build of the Body of Christ for the work of the social gospel through local boys programs like the YMCA and Boy

Scouts. And mid-20th century proponents like Billy Graham recruited the emerging celebrity class of collegiate and professional athletes in efforts to attract young men and women (but mostly men) to hear the gospel message. Yet, in the 1980s, the efforts of some ministries shifted away from these earlier iterations of the muscular Christian tradition towards something else. Previous generations of muscular Christian advocates emphasized the production or recruitment of athletic bodies in order to perform the work of the church. However, the hard body Christianity of the 1980s was a product of its era, reflecting the gendered anxieties of New Right conservativism and the rising prominence of the bodybuilder physique in Hollywood cinema. Hard body Christianity emphasized demonstrating evangelical Protestantism’s mastery of and conformity to the hegemonic masculinity displayed in action cinema, defined by James Messerschmidt as

224 Ruud Stokvis, “The Emancipation of Bodybuilding,” Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics 9 (2006): 463-479.

101 “emphasiz[ing] practices toward authority, control, independence, competitive individualism, aggressiveness, and the capacity for violence.”225 Ever keen to adopt secular media for evangelistic purposes, some athlete evangelists built upon the narrative frames and tropes of the action cinema, highlighting the destructive potential of the hard bodied Christian white athlete.

More so than any other evangelistic ministry of the decade, The Power Team – a group of white male athletes who performed strength acts as a means of attracting an audience to the gospel message – capitalized on the shift towards hard body imagery in

American popular culture. By breaking baseball bats, ripping phone books, bending steel, snapping handcuff links, smashing concrete, running through slabs of ice, and exploding hot water balloons with their breath, this self-identified “wrecking crew for Jesus” displayed their strength before US church and school audiences, contextualizing their abilities and physiques within personal testimonies of the transformative power of Jesus

Christ. Explicit ties between muscles and morality had appeared in earlier iterations of muscular Christianity, but rarely had those muscles ever been as large as they were during the Reagan decade. I contend that the success of this particular type of ministry within American evangelicalism during the 1980s reflected and profited from conservative Christian anxieties about declining national strength and a desire for aggressive male role models.

225 James Messerschimdt, Masculinities and Crime: Critique and Reconceptualization of Theory (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), 82.

102 The Age of the Spectacular

“Listen to me,” began John Jacobs, a young and thick-necked Assemblies of God minister. “I want to tell you a story.” In the classic ministerial style, Jacobs started off slowly, building suspense as his narrative continued. With the theme music from Rocky playing in the background, the throng of 3,000 people gathered in a Tacoma church gazed upon this giant of a man, 6’3”, 300lbs, with a 54in. chest and 20in. biceps. Two stacks of bricks ten stones thick flanked Jacobs on either side. As the music rose, Jacobs gazed out upon the crowd, shouting “I’m going to tell you a comeback story bigger than Rocky!”

Having minimized the feats of Balboa and maximizes Christ’s victory in the resurrection instead, Jacobs slammed his hands down upon the bricks, snapping them in half as crowd cheered wildly.226 As police officer walked over to handcuff him, Jacobs began to implore the audience to call upon God to break these “chains of the devil.” As the audience prayed, a fellow performer held the microphone up to Jacobs’s chest. Huffing loudly, Jacobs’s grunts demanded audience attention – they were the call to watch the muscleman at work. Jacobs groaned louder and louder, and with great might he strained the muscles in his neck, upper back, biceps, and chest, putting his entire upper body to work against the devil’s bonds. With one last yell, Jacobs snapped the links, signifying his release from bondage into to true Christian freedom. The crowd cheered as the other

226 The film’s influence on the Power Team, as both inspiration and foil, is easy to see. Perhaps part of what makes Rocky so appealing for these performers is the film’s easier to follow narrative about a white working class tough guy trying to fit into the modern world and the place of white athletes amid the rising prominence of African Americans in his sport. It is also no accident that the opening scene of Rocky is a boxing match in a converted church (Ressurection Athletic Club) under the watchful gaze of Jesus.

103 performers exhorted them, shouting “Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!” Hundreds rushed to the stage to take part in the culminating altar call.227

This snapshot of a Power Team performance offers insight into how the ministry worked and the spiritual emphasis performers placed upon their own bodies and upon acts of destruction. It was a ministry of spectacle, not concerned with producing athletic bodies for the church, but presenting the destructive power of those bodies within a context of Christian witness. In keeping with the great evangelical tradition of adapting secular entertainment conventions for evangelistic purposes, Jacobs began the Power

Team in 1980 as an attempt “to influence young people the right way,” which required

“getting their attention and speaking their language.”228 The language Jacobs spoke was that of the action cinema, favoring destruction as the primary means of communicating with the audience and signifying his conformity to the hegemonic masculinity of the genre. According to Jacobs, Christianity had lost its appeal among the “young people who’ve been turned off God by dull, boring religion,”229 the same young people who were the primary audience of the hard body spectacles of Hollywood and television.

Like his evangelist predecessors, Jacobs defended his showmanship approach to evangelism as necessary for his time and age, utilizing the narrative frames and dissemination technologies of mass culture even as his ministry competed with other cultural products for the time, energy, and resources of potential viewers. “People are

227 This is a typical scene at Power Team performances across the country during the 1980s, and even unto today. This particular example is recorded in Meg Grant, “John Jacobs and His Team of Muscular Christians Give New Meaning to the Power of Faith,” People Magazine, February 8, 1988.

228 Quoted in Ken Pellis, “Macho Ministry: ‘We are the Power Team, and we are here to Wage War on the Devil,” St. Petersburg Times, November 4, 1989.

229 Quoted in Marla Williams, “Body and Soul: They Say the Lord Works in Mysterious Ways. The Power Team is Definitely One of Them,” Orlando Sentinel, October 11, 1988.

104 drawn to the spectacular,” said Jacobs, concluding “We can’t reach people the way we did 50 years ago.”230 After all, it was the era of the summer blockbuster, the action movie explosion, monster truck rallies, of “Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!”231 “Our program,”

Jacobs said, “I want it to appeal to people. It’s to inspire, motivate and encourage. It’s more than just a bunch of guys lifting weights. A lot of people preach the gospel; we’re just a different kind of gospel.”232 Power Team members were quick to insist that they were not spiritualizing the feats performed. Jacobs claimed these are all just “foolish things” God uses “to spread his message,”233 acknowledging “If I walk into an auditorium in a suit a tie, probably nobody would notice or listen. But if I break ice, crush concrete and break out of handcuffs, it gets people’s attention.”234 This was especially true of the young people Jacobs hoped to bring to Christ.

Masculinity in the Action Cinema and Youth Programming

Team performers clearly stated that their goal was to reach young people through media which dominated the “age of the spectacular.” For Thomas Hughes, it was the novel. For Billy Sunday, it was baseball. For John Jacobs, it was action cinema. Michael

Rogin has suggested that “during Reagan’s lifetime, the locus of sacred value shifted

230 Quoted in Paul Weingarten, “Power Team Pounds the Pulpit…to Bits,” Chicago Tribune, December 25, 1988.

231 Monster truck rally commercials of the 1980s frequently ended with the announcer repeatedly shouting “Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!”

232 Quoted in Lewis Beale, “Religious ‘Power Team’ Sweeps U.S.” Toronto Star, March 31, 1989.

233 Ibid.

234 Quoted in "Macho Wrestling Ministers Grapple with Man and God," San Francisco Chronicle, May 09, 1988.

105 from church not to the state but to Hollywood,”235 by which he meant that the redemptive function of the church had largely shifted over to the entertainment industry. As the productive center of an entire economy of fantasies, Hollywood’s film industry capitalized on the widespread experience of national self-doubt in the late 1970s by offering films that linked national fortunes to the bodybuilder physiques of white action heroes.236 The 1980s action film was a celebration of the exaggerated male body, its capacity for violence, and its raw sexual potential. Whether through shooting, boxing, archery, running, or doing pull ups, sit ups, or dead lifts, these films never failed to show that such bodies were sporting bodies and the products of athletic discipline.237 These films, like Power Team performances, also valorized self-sufficiency and the power of the individual hard body to overcome its physical and metaphorical obstacles.

The lasting influence of hard body action films (and their value for cultural studies) has drawn the attention of numerous researchers, who’ve generally found in them evidence of what audiences wanted to see and the body types consumers found most pleasurable to gaze upon. In the early 1990s, Susan Jeffords’s Hard Bodies and

Yvonne Tasker’s Spectacular Bodies provided extended analyses of the gender and racial

235 Quoted in David Chidester, Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 94.

236 Visually, such displays were indebted to the homoerotic war propoganda and commercial advertising industries of the early and mid-20th century. A fuller description of the legacy of the wartime and commercial image of “hetero-masculinist Anglo-Saxon nationalism” can be found in Christina Jarvis, The Male Body at War: American Masculinity During World War II (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004).

237 A representative sample would include Schwarzenegger’s Conan the Barbarian, Predator, and Terminator, the Stallone franchises, Rocky and Rambo, Swayze’s Roadhouse, and Van Damme’s Bloodsport. While Rocky was released in 1976, its sequels were definitely more in line with the zeitgeist and iconography of the 1980s. You can also see this shift in Stallone’s increasingly bulky body from one installment to the next. Not all hard bodies were of equal size. Van Damme, Kurt Russell, and Bruce Willis were all noticeable smaller than Schwarzenegger and Stallone, yet the action-drive plot of their films were certainly cut from the same cloth as other hard body movies.

106 politics of the genre, as well as analyzing the genre’s gendered ways of storytelling, framing action as a display of gender identity and establishing “the primacy of the body over the voice.”238 More recently, Kent Brintnall has looked at this genre through the lens of Bataillean negative ecstasies, suggesting that the genre’s “triumphant narrative seeks to assuage the anxieties related to morality, limitation, and vulnerability”239 by displaying images of the battered but not defeated (white) male overcoming his suffering through displays of righteous violence. Brintnall also highlights the genre’s indebtedness to

Christian imagination, as both the narratives of Christ’s life and death and those of action heroes overtly connect “suffering to triumph, victimization to victory, [and] ordeal to overcoming.”240 These scholarly works share a commitment to identifying the psychological function such films performed for the coveted young white male demographic, allowing audiences to partake in fantasies of masculine plentitude and power at a time when many young white males felt increasingly disenfranchised by political and economic circumstances, a sentiment exacerbated by the moderate gains made by women, people of color, and gays and lesbians over the preceding few decades.

The physical and dispositional characteristics of the heroes of bodybuilder/killer films – heightened muscularity, a balanced display of physical excess but emotional restraint, artfulness in displays of force, and a keen sense of individualistic determination

– are the same characteristics that the first muscular Christians hoped competitive

238 Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema (New York: Routledge Press, 1993), 6; Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994).

239 Kent Brintnall, Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-In-Pain as Redemptive Figure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 25-64.

240 Ibid, 63.

107 athletics would instill in young middle-class white men, albeit this time with more muscle than ever before. The connections Brintnall identifies between narratives of the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus and those of the action genre are also informed by a history of muscular Christian advocates ideologically graphing Christ’s masculine character upon the litany of abuses he endured and through which he eventually conquered death. As sports theologian and former bodybuilder Wes Neal argued, Jesus achieved true victory when he subjected himself to “His father’s will even when it meant He would experience great pain, death, and total separation.”241 That Jesus went through this “without a whimper” shows us “the winning character of Jesus.”242 Giving one’s body to the cause – a prime directive in the masochistic realm of competitive athletics – is also a performance of action cinema masculinity.

Cable television also provided its own forms of entertainment that capitalized on the hard body trend, providing numerous opportunities for citizens to imagine themselves as beefy rampagers. Former Mr. Universe Lou Ferrigno brought The Incredible Hulk

(1978-1982) to life for audiences who found pleasure in David Banner’s metamorphosis from mild-mannered, erudite scientist (played by Bill Bixby) to the monosyllabic green beast with biceps, favoring a masculinity defined by grunts over dialogue and action over contemplative study.243 Of course this was the same stratification of masculinities presented in the presidential politics that separated Carter from Reagan in popular

241 Wes Neal, The Handbook of Athletic Perfection (Milford, MI: Mott Media, 1981), 81-82.

242 Ibid.

243 Ferrigno would also go on to star in a series of Hollywood films which centered around his physicality, including Hercules (1983), The Seven Magnificent Gladiators (1983), and Sinbad of the Seven Seas (1989). Traditionally, the comic character was named Bruce Banner. Executives for the show feared that the name Bruce was “too homosexual” for television. See the interview with creator Stan Lee for more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek2-fcGT2YA.

108 imagination, just as it was also a narrative that played upon the nerd/jock dichotomy of

Charles Atlas’s comic book advertisements, the typology of masculinities found in the

Wieder brothers’ physical culture magazines, the distinction between pacifistic and aggressive masculinities within American evangelicalism, and in the day-to-day lives of the American schoolboys who constituted the show’s target demographic.244 Such entertainments played to the aggressive qualities of young boys, characteristics which muscular Christian authors presumed to be both natural and necessary for the performance of Christian masculinity.

Eager to reach the same audiences as the male-oriented action films, cartoons, and pro-wrestling programs, Power Team performers presented themselves and Jesus as the real world equivalents to the heroes idolized in these fantastic cultural productions.

Paralleling other trends in evangelical culture, team programming specifically targeted boys through entertainment mediums and iconographies familiar to them while positioning team performances as the Christian alternative to secular entertainment. Team publicity director Gordon McDonald, a Pentecostal pastor at Calvary Community Church in Surrey, British Columbia, acknowledged the group’s indebtedness to popular culture, acknowledging the show as "entertainment [for] non-Christians . . . It's aimed at the people who go to tag-team wrestling and Joe Cocker."245 As evangelicals began creating their own sanctified alternatives to sex manuals, inventing Christian rock, writing their

244 Angelo Siciliano, also known as Charles Atlas, was a mid-20th century bodybuilder who advertised a home exercise regimen for boys in the back of comic books in the 1940s and 1950s. The narrative arch of these comics involved a skinny boy being embarrassed by a larger male, ordering Charles Atlas’s program, and then confidently returning to confront the bully with their newly built muscles. Brothers Joe and Ben Wieder created and owned several men’s health magazines in the mid-to-late 20th century, including their flagship product, Muscle and Fitness.

245 Quoted in Todd Douglas, “Musclemen Meld Faith, Showbiz: Evangelists Set Event for Eve of Gay Games," The Vancouver Sun, July 21, 1990.

109 own self-help books, and producing their own cable television channels, the Power Team contributed their own programming to the Saturday morning line up. While Tarzan and the Incredible Hulk allowed viewers to vicariously beat down the domesticating forces of over-civilization, the Power Team’s show on the Trinity Broadcast Network taught viewers that such displays of masculine strength symbolized the spiritual might of the white Christian male. One fan went so far as call Jacobs “The Superhero of

Christianity.”246 Some Power Team publications presented John Jacobs and other members as Christian versions of Saturday morning heroes. Borrowing iconography from

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Jacobs suggested that the mesomorphic figure of cartoon masculinity, when used for good, was a symbol of Christian manhood.247

Other publications of the John Jacobs Evangelistic Association also played into this framework. Between 1991-1992, J.J.E.A. published four editions of The Action

Adventures of John Jacobs and the Power Team, a comic book account of “Commander

J.” leading the team as they battled to defeat the Clips street gang (a play on the L.A.

Crips), assassins, tech-savvy Satanists (represented in the schools by scrawny computer geek kids, replaying a conservative Christian trope about the occult influence of nerd games like Dungeon & Dragons), and a group of wrestling heels (bad guys).248 Each

246 Quoted in Quoted in Born Again: The Power Team Story, “The Power Team Begins Their Impact on American Ministry – A Scene From the Official Power Team Documentary,” [date unknown], Vimeo video, 5 minutes 53 seconds, [unknown posted date]. http://powerteamfilm.com/featured/a-scene- from-the-film-their-meteoric-rise/.

247 To see how Jacob’s best appropriated the phallic symbolism of the show, compare the following images of a typical scene from He Man and from a John Jacobs Evangelistic Association advertisement: http://nitku.net/writings/images/heman-shera/heman-0.30.jpg; https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3568/3829837661_ee07b0142d_b.jpg.

248 Comics written by Larry Walker, illustrated by David Wilson and Terry Tidwell. Dungeons & Dragons was routinely singled-out within conservative Christian circles for the supposed occultic influence it had on youth. Jack Chick, the most widely circulated Christian cartoonist, took his own swipe at D&D in Dark Dungeons, pub. 1984. For a brief look into one of these comics, see Chris Sims, “Bizarro Back 110 volume made direct connections to the other famous comic forms of heroic masculinity, tying Jacobs to G.I. Joe and pro-wrestling “faces” (good guys). The presentation of the

Power Team as the flesh and blood forms of the beefy white men who saved the day in children’s entertainment (or in the Hollywood blockbuster) left little doubt about the intended audience of the group’s performances.

As part of their normal routine, Jacobs also referenced popular heroic films of the era, only to discredit them as artifice when compared to true, Christian heroism. In one case, he introduced karate expert Ken Henderson as “the original Karate Kid before there ever was a Karate Kid.”249 At other times, Jacobs told audiences that Superman, Rambo, and Rocky weren’t real, then offered them the sufficient substitute of Jesus. Rocky may not be real, “But there was a real Rocky who lived the greatest comeback story there ever was… He went down to Hell and said, ‘I am a champion.’”250 Christ is even better than

Stallone’s bulky pugilist, whose feats of winning out against representatives of black athletic prowess (Apollo Creed/Clubber Lang) and the forces of Communism (Ivan

Drago) pale in comparison to beating out sin, death, and the devil himself. The real championship belt, idolized by fans of both boxing and pro-wrestling, thus rightly belongs around the waist of the one true champion, Jesus.251

Issues: The Power Team VS. The Agents of Death,” June 10, 2013, accessed September 7, 2015, http://comicsalliance.com/bizarro-back-issues-the-power-team-vs-the-agents-of-death-1992/.

249 This entire episode is available on video. The Night Room, “Ken Henderson in Power Team with Triple Break,” [date unknown], Youtube video, 7 minutes 33 seconds. Posted July 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mRbh44MRXk.

250 Quoted in Weingarten, “Power Team Pounds.”

251 Perhaps the most iconic of Rocky theme music, Power Team shows also featured “Eye of the Tiger” on heavy rotation. Power Team music frequently came from pop culture sources, but often from Christian radio as well. The team put out a mix-tape of songs frequently played in their shows: “John Jacobs and the Power Team” Soundtrack. Available on iTunes at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/john- jacobs-power-team-soundtrack/id390289341. 111 The Power Team’s efforts to offer a Christianized version of the Hollywood and comic book hero resonated with evangelical pastors and parents eager to find a way to communicate their faith to their children. “The kids of today need heroes,” according to

Joe Childs, associate pastor of the Victory Christian Center in Cathedral City, CA, but

“the ones they’ve been provided with are not good heroes.”252 Jacobs and other performers could, in Childs’s estimation, fill that void for the children of conservative

Christians. Other audience members reported seeing “the power of God” in the shows, a strength which “is coming from another being,” on display “representing the gospel of the Bible.”253 Pastor John Rodgers, added “the Bible tells us to follow me and I’ll make you fishers of men. And a fisherman uses bait, and they catch the fish. And so we get the attention of the people and then we catch the fish. They listen to the story of Christ.”254

Even skeptics like renowned scholar Martin Marty, claiming that some kids needed “to be convinced that Christianity isn’t sissy,” believed that “This worship of brawn and mindlessness…talks to kids nowadays and meets them where they are.”255 Young boys idolizing and impersonating comic book heroes and professional wrestlers were thus taught that true masculine strength was God-given.

252 Quoted in Beale, “Religious Power Team Sweeps U.S.”

253 Ibid.

254 Event captured on video. Huuhataja, “Power Team - John Jacobs,” [date unknown], Youtube video, 4 minutes 49 seconds, posted May 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmSwW-3JXFI.

255 Quoted in Weingarten, “Power Team Pounds.”

112 Desiring Real Men

Perhaps part of what made hard body performances of masculinity so popular in

American culture, especially among conservatives, was that they provided visible solutions to pressing, but opaque, social concerns. As I suggested earlier, Power Team performances – and the hard body cultural productions they borrowed from – alleviated and profited from conservative Christian anxieties about declining national strength and a desire for aggressive male role models. By the beginning of the 1980s, the most prominent supporters of hard body Christianity had listed a variety of woes plaguing contemporary American Christian men, issues which they felt were at the root of the nation’s international and domestic concerns. Frequently, these concerns were couched in a language of lost American masculinity, the results of a generation forsaking the responsibilities of fatherhood. Edwin Louis Cole, founder of the grassroots Christian

Men’s Network and occasional host of the The 700 Club, summed up the issues facing the country thusly:

Today, many men believe that America is great because of the virtue of its wealth. But, it was the virtues of American men and women that brought us our wealth. Men, families, nations are great by the wealth of their virtues, not by virtue of their wealth. Men produce nations. A great nation is great because its men are great. For America to recapture its greatness, its men must recapture their manhood.256

Unlike the modern man who shirked family responsibilities, those “pussyfooting pipsqueaks who tiptoe through the tulips,” Cole called for a return to a Christlike masculinity, one defined by ruthlessness and toughness. “Christlike and manhood,” Cole

256 Edwin Cole and Doug Brendel, Maximized Manhood: A Guide to Family Survival (New Kensington: Whitaker House Publishing, 1982), 134-135. Emphasis in original.

113 contended, “are synonymous.”257 Elsewhere, James Dobson lamented that men had lost the gumption necessary to rule the household as God had intended. Dobson’s first publication, Dare to Discipline, blamed the social disruptions of the 1960s on parents sacrificing their children “on the altar of overindulgence, permissiveness, and smother- love.”258 Robert Bly, the successful men’s rights author whose career first blossomed in the early 1980s, asserted that national decay was the result of the “diminishment and belittlement of the father,”259 and that national restoration could only be achieved by a return of the pater familias to his proper place at the family center, paralleled some of

Reagan’s own explanations of the decline in “family values” over the preceding three decades. Such statements highlight the centrality of strong, central father figures in the conservative rhetoric of the era.260

Within the context of the Power Team, John Jacobs frequently told the men in the audience that they needed to reestablish their proper position as the spiritual head of the household. Sharon Mazer notes that, in Jacobs’s formulation, just as each man’s body and spirit are subject to control and constraint, so too should a “truly devoted husband” control and constrain “his family and his community.”261 Mazer also acknowledges that the urge to psychoanalyze is tempting, given that the desire for stable, patriarchal families

257 Ibid, 35; 62-63.

258 James Dobson, Dare to Discipline (Carol Stream: Tyndale House Publishers, 1970), n.p.n.

259 Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men (Reading: Addison Wesley, 1990), 35.

260 These statements also parrot, to some extent, the concerns of Victorian and Progressive era muscular Christian boys workers, particularly those of G. Stanley Hall and Bruce Barton. However, these concerns reflect the cultural and political anxieties of the 1970s and 1980s much more than late 19th or early 20th century concerns.

261 Sharon Mazer, “The Power Team: Muscular Christianity and the Spectacle of Conversion,” The Drama Review 38 (1994), 170-171.

114 is so palpably present.262 The absence of a strong relationship with a paternal father figure is one of the most frequent features of the lives of religious leaders, including

Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, and Confucius, all of whom are invoked as models of this type of masculine leadership or whose examples are frequently used to justify such familial arrangements. It is fascinating that Jacobs’s personal testimony of the transformative power of faith begins in the wreckage of his parents’ marriage and subsequent sense of fatherly abandonment. Performer Mike Hagen, whose father died when he was seven, admits that the loss left him with numerous insecurities which successful athletic performances alleviated.263 It is worth noting that Edwin Cole’s abusive father served as a suitable foil to the comforting relationship he found in Jesus.

James Dobson’s father was an itinerant preacher who frequently left his son in the care of relatives. Jerry Falwell, who presented himself as the political defender of good Christian family values, grew up the son of a agnostic bootlegger and the grandson of an avowed atheist. In Jacobs’s words, for these men, Jesus was “a father to the fatherless.”264

Bodybuilding Jesus

One oft-repeated lament for writers like Dobson, Bly, and Cole was that men had poor images of true masculinity, personified in wimpy images of Jesus. A true restoration of American manhood, it seemed, required that Jesus be made masculine again, this time in the image of the strong, aggressive protector. The gender coding of size in

262 Ibid.

263 Hagen: “I thought that if I could be good in sports, because that’s what I was talented at, that I could overcome the odds, that I could get people to like me.” The Strength Team, “Mike Hagan 1989 with the Old Power Team,” [date unknown], Youtube video, 9 minutes 35 seconds, posted October 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KQyPbpkS2w

264 Quoted in Mazer, “Power Team,” 170-171. 115 bodybuilding – aligning waifishness with femininity and bulkiness with masculinity – was ever-present in Power Team performances. Yet, it was also palpably present in

American popular culture. From big hair to big earrings to silicone implants, 1980s popular culture asserted bigger was better. Within the logic of the Power Team, however, the bodybuilder infatuation with bulkiness combined with a deeply rooted American

Christian belief that the shape of the body revealed the internal character of the person, something which would otherwise remain invisible. At a show in Louisville, Jacobs’s message reinforced the image of Jesus as a deity whose salvific power is connected to his physical strength:

If Jesus Christ is not in your heart, and not in your mind, and not in your family, the thief [Satan] is coming in! But thank God! When you put the blood of Jesus over your family, when [Satan] tries the door, you need somebody bigger and tougher than he is.265

Salvation, it seemed, was only possible through a Christ who asserted his dominance through physical competition. In the logic presented here, a puny Jesus is an ineffective

God. Jacobs assured his audiences that this wasn’t the case; rather, “Jesus Christ was no skinny little man. Jesus was a man’s man!”266 A Jesus without muscles is no Christ at all.267

This portrait of Christ as a hypermuscular fighter is a consistent image within sports evangelism, echoing older muscular Christians like Billy Sunday and Warren

Conant. Yet it also fit within the gender anxieties of evangelical culture in the decade.

265 Transcription of a performance in Louisville Kentucky, captured on video, “Power Team - John Jacobs,” emphasis added.

266 Quoted in Mazer, “Power Team,” 162.

267 In other statements, Jacobs refers to God as "The King who leads His people to victory." Mazer notes that this echoes the late-medieval European image of the earthly king as rex athleta Christi, the king who is the athlete for Christ. Mazer, “Power Team,”186, n.3.

116 Rev. Jerry Falwell, then at the height of his national prominence, repeated this message:

“Christ wasn’t effeminate. The man who lived on this earth was a man with muscles….

Christ was a he-man!”268 Concurrently, Edwin Cole argued that unlike “sissified paintings of Jesus,” which fail to show “the true character of Him who was both Son of

Man and Son of God,” a true image would show that “Jesus was a fearless leader, defeating Satan, casting out demons, commanding nature, rebuking hypocrites,” and that

“God wants to reproduce this manhood in all men…. Since to be like Jesus – Christlike – requires a certain ruthlessness, manhood does also.”269 An effete, pacifistic Christ would not be capable of delivering on his salvific promises. Other influential conservative

Christian authors like James Dobson and even Catholic antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly framed the stern Jesus as the ultimate symbol of Christian masculinity, stressing fatherly strength as a prerequisite for domestic tranquility and the stabilization of the state. Like action cinema heroes, this hawkish Christ was no proponent of the lily-livered diplomacy associated with Jimmy Carter.270

This linking of physical and spiritual strength with aggressive foreign policy and manhood was a recurrent theme within conservative Christian circles, something to which Power Team performances gave visual confirmation. Highly critical of Carter’s cutbacks on nuclear armaments, one of Reagan’s signature policies as president was to invest unprecedented sums of money in America’s military infrastructure, visibly beefing

268 Quoted in Michael Kimmel, Misframing Men: The Politics of Contemporary Masculinities (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 23.

269 Cole, Maximized Manhood, 63.

270 Even if Carter was an evangelical, he was clearly of the wrong variety for many others who wore the mantle in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His refusal to issue executive orders regarding abortion alienated him from his religious brethren, a fissure which Reagan was happy to exploit for political advantage.

117 up the American arsenal. In his 1983 address before the National Association of

Evangelicals, Reagan made clear his belief that such spending was instrumental in providing the concrete, visual symbols of American moral strength. He warned the gathered ministers to not “ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire,”271 and to not mistakenly view his policies as that of an arms race but to recognizing it as the American contribution to a battle between good and evil. Within

Reagan’s vernacular, the armaments purchased were not secular weaponry, but rather manifestations of the spiritual commitment the nation was making to doing its ordained part to arrest the advances of evil on the global stage (manifested in the Soviet Union).

One might argue that Reagan’s invocation of an evil empire and of waging a spiritual battle for the soul of the world was a means of playing to the crowd in a familiar dialectic. In a time in which the commander and chief openly expressed his belief that might made right, and in a time in which secular entertainment promoted that belief, it is easy to see how and why a strength ministry espousing a bigger, beefier image of Jesus found success.

Sanctifying Destruction and Individual Determination

Like earlier sports evangelism ministries, Power Team disavowed the spiritual significance of their performances as little more than a means through which to attract an audience. Yet, there is little doubt that the performances also presented the argument that

Christian manhood is a force to be reckoned with, and one strong enough to withstand the

271 Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals,” Orlando, Florida, March 8, 1983. ReaganFoundation, “Evil Empire’ Speech by President Reagan to the National Association of Evangelicals,” March 1983, Youtube Video, 30 minutes 5 seconds, posted April 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcSm-KAEFFA. 118 corrupting influences of the secular world. Gender theorist R.W. Connell suggests that body-reflexive practices are not internal to the individual:

They involve social relations and symbolism; they may well involve large- scale social institutions. Particular versions of masculinity are constituted in their circuits as meaningful bodies and embodied meaning. Through body-reflexive practices, more than individual lives are formed: a social world is formed.272

Bodybuilding is a social world of individual agency. Rise or fall, responsibility rests only with the participant. While he may receive encouragement verbally, no one is allowed to carry the weight for him. Within the logic of Power Team performances, acts are always performed by a single individual – one mammoth of a man breaking through the forces that bind him to sin and death.

One illustrative example from 1989 took place at Aimee McPherson’s Angeles

Temple. Jacobs introduced performer Ken Henderson in terms of his athletic attributes:

“He’s a black belt in karate. Seven years undefeated in karate competitions…. He stands

6’2”, 240-lbs, with 20-inch biceps… with amazing speed and power.”273 After a triumphant entrance, Henderson stepped up on the scaffolding to face three stacks of concrete slabs, six bricks deep (6-6-6), smiled at the audience and yelled, “I love Jesus!

Hallelujah!” With Henderson in position above him on the stage, Jacobs hypes the feat and tells the audience of the significance of what they are about to witness:

I’m going to need your help. I can’t believe what I’m seeing! A man won a world championship this way breaking four. Ken’s breaking stacks of six! Let this one represent the Anti-Christ! Let this one represent the Beast! Let this one represent the false prophet!274

272 R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 64.

273 Video, “Ken Henderson in Power Team with Triple Break,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mRbh44MRXk.

274 Ibid.

119

The Angeles Temple crowd realizes Henderson will break one stack with each arm, and the one in front of him with his face (forehead). Jacob’s rhetoric whips them into a frenzy as the tension builds over several agonizing minutes. As Henderson slowly practices different approaches, there is a noticeable squeal of high-pitched voices as he removes his outer garment, revealing his amazingly huge chest and biceps. As he sizes up his final approach, the music switches over to U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name.”

With the Edge’s iconic guitar rift rising to crescendo, Henderson times his final strike to match the music, breaking through the idols of evil. The crowd screams as Henderson rises back up, fixes his hair, points to sky, looks directly at the camera and yells “Jesus is all!”

The connection to one of the most important sites in the history of Pentecostalism is more than tangential. As Grant Wacker has detailed, Pentecostal anthropology in the early 1900s (and to some extent still today) provides a space wherein that which is human and mundane can be transformed into something truly extraordinary. In Wacker’s summary, “after conversion, sanctification, and Holy Spirit baptism, saints could quite literally become vessels of the Almighty’s power on earth.”275 While this echoed social gospel post-millennial beliefs in the efficacy of human effort rightly guided be a God- consciousness, this Pentecostal legacy also laid the foundation for later American evangelical perceptions of the mundane world in which “material objects could serve as vehicles for healing or other manifestations of miraculous power.”276 That history is still

275 Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 95.

276 Ibid, 94.

120 present on Power Team stages when Assemblies of God ministers present their bodies as vessels of divine power destroying the totems which bind them to sin and death.277

Yet the items the Power Team destroyed were often items of everyday domestic life: slabs of concrete, cinder blocks, bricks, and pieces of rebar are common items of home construction; and hot-water bottles, baseball bats, and phonebooks were quotidian items likely to be found laying around the suburban homes from which many in the audience had come and to which they would return when the event ended. Team members were destroying items of domesticity, a domain over which wives and mothers traditionally held power, the target of conservative Christian criticism from authors like

Bly, Dobson, and Falwell for dissuading masculine impulses in efforts by well-meaning but misguided mothers to raise docile boys. The necessity for strong fathers to retake their rightful place as the role models for sons, to take it back from mothers, undergirded many of Jacobs’s comments about home life, parenthood, and Christian manhood.278

Although never explicitly stated in Power Team performances, the destruction of these items betrayed a hard body Christian commitment to destroying the domesticating forces that emasculated boys.

277 Totemic destruction is found in many religious traditions (the stoning of Iblis at Jamarat during the Hajj and the desecration of the idols of Ba’al stand out as other examples within monotheistic contexts). My point here is that the Power Team members conceived of their bodies as vessels of divinity, a specifically Christian way of thinking through the relationship between Creator and created.

278 As mentioned earlier, it is something of paradox that the most vocal opponents of the increased familial leadership capacity of women were men whose own childhoods were marked by absentee or abusive fathers. Perhaps this is a contributing factor for why so many of these writers claim that men have shirked their familial obligations, leaving a leadership vacuum which women have had to fill, however poorly they may do so.

121 Hard Bodies and Sex Appeal

Power Team members incorporated the sexual appeal of their bodies into their promotional strategy as well. Speaking of the action cinema, Kent Brintnall argues:

The muscular male body on display – especially when shown performing acts requiring strength, skill, and speed – unquestionably signifies masculine power. This body’s beauty and grace, as much as its efficacy and potency, makes masculine power attractive, alluring, enticing. Thus, the muscular male body on display – even when shown performing acts requiring strength, skill, and speed – is an object of erotic contemplation.279

As a performance of masculinity, bodybuilding literally cries out for attention, begging for those in the vicinity to look at the body in the throes of action and admire it.

As Annie Blazer has noted, “weight lifting is a sport that relies on, even requires, the conflation of pain and pleasure; the soreness that results from weight training is a valuable indication of progress.”280 The theology of Christian bodybuilding is, then, a reflection of an emphasis upon suffering as the ultimate act of imitatio Christi. As a way of knowing the world, pain is a sensation that confirms one’s own efforts along this path of spiritual and physical transfiguration. In a grander view, bodybuilding is an exhibition of masochism which complements and is informed by Christian theological witness to public suffering. Mark Simpson’s observation, “The terrible litany of suffering that the bodybuilder inflicts on his body… is always intended for public consumption, whether in the gymnasium with roars and yells, or at contests, sweating and posing with a silent

279 Kent Brintnall, Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-In-Pain as Redemptive Figure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 30.

280 Annie Blazer, Playing For God: Evangelical Women and the Unintended Consequences of Sports Ministry (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 92.

122 beatific smile,”281 further reminds us that bodybuilding is a gender performance, one in which performers present their bodies for visible consumption.

What legitimated these displays of the hard body on sacred ground or in school gymnasiums? While such overtly sexualized performances might strike an observer as out-of-place within a church setting, social geographer Karen Morin notes that across the main monotheistic traditions, in contrast to the admonitions to modesty imposed upon women, the admonitions governing men’s religious dress often “originate out of a call to show.”282 Sometimes that manifested in orders to put on garbs which expressed communal identity (kippahs) or conform to regulations concerning stylizations of head and facial hair, and sometimes in orders to remove garments in order to shock audiences into a paying attention (Saul’s nakedness in 1 Sam. 10:6 or Isaiah’s in Is. 20:2). Power

Team performances were certainly in line with the latter.

Partial uncovering in gymnasiums make sense in that they are the socially legible stages of masculine performance. Speaking about the sociology of bodybuilding, Tristan

Bridges suggests that bodily capital has “greater relative value within specific fields of practice.”283 In other words, spatial location helps audiences contextualize the significance of musculature in both degree and kind. While bodybuilders are often deemed as freakish within certain fields, their girth is given positive meaning with other contexts, e.g.: the gym. As most assemblies took place in school gyms, Power Team associates benefited from this contextualization, positing the performers spatially as

281 Mark Simpson, Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 1995), 39.

282 Karen Morin, “Men’s Modesty, Religion, and the State,” Journal of Men and Masculinities 16 (2013): 307-328.

283 Tristan Bridges, “Gender Capital and Male Bodybuilders,” Body and Society, 15 (2009): 83- 107. 123 experts in gym culture and making their bodies legible as positive proof of their expertise. In the epistemology of the gym class, where being bigger and stronger often correlated with being better than one’s peers, the bodies of Power Team performers were clearly inscribed as desirable, both as aesthetic object and for the fantasies of masculinist power and superiority they were meant to signify.

While normative understandings of masculinity posit the male subject as an agent of desire, these shows intentionally frame the performers’ bodies as objects of erotic contemplation, giving audience members opportunities to admire the performers’ bodies by having them briefly strike bodybuilder poses at the end of their acts. Team members normally begin their show in modest warm ups covering their bodies, exposing only hands and head. Before completing the act of destruction, the active cast member would remove their outer top garment, revealing a tank top that allowed for a better view of their large biceps and round chests, often to ear-piercing shrieks. While most religious proscriptions involving body covering are to cover the eroticism of the female body,

Power Team shows incorporated disrobement in order signifying the Christian male body as one whose sexual capital ought to be noticed by women within a religious setting (a church). The message for young boys was simple: girls dig beefy Christian men.

Numerous newspaper articles contain testimonies to the sexual nature of these religious shows. Wife and mother Krista-Carol Littrell confessed, “every time they stand up there and flex I scream,”284 though, she claimed, because of the authenticity of their testimonies and not, she assured the reporter, because of lust. Jacobs occasionally invited audience members to even touch the bodies on display. Before performer Mike Hagen lay

284 Quoted in Pellis, “Macho Ministry.”

124 down on bed of nails and had weights pressed against his chest, Jacobs invited young women on stage to touch Hagen’s chest to ensure that what they are seeing (and feeling) is a true hard body, unprotected by artificial padding.285 A fan described Jacobs himself as “a massively big guy, very handsome, incredibly charismatic and he’s probably all things that most men wish they could be.”286 While such performances may have transgressed older notions of decorum, there is little doubt they offered young male audience members a chance to see (in both the performers and in themselves) the possible sexual capital of the white Christian male. In that sense, these shows performed a kind of therapeutic, pastoral function for young boys and men.

These shows certainly also carried a homoerotic connotation to them. As a means of combating accusations of sexual deviancy, performers often spoke directly to their wives and children in the audience, their very presence a visible signal that the men conformed to heteronormative expectations. In his essay “Masculinity as Spectacle,”

Steve Neale suggests that “In a heterosexual and patriarchal society the male body cannot be marked explicitly as the erotic object of another male look: that look must be motivated in some other way, its erotic component repressed.”287 In other words, the erotic display of the male body must take place under a condition of deniability. From an evangelical perspective, Power Team performances were not erotic (at least, they were permissible) precisely because they were couched within the context of heterosexual

285 Quoted in Andrew Bagnato, “Power Team Flexes Muscles for Inner Strength,” Chicago Tribune, April 29, 1987.

286 Quoted in Born Again: The Power Team Story, “The Power Team Begins Their Impact on American Ministry – A Scene From the Official Power Team Documentary.” http://powerteamfilm.com/featured/a-scene-from-the-film-their-meteoric-rise/.

287 Steve Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle,” in The Sexual Subject: a Screen Reader on Sexuality (New York: Routledge Press, 1992 [1983]): 277-287. 125 witnessing. As mentioned earlier, it was young women, not young men, who were invited on stage to touch the bodies on display. The screams of the female audience members as the men took off their clothes were integral to legitimating the event as something other than homoerotic spectacle, giving aural confirmation that these bodies are meant for heterosexual consumption. In school assemblies, girls were invited to hang off the ends of weight bars as the men perform lifts, signifying that the proper relationship between men and women was one in which women are objects to be acted upon (or otherwise considered ornamental). Ultimately, the performers’ religious testimonies justified other men watching them lift weights as something evangelistic rather than exhibitionistic, something akin to how displays of spectacular violence in action films and blood sports justified men gazing upon other spectacular bodies. All of these efforts were part of a public relations strategy to limit accusations of inappropriate sexual expression.

The Twilight of Hard Body Christianity

The hard body Christianity of the 1980s carried traditional muscular Christian concerns about white middle class boys being emasculated by doting mothers, middle class work, and the social advances of women, sexual, and racial minorities. At the same time, it marked a departure from muscular Christianity’s earlier iterations to the extent hard body Christianity reflected the anxieties of New Right conservativism and was concerned with demonstrating the destructive potential of those bodies. While I would argue that there are noticeable differences between late Victorian muscular Christianity, its early 20th century evangelistic version, and the hard body version of the 1980s, the thread that connects them is gender anxiety. Victorian muscular Christianity focused on

126 the production of athletic male bodies for the sake of empire in England, commerce in

America, and the social gospel in both. Early to mid-20th century muscular Christianity dropped this emphasis on producing athletic male bodies in favor of recruiting athletes for evangelistic purposes. In the 1980s, hard body Christianity was seemingly less concerned with recruiting celebrity athletes and more concerned with displaying the destructive power of the hard body Christian male athlete (which I argue is itself a response to perceived feminizing trends in American culture). All three iterations had supporters who actively sought to bring a disturbingly violent masculinity back into the church. All three had supporters who blamed mothers, "over civilization," and absentee father figures for American masculine/moral decline. Though the language may have softened, the misogyny lingered.

The type of masculinity championed by Power Team members conformed to

James Messerschmidt’s critical definition of hegemonic masculinity mentioned earlier, yet it was also a view of masculinity found throughout American culture broadly and in conservative Christian rhetoric in particular. By adapting the narrative and visual elements of the action cinema to an evangelistic purpose, John Jacobs had created an effective method of reaching young men. In the process, the shows he orchestrated also showcased men’s bodies – as sexual symbols, as tools of destruction – in ways which are both understandable and problematic. They are understandable in the sense that they respond to and profit from the gender anxieties of the era, incorporate the spectacles of popular culture, and are driven by a desire to evangelize to young men through familiar media. These performances are also problematic because they play upon homoerotic elements to promote heterosexuality, depend upon the risk of injury to display the

127 invincibility of the hard male body, use elements of the strip tease in a church setting while promoting clean living, and (most disturbingly) teach young boys that problems, particularly those at home and at school, should be solved through brute force. The Power

Team’s Christianized version of hard body imagery integrated spectacular displays of the hard male body – jumping, running, breaking through objects, inflicting harm on others, suffering in its own pain only to emerge triumphantly over it – with religious significance, providing powerful visual confirmation of the physical and spiritual might of the white middle class evangelical male heterosexual.

As gender theorist Michael Messner observed, “although [action film masculinity] clearly provided a symbolic support for the resurgent conservativism of the Reagan era, this simplistic reversion to an atavistic symbology of violent, stoic, and muscular masculinity probably fueled tensions in gender relations as much as it stabilized them.”288

The iconography of the hard body fell out of favor with American audiences as the 1980s wore on, particularly as more and more women began to demonstrate that they too could possess their own hard bodies and fulfill the duties of the hard body action hero. Linda

Hamilton’s beefed up Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 (1991) and Sigourney Weaver’s more aggressive Ripley in second and third installments of the Alien franchise (1986,

1992) featured women in “hard body” roles, although still heavily dependent upon the gendered expectation of them as maternal protectors.289 In physical culture, home fitness guru Tamilee Webb made an eight-figure empire out of her Abs of Steel and Buns of Steel

288 Michael Messner, “The Masculinity of the Governator: Muscle and Compassion in American Politics,” Gender and Society 21 (2007): 461-480.

289 For a more in-depth look at the gender implications of these new roles of women, see Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, 132-141.

128 workout VHS tapes, showing women that their own bodies could be just as rock solid as those of the boys. By the 1990s, shows like American Gladiator brought hard body women into primetime, competing against men as well as other women in contests of athletic skill and endurance. These developments destabilized the gender coding of hard bodies, exacerbating the decline of hard body Christianity.

Concurrently, the strict paternalism found in much hard body iconography was increasingly challenged and eventually supplanted by alternative, more tender masculinities in popular discourse. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the icon of the indestructible, non-emotional human war machine was frequently lampooned. Even

Hollywood was aware of this development, producing films which showed hard body actors in more sentimental, relational roles [Kindergarten Cop (1991) and Braveheart

(1995) stand out as two memorable examples].290 The 1990s model of hegemonic masculinity increasingly emphasized a paternalistic masculinity not solely predicated upon physicality or violence, but not far removed from it either. The image of real men as destroyers was being replaced by images of men as protectors. As Messner noted,

“toughness, decisiveness, and hardness are still central to hegemonic masculinity, but it is now normally linked with situationally appropriate moments of compassion and, sometimes, vulnerability.”291

All of this reflected the shift in foreign policy away from the rhetorical annihilation of the Soviet Union (Reagan’s evil empire and Jacobs’s Satan) to that of the

United States as global policeman, militarily without peer and righteous in its use of force

290 See Brenton J. Malin, American Masculinity Under Clinton: Popular Media and the Nineties “Crisis of Masculinity” (New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2005); Brintnall, Ecce Homo, 39-46.

291 Messner, “Masculinity of the Governator,” 466.

129 internationally. The strict dialectical framing of the Cold War and the bombastic saber- rattling that it seemingly demanded fell out of favor as the vestiges of the old Soviet

Union began to crumble. The hard body politics of the Reagan administration, whose leader had so eloquently framed the economic conflict between capitalism and communism as one invested with cosmic significance, began to rhetorically pivot away from grandstanding and towards international diplomacy. The sort of paternalistic imperialism which followed, embodied in defense planning guideline known as the

Wolfowitz Doctrine (released April 16, 1992) – which in reality was a collaboration of numerous powerful Republican leaders, including Deputy Under Secretary of Defense

Scooter Libby, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin

Powell – neatly correlated with the image of the 1990s "New Man" as benevolent protector.

Archetypes of evangelical masculinity mimicked this transition away from the excesses of hard body masculinity in politics and popular culture. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, evangelical writers increasingly abandoned the language of male-headship for a language of servant-leadership to describe power structures within family systems.

This shifting language was found most clearly in Stu Webber’s best-selling Tender

Warrior: God’s Intention for a Man (1993):

The heart of the Warrior is a protective heart. The Warrior shields, defends, stands between, and guards… He invests himself in ‘the energy of self-disciplined, aggressive action.’ By Warrior I do not mean one who loves war or draws sadistic pleasure from fighting or bloodshed. There is a difference between a warrior and a brute. A warrior is a protector… Men stand tallest when they are protecting and defending.292

292 Stu Webber, Tender Warrior: God’s Intention for a Man (Colorado Springs: Multnomah Books, 1993), 44. 130 Webber’s protectionist language certainly reflects the spirit of his time, yet also reflects muscular Christian ideals about the disciplined use of force found in its earliest iterations.

This is at odds with elements of the excessively violent 1980s hard body masculinity and the kind of hard body Christianity found in Power Team performances.

Even within sports evangelism, the presence of hard body Christianity quickly evaporated, giving way to the “soft patriarchy” of the Promise Keepers, an interdenominational men’s ministry founded by the devout Roman Catholic Bill

McCartney. McCartney shied away from the hard body ideology of the Power Team and instead offered a softer version of masculinity, one that framed tenderness as situationally appropriate for proper physical, emotional, and spiritual health. It was also an intentionally inter-racial ministry, attempting to reconcile the on-going divisions between

White, African-American, Native American, and Asian American men. Gathering thousands of middle-class men in sports stadia across the country, the former University of Colorado football coach brought men together in a homosocial environment where they were already accustomed to showing emotion in a “safe” space. There, men could freely experience the sort of powerful “collective effervescence”293 that would cause them to commit themselves to lives of servitude to Jesus Christ without accusation of giving in to womanish emotional hysteria. While not trading in sports explicitly or even primarily, the ministry defended its support of traditional patriarchal family relationships within sports stadia while often drawing upon the rhetoric of sports metaphors to drive

293 Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008 [1912].

131 their message home to the thousands of men in the stands.294 It is also worth noting that even though McCartney himself was a Catholic, the leading authors of the movement included numerous supporters of the kind of hard body Christianity found in the 1980s, including evangelicals Bill Bright, Edwin Cole, and James Dobson.295

Finally, even the Power Team was not immune to this transition. While the earliest formation of the strength ministry traded upon the allure of images of white male hard bodies – products of the repetitive acts of bodybuilding and pharmacological enhancement – latter iterations of the ministry adapted with the times. An audience member later recalled how team introductions began to include descriptions of their softer side. One member was introduced thusly: “He gave his heart to the Lord Jesus

Christ eight years ago. Bo is no pansy, folks, he stands 6’5” and weighs in at 322 pounds. Don’t be fooled by his massive exterior ladies, he’s a got a teddy bear heart.”296

Note that Bo is still gender-coded according to physicality, but is now also defined as a man with a sensitive side. By the mid-1990s, the team had added its first African

American cast member (a move which was concurrent with the rising popularity of the intentionally interracial Promise Keepers ministry). In the 21st century, the ministry also added its first female stock character, Saber, a woman who breaks baseball bats while wearing leopard print pants rather than the traditional warm up leggings all other male

294 See Michael S. Kimmel and Michael Kaufman, “Weekend Warriors: The New Men’s Movement,” Feminist Issues 13 (1993): 3-21; Dane Claussen, Standing on the Promises: The Promise Keepers and the Revival of Manhood (Jefferson: McFarland Publishing, 2000).

295 These four men, along with Tony Evans, Luis Palau, Randy Phillips, and Gary Smalley, co- authored the central text of the movement, Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper, originally published by Dobson’s Focus on the Family in 1994.

296 Quoted in Erika Rae, “I Hold John Jacobs and the Power Team Personally Responsible for the Loss of my Virginity,” The Nervous Breakdown Blog, January 11, 2009. http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/erae/2009/01/i-hold-john-jacobs-and-the-power-team-personally- responsible-for-the-loss-of-my-virginity/.

132 performers had worn since the ministry’s inception – a clothing decision which rather obviously sexualizes her as a means of demonstrating her conformity to gender expectations despite her displays of bodily strength.297 Such changes serve as evidence of shifting gender expectations within hard body Christianity over the years.298

297 Promoters and participants’ overt sexualization of female bodybuilders has helped deflect accusations of sexual deviancy and gender dysphoria. For example, in Pumping Iron 2: The Women, Ms. Olympia winner Rachel McLish is presented in several exotic pin-up poses and outfits, signaling that her muscular body is still an erotic object for visual consumption. See Maria R. Lowe, Women of Steel: Female Body Builders and the Struggle for Self-Definition (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

298 The Power Team ministry also spawned numerous spin-off groups over the years, with names like The Dunamis Team, Team Impact, The Power Force, Strike Force, X-Treme Impact, The Omega Force, The Truth Force, and The Strength Team. These organizations often featured one or more former Power Team cast members, who for one reason or another, separated to form their own copycat ministries. In that, they participate in a long cyclical history of Protestant fracturing and reorganization. 133 CHAPTER 4 - SEXY ABSTINENCE: SPORTS EVANGELISM AND SEXUAL

ETHICS IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

If we go on exploiting sex in books, in magazines, in the movies, and on the stage, what of the future of our civilization, of our homes and of the nation? - Billy Sunday, The Sawdust Trail299

By the late 1990s, the type of hard body Christianity promoted in strength ministries like the Power Team had gone out of fashion as the cultural trends that sustained them subsided. The shift away from cold war politics, the slimming down of the action hero, the changing gender and racial anxieties of life during the Clinton administration, and the diminishing place of professional wrestling in the national spotlight reduced the cultural-political importance of displaying the destructive potential of the white, male hard body. What emerged in its stead was a thoroughly modernized version of sports evangelism, adapted to the cultural concerns of a new time in American politics and utilizing the tools of commercial culture deemed most appropriate to impact the target audience. Situated in the cultural battles of the decade, amid the Monica

Lewinsky scandal, alarm over teen-pregnancy, and the growing gay rights movement, evangelical politics increasingly focused on championing the primacy of the heterosexual monogamous marital relationship. Some well-known athlete evangelists entered into this arena, using their public platform to encourage young men and women to turn away from the permissiveness of worldly culture and to follow the conservative sexual ethics of their faith. Some did so through appropriating the hyper-sexualized commercial and

299 William “Billy” A. Sunday. The Sawdust Trail: Billy Sunday in His Own Words (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), 65. 134 entertainment industries so frequent invoked in conservative Christian lamentations about the decaying state of American public life.300

Few areas so clearly demonstrate this interplay between evangelicalism and commercialism than those efforts aimed at inculcating evangelical youth in conservative sexual ethics. The social positions of evangelical youth (as potentially rebellious hormonal teenagers, often stuck in secular public schools) and whose access to information (via television, the movies, young adult literature, and the Internet) increasingly place them beyond the protective, sheltering borders of American evangelical subculture. In an effort to reach young men and women, evangelical athletes have stepped in as the type of heroes with which conservative Christian parents hope their children will identify and whose public statements might re-affirm their beliefs not only as righteous, but also popular. In this chapter, I look at how evangelical athletes have promoted one such political/moral position among youth: the conservative Christian option for abstinence before heterosexual monogamous marriage.

In what follows, I examine athlete evangelists’ efforts to promote abstinence as a viable, popular sexual identity for young men and women at the turn of the 21st century. I begin with a brief review of the political climate concerning abstinence-only education and sexual identity in the late 1990s before turning my attention to evangelical efforts to rebrand conservative Christianity as a sex-positive religious tradition and abstinence as a sexually powerful and desirable alternative to intercourse. I close by looking at

300 Foucault suggested that as the body became a site of contention between children and their parents who wished to regulate children’s sexuality, the body also became the site of exploitation as a means of control. “The revolt of the sexual body is the reverse effect of this [regulatory] encroachment. What is the response on the side of power? An economic (and perhaps also ideological) exploitation of eroticization, from sun-tan products to pornographic films. Responding precisely to the revolt of the body, we find a new mode of investment which presents itself no long in the form of control by repression but that of control by stimulation.” Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. by Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 56-57. 135 evangelical Christian athlete participation in the hypersexualized commercial culture

Billy Sunday once lamented. Focusing on the naked or nearly naked images of Lori

“Lolo” Jones and Tim Tebow, two high-profile athlete-evangelists, I situate these performances within a larger evangelical attempt to present the option for abstinence before heterosexual monogamous marriage as the sexy option for young people.

I argue that these images, which may initially strike the reader as hypocritical, even pornographic - perform evangelistic work. By using their aesthetic and sexual appeal, Jones and Tebow (among others), literally offer up their bodies as the material objects of desire in an on-going evangelical media strategy to sexualize abstinence for a younger generation, challenging the common perception of virginity as an undesirable state of being. In doing so they are helping evangelical parents show their teenage children that virgins, and virginity, can be popular.

Evangelicals, Sexual Ethics, and the Campaign for Abstinence

The American bedroom was a prominent subject in the political discourse of the

1990s. The hotly contested passage of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in 1993 challenged the equation of patriotism with heterosexuality, a national debate over a gay marriage legal case in Hawaii spurred the Republican-controlled congress to pass the Defense of

Marriage Act in 1996, and the 1998 Lewinsky scandal – with its attendant media frenzy about an unfaithful president and his subsequent impeachment by congress – provided regular fodder for conservative pundits bemoaning the end of morality in America.

Elsewhere in 1998, all-pro defensive end and ordained minister Reggie White made

136 national headlines by claiming that homosexuals were actively “hurting our children”301 in a tirade before the Wisconsin state legislature, repeating a trope about gay men as rapist pedophiles that can be traced back to at least the 1950s. Undoubtedly, sexual ethics had become one of the primary talking points in the culture wars of the 1990s. And, as

White’s comments demonstrated, a fair amount of the discourse on sexual ethics revolved around sexuality in the lives of American children, especially teenage girls and boys.

Among American evangelicals, the greatest of these concerns was the growing number of unplanned teenage pregnancies across the United States.302 While many child psychologists, reproductive health experts, and school administrators responded to these concerns by advocating for a comprehensive overhaul of sex education in American public schools, which would also include teaching safe-sex practices other than abstinence, some more conservative Americans believed this to be a defeatist approach.

Rather than blithely stand by and concede that teenagers will have sex regardless, the latter group became increasingly determined to promote restraint before monogamous heterosexual marriage through pro-abstinence campaigns aimed at teenagers and young

301 Reggie White’s speech may have landed him in hot water nationally, but many in the evangelical community loved him for it. Following that speech, White became a featured guest in Focus on the Family’s Citizen magazine and on The 700 Club, evangelical publishing house Thomas Nelson put out three books with White given credit as lead author, and was a guest speaker at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual gathering, held at the Georgia Dome in 1999. Amy Rinard, “Speech by White shocks Assembly,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, March 25, 1998.

302 Data from longitudinal studies suggest that pregnancy among women ages 15-19 peaked in 1991 at approximately 6% and has been steadily declining ever since. Brady Hamilton and Stephanie Ventura, “Birth Rates for U.S. Teenagers Reach Historic Lows for All Age and Ethnic Groups,” National Center for Health Statistics Data Brief 89 (2012), 1-8. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db89.pdf I argue that this was the greatest concern for evangelicals of the era for a few reasons. First, the widespread success of evangelical abstinence programs suggests that such programs assuaged widespread social conservative anxieties about teenage sexual activity. Second, while access to abortion obviously was still an important talking point, Roe v. Wade had been the law of the land for over twenty years. Third, although gay rights were increasingly part of public discourse, no state had legalized same-sex marriage, or even civil unions, by this time. Lastly, for a good portion of the 1990s, many evangelicals publicly argued that no homosexual could be a Christian, and only later would shift their tactics towards an acknowledgement of gay and lesbian Christians while still arguing that they were sinners who needed to undergo re- orientation, conversion, or abstinence therapy. 137 adults.303 Conservative parents had to change their tactics in order to face the realities that they could no longer shelter their children from sexualized secular culture in the era of cable TV and the Internet. Rather than simply preach against the influences of that culture, evangelicals once again adapted its tools and narrative frames for evangelistic purposes. In this case, rather than resisting the secular emphasis on and commercialization of sex, evangelicals rebranded their option for abstinence before monogamous, heterosexual marriage not only as the morally righteous choice, but also the most popular and most sexy.

In order to do so, the most successful ministries incorporated elements of commercial culture while critiquing commercialism’s overt displays of sexuality.304

Nationwide evangelical purity programs like True Love Waits, Silver Ring Thing, and

Pure Freedom attempted to persuade teenagers to avoid sex by castigating secular media

303 The effectiveness of pro-abstinence campaigns, particularly “pledging” programs, was questionable. Research has shown that pledgers still engaged in pre-marital sex, and that young people who took such pledges were one-third less likely to use contraception when they became sexually active (before marriage) than their non-pledger counterparts. Pledgers also appear to have the same STD rates as non- pledgers, and are comparatively more likely to have engaged in oral and anal sex, even among those who still identify as virgins. Peter Bearman and Hannah Brückner, “Promising the Future: Virginity Pledges and the Transition to First Intercourse,” American Journal of Sociology 106 (2001): 859-912; Peter Bearman and Hannah Brückner, “After the promise: The STD consequences of adolescent virginity pledges,” Journal of Adolescent Health 36 (2005): 271-278.

304 Contrary to the stereotypes of evangelical Americans as sexual prudes, they’ve actually been one of the most vocal groups in American culture espousing a positive view of sexuality, one localized in the monogamous heterosexual marital bedroom. Amy DeRogatis argues, “Protestant evangelicals did not turn away from the sexual liberation movement begun in the 1960s; they have simply made it their own, publishing sex manuals, running sex workshops and holding counseling sessions to instruct husbands and wives on the best techniques for a sexually satisfied marriage.” The plethora of evangelical sex manuals, workshops, and Christian sex toy companies which have appeared since the 1960s drive home the reality that evangelicalism is not as sex-negative as it has appeared to many outsiders. Rather, evangelical sex- positivism is a tradition that holds that “the sexual body plays an important role in personal salvation,” and that “both purity (outside marriage) and pleasure (within it) are ways that evangelicals can witness to others.” The message underlying many of these materials is a simple one: evangelicals have the best sex. As a result, the common rhetoric of evangelical sexual culture implies that abstaining from sexual sin, remaining “pure” until monogamous heterosexual marriage, and exploring the joys of sexuality within that marriage are the sexiest choices. See Amy DeRogatis, “What would Jesus do? Sexuality and salvation in Protestant evangelical sex manuals, 1950s to the present,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 74 (2005): 98-99; DeRogatis, Saving Sex: Sexuality and Salvation in American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 6; 3. 138 for spreading a culture of sex while also appropriating elements of secular culture to appeal to their teenage audiences.305 By putting positive peer pressure on teenagers through virginity pledges, creating the teenage fashion fad of the purity ring (a visible declaration of inward and invisible commitment to abstinence as a means of witnessing to others), entertaining them at stadium-filling youth rallies with guest speakers, mini- concerts, and testimonials from attractive young people, campaigners fought hard to frame abstinence as the popular choice for American teenagers. Organizers even went so far as to take slogans from feminist and gay-rights activism, encouraging teenagers to take control of their own bodies and “come out” as abstinent to their peers.306 Positioning abstinence as a preferable and trendy sexual identity was “more than a mere spoonful of sugar to conceal the unsavory medicine of prohibited sex.”307 It was a campaign that presented abstinence as “a lifestyle that is most beneficial (and pleasurable) to the individual.”308 Such programs defined abstinence as a sexually pleasing choice for

305 Christine Gardner, Making Chastity Sexy: The Rhetoric of Evangelical Abstinence Campaigns (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); See also Sara Moslener, “Don’t Act Now! Selling Abstinence in the Religious Marketplace,” in God In the Details: American Religion and Popular Culture, ed. Eric Mazur and Karen McCarthy (New York: Routledge Press, 2009), 197-218; Sara Moslener, “By God’s Design? Sexual Abstinence and Evangelicalism in the United States, 1979-Present,” (PhD diss., Claremont Graduate University, 2009).

306 Heather White has noted that these programs and similar campaigns are attempting “to make a moral injunction into an identity movement” on par with those of gays and lesbians. Positioning abstinent teenagers “as cultural outsiders hiding a despised sexual secret,” these campaigns also adopted the language of gay and lesbian liberation movements, encouraging abstinent teenagers to make their position public knowledge by ‘coming out’ as abstinent.” Heather Rachelle White, “Virgin Pride: Born Again Faith and Sexual Identity in the Faith-Based Abstinence Movement” in Ashgate Research Companion to Contemporary Religion and Sexuality, ed. Stephen J. Hunt and Andrew Yip (London: Ashgate, 2012), 241- 254; Gardner has highlighted the adoption of the feminist movement’s argument of “my body, my choice” in the way these campaigns attempt to persuade teenagers that they are autonomous sexual agents who have the power to control their sexual bodies.” Gardner, Making Chastity Sexy, 14.

307 Gardner, Making Chastity Sexy, 61.

308 Ibid. 139 committed Christians, an argument which was repeated by evangelical leaders on the national stage.

Celebrities featured among the most desirable spokespersons for these groups.

Looking out at the landscape of American celebrity culture, many evangelical commentators were dismayed to see so many influential Americans, especially men, modeling lives of sin. As one parental advice author put it:

Our sports, movie, and music stars seemingly get away with any behavior they feel like indulging – drugs, sexual assault, even murder – all without suffering any consequences. What kind of self-image do young boys develop when they feel forced to, or are unable to, live up to these kind of stereotypes?309

In his best-selling Bringing Up Boys, James Dobson insisted that teenagers “are desperately looking for a valid reason to say no,”310 amid a culture that encouraged them to say yes to sex before marriage. Believing in the power of the public platform, many evangelical Christians hoped that some in the limelight might use their powers for good and serve as role models to young Americans, especially concerning sexual ethics. Who better to fill this void than athletes?

A.C. Green, Rap Music, and Abstinence Committed Bears

Just as Christian athletes have become spokespersons for different sexual ethics in the past, they would do so again in the battle to promote abstinence.311 Among the first to

309 Rick Johnson, That’s My Son: How Moms Can Influence Boys to Become Men of Character (Grand Rapids: Revell Press, 2005), 42.

310 James Dobson, Bringing Up Boys: Practical Advice and Encouragement for Those Shaping the Next Generation of Men (Carol Stream: Tyndale House, 2001), 98.

311 A few early muscular Christians believed athletics could function as a release for dangerous sexual urges. Throughout the 20th century, some prominent athletes used their public position to champion monogamy (Bart Starr) or deride those they believed were immoral (Reggie White). I’ve written about 140 do so was NBA “Iron Man” A.C. Green.312 Playing in an NBA record 1,192 straight games from Nov. 19, 1986 to April 18, 2001, Green was a paragon of durability on the hardwood. However, the 6’9” power forward was also known for a different longevity record, one which required just as much personal sacrifice and determination. Publicly committed to remaining abstinent before marriage, and to postponing marriage until after his NBA career was over, Green waited until age 38 before marrying his longtime girlfriend. This feat is made all the more impressive when juxtaposed against the reports of fellow teammates like Earvin “Magic” Johnson betting Green wouldn’t have the strength to remain a virgin in the NBA, and other teammates encouraging women to attempt to get him in bed.313 Amid the sensationalized (and often scandalous) Lakers culture, fueled by drugs and alcohol at the Beverly Hills mansion of owner Jerry Buss and orgiastic parties at Magic Johnson’s Bel Air abode, Green’s commitment to remain abstinent was out of place. The “out-of-placeness” of his stance within professional sports provided a narrative frame through which Green could position his decision as a viable counter-cultural option for both himself and those who wished to follow his example.314

these in more detail in an early draft of this chapter: “Virgin evangelical athletes and the campaign to make abstinence sexy,” US Sport History Blog, February 26, 2015. http://ussporthistory.com/2015/02/26/virgin- evangelical-athletes-and-the-campaign-to-make-abstinence-sexy/

312 AC is his legal first name, not an abbreviation. He has no middle name.

313 Jeff Pearlman, Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s (New York: Gotham Books, 2014), 270-273; Bill Plaschke, “Sex Free A.C. Just Grins, Bears It,” L.A. Times, May 20, 2000; See also ESPN, “How L.A. Laker A.C. Green Stayed a Virgin his Entire NBA Career,” July 2016, Video, 8 minutes 22 seconds, posted July 2016. http://www.espn.com/video/clip?id=15474292

314 The sordid tale of Lakers’ sex culture, and Green’s victory over it, are recounted in A.C. Green and J.C. Webster, Victory: The Principles of Championship Living (Lake Mary: Creation House Publishers, 1994). Green and Webster reunited the following year for Zondervan’s “Today’s Heroes” series, A.C. 141 After having accepted Jesus into his heart on a F.C.A. trip in high school, Green was determined to live out his faith through his gifts on the basketball court.315 The A.C.

Green Youth Foundation, was founded in 1989 with the mission: “To serve both youth and the communities in which they live by providing information about sexual abstinence and social issues that concern our young people and educating them to make responsible choices to prepare them for their future.”316 The foundation acted out the mission by using Green’s social position to attract young audiences. Reiterating staid conservative themes of personal responsibility, Green’s position on the teenage pregnancy issue was simple: “We need more self-control than birth control.”317 His efforts, and that of his foundation, utilized popular culture to accomplish this goal.

In 1994, Green contacted other African-American athletes to ask them to help put out a rap video promoting abstinence to African-American teenagers. The Athletes for

Abstinence (consisting of Green, David Robinson, Barry Sanders, Darryl Green, Reggie

White, and Dave Johnson) formed their own rap super-group in an effort to preach their message in a familiar cultural medium.318 The group’s one and only single, “It Ain’t

Green (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishers, 1995). Victory was later picked up by Thomas Nelson publishers, adding to their already sizeable number of books about the faith of professional athletes.

315 Green’s testimony was published in Decision Magazine, a production of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. http://web.archive.org/web/20060925083017/http://www.sacredhoops.com/ac_green.html

316 “Mission Statement of the AC Green Youth Foundation,” http://www.acgreen.com/foundation/index.html

317 Quoted in Dobie Holland, “Athletes for Abstinence Promotes ‘Sexual Purity’ For Teens Until Marriage,” Jet, January 10, 1994, 49.

318 These men have had various connections with the evangelical establishment. White had already received Athletes In Action’s Bart Starr Award in 1992; it is also worth noting that AIA chose Bart Starr as their exemplary person. In his own time, Starr was known for his stalwart defense of sexual restraint and monogamy during the sexual revolution, especially when compared with Joe Namath’s sexual escapades. Darryl Green won the Starr Award in 1997. David Robinson, who attended best-selling author Max Lucado’s Oak Hills Church in San Antonio, became a minister for the church after his retirement. And 142 Worth It,” was part rap video, part public service announcement. Before the music began, interviews with teenagers confirmed that their world was dominated by a simple cultural message: “If you’re not having sex, you’re not going to be popular. You’re not going to be wanted by all the men. You know, they’re saying that only the cool people are having sex, and if you’re not having sex then you’re an outcast.” The response of Green,

Robinson, et al.: “Let me drop a little lecture on safe sex / nothing but a joke by the government’s latex / ‘cause there’s no safe sex except for abstinence….”319 In an interview with the African-American weekly magazine Jet, the born again Christian specified that the video was targeted specifically to young African-American men and women. According to Green, “Abstinence has primarily been a White middle-class family value and we need to change that.”320 This intervention specifically targeting young African-Americans was part of a larger evangelical movement to use rap/hip-hop to promote abstinence, joining with rap/rock outfit D.C. Talk’s “That Kind of Girl,” and

“I Don’t Want It,” and TG4’s “Virginity,” in a growing discography of pro-abstinence urban music.321

While most sports evangelism efforts of the 20th century were spearheaded by white males, there were several reasons why African-American elite athletes rose to prominence within sports evangelism during the 1990s. The Promise Keeper’s theme of decathlete Dave Johnson took up a position with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in his retirement. Sanders’ appearance in the video is interesting. He had a child out of wedlock the same year the video was produced (1994). Depending on your position, his pro-abstinence message can be interpreted as hollow in light of that revelation or positive construed as the wisdom of a person struggling with the consequences of sexual activity.

319 Athletes for Abstinence, “It Ain’t Worth It,” Dir. Bobby Broome (A.C. Green Programs For Youth) VHS, 35 minutes, 1994.

320 Quoted in Holland, “Athletes for Abstinence,” 49.

321 See also Judith Newman, “Proud to Be a Virgin,” New York Times, June 19, 1994.

143 racial reconciliation provided more African-American athletes leadership opportunities within evangelical sports culture, even as Promise Keeper rallies continued to draw overwhelmingly white male crowds.322 Chart-topping rap and hip-hop super-groups like

NWA, Public Enemy, and the Wu-Tang Clan greatly increased the commercial appeal of their respective genres, moving the music of the city out into the suburbs. And teenage pregnancy, evangelicals’ great social concern for adolescents, was three times as prevalent among African-American adolescents as their white counterparts.323 The

Athletes for Abstinence rap group emerged from this nexus of sexual and racial anxieties and changing norms in American popular music and sports evangelism, utilizing an entertainment form known for valorizing sexual licentiousness in order to promote restraint.

Amid the nationwide controversy regarding funding for abstinence- only/comprehensive sex education curriculums in public schools, Green’s Youth

Foundation leadership created, promoted, and distributed their own addition to the curriculum controversy. Green’s sex education curriculum, Game Plan, “uses a positive, sports-themed approach to understanding the benefits of abstinence” and “helps teens understand that abstinence is the healthiest choice.”324 Like other Christian-based abstinence programs of its era, Game Plan encouraged its readers to take an abstinence pledge in the hopes that such a commitment would provide positive social pressure which would help teenagers choose abstinence. The pledge, reading: “In order to protect my

322 Ted Olsen, “Promise Keepers: Racial Reconciliation Emphasis Intensified,” Christianity Today, January 6, 1997.

323 Hamilton and Ventura, “Birth Rates for U.S. Teenagers Reach Historic Lows for All Age and Ethnic Groups,” 3.

324 Scott Phelps and Libby Mack, A.C. Green’s Game Plan: Curriculum (Project Reality, 2001). 144 future and help me accomplish my goals, I choose to be sexually abstinent from this day forward until marriage,”325 explicitly links delaying sexual activity until heterosexual monogamous marriage with future hopes and dreams, implying engaging in sexual activitity outside of marriage will have ruinous consequences. By making the pledges part of public commitment, they also repositioned abstinence as a popular choice among social peers.

In order to spread the message of this campaign, Green created a mascot to help promote the Youth Foundation brand. As part of the Foundation’s “I’ve Got the Power”

(to resist sex) campaign, Green and company invented an 8” tall green teddy bear called

Little A.C., the “Abstinence Committed” bear. Tapping into the then-trending stuffed animal collections fueled by companies like TY Beanie Babies (1993) and Build A Bear

(1997), the Little A.C. bear made American pop culture work for the abstinence cause.

Foundation director GinaMarie Scarpa convinced Green to share the message by bringing the bear with him to games. Playing for one of the most storied franchises in NBA history, in the second largest media market in the United States (Los Angeles in 1999-

2000), Green placed Little A.C. on top of his head when he was sitting on the bench.

Game after game, broadcast after broadcast, Green’s bear was on TV for 82 regular season games and the additional playoffs championship run, on sports news media, celebrity interest pieces, and on other venues. If that wasn’t enough, Green’s Foundation distributed over 19,000 bears to attendees of the Lakers’ Christmas Day victory over

David Robinson’s San Antonio Spurs at the Staples Center.326

325 Ibid, 2007 edition, 77.

326 Bill Plaschke, “Sex-Free A.C. Just Grins, Bears It.” 145 While Green’s attempts to win over American youth might strike outsiders as strange, they made perfect sense within the historical context of evangelicalism and its relationship with popular culture. Since his retirement from professional sports in 2001,

Green has continued to use his social influence to spread the abstinence message among

America’s youth through basketball camps, promoting his foundation’s abstinence-only curriculums, giving out Little A.C. bears, and appearing on Trinity Broadcast Network.

For his efforts, Athletes in Action awarded Green the Bobby Jones Award at the 2011

NBA All-Star Breakfast.327 The award, given to the NBA personality who best exhibits

“character, leadership, and faith in the world of basketball, in the home, and in the community,”328 is a mark of Green’s legacy within sports evangelism.

Selling a Sexually Active Virginity

Athletes parlaying their cultural capital as celebrities into opportunities to shape sexual practice in America is not unusual. The organizers of the abstinence campaigns of the 1990s and early 2000s sought out celebrity endorsements under the assumption that doing so would help their public relations campaign to reinvent abstinence as a popular, viable option for American youth. As Christine Gardner explains, by inviting “well- known celebrities and unknown teenagers and adults alike [to] share their personal stories of living a sexually abstinent life…” the organizers hoped to “convey the message that

327 The NBA All-Star Breakfast is an event created by Athletes in Action and has been held every year since 2008. David Robinson, one of Green’s collaborators on the Athletes for Abstinence video, won the Bobby Jones award in 2012.

328 Dave Lower, spokesperson for AIA at the breakfast, who presented the award to Green. Quoted in Katherine T. Phan, “NBA Legends AC Green, Del Harris Honored at All-Star Breakfast,” Christian Post, February 21, 2011.

146 abstinence works and is a realistic lifestyle choice for teenagers.”329 Yet one part of this strategy that did not immediately manifest within sports evangelism was the intentional use of attractive individuals to promote this message. Having young and attractive evangelical celebrities or attractive teenage peers share their personal testimonies of remaining abstinent implies that if these beautiful people can wait for sex until marriage, when they’ll be having the best sex possible, so can the teenage audience. In Gardner’s estimation:

Since abstinence deals with subverting or redirecting sexuality, it is not appealing if its only spokespersons are physically unattractive. It is easy for someone to pledge sexual abstinence if the opportunity for sex is nonexistent. On the other hand, if people as popular and beautiful as Rebecca St. James or the Jonas Brothers or Jordin Sparks can pledge abstinence, so the argument goes, then perhaps I can pledge abstinence, too.330

By specifically choosing aesthetically pleasing celebrities and teenagers – those with the highest levels of “erotic capital” – to endorse abstinence, the campaigns ground their message in the sexually appealing bodies of the testifiers.331 Gardner suggests that this functioned as an “embodied argument… an argument displayed in physical form”332 which bridged the space between speaker and audience. By grounding the claim that

329 Gardner, Making Chastity Sexy, 55.

330 Ibid, 56.

331 Bourdieuian theory makes room for a variety of capitals. While the concept of erotic capital predates her book, sociologist Catharine Hakim claims to have coined the term, referring to it as a “complex but crucial combination of beauty, sex appeal, skills of self-presentation, and social skills… attractive to all members of their society and especially to the opposite sex.” Catherine Hakim, Erotic Capital: The Power of Attraction in the Boardroom and the Bedroom (Philadelphia: Basic Books, 2011), 1- 2.

332 Gardner, Making Chastity Sexy, 57-58.

147 abstinence is sexy in the physical bodies of attractive speakers, the case was made that abstinence was attractive by association.333

Operating under that same logic, getting popular, sexy athletes to endorse abstinence was to make an embodied argument of a different form. For all his efforts,

A.C. Green did not fit this mold of evangelism, as neither he nor his ministry was ever presented as sex figures or sexy ideas.334 Yet as the new millennium unfolded, other, better looking evangelical athletes appeared on the national stage. Growing up in the heydays of the abstinence ministries, Lori “Lolo” Jones and Tim Tebow became the national faces of sports evangelism in the late 2000s. Like their predecessors, both have used their place in the national spotlight to promote their interpretation of sexual ethics.

What makes these two stand out isn’t that they’ve used their cultural influence to promote their version of the faith and sexual morals, but the manner in which they’ve done so.

By literally putting their bodies on display, Jones and Tebow used the tools of sexualized consumer culture in order to promote abstinence as viable option for

American teenagers. Although they are not the only self-identified Christian athletes to pose naked - MMA fighter Jon “Bones” Jones, marathon runner Ryan Hall, sprinter

Carmelita Jeter, and running back Adrian Peterson have also stripped down for ESPN’s

Body issues – Jones and Tebow are the only ones who’ve made a public commitment to remaining abstinent before marriage a central part of their public ministry.335 If posing in

333 For a systemic review of the emphasis on popularity and sexiness in abstinence campaigns, see Gardner’s 2nd chapter, “Of Purity Rings and Pop Stars: Using Sex to Sell Abstinence,” Making Chastity Sexy, 41-62.

334 Perhaps this is because the most prominent celebrities of the evangelical abstinence movement in the late 1990s were white and intentionally focused on a majority white evangelical teenage population.

335 The images of the other athletes mentioned are available at the following: http://espn.go.com/espn/photos/gallery/_/id/8146596/image/8/bodies-want-2011; 148 the buff is so antithetical to evangelical faith, why do so many evangelicals do it? Perhaps the short quote which accompanies Ryan Hall’s image reveals part of the answer: “I’m a

Christian, and I think God created amazing bodies for us… I believe God gave me a gift, and I need to get everything out of it.”336 If Amy DeRogatis is right in arguing that for evangelicals “the sexual body is an arena for testifying to faith,”337 then the images that follow constitute one means of witnessing to others.

Lolo Jones, Evangelical Cover Girl

In the fall of 2009, marketing executives at ESPN: The Magazine, were struggling to come up with ways to increase revenue amid the fallout from the market collapse of the previous year. Advertisement revenues were down 24% in the first six months from the same period a year earlier.338 In order to attract advertisers’ money, ESPN decided to put a little skin in the game. ESPN’s The Body Issue was the first such attempt to cut into the niche-market carved out by competitor Sports Illustrated’s famous “Swimsuit Issue.”

In the issue, high quality glossy prints of professional athletes showcased the sexual allure of world-class bodies were tempered with images of the damage athletic participation can do to the human form.339 As ESPN editors explained at the beginning of

http://espn.go.com/espn/photos/gallery/_/id/8146596/image/13/bodies-want-2011; http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=8147232; http://espn.go.com/espn/photos/gallery/_/id/8146598/image/21/bodies-want-2009.

336 For more on Ryan Hall, see Jeré Longman, “A runner’s belief: God is his coach,” New York Times, July 14, 2012.

337 DeRogatis, Saving Sex, 6.

338 Stephanie Clifford, “Special Issues a Bright Spot for Magazines,” New York Times, October 11, 2009.

339 For example, the first issue in 2009 included photographs of NFL receiver Torrey Holt’s crooked middle finger, surfer Laird Hamilton’s cracked heel, and a close up of a knee surgery. 149 the article, “we think of the following pages as a celebration and an exploration of the athletic form.”340 However, many images show the atheletes in static poses, suggesting that such bodies are appreciated more for their aesthetic (and commercial) value.341

Rather, the images are designed to capture the desirability of the bodies showcased. As the editors themselves suggested, “the best bodies in sports grab us because they can accomplish things we can only imagine. In all their shapes and sizes, they are quite simply… bodies we want.”342 The desirability of such bodies, both as possessions to be objectified or to be occupied in fantasies, was the primary reason for inclusion.

Upon initial approach, Lori Jones rejected the offer. “Pose naked? No way,” Jones said, “I’m a very strong Christian. That’s against my morals.”343 Yet after a moment, the

Olympic hurdler and Iowa native began to reconsider their pitch. After all, her sponsors reminded her of the wholesome image of ESPN’s parent company, the Disney

Corporation.344 Besides, she would have input into which photo was chosen. After careful deliberation, Jones hoped that her photograph, and its inclusion in the tantalizing “Bodies

We Want” subsection, would send a positive message about body image to young girls.

340 ESPN: The Magazine, Body Issue, October 19, 2009, 49.

341 Feminist analyst Lorin Shellenberger suggests that “far from celebrating the athletic form, ESPN’s Body Issue relies on relations of biopower that capitalize on the differences in social presence between men and women” and that sport-related media “further subjugates the bodies of athletes and situates the bodies of non-athletes as somehow lacking.” Lorin Shellenberger, “Aesthetics and Athletics: Staring at Difference in ESPN the Magazine’s ‘Bodies we Want,” Textual Overtures 2 (2014): 46.

342 ESPN: The Magazine, Body Issue, October 19, 2009, 50. Emphasis added.

343 Quoted in Bryce Miller, “Hurdler Jones Debated ESPN’s ‘Body Issue’ Photo Shoot,” Des Moines Register, October 6, 2009.

344 There’s a lot more to the Disney connection than I have space to say here. It should be noted that the Disney company owns, or once owned, the rights to many “abstinence committed” individuals, including Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, and the Jonas brothers, as well as ABC, ESPN, and their affiliates, including the SEC network. I’ve noted where a company has a Disney connection in the footnotes that immediately follow.

150 Already an adept marketer with more social media followers than any other female track athlete in the world, Jones hoped the image would tell young women “They don’t have to be skinny or starve themselves,” and that they “can be strong and beautiful, but don’t need to be 110 pounds.”345 Jones thus overcame here initial hesitancy to pose nude when she reconciled the medium with its ability to carry her message. For Jones, this wasn’t a betrayal of her Christian faith. It was an opportunity to put that faith into practice by using her body as a visual discourse on weight and beauty.346

However, for some reviewers in secular media, Lolo’s photo shoots are more a matter of “marketing Lolo – the athlete, the brand,” than about reaching young women.347

To be fair, Jones (like many other female athletes garnering attention for their sport) was already making a good amount of money from endorsements from BP, ASICS,348 Red

Bull, and Oakley Sunglasses, and had even taken a turn on ABC’s Dancing With the

Stars.349 Such exposure certainly contributed to the sense that Jones was a

345 Quoted in Miller, “Hurdler Jones.”

346 Much of Jones’s personal story reads like a telling of the American dream. Like James Dobson, Robert Bly, Jerry Falwell, and John Jacobs, Jones too emerged from the household of an absentee (and alcoholic) father to achieve national acclaim. After years of homelessness around Des Moines, switching schools numerous times, living in a Salvation Army basement, and moving in with multiple families in high school, Jones eventually won a scholarship to run track at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. She would go on to earn multiple NCAA titles and All-American honors during her collegiate career, and ultimately competed in three Olympic games, becoming one of ten Americans to compete at both the Winter and Summer Olympics. Perhaps her most famous moment came in the Beijing 60m hurdle, when Jones opened a lead over her competitors before catching her foot on the penultimate hurdle, losing the gold medal to fellow American Dawn Harper.

347 Sean Keeler, “Lolo Jones in the nude: It was all about marketing Lolo, not some ‘message’ to girls,” Des Moines Register, October 6, 2009.

348 The name ASICS is itself a reminder of the history of sport and religion. The Japanese shoe company chose ASICS as an acronym for the Latin phrase, anima sana in corpore sano, “a healthy spirit in a healthy body.” The phrase, attributed to Juvenal, reappears in various forms in physical cultural history, including the words on the YMCA’s original triangle logo, “mind, body, and spirit.”

349 Rachel Smallwood, Natalie A. Brown, and Andrew C. Bilings, “Female bodies on display: Attitudes regarding female athlete photos in Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue and ESPN: The Magazine’s 151 businesswoman first and an athlete second. A damning piece by the New York Times’

Jeré Longman accused her of becoming “whatever anyone wants her to be – vixen, virgin, victim – to draw attention to herself,” and condemned her for playing “into the persistent, demeaning notion that women are worthy as athletes only if they have sex appeal.”350 Joy Behar, co-host of ABC’s popular The View, accused Jones of hypocrisy:

“This is the ‘good’ Christian girl. I mean… uh… hello!? If she’s so religious why is she posing naked like that? I’m just saying, she’s a Christian!”351 The commercial success of the issue, along with its increased advertisement revenue and stupendous sales, certainly highlighted the pure economic incentive behind the project.352 Common sense, it seemed, dictated that Christian athletes like Jones ought not pose naked, least of all in crass attempts to bolster revenue through pornography.

But what about her reception among evangelicals? Pure Freedom founder Dannah

Gresh defended Jones’s choice to appear in the magazine, arguing that “following in the footsteps of Jesus Christ is a messy business,” and that she found Jones’s work to be

“muddy and glorious all at the same time.”353 After the release of the New York Times

Body Issue,” Journal of Sports Media 9 (2014): 1-22. Dancing With the Stars airs on ABC, which, along with ESPN, is part of the Disney family of networks. Jones spoke of her commitment to abstinence from this stage as well.

350 Jeré Longman, “For Lolo Jones, Image is Everything,” New York Times, August 4, 2012. The severity of Longman’s article prompted rebukes from New York Times’ public editor Art Brisbane, conservative news outlets like Fox News and The American Conservative, and even some sports media outlets like Deadspin.

351 The View, Dir. Ashley S. Gorman, ABC, May 23, 2012.

352 Advertisement sales jumped 35% and sales had jumped 200% compared with the previous year. See Clifford, “Special Issues”; Darren Rovell, “ESPN The Magazine’s Body Issue: A Financial Success,” CNBC, November 30, 2009.

353 Dannah Gresh, “Blind Date for Tim Tebow and Lolo Jones.” http://purefreedom.org/blind- date-for-tim-tebow-lolo-jones/

152 article, NFL QB Kurt Warner – another outspoken evangelical and recipient of the Bart

Starr Award – signaled his resignation with secular media attacks on people like Jones.

“It’s the world we live in,” he said, adding that, because of her faith, there are those who wait for her “to fall.”354 Jones defended her decision on Twitter, rhetorically asking, “Go to a museum & look at naked pictures/statues of ppl and its considered art but what I did is not [sic]?”355 Acknowledging the double standard she faced as a Christian woman,

Jones also pointed to Ryan Hall’s naked photos and asking, “Shall you judge him as well?”356 Christianity Today’s Her-Meneutics blog writer Laure Leonard saw the political currency of the images: “The world-class runner shows that virginity isn’t just for nerdy

18-year-olds – and that following God’s plan for sexuality can be really hard.”357 She goes on to describe the “Christian view of sexuality” as countercultural, recognizing that

Jones’s images “have helped put a new ‘face’ on abstinence… [that] it’s a legitimate choice embraced by attractive, successful people who have had ample opportunities to have sex but aren’t because of God’s call on their lives.”358 These evangelicals clearly see something more than hypocrisy in the photos.

That said, let’s take a closer look. In the following section, I disect images for their commercial context, sexual content, and their place within the history of evangelical efforts to position abstinence as a sex positive, popular choice for adolescents. I also draw

354 Quoted in Joshua Rhett Miller, “Tebow, Lolo should never apologize for their faith, says Kurt Warner,” Fox News, August 13, 2012. http://www.foxnews.com/sports/2012/08/13/faith-and-professional- sports-make-polarizing-mix-former-nfl-star-kurt-warner.html

355 Lolo Jones, Twitter post, May 25, 2012, http://www.twitter.com/lolojones

356 Ibid.

357 Laura Leonard, “Sex and the Single Olympian: Lolo Jones Talks About Her Virginity,” Her- meneutics Blog, Christianity Today, August 6, 2012.

358 Ibid.

153 attention to some of the gender dynamics at work in the sexualized presentation of the body of a female athlete and in sexualizing evangelicalism.

Due to copyright infringement concerns, I am unable to reproduce the images directly in this work. I have provided links to the appropriate websites in the footnotes when possible. In the event those websites are no longer operational, I’ve also offered search engine terms that should bring up the appropriate image.

ESPN The Magazine359

Photographer Sarah Friedman’s image of Lolo sitting on an ornate French provincial ottoman, gazing back at the viewer, positions her as a stationary object among the furniture. Her legs are positioned to simulate a running motion, maybe even a hurdler’s leap, but the reality is that she’s made to be static. The expository note accompanying the image, the magazine’s version of a museum didactic, suggests Lolo was chosen because: “In a sport that requires her to waste nothing, she more than obliges.”360 Dennis Shaver, Lolo’s coach at LSU, continues:

In hurdles, it’s critical that the body be efficient, no lost energy. That’s Lolo. She can power-clean more than 200 pounds, but her body fat is near 10 percent. She has the perfect core, which where her horsepower comes from. Her abs are like a washboard, all muscle fiber and no fat. And even then, you’d need Lolo’s determination.361

In keeping with the official raison d’être for the magazine, Lolo’s inclusion was primarily to showcase the type of body that can be won through athletic discipline – the prize of sacrifice and the tangible evidence of internal resolve.

359 ESPN: The Magazine, Body Issue, October 19, 2009, 49. Copyright Sarah Friedman. http://www.espn.com/espn/photos/gallery/_/id/8146598/image/16/bodies-want-2009; Search engine suggestion: “Lolo Jones ESPN Bodies We Want Chair.”

360 ESPN: The Magazine, Body Issue, October 19, 2009, 49.

361 Quoted in ESPN: The Magazine, Body Issue, October 19, 2009, 49.

154 Yet, there are some incongruities between the official version offered by both

ESPN and Jones. A careful observer will note that while Lolo’s abdomen is the focus of the didactic note, it is completely obscured in the image. In fact, Lolo is turning away from the viewer, ensuring that they cannot see her body core. And for an image which is supposed to capture her efficient use of energy and the power of her muscles, it is curious that she is staged motionless. Actually, Lolo revealed that another image from the shoot did a better job of showing “how hard [she] worked for those muscles,” but that it did not

“portray the message [she] wanted to send,”362 referencing her claim that the shoot was about sending a positive body-image message to young women. Yet, with the exception of her well-stylized, curly blonde hair, there is very little which definitively inscribes

Lolo’s body as a feminine one. Her breasts are hidden, and her derriere is mostly concealed by the French ottoman. Her body is actually rather androgynous in the picture, made legible as feminine by the stylization of the body in hair and make-up and positioned upon a piece of domestic furniture. In comparison with the action-oriented photos of most athletes in the series, including other female athletes, Lolo’s stationary posture is rather ornamental.

From Jones’s perspective, this wasn’t even the most risqué of photos taken during the shoot. In an interview with USA Today, she suggested that other images “didn’t portray the message I wanted to send.” One photo in particular, she said, “probably moved into a sexual area, which I did not want.”363 While her stated goal was to demonstrate that “You can be strong and beautiful, but don’t need to be 110 pounds,” it

362 Quoted in Miller, “Hurdler Jones debated ESPN’s ‘Body Issue’ photo shoot.”

363 Ibid.

155 seems that Jones was also quite aware of the reputational risks involved in participating in such a project, even with the best intentions. Perhaps this image of Jones in a stationary pose best captured those qualities in a way an action shot would not have. Then again, most of the other athletes who posed naked for the magazine are shown being athletes. Maybe this image really was about aesthetics rather than sexuality. The same cannot be said about some of Jones’s other photographs.

Spikes Magazine364

Lolo Jones has also overtly exploited her sexual allure on behalf of her sport. In the summer of 2010, powerbrokers at the International Association of Athletics

Federations, the world governing body for track and field competitions, were mindful of the public’s waning interests in their sports when they came up with the idea for the promotional Spikes magazine and the marketing campaign they’d use to spread copies.

First, the magazine was distributed free of charge, the idea being simply to raise the public profile of track sports. Second, the cover art was sure to turn heads. Shortly after she brought home gold at the World Indoor Championships in Qatar, Jones transformed into a 1950s pin-up girl for the inaugeral cover. Wearing nail polish she described as

“hooker red,” Lolo temporarily became Lolita, feigning sexual ignorance while performing sexual work.365

364 Lolo Jones, American Dream Girl. Copyright Spikes Magazine, 2010. http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/05/22/article-2148269-133C9D99000005DC-654_306x453.jpg; Search engine terms: “Lolo Jones Spikes Magazine.”

365 See Giles Richard, “Review: Spikes magazine breathes new life into athletics,” The Guardian, August 21, 2010. The pin up tradition frequently infantilized their subjects even as they highlighted their sexual allure, adding to the Lolita-esque character of this image.

156 This pose comes out of a history of evangelical virgins paradoxically performing sexual routines. Brittany Spears made headlines in 1998 when she publicly assured her fan-base that she intended to remain a virgin until marriage even as she struck an evocative pose on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.366 Her self-presentation as a naive object of sexual desire followed earlier performances of Madonna (“Like a Virgin”) and would be appropriated in the near future by artists like Jessica Simpson and Miley

Cyrus.367 Sexual innocence is, here, not a cut and dry matter. As Heather White has suggested, although public statements from these women may contain a ‘born again’ accent, they demonstrate a remarkable fluency the discursive performances of sexual life.”368 Jones’s Spikes photo certainly is in line with this history of virginal sexiness, calling into question traditional narratives about abstinence as prudishness.

As with the ottoman photo, the “American Dreamgirl” is once again set motionless on top of a prop. This time, however, we can see the front of Jones’s body.

Her hair is curled and a flower is tucked in for good measure. A pink top, daisy dukes, and ruby red lipstick to go with “hooker” red nail polish complete the vision of Jones as an icon of sexualized femininity. The born again athlete is positioned with her right arm bent with her hand behind her head, a form which accentuates her breasts and pulls her shirt up even further. The airbrush quality of the image and the fuzzy border surrounding the background picture reiterate that what the audience looks upon is a dreamscape of

Jones, a version of her that exists only in the mind of the voyeur. It is Jones as sexual

366 L. M. Carpenter, Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experience (New York: New York University Press, 2005).

367 Britanny Spears, Jessica Simpson, and Miley Cyrus (aka Hannah Montana) were also Disney stars in their youth, occassionaly promoting abstinence before marriage in public appearances.

368 White, “Virgin Pride,” 9. 157 fantasy – her unavailability exacerbated by her commitment to remain abstinent before marriage. That this adds to her desirability within an evangelical framework is evident in the writings of dozens of purity program authors who tell young girls that it is this virginal virtue that is the true source of their erotic capital.369

Outside Magazine370

The photo shoot for Outside Magazine’s February 2012 issue came just a few months before beginning of the qualifying trials for the London Olympics, the place for

Jones’s redemption following her agonizing loss four years earlier. It also came shortly before Lolo’s interview with HBO’s Real Sports in which she reaffirmed her decision to remain abstinent until marriage, generating a flurry of articles in both evangelical and secular media. Professionally, it put her name back in the headlines right when she would need it most. The tag line for the cover photo laid out the stakes: Lolo Jones was the

Comeback Athlete of the Year.

In a taped interview with Jones, you can see the several poses Jones performed, some which were included and some that were left out of the magazine.371 Wearing an

ASICS jacket and a Red Bull sweatband around her neck, Jones acknowledges the kindness and professionalism of photographer Robert Maxwell, especially considering

369 See Gardner, Making Chastity Sexy, 41-62.

370 Lolo Jones cover, Outside Magazine, 2012. Copyright Outside Magazine. Credit: Robert Maxwell: http://www.outsideonline.com/1748771/outside-magazine-feb-2012; See also this image: https://www.outsideonline.com/sites/default/files/styles/img_600x600/public/migrated- images/lolo_ph.jpg?itok=LmPP7OnV. Search engine terms: “Lolo Jones Outside Magazine.”

371 “Behind the Scenes with Olympic Hurdler Lolo Jones and photographer Robert Maxwell for the February cover,” Outside Online, January 6, 2012. http://www.outsideonline.com/1863061/lolo-jones- cover 158 that she’s “not a real a model,” this even as she has make up applied to her inner pelvic region by the staff. In the video, you can see at least four different outfits she tried on for the shoot, three of which present her body wrapped in some kind of red or black fabric, not lingerie, but not too far removed. It might be more accurate to describe the outfits as carefully placed strips of ribbon, as if Lolo was a present waiting to be unwrapped. She’s not in bondage, but she’s definitely tied up. Such images invoke sexual desire, framing

Jones as a bound woman, if not a woman in bondage. Hers is not a naïve virginity, but one fully aware of its sexual potential.

In no photo is she depicted as active. Asking a model to stand still for a photograph would make perfect sense, unless the reason she is being featured is to honor her as the magazine’s Comeback Athlete of the Year. Jones could have been shown running at Olympic speed, leaping over hurdles, or leaving the competition in her wake.

It is this conscious decision – by the photographer, by the editor, and by Jones – to portray her in static pose that reveals something about the gender discrepancies in how bodies are displayed. As with the previous images, the conscious decision to position the subject as static rather than dynamic suggests that it is Jones’s visual allure – not her athletic achievement – which is being honored.

I am not suggesting that Jones’s decision to pose for these magazines is, in any way, antithetical to her Christian faith. Nor am I suggesting that such self-display is a mark against her character. However, I do contend that these photographs and the decision to participate in a sexualized commercial culture are part of her evangelism.

Whatever Jones had hoped for in these photos – to challenge commonplace standards of beauty for young women, to portray a body positive image, to boost the public profile of

159 her sport, or even to garner some additional advertising money – they also perform other work. Perhaps the most obvious is that they conform to historical traditions of objectifying female athletes by placing her in a subjugated framework (as art object to be looked upon, as ornamental furniture, as a pin-up girl to be lusted after, or as a present to be unwrapped).

Most importantly, however, Jones is performing the most popular and enduring forms of eroticized femininity within a patriarchal cultural framework, even as she espouses the virtues of remaining abstinent before marriage. As a nude model, Jones performs a classic, respectable archetype of feminine beauty in a domesticated setting, one that displays her features without devolving into pornographic display. As a pin-up girl, she demonstrates her mastery of the archetypal sexually alluring girl next door.

Lastly, she presents her body as a gift to be unwrapped, conforming to a masculinist tradition which tells young women that their bodies, especially their virginity, is a gift they are expected to give their husbands on their wedding nights.372 Jones has taken on these roles of eroticized femininity and performed them admirably. These images present a well-known virgin athlete as a sex symbol, one whose personal erotic capital raises the eroticism of virginity as a sexual identity for adolescents. By placing herself at the center of that sexualized commercial culture while simultaneously becoming one of the most prominent advocates for abstinence among evangelical Christians, Jones continues a longstanding tradition of reframing evangelicalism – and evangelical sexual mores – as a sex positive religious identity and abstinence as a erotic and popular sexual identity for young Christians. She’s not the only one.

372 This tradition is also at the root of much evangelical literature on sexuality written for young women. See DeRogatis, Saving Sex, 42-70; Gardner, Making Chastity Sexy, 63-87. 160 Tim Tebow, Evangelical Underwear Model

At 6’3”, 236 lbs, Tim Tebow has the physical features of hegemonic masculinity - young, white, tall, muscular, handsome, and virile – and he’s not afraid to show them off.373 The former NFL Quarterback, Heisman trophy winner, and national collegiate football champion has been a darling of evangelical Christian subculture since the late

2000s when his athletic success and outspoken evangelical faith made him the overnight public personification of white evangelical Protestantism in American popular culture.374

He’s also been one of America’s most marketable athletes, and unquestionably the most successful self-promoter in the history of sports evangelism. Having sold his image to both Christian conservative organizations and multinational manufacturers alike, Tebow has made millions through his contracts with Nike, Jockey International, FRS energy drinks, and a variety of non-profit groups, including his famous appearance in a 2010 antiabortion commercial for James Dobson’s Focus on the Family which aired on Super

Bowl XLIV. More than that, Tebow’s popularity also stems from his public commitment to remain abstinent before marriage, which he has used to position himself as a countercultural alternative to the scandal-plagued world of other professional athletes.

Tebow is frequently invoked in conservative Christian circles as a moral exemplar for teenage boys, often specifically because of his commitment to abstinence. In February

373 For a simple image capturing Tebow’s embrace of his cult of personality, see the September, 2012 GQ Magazine image of Tebow as Jesus at the following link: http://media.gq.com/photos/55831a3b3655c24c6c95a831/master/pass/sports-2012-09-tim-tebow-tim- tebow-article-01.jpg. Search engine terms: “GQ Magazine Tim Tebow.”

374 Eric Bain-Selbo’s Game Day and God (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2009) explores the racial history of idolizing white evangelical collegiate quarterbacks in the American South. Tebow no longer plays in the NFL. After bouncing around the league for a few years, Tebow took up a job as a sports announcer for ESPN’s SEC Network, wherein he provides analysis for the collegiate game which won him international fame.

161 2010, just three days before Tebow would appear in the Focus on the Family ad, Sen.

Johnny Isakson (R - GA) invited him to lead the closing prayer at the National Prayer

Breakfast, calling Tebow “a role model for the youth of America.”375 His name and ministerial works also appears in Christian parental advice books. In What A Son Need’s

From His Mom, Cheri Fuller argues that “role models [are] the most persuasive, positive tool you have to impart values,”376 and lifts up Tebow’s name among the biblical heroes as paragons of the masculinity to which boys ought to aspire. Connie Rae’s Help For

Parents of Troubled Teenagers contends that children of both sexes are less likely to be sexually active if they see their same-sex peers resisting sexual urges and believe that this position is going to be accepted in society.377 Tebow’s public witness to and performance of abstinence certainly aids in that endeavor. Like the other pro quarterback in a number

15 jersey (Bart Starr), Tebow has become a figure of American goodness and wholesomeness amidst a sea of less than reputable peers in both entertainment and sports.

Tebow’s also aware of his place in the public spotlight and treats his place in it as part of the duties God has given him. The Baptist minister’s son prefaces his semi- autobiography by saying, “I am responsible for how I use my platform, whatever its size

– at this moment in time – to influence others…. I have a platform that He can use for His good purposes and perhaps even the good of others – today.”378 For Tebow, his job is to

375 Tim Tebow: Everything In Between, Dir. Chase Heavener. T & H Films. Summit Entertainment. 58 minutes. 2011.

376 Cheri Fuller, What A Son Needs From His Mom (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 2013).

377 Connie Rae, Hope For Parents of Troubled Teens: A Practical Guide to Getting Them Back on Track (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 2012), 153.

378 Tim Tebow and Nathan Whitaker, Tim Tebow: Through My Eyes (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2011), x. 162 be a role model. Recalling the 2008 SEC Media Days interview in which a reporter asked him to confirm his commitment to remain abstinent before marriage, Tebow acknowledged that the question, intrusive as it was, made him stand out in athletic culture in which “athletes seem to be in the news far too much for the negative ways in which they relate to women, all too often with a lack of respect, and horrifyingly at times, with violence.”379 He also realized that “there was the chance [young men and women] might find encouragement in my words and lifestyle to do the same thing and wait until they were married to engage in sexual activity.”380 He goes on to say that, even though he wouldn’t have wanted the question asked in the first place, he believes God had a hand in it: “It got a lot of people talking about [abstinence]…. Seeing my words have that kind of impact made me realize that God had a plan for this, too.”381 From politicians to preachers, from pundits to parents, Tebow has been repeatedly lifted up as an excellent role model for young men.

But can God’s role model for abstinence also be an underwear model? In what follows, I take a close look at the work Tebow does for the evangelical abstinence movement, presenting abstinence before marriage as a viable, sexy, and popular option for young men through a performance of eroticized masculinity. By playing into one of the more popular archetypes of a male sexual allure – the underwear model – Tebow demonstrated that abstinent evangelical men can show off their sexiness with the best of them. To make this argument, I focus on three images of Tebow produced by Jockey

379 Ibid, 215.

380 Ibid, 215-216.

381 Ibid, 216.

163 International, reading the images for their sexual content and exploring how the public has read them as pornographic material. The photographs, playing off the equestrian name of the company and the football team for which he was then playing (Denver

Broncos), suggest that this sports evangelist is more than capable of showing off just how sexy abstinence can truly be.

Jockey Advertisement, July, 2010382

In the first photograph, released shortly after he was drafted by the Denver

Broncos in July 2010, Tebow poses with his arms crossed, fully clothed in a Jockey

Classic White Tee. Even though in this ad most of his body is covered, it is perhaps the most sensual of the three. He brings his eyes into direct contact with the viewer. His eyes became the common focal point of his pictures during his rise to stardom when he began making a regular practice of writing biblical verses into his eye black before important football games, marking his body as site of Christian witness and testimony.383 Other images focusing on his eyes, such as ads for companies like Nike and FRS energy drinks, stress his ferocity, intensity, and aggressiveness – quintessentially masculine ideals made visible through furrowed brows and flushed, sweaty skin. However, in this image he is more relaxed, inviting (he is smiling), and perhaps flirtatious. His gaze is both captivating and alluring.

382 Tim Tebow, Jockey International advertisement, July, 2010: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/02/02/article-2095176-118E3002000005DC-121_306x423.jpg. Search engine terms: “Tim Tebow Jockey Whips.”

383 After writing John 3:16 in his eye black for the 2008 college national championship game, the passage became the top searched item on Google, recording 94 million hits that day. Tom Krattenmaker, Onward Christian Athletes: Turning Ballparks into Pulpits and Players into Preachers (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010), 38. See also Tebow and Whitaker, Through My Eyes, 209.

164 When asked whether or not he would ever do an underwear ad on par with the one

David Beckham did for Jockey, Tebow’s rejected the premise of the question. “You know, I am very excited to be with Jockey, and I think everything they do is extremely classy and I am so excited to be with them.”384 Aware of the quickness with which similar celebrities found themselves betrayed by a religious fan base, Tebow wasted no time in assuring viewers that ads were not risqué. “I wouldn’t do anything that goes against what I stand for.”385 Jockey doesn’t make classless advertisements, especially not those that featuring a young evangelical heartthrob. Like Lolo Jones, Tebow initially invoked his faith as defense against accusations of impropriety. And like those of Jones,

Tebow’s modeling photographs challenge normative assumptions: about abstinence and prudishness, about professional athletics and sexual ethics, and about how evangelicals interact with erotic commercial culture.

Curiously, this ad incorporates an element of homosexual innuendo that goes against the dominant evangelical Christian attitude toward non-heteronormative sexualities. Tebow stands squarely facing the camera, smiling, and making direct eye contact with viewer. This engagement works as a kind of flirting, one that suggests an invitation to play. However it is the props in the background that allow for a possible interpretation of Tebow’s role in the image. Set in a horse stable, Tebow is surrounded by whips, reins, and saddles – implements of domination for both horse-masters and sadomasochist fetishists. This image of a domineering and physically powerful man with

384 Kristin Wong, “Tim Tebow Addresses Dating Rumors: “I’m Just Having Fun,” Hollyscoop, February 20, 2012. Emphasis added. http://edit.stage.hollyscoop.com/katy-perry/tim-tebow-addresses- dating-rumors-im-just-having-fun.html

385 Adam Schefter “Tim Tebow to appear in Jockey ads,” ESPN Online, March 25, 2011. http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=6256890 165 an arsenal of kinky, leather sex toys more closely tied to gay erotica than heterosexual pornography suggests Tebow is the master in the dominant/submissive relationship between himself and viewer. Even if the reader were to assume that the image suggested a “straight” encounter, this is a large step removed from the stereotypical idea of conservative Christians as men and women lacking imagination in their sexual lives. The incorporation of transgressive sexual themes, such as BDSM and leather fetish, suggests quite the opposite.

Perhaps the connection between the evangelical and the leather implements in the background is over-stated, but perhaps not. Although there is some legitimate play on tropes in the image that might divorce the picture from its sexual overtones (both Jockey and the Broncos are equestrian names), the fan commentary suggests that this interpretation is a popular one. That Tebow is regularly described as “prime beef” in the commentary sections of web pages is not interesting or surprising in itself. However, some move beyond merely seeing him as attractive towards sexual fantasy. Twitterer

ZoZoBeans93, a young woman, exclaimed “Oh Tim Tebow, I would love to feel your jockey…T-Shirt! :).”386 And UtahScott’s terse comment, “I love it when a Christian get’s

[sic] all kinky,”387 shows that the ad has a sexual resonance for men and women. Other

Huffpost.com commentators debated whether or not Tebow would be uncomfortable with gay men looking at him in his underwear; one assuming that was the intended market.

SteveDenver egged the QB on, “Come on Tebow, show us your Tebag!”388 The shot

386 Zoe Kidwell, Twitter post, @ZoZoBeans93, https://www.twitter.com/zozobeans93

387 “Tim Tebow Will Be Face of Jockey Underwear,” Huffington Post, July 27, 2010. See comments section. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/27/tim-tebow-will-be-new-fac_n_660787.html

388 Ibid. 166 reveals nothing below the waist, leaving fans to guess whether or not Tebow really is, as one fan hoped, “the total package.” An underwear advertisement featuring a man fully clothed? Indeed, the image’s themes demand that viewers employ their imagination. The image’s function as a type of erotic art is perhaps best summarized by one Facebook user’s declaration of what use she found for it, to help her achieve “multiple, small orgasms.”389 The ads that emerged later helped the viewer make similar connections.

Jockey Advertisement, January, 2012390

The second image, released at the start of the 2012 NFL playoffs, is shot over his left shoulder, giving a clear view of his deltoids and trapeziums. Aside from his muscular physique that dominates the image, we can be certain that Tebow himself, and not the product he is sporting, is meant to be the central focus. He is posed sitting down on a bench in a locker room, obscuring most of the area below the waist, but especially the area covered by the Jockey underwear, themselves hidden beneath gym shorts. Putting the product front and center would make sense, however, there is nothing noticeable to distinguish them from other boxer-briefs. Indeed, the product remains non-descript and hidden from view, whereas Tebow’s lean muscular body occupies the lion’s share of the space within the borders.

389 These comments mentioned in this section have been culled from articles on news websites, Facebook, Twitter, personal blogs, and Jockey’s corporate website. Many of these comments have subsequently been taken down by either the companies which host the sites or by the users themselves. All of the quotes mentioned in this section were posted in response to the specific image of Tebow. The comment about orgasms was found on Jockey’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Jockey?v=wall. Some of those comments were captured here: Michael Roberts, “Tim Tebow’s Jockey Photo Causing ‘multiple, small orgasms,” Westword.com, July 28, 2010. http://www.westword.com/news/tim-tebows-jockey-photo-causing-multiple-small-orgasms-5823667

390 Tim Tebow, Jockey International advertisement, January, 2012. “Playoffs. It’s Tebow Time:” https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/63/16/0e/63160e88d5d4efceae46e8a93538ceb5.jpg. Search engine terms: “Tim Tebow Jockey Locker Room.”

167 But, Tebow’s body is not the only subject in the photograph. He sits alone in a locker-room, one of the most segregated spaces of American physical culture. Although he sits alone, Tebow remains in a homosocial environment. His powerful frame lies center-stage, the only light in the room is that which is reflected off his skin. The light source is placed above his head, coming from heaven as it were, bringing divine sanction to the near-nakedness of the evangelical wunderkind. The religious element is subtle. The sexual content of the image is not. Both company officials and fans alike have given witness to its messages. Dustin Cohn, Jockey’s chief marketing executive, has said that

Tebow appeals to both men and women: “He is the hottest athlete in the country today.”391 Cohn added that the idea came from the fan mail the company received for an earlier video commercial that featured Tebow shirtless for a mere second. “We got a lot of complimentary e-mails for that one second.”392 Journalists also knew the score. The top Tweeted news article related to this ad’s debut was USA TODAY’s “Shirtless Tebow is Jockey Sex Symbol.” However, the ad’s virtual successes were not long lived, as

Jockey eventually pulled the image from their website. When asked whether it Tebow himself or his fans who advocate for modesty had a hand in the image’s removal,

Jockey’s PR director defended the decision as a matter of good judgment: “Some things are better when left to the imagination.”393

The image’s multiple interpretations are not lost on Tebow’s fans. Commenters on Jockey’s Facebook page (where the image remained) have viewed it as “an act of

391 Michael McCarthy, “Shirtless Tim Tebow is Jockey Sex Symbol,” USA Today, January 11, 2012.

392 Ibid.

393 Don Walker, “Tebow-mania Provides Boost to Jockey,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, January 10, 2012. 168 charity :)” for those who find him attractive. Others see it as evidence of his special partnership with the almighty, demonstrating that “God just blessed him all over, inside and out.” This sentiment is mirrored on the conservative blog freerepublic.com, wherein one person exclaimed that, like the body of Jesus himself, Tebow’s “body is a gift of God and temple of the Holy Spirit.” One responded with the simple prayer: “God bless

America!!!” 394 These declarations, and others like them, demonstrate that the image of

Tebow’s musculature and form can and have been interpreted on multiple levels, including sexually. We can only surmise how this particular “act of charity” of the philanthropist is being employed in the bedrooms of those women (and men) who are drawn to him for either his physical form, his religious conviction, his athletic performance, or his promise of a brighter future for a celebrity culture mired in fallenness. Each of these elements contributes to making him sexually attractive, making these images perform sex work.

Jockey Advertisement, February, 2012395

In the final picture, released February 3rd, 2012, Tebow is once again promoting

Jockey underwear without showing any underwear, save the tiniest glimpse of the elastic band. Instead he is seen in blue jeans, shirtless, and throwing a football. Tebow’s companions, two horses running wild in the open grasslands, are also visual allusions to sexual rhetoric. The beasts are running as wild as the lands they roam, a frontier without

394 Again, most of these posts and comments have subsequently been deleted. https://www.facebook.com/Jockey/

395 Tim Tebow, Jockey International advertisement, February, 2012: https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/564x/5c/2d/14/5c2d146534713492503492047dae1fb7.jpg. Search engine terms: “Tim Tebow Jockey Horses.”

169 limitations. However, the only stallion the image is concerned with is the man in the middle. The angle of the shot, taken from the ground, forces the viewer to look upward upon the quarterback’s body, seeing every rigidly defined muscle in his hardened torso.

Tebow’s muscular frame is even more pronounced than the muscles on the photo’s only real studs. The messages about his animal-like stamina, physical endowment, and unbridled sexual power are not exactly subtle.

As was said earlier, following the January ad, Jockey decided to give Tebow more clothing because “Some things are better when left to the imagination.” As some online comments made clear, many viewed used this image to spark their own imaginations.

Facebook fan Thomas K. made the connection quite quickly: “He doesn’t need to drop his pants to show that he’s a beast.”396 With one arm cocked back and ready to unload, the viewer is allowed to gaze upon his chest in motion, both of which are elements denied in the other two advertisements. The result is a slew of viewer comments shouting

“Hallelujah thank you Jesus!!!!” “Schwing,” (slang for sexual arousal, made famous on

Saturday Night Live), and “Thank you God for making that!” from several women of various ages. Numerous other comments swear that the ad sells underwear anyway. As one user put it, “God’s masterpiece … doesn’t have to be in his underwear to sell the product.”397 He inspires their purchase without showing them. Virgin or not, such images and the responses they’ve inspired show that Tebow is most certainly sexually active.

Of course, not all Internet commentary has viewed these images positively, and some have gone so far as to question Tebow’s Christian upbringing for participating in

396 https://www.facebook.com/Jockey/.

397 Again, most of these comments have been taken from comments posted on Facebook, Huffpost, or elsewhere online and have since been deleted.

170 them. Tommytoons perhaps summed it up best for the skeptics in the blogosphere: “Now let me get this straight? This ‘born again’ Christian is going to be a spokesman and perhaps model for Jockey Underwear? Hmmm…I wonder what Jesus would say?”

Multiple posters on freerepublic.com expressed concern that the locker-room photo would suck him into idolatry of self, with “Satan laughing and jeering all the way,”398 confident that Lucifer “will surely try to divert him.”399 Others suggested they were in bad taste and contrary to “Our Lord’s teachings on modesty.” These commentators, and others like them, see the type of sex work the images perform. They simply aren’t as excited about it.

Others don’t see the images as sexual at all. Some defend Tebow himself, saying that his image and popularity are the result in his “faith in our holy father. Not sex.”

Tebow’s public persona as a proponent of his Christian faith and practice helps to convince some people that he is incapable of participating in the selling of sex. He is the kind of man whom some mothers wish their daughters would marry. He is, in the words of journalist C.J. Krasyk, “The role model American sports has been wanting.”400

However, Tebow’s participation is not the only reason some may resist categorizing these images as material for sexual stimulation. Evangelical Christians who support Tim

Tebow with their energy and patronize his products would be hesitant to view these images as having sexual content. Admitting that the images were sexual would be

398 Comment by user yldstrk, posted January 11, 2012 at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f- news/2831427/posts.

399 Comment by user SandyInSeattle, posted January 11, 2012 at at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2831427/posts.

400 C.J. Krasyk, “Tim Tebow: The Role Model American Sports Have Been Wanting,” Bleacher Report, January 12, 2012. http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1022554-tim-tebow-the-role-model-that- american-sports-has-been-wanting 171 tantamount to confessing their complicity in perpetuating the very market system of sexual exploitation they have so zealously lambasted elsewhere. To openly acknowledge the images as sexual fodder would invite more of the accusations of hypocrisy of the kinds mentioned earlier. Despite such protestations and visual word play, these images are too suggestive to assert that Tebow’s own virginal status is exclusively defined in terms of sexual inactivity. Tebow, and other evangelical Christians like him, can be highly sexually active without ever participating in sexual intercourse.

The Jockey advertisements featuring Tebow do their own kind of evangelism by contesting normative assumptions about male virginity in American popular culture.

Tebow, the all-American hunk, is showing that even abstinent evangelicals can perform the eroticized masculinity of American consumer culture. In doing so, he challenges common assumptions about professional athletes and sexual promiscuity, while also demonstrating his – and by extension, evangelicals – mastery of this kind of masculine performance. If virginity in American youth culture is still largely portrayed as the unfortunate fate of the ugly, the socially awkward, and the physically under-endowed, these photographs work to offer an alternative understanding of virginity by presenting a young, handsome, available, and wealthy man who is a virgin by choice, not a virgin by circumstance. The comment sections of celebrity gossip sites, social media, and news outlets attest to the existence of many women (and a few men) who profess their desire to mate with him. This is echoed in the running commentaries on fan-pages on tumblr.com,

Tebow’s Facebook page, the Tebowettes YouTube Channel, and tebowner.com, whose owner describes himself as having a “raging Tebowner” for the “Chosen One.” The male champion of sexual restraint for evangelical Christians is most certainly sexually active.

172 Jones, Tebow, and Gender Expectations

While both Jones and Tebow have presented themselves as the objects of sexual desire, it is clear that the manners in which they’ve done so and how those actions have been received within both mainstream and evangelical-centric media have been very different. Sexual purity and abstinence have different definitions dependent upon their application to either men or women. These advertisements underscore the gendered coding of virginity within American culture broadly and manifested within a specifically evangelical Christian framework.

Like other female pop star predecessors from the American heartland – including

Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, and Miley Cyrus – Jones was lambasted for hypocritically displaying herself as a sexual being while simultaneously proclaiming her

Christian identity. As was previously noted, pundits from the New York Times to daytime television hosts questioned Jones’s sincerity, opting to read her modeling career as little more than a callous attempt to turn her appeal among the evangelical faithful into cash.401

Decontextualizing these images from the larger abstinence movement makes such assessments possible, even understandable. However, it also perpetuates a patriarchal approach to female sexuality that prescribes an impossible double standard in which young women are expected to simultaneously modify themselves into objects of feminine beauty while also maintaining an aura of childlike innocence and naïveté. The plethora of

Internet commentators skeptical of Jones’s claims to virginity also calls into question her trustworthiness as a witness to her own sexual purity. As feminist writer Jessica Valenti

401 The double standard I’m talking about here is also present in the writings of Jeré Longman, who blasted Jones’s nude photos in August 2012 but said nothing of fellow evangelical athlete Ryan Hall’s nude photos. See Longman, “Runner’s Faith.”

173 suggested of a similar case, for women, purity “isn’t just about not having sex, it’s about not being a woman…being in a state of perpetual girlhood.”402 While Jones is regularly criticized for not being able to win on the world’s biggest stage in her sport, perhaps it is her inability to win the impossible game of balancing eroticized femininity and naïve girlhood which animates much of the resentment shown towards her.

While Jones’s images play into a variety of stereotypes about female virginal naïveté, objectification, and domestication, Tebow’s photographs offer a masculine virginity which is virile, active, and physically endowed. Comparing the image sets of these two athlete evangelists reveals a lot about what is and is not permissible within sexualized abstinence. Although Jones shows more skin in her images than Tebow does in his, his are the more revealing between the two. Jones may be naked in one image, but the staging and positioning bends more towards erotic art than pornography.403 It is the interplay between those two that makes such images compelling. Alternatively, Tebow often wears more clothes, but he also has the privilege of presenting himself as one who is sexually knowledgeable, powerful, and in control. The type of eroticized masculinity he performs in these images is neither naïve nor domesticated. Like the horses behind him, Tebow’s sexuality is running free. And as another image not-so-subtly suggests,

Tebow can “take the reins” in the bedroom (and the whips if he so chooses). Both athletes have participated in evangelicalism’s ongoing sexualization of abstinence; but what that means for young women and young men is completely different.

402 Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women (Berkeley: Sea Press, 2010), 19.

403 I recognize that the distinction between erotic art and pornography is subjective and often complicated by racist and classist sentiments. 174 Abstinence and the Unmarried Evangelical Athlete

Athlete-evangelists like Green, Jones, and Tebow have made efforts to change the narrative about abstinence for young men and women in both traditional and innovative ways. Like their predecessors, they’ve used their public platform to defend their own ideas about sexual morality, even when those ideas have been criticized for being too antiquarian for the contemporary world. Among the born-again, being labeled countercultural is a badge of honor. They’ve also fully embraced the muscular Christian philosophy on celebrity – they feel obligated as Christians in the public spotlight to be role models for children and to use their social capital to promote Christian sexual ethics.

They’ve adopted the most popular and influential trends of capitalist commercial culture to promote abstinence, even while simultaneously bemoaning the exploitation of sexuality so often found in contemporary marketing. For most evangelicals, it isn’t hypocritical to engage with the tools of mass marketing, it’s creating a model of evangelism that meets a fallen world where it is to change it for the better.

Yet, the tools they’ve adopted also reveal innovation. While Green, Robinson,

White, and the other members of the Athletes for Abstinence group put popular music to work for abstinence, they did so specifically to an African-American audience that had largely been at the periphery of the established sports evangelism ministries. A.C.

Green’s Youth Foundation’s efforts to raise awareness for abstinence through the mass production and gifting of Little AC bears turned a ubiquitous household artifact of childhood innocence into a symbol of religiously-inspired sexual politics. And, mirroring larger trends among conservative Christian advocacy groups, his curriculum for abstinence-only education turned the discussion away from public health policy and

1 75 towards a discussion about God’s plan for young adults. In the midst of professional sports culture that was (then and is now) endlessly producing stories of sexism, sexual assault, and promiscuity, Green’s decision to remain abstinent before marriage stood out in stark contrast.

Obviously, the two young adults who grew up during the heydays of abstinence programs embarked upon pro-abstinence missions of a different sort. Jones and Tebow didn’t just critique overtly sexualized commercial culture and the parade of athletes behaving badly; they entered it to make it their own. Through their performances of eroticized embodiment, Jones and Tebow demonstrated that evangelical Christian faith is not as prudish as many detractors claimed and that the choice to remain abstinent before marriage was a viable, popular, and even sexy option for American youth. While their advertisements are variously read as hypocritical money-grabs, shameless self-promotion, or even outright betrayals of their professed religious beliefs, these images are best understood within the context of an evangelical effort to generate cultural change by redefining what it means to be a virgin for millennial teenage adolescents.

So what are we ultimately to make of athletic bodies on display? Jones and

Tebow have utilized their erotic capital to promote abstinence. More than that though, they’ve used their positions as high-profile athletes to demonstrate that it is possible to be a public figure in the spotlight without giving in to sexual temptation, this amid a sporting culture rife with tales of sexual promiscuity, impropriety, abuse, and scandal. They’ve mastered the art of subduing the body to the desires of the mind to the point where their own bodies – young, fit, toned, and bronzed – have become tools in the service of a greater cause. While this seems paradoxical, it is a continuation of evangelicals’ long

176 history of adapting to and adopting from trends in mainstream sexual discourse. Posing as either a nude model, a pin up, or an underwear model doesn’t mean that Jones or Tebow has betrayed their religious heritage. It’s quite the opposite. They’ve made the tools of mass marketing work for that heritage, demonstrating that even abstinent Christians can perform eroticized femininities and masculinities with the best of them.

177

CHAPTER 5 – VIOLENT MEN OF GOD: CHRISTIAN WARRIORS AND

MIXED MARTIAL ARTS MINISTRIES

Blessed be the Lord my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle. – Psalm 144:1

A few minutes after breaking Frankie Edgar’s nose with a kick to the face late in the second round, the African-American-Korean mixed martial artist (MMA) Ben

Henderson celebrated earning the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) lightweight title by dedicating the victory to his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, a message which was immediately translated for thousands of witnesses in the Saitama, Japan arena. There is nothing unusual about Christian athletes giving the glory to God post-contest, nor about

Henderson’s claim that his faith effects how he conducts himself in his professional world. Yet to see the bloodied and bruised Henderson, or his UFC compatriots Randy

Couture and Vitor Belfort, offer their testimonies moments after demonstrating their superior talents for inflicting and enduring pain is disconcerting for many who perceive a disconnect between the professional obligations of professional fighters and the ethical dictates of the faith they proclaim on international television and in the arena.

The issue of sports violence has troubled a number of scholars who are suspicious of the viability of professional sports as an arena for evangelism, or at least one fraught with problems from a theological perspective. Robert Higgs and Michael Braswell conclude that “Sports are about the chosen ones, those who are able to make the team – the fit, the able, and the talented. All religions at their best are about caring for the

178 unchosen, the rejects, those who don’t qualify for any team.”404 Kinesiologist Shirl J.

Hoffman claims that “any reasonable person of any theological persuasion”405 can recognize that a sport like MMA is too dangerous for participation. Focusing on the ethical quandaries of MMA, UK-based theologians Nick Watson and Brian Brock conclude that “boxing and MMA are immoral, and are thus not appropriate or helpful for humans (with Christian belief) to participate in, and/or watch; however, within God’s economy these activities may engender some moral goods (e.g., positive character development and healthy civil engagement = social harmony).”406 For such scholars, having a professional career as pain-inducing, back-fisting, spin-kicking fighter, or being a fan, promoter, or sponsor, is anathema to Christian faith. Cage fighting and Christianity just don’t mix.

Yet despite such misgivings among academics, MMA is becoming a more commonplace site of witnessing in the 21st century. Para-church ministries such as

Anointed Fighter and the MMA Chaplains Association cater to a fierce flock of men and women, encouraging amateur competitors to integrate their pastime with their faith and for professional fighters to use their public platform to promote their understanding of

Christianity. At the local level, numerous congregations across the United States have begun to add amateur MMA training to their ministerial offerings. While some ministries include female congregants, most of the organizational leadership, participants, and

404 Robert Higgs and Michael Braswell, An Unholy Alliance: The Sacred and Modern Sports (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2004), 236.

405 Shirl J. Hoffman, Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports (Waco: Baylor University Press), 192.

406 Nick Watson and Brian Brock, “Christianity, Boxing, and Mixed Martial Arts: Reflections on Morality, Vocation, and Well-Being,” Journal of Religion and Society 17 (2015): 12-13. See also Joe Carter, Ted Kluck, and Matt Morin, “Is Cage Fighting Ethical For Christians?” The Christian Post, January 25, 2012. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/january/cage-fighting.html. 179 spectators of these programs are male. The spread and development of such ministries shows that MMA-related programming, sermons, and viewing parties are becoming increasingly popular ways of attracting men to the Christian faith.407

This integration of faith, fists, machismo, commercialism, and entertainment raises numerous questions. Chiefly, if Christianity and MMA are as antithetical as some scholars, senators, liberal Protestant ministers, evangelical authors like The Gospel

Coalition’s Joe Carter and other members of the genteel, intellectual class have suggested, then why do such ministries continue to have massive appeal among so many evangelical Protestants today?408 Conversely, why do other evangelical luminaries – including charismatic pastor Mark Driscoll, Focus on the Family’s Ryan Dobson, and the

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s President, Rev. Dr. Albert Mohler – defend the sport’s integration into Christian men’s outreach programs? And what are the qualities of

MMA that some American evangelical communities find so attractive, and what outcomes do proponents of Christian MMA ministries hope they will produce?

This chapter seeks to answer these questions through an exploration of the politics of the violent athletic male body on display. Herein, I discuss how Christian MMA enthusiasts, participants, and fans justify blood sport in light of their religious convictions and explore how male bodies performing violence embody assumptions about masculine

407 A New York Times article from 2010 estimated the number of such programs to be around seven hundred. However, this estimate was based solely on conjecture, and has since been repeated in academic articles and around the blogosphere ever since. Hard figures are hard to come by, in part because Christian MMA gyms, summer camps, participant ministries, church viewing parties, conferences, etc. are often infrequent, founded quickly, and are often dissolved quickly too. In that way, they tend to mirror larger association and disassociation trends within evangelical communities. R.M. Schneiderman, “Flock is Now a Fight Team in Some Ministries,” The New York Times, February 1, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/us/02fight.html.

408 Joe Carter, “Jesus is Not a Cage Fighter,” The Gospel Coalition, May 30, 2014. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/jesus-is-not-a-cagefighter 180 gender and evangelical masculinity in post-9/11 America. I begin by discussing the concurrent rise of MMA and MMA ministries within the context of evangelical American gender anxieties in the late 1990s. From there, I examine the calls for a “warrior masculinity” within American evangelicalism and situate it within the politics of the war on terror, examining how these calls to establish masculinity through acts of violence assuaged feelings of vulnerability and feminization. Next, I explore the particular model of evangelical male identity lionized in MMA ministries. Lastly, I examine how the bodies of both MMA enthusiasts and participants operate as mediums through which young men are taught are particular type of evangelical masculine identity built upon internal and outward acts of violence.

Androcentric Entertainment and the Men Missing from the Pews

As I’ve outlined in previous chapters, Christian leaders often prohibited participation in the more overtly violent types of sports until their evangelistic, economic, or military utility could be sufficiently demonstrated. Typically, arguments in favor of

Christian participation in those traditions were grounded in the assertion that such competitions provided a necessary, militaristic training and conditioning service for the community and/or a soteriological service to the individual. From the medieval jousting tournament in the monasteries of central Europe, to gouging, cudgeling, and wrestling in rural Appalachia in colonial America, to the development of Christian rugby and boxing clubs during the industrial and progressive eras, one-on-one combat has been lionized by religious actors. The history of mixed martial arts in America follows a similar pattern of initial obstruction, adaptation, and adoption by religious groups. This time, however, the

181 pattern would be played out under the circumstances of late 20th and early 21st century entertainment, mass communication technologies, and responding to the particular political concerns of contemporary American life.

From its earliest iterations, professionalized MMA’s founding figures have presented their product as an entertainment sport in which hierachies of masculine superiority can be established and maintained. Hollywood films like Bloodsport (1988) and the Street Fighter (1987) and Mortal Kombat (1992) video game series highlighted an entertainment industry market for determining the superiority of fighting styles - and nationalities or ethnicities which bore their names. Seeing a market opportunity,

American businessmen Art Davie and Robert Meyorwitz – along with the Brazilian jujitsu family dynasty of Rickson and Rorion Gracie, Hollywood producer and former

NRA board member John Milius (of Conan the Barbarian fame), and fighter Ken

Shamrock – organized the first Ultimate Fighting Championship in Denver, CO in

1993.409 Touting its product as the most violent and brutal sport in American entertainment, the UFC would go on to become the largest promotional body in the sport.

By pitting muay Thai, Chinese kung-fu, Brazilian jujitsu, Japanese sumo, French savate,

Israeli krav maga, and other schools of boxing, wrestling, and kickboxing against one another, the sport’s promoters claimed that the Octagon was a “no holds barred” crucible in which “There Are No Rules,” and through which fighters could defend the honor of their chosen fighting style.410

409 For more on Hollywood’s and the entertainment industry’s roles in the creation of professional MMA, see Christopher D. Thrasher, Fight Sports and American Masculinity: Salvation in Violence from 1607 to the Present (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2015), 208-215.

410 For a closer look at the origins of MMA, see Miles Adam Park, “In the Octagon: Mixed Martial Arts Comes to Life,” in American History Through American Sport: From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme 182 As MMA’s popularity mushroomed, calls to regulate - or even eliminate - the sport grew as well. Senators Ben Nighthorse Campbell and John McCain and Gov. Roy

Romer condemned the sport as an organized street fight.411 McCain, a boxing aficionado with ties to the gambling industriy and then chairman of the Senate Communications

Committee, demonized MMA as “human cockfighting”412 and attempted to prevent cable providers from carrying UFC broadcasts. Athletic commissions across the country began to outlaw MMA events. As had happened with previous combat sports, MMA was initially condemned by a socially elite group of critics for being too barbaric.413

However, like the great boxing promoters of the previous century, UFC organized successfully instituted a public relations campaign to rebrand the sport. The old slogan,

“There Are No Rules,” highlighted danger and a lack of restraint. The new slogan, introduced by UFC President Dana White in 2002, legitimized MMA by framing it as a serious sport: “As Real As It Gets.” Trading in narratives of danger for authenticity, UFC

Sports, volume 3, ed. by Danielle Sarver Combs and Bob Batchelor (Santa Barbara: Praeger Press, 2013), 295-314.

411 Larry King Live, “Ultimate Fighting,” CNN, December 6, 1995; For more on MMA’s relationship with the law in America see Michael Kim, “Mixed Martial Arts: The Evolution of a Combat Sport and Its Laws and Regulations,” Sports Lawyers Journal 17 (2010): 49-71.

412 Quoted in Martin Marty, “Blood Sport,” The Christian Century, November 27, 2007. http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2007-11/blood-sport.

413 There is a historical class distinction between types of sporting violence that are legitimated or deemed illegitimate within muscular Christian apologetics. In industrial and post-industrial England and the United States, more violent sports (typically deregulated forms of boxing, cudgeling, and wrestling) were associated with the rough-and-tumble masculinities of the western frontiersman or the working class city- dweller (vocations in which muscularity was explicitly tied to economic productivity). However, these sports were increasingly regulated and ultimately were granted increased legitimacy as more white men of the managerial class began to participate in them, usually under the guise that such activities built manly character. This can be heard in boxing’s rhetorical transition from barbaric practice to being called “the sweet science” and “the manly art.” See Michael Kimmel, American Manhood: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996); Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Elliot Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare- Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).

183 leadership repositioned MMA as a laboratory in which competitors could prove their claims to be “the best.” The UFC’s reality TV series The Ultimate Fighter, first broadcasted on male-oriented Spike TV cable channel in 2005, provided amateur competitors an opportunity to prove their mettle. It also provided the UFC with a growing fan base across the US and eventually across the globe, attracting 2.6 million viewers for the series finale.414 Since then, MMA has become one of the fastest growing and most profitable branches of the sport industry, hosting events in over 15 countries, with growing audiences in Europe, South America, and East Asia.415 In the United States, the sport has attracted over thirty one million fans, seventy-five percent of whom are men, and nearly a third of whom are men 18-34 years old.416 Like martial sports of old, MMA had demonstrable economic utility and attractiveness to men of a certain sort.

Mixed martial arts’ rise in popularity over the past twenty years has correlated with an increased effort to provide a version of Christianity attractive to men of all ages, and young men in particular. Responding to concerns about the absence of men in the pews and a lack of testosterone in Christian iconography, some conservative Christian authors and clerical leaders argued that in order to bring men back to church the Christian community must replace what they perceived as the dominantly feminine mode of the faith with one enticing to men. By the time the UFC was getting off the ground, the

414 Thrasher, Fight Sports, 227-231

415 Julie Scelfo, “Blood, guts and money: Don’t look now, but Mixed Martial Arts has gone mainstream,” Newsweek, Vol. 148, Is. 13, (2006), 50.

416 Scarborough Sports Marketing, “Mixed martial arts (MMA) attracts young adults with purchasing power,” PR Newswire, November 23, 2009. http://search.proquest.com/docview/450396692?accountid=14270; Kelsey Philpott, “The UFC Fan Base,” Payout - The Business of MMA, November 29, 2010. http://mmapayout.com/2010/11/the-ufc-fan-base/; See also Nancy Cheever, “The Uses and Gratifications of Viewing Mixed Martial Arts,” Journal of Sports Media 4 (2009): 25-53.

184 Promise Keepers were already filling football stadiums and admonishing men to worship

God with all the might they might bring cheering on their favorite team.417 Trying to identify why men were less interested in religion, Christian men’s authors critiqued the feminized church for having failed to appeal to men’s quintessentially masculine characteristics. President of Ransomed Heart ministries John contended that men’s absence from the pews was because of the church’s overly feminized culture, one which emphasized Christ’s pacifism, meekness, and gentleness over his manhood, and power.

This, Eldredge argued in his best-selling Wild at Heart, discouraged men’s masculine nature, forgetting that “aggression is part of the masculine design,”418 and that for a boy to “become truly masculine,” he needs a “battle to fight; he needs a place for the warrior in him to come alive.”419 In Bringing Up Boys, Focus on the Family’s James Dobson blamed “radical feminism” for today’s “masculine confusion,” and endorsed English philosopher Roger Scrutton’s contention that feminism had “snuffed out male pride wherever it had grown and ruthlessly uprooted it… downgrad[ing] or reject[ing] such masculine virtues as courage, tenacity, and military prowess in favor of more gentle, more ‘socially inclusive’ habits.”420 And in his 2005 book, Why Men Hate Going to

Church, Church for Men founder David Murrow posited that men find church “dull and

417 See Standing on the Promises: The Promise Keepers and the Revival of Manhood, ed. Dane Claussen (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2000).

418 John Eldredge, Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secrets of a Man’s Soul (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2001), 10.

419 John Eldredge, Wild at Heart (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2011 [2001]), 140.

420 James Dobson, Bringing Up Boys: Shaping the Next Generation of Men (Carol Stream: Tyndale Publishers, 2005), 213; 169. 185 irrelevant” because it doesn’t reflect their “masculine heart[s].”421 The over-civilizing world of middle-class mainstream Protestantism, and secular societies groaning under the weight of feminist critique, they claim, had edged men out.422 Frequently, the solution these authors offered was to make Christianity appealing to men again by re-creating a masculine version of the faith.

The Growth of Christian Martial Arts Ministries

Stemming from this desire to create a version of Christianity palatable to the perceived innate aggression of the masculine soul, MMA became an increasingly enticing form of popular culture that could be adapted to evangelistic purposes. Seeing the immense following the sport had among the coveted male 18-34 demographic, a group which normally had high levels of disposable income and few family obligations, several evangelical communities anxious to bring men back to the pews eagerly integrated the sport into ministerial programming. The International Network of Christian Martial

Artists, founded in 1999, sought to connect MMA instructors, practitioners, and enthusiasts with one another, forming a social network that was non-denominational with regard to theology and fighting style. Older Christian martial arts advocacy groups like the Christian Martial Arts Council began extending services to the MMA community in order to – according to their website’s mission statement – “facilitate Christ’s admonition

421 David Murrow, Why Men Hate Going to Church (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2005), 16.

422 This concern about over-civilization is a trope that goes back to the early history of muscular Christianity in America. See Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1995); John J. Brent & Peter Kraska, “Fighting is the Most Real and Honest Thing’: Violence and the Civilization/Barbarism Dialectic,” British Journal of Criminology February 11, 2013, doi: 10.1093/bjc/azt001 186 to fulfill the Great Commission through the medium of the martial arts.” Such ministries, along with international programs like Anointed Fighter, provide the same sort of chaplaincy support and outreach found in every major American sport.

At the local level, some pastors have incorporated MMA instruction into ministerial programming with the expressed goal of recruiting men who would otherwise not attend church. For instance, at Xtreme Ministries in Clarksville, TN, John “The

Saint” Renken – a retired pro fighter, Ft. Campbell Combatives Team instructor, and former lead pastor – succinctly stated his justification for incorporating MMA programming into his church: “Mainstream Christianity has feminized men…. I think most of our problems in society today are due to a lack of a warrior ethos.” He continues,

“at the end of the day it’s about reaching people with gospel, regardless of what you do to introduce them into a relationship with Jesus Christ.”423 Renken, who fashions himself as a crusader with an American eagle as his totem on his website www.fightingpreacher.com, and his book, Peaceful in a Violent Sort of Way, argues that the sport ministry “gives me an avenue to reach those guys I probably would not have if it wasn’t for MMA.”424 Just to the east, Rick Hocker, lead pastor of Freedom Fellowship in Virginia Beach, signed off on his son and associate pastor Preston Hocker’s creation of a fight ministry because “tough guys need Jesus too.”425 For men like Renken and

Hocker, American Christianity is desperately in need of a testosterone boost. MMA is

423 Fight Church, directed by Daniel Junge and Bryan Storkel. DVD, Film Harvest Studios, 84 minutes, 2014.

424 Fox and Friends, “Fight in the Name of the Lord?” Fox News. April 7, 2010.

425 Junge & Storkel, Fight Church. 187 just one such means of attracting those “rough men” and “tough guys,” men whom the church needs just as much as they need Jesus.

Although several religious leaders initially panned MMA for its unabashedly violent content, many American evangelical leaders began to make concessions for

MMA subcultures within their churches. In one apology for these ministries, Albert

Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, argued that “The main issue is not the legitimacy of martial arts, but the fact that these churches are making a self-conscious effort to reach young men and boys with some kind of proof that

Christianity is not a feminized and testosterone-free faith that appeals only to women.”426

Megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll, formerly of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, echoes the sentiments of Eldredge and Murrow when he says men are turned off from churches which ignore or otherwise try to dissuade their violent nature: ‘‘As a pastor and as a Bible teacher, I think that God made men masculine.... Men are made for combat, men are made for conflict, men are made for dominion.... That’s just the way men are made.’’427

Contemporary American evangelicals incorporating MMA into their churches, or at least tacitly endorsing its presence in other churches, are not too far removed from the arguments of the first generations of Muscular Christians who had also suggested that men abandoned the church because the sentimental church had first abandoned them.428

426 Albert Mohler, “NewsNote: Masculinity in a Can, Fight Club at Church, and the Crisis of Manhood.” February 5, 2010. http://www.albertmohler.com/2010/02/05/newsnote-masculinity-in-a-can- fight-club-at-church-and-the-crisis-of-manhood/.

427 Fighting Politics, directed by Emily Vahey, Media Fly Films, 93 minutes, 2009.

428 See Putney, Muscular Christianity, 170; See also David Rosen, “The volcano and the cathedral: muscular Christianity and the origins of primal manliness,” in Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, ed. Donald Hall (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 25-26. 188 MMA ministries, supporters have argued, are appropriate antidotes to this problem. MMA is a means of reaching non-church-going, rough-and-tumble men who do not identify with the “feminized” Christianity. God, the church, and society need these men, and the end result – their hopeful Christianization – justifies the means. Reading such justifications, one gets the impression that MMA ministries don’t work because God approves of them, but that supporters believe God approves of MMA ministries because they gets results among this niche-market. Retired fighter Jason Freeman relays the story of how fighting, once merely an acceptable social outlet for his aggressiveness, had become a means through which God could use him to attract others to his brand of

Protestantism. In true evangelical fashion, Freeman believes God “built up a stage underneath [him] to speak off of and reach others.”429 Charles Pettitt, author of the fictional novel The Warrior, prefaces his book by claiming “We need spiritually strong young men and women for Christ to stand up in arena like MMA, and proclaim their love of Christ.”430 This is a common view among the mostly white male crowd of Internet commentators on MMA enthusiast websites. Ian Borer and Tyler Schafer’s review of unsolicited threads asking whether or not MMA and Christianity were reconcilable revealed that most commentators (unsurprisingly) believed that they were, often invoking the idea that MMA has a “unique position to serve as a recruitment tool which could help

429 Quoted in Annika Young, “Fighting Your Family’s Demons,” The 700 Club clips, Christian Broadcast Network. http://www1.cbn.com/700club/fighting-your-familys-demons; See also Dannon Svab, Knocking Out the Devil: The Jay Freeman Story (n.c.: The author, 2011).

430 Charles J. Pettitt, The Warrior: Can Mixed Martial Arts and Christianity Coexist? (Bloomington: WestBow Press, 2014), xv.

189 restore traditional masculinity.”431 God’s church, it seems, is in desperate need of real

“warrior” men.

Christian Warriors in Post 9/11 America

What precipitated this strong call for a return to a violent masculinity within evangelical churches? One the one hand, calls for a restoration of gender balance in the pews, a portrayal of the ambiguously “feminine” as the root causes of social evil, and the belief that sports could be used to attract men who would otherwise go un-churched, have more or less defined the muscular Christian movement. However, the emergence of

MMA ministries at this particular time is also tied to a uniquely 21st century American crisis of masculinity built upon a decade and half of post 9/11 national vulnerability and colonialist foreign policy. This section examines the politics of warrior Christianity through the lens of the war on terror.

When the planes hit the towers on the morning on September 11th, 2001, as another plane crashed into the Pentagon, and another went down in a Pennsylvania field, many American men spent the following weeks trying to assess the likelihood of a draft, considered enlistment, and otherwise tried to make sense of the world. What was made clear – through presidential speeches, op-eds, editorials, Sunday sermons, and pamphlets at the army recruiter’s station in school lunchrooms – was that the nation was attacked, and this required a righteously violent response from the American people. In his speech before a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20th, President George W. Bush spoke about a national response defined by “courage,” “endurance,” “the giving of blood,” and “the

431 Ian Borer and Tyler S. Schafer, “Culture War Confessionals: Conflicting Accounts of Christianity, violence, and mixed martial arts,” Journal of Media and Religion 10 (2011): 165-184. Emphasis in original. 190 saying of prayers.”432 The president continued by asserting that the nation’s new defense would best be served by military offensive. Like Jesus warning the disciples about the

Day of the Lord in Mt. 24, Bush alerted the armed forces to “be ready,” for “the hour is coming when America will act.”433 Rhetorically, the president had positioned the US military as the advanced forces in God’s army at Judgment Day, assuring the nation that

God “is not neutral in this conflict.”434 With God on our side, who could be against us?

President Bush’s speech, along with its theo-political overtures, also invoked common clichés of sporting culture. The necessity for courage in the face of adversity, endurance in spite of pain, and the willful self-sacrifice of national blood for the sake of a greater cause could easily have been lifted from a coach’s half-time speech to a beleaguered team. What was not so explicitly stated at the time, but certainly can be seen in the undercurrent and rhetoric of the discussions regarding that historic day ever since, was that many Americans interpreted the events of that morning as an act of humiliating feminization. The nation was made vulnerable – that is, rendered feminine by virtue of having been penetrated. The United States had been “attacked,” national security was

“breached,” and Islamic radicalism threatened to impregnate itself on American shores.

Although the calls to restore a violent masculinity had existed throughout the 1990s, they reached new and loftier heights in the era of war on terror.

Gender historians have pointed out that the emergence of contemporary American sporting culture can largely be defined by a desire to create “a homosocial cultural sphere

432 George W. Bush, “Address to the Joint Session of Congress Following 9/11 Attacks,” September 20, 2001.

433 Ibid.

434 Ibid.

191 which provided men with psychological separation from the perceived ‘feminization’ of society”435 in the late 19th century. More recently, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu attempted to explain why societies would invest themselves in inculcating violent dispositions within young men, largely as an extension of a patriarchal project that included both the subordination of women at home and other masculine subjects abroad.

He posited that western societies tended to define manliness through violence – especially violence as righteous revenge. “Manliness,” Bourdieu argued, is largely defined as “the capacity to fight and to exercise violence (especially in acts of revenge),” and “is first and foremost a duty,”436 of ‘real’ men. This, he contends, is the arena in which virility is established. However, because this masculine virility can never be eternally established, it is also “the source of an immense vulnerability,”437 a fear of eventually being feminized. It is this fear of feminization that Bourdieu identifies as the genesis for societies investing in “all the masculine games of violence, such as sports in modern societies, and most especially those which most tend to produce the visible signs of masculinity, and to manifest and also test what are called manly virtues, such as combat sports.”438 The September 11th attacks provided just such an experience of vulnerability, one that demanded a reinvestment in the games of violence that produced visible signs of masculinity.

435 Michael A. Messner, “When bodies are weapons: Masculinity and Violence in Sport.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 25 (1990): 204; See also Michael A. Messner, “Sport and Male Domination: The Female Athlete as Contested Ideological Terrain,” Sociology of Sport Journal 5 (1988): 197-211.

436 Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, translated by Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 50.

437 Ibid.

438 Ibid, 51.

192 Undoubtedly, MMA has enjoyed unprecedented commercial success since the

September 11th attacks. Zuffa, the promotional company started by current UFC chairman

Dana White and casino magnates Frank & Lorenzo Fertitta, purchased the UFC in

January 2001 for two million dollars. In the eight-year history of the UFC prior to 9/11, the largest promotional body in the sport had hosted a mere 36 events, or four and half events per year. However, from Sept. 28 to the present, the UFC has hosted an additional

320 events at a rate of 21 events per year, nearly five times as many as they did in the

1990s.439 In July 2016, White and the Fertitta’s sold the UFC for four billion dollars, indicating that the worldwide market for MMA had rise two-thousand fold since 2001.440

MMA achieved this massive success amid the war on terror and what it reveals about the financial value of images of male bodies in pain. Like other combat sports, it is easy to see MMA as a proxy for war. As Elaine Scarry has noted, “In war… the participants must work to out-injure each other. Although both sides inflict injuries, the side that inflicts the greater injury faster will be the winner.”441 Such is the reality of violence in the Octagon too. Images of men’s bodies in pain and inflicting damage upon one another particularly resonated with a majority American white, male, heterosexual, millennial audience in the post-9/11 world in a way it didn’t before. In the aftermath of national emasculation, a generation of millennial men increasingly turned to the type of warrior masculinity

439 Ultimate Fighting Championship website. www.ufc.com.

440 Darren Rovell and Brett Okamato, “Dana White on $4 billion UFC sale, ‘Sport is going to the next level,” July 11, 2016. http://espn.go.com/mma/story/_/id/16970360/ufc-sold-unprecedented-4-billion- dana-white-confirms.

441 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 89.

193 embodied in MMA culture, not only in American entertainment, but also in many of its churches.

In the fifteen years since 9/11, God’s pressing need for Christian warriors grew within American evangelical culture, reflecting a society responding to its own vulnerability and its colonialist/self-defensive wars abroad. In He Fights for You: 40

Promises for Everyday Battles, the prolific men’s devotional author Max Lucado charges his readers to “March like a Promised Land conqueror,”442 assured in the knowledge of

God’s complete victory over the devil and his grip on the reader’s life. The men’s ministry Core 300 calls for men to “get out of the stands and into the arena,” because the

“violent men of God” must take the Kingdom “by force, through faith.”443 Even the

Promise Keepers – whose diminishing role in evangelical men’s ministries in the 1990s coincided with MMA’s rise to popularity – has gotten in on the action, hosting an

Awakening the Warrior and Battle Lines series of men’s conferences in 2013 and 2015

(respectively).444 This strong desire for a bellicose Christian masculinity isn’t confined to evangelicals either, as Catholic writer Leon Podles also contends that “sacred violence is the ultimate meaning of masculinity,” and that “masculinity is, at heart, a willingness to sacrifice oneself even unto bloody death for the other.”445 A writer for Christianity Today

442 Max Lucado and Andrea Lucado, He Fights for You: 40 Promises for Everyday Battles (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2015), 14.

443 Core 300 website, http://www.core300.org/core-300-beliefs/. The name is a reference to a 2006 gory action film featuring a mostly naked and supremely buff collection of white soldiers who fight to the last man to defend their homeland from an overwhelming, brown-skinned Persian army.

444 Eleanor Osborne, “Spirit Warriors: Promise Keepers hope to reach the hearts and minds of men and boys at Daytona Beach conference,” Daytona Beach News, October 19, 2013; See also https://promisekeepers.org/event-details.

445 Quoted in Timothy Nonn, “Renewal as Retreat: The Battle for Men’s Souls,” in The Politics of Manhood: Profeminist Men Respond to the Mythopetic Men’s Movement, ed. Michael S. Kimmel (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 178. 194 went so far as to say that men “can’t grow in godliness unless we are fighting,” which he defines as fighting to “lead, love and protect”446 that which men hold dear. Real men need to become warriors to achieve true masculinity; they need a battle to fight. Warriors never surrender; they never tap out in a fight (unless of course, they are submitting to

Jesus).447

While this has echoes of earlier muscular Christians, it also reflects the past fifteen years of American foreign policy. As the Bush administration sold the Iraq War to the American public under the guise of protecting American interests from outside aggressors, the same evangelical leaders who espoused the virtues of warrior masculinity vigorously supported the President and his advisors’ decision. Lucado, invoking iustum bellum, defended the invasion because “innocent people need to be protected.”448 He continued by saying the president, “has a moral obligation to protect innocent people here and abroad, but especially here.”449 Of course in this case, the protectionist military strategy took the form of a whole-scale invasion of a country thousands of miles away from the U.S. Jerry Falwell published an article simply entitled, “God is Pro-War,” in which he outlined his belief that “our God-authored freedoms must be defended,” and

446 Ed Stetzer, “Act Like Men: What it Means to Fight Like a Man,” Christianity Today, August 6, 2014. http://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2014/august/act-like-men-what-it-means-to-fight.html

447 In his autobiography, Tapped Out By Jesus, former professional fighter and current Team Impact Ministries strongman Ron Waterman explains that no matter how many fights he participated in, he couldn’t achieve true victory until, paradoxically, he “tapped out” (submitted) his life to Christ. Ron Waterman, Tapped Out by Jesus: From the Cage to the Cross (Alachua: Bridge-Logos Publishers, 2011).

448 Larry King Live, “Panel of Christians Speaks Out on War With Iraq, CNN, March 11, 2003. Transcript available at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0303/11/lkl.00.html

449 Ibid.

195 that “President Bush declared war in Iraq to defend innocent people.”450 On his daily radio show, Dobson argued that “America comes as a liberator, not as a conqueror,” and that the American people have a “moral obligation”451 to fight. What is most interesting to me is that Dobson and Falwell have been among the most ardent supports of the muscular Christian movement, often using the same language to call upon men to fight for the establishment of a proper, God-oriented (and androcentric) society.

They are not alone, either. Daniel Junge and Brian Storkel’s documentary about

Christian MMA ministries, Fight Church, captures a wide variety of individuals who support MMA and MMA ministries using similar hawkish language, claiming that participation in MMA gives men a “warrior ethos” and “the strength to stand up to evil, wickedness, and unrighteousness,” that is out there, “trying to seek and destroy us.”452

“This is a battlefield,” says pastor Joe Burress. “We need to charge them, not wait for them to come to us.”453 Although he may be speaking of the devil, Buress uses the same rhetoric that was used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The apologetics for Christian

MMA sound eerily similar to the apologetics for the wars that have defined the nation during the past 15 years.454 In the era of the war on terror, MMA ministries are a crucible

450 Jerry Falwell, “God is Pro-War,” World News Daily, January 1, 2004. http://www.wnd.com/2004/01/23022/

451 U.S. Newswire, “Dobson Supports War Efforts in Iraq; Pro-Family Leader Calls for Support, Prayer for Troops on National Daily Broadcast.” March 21, 2003, 1.

452 Junge and Storkel, Fight Church.

453 Ibid.

454 They also sound like the muscular Christian apologetics of the English reformers whose utilitarian approach to physical culture revolved around the production of white males with the discipline and martial training to the administration of the colonialist project of British imperialism.

196 through which men can be trained in the habits and dispositions necessary for the survival of the church and the nation in this moment of crisis.

Amid this nexus of hawkish patriotism, foreign aggression, and a perceived lack of testosterone in the pews, MMA ministries emerged as a vehicle through which churches could train men to carry out the righteous, protectionist violence of God. As with many of the other sports ministries discussed earlier, MMA ministries present a version of God that highlights the characteristics that the sport is supposed to inculcate in its participants. As we will see, the Jesus of MMA is as tough as they come, exercising his righteously violent prerogative to establish the Kingdom of God on earth.

MMA Jesus

Christian MMA ministries have a shared hope of counteracting a perceived stereotype of Christianity among non-church-going men: that it is a domesticated faith revolving around an effete Jesus.455 Apologists for these ministries tend to masculinize

Jesus himself through violent imagery in order to present a form of Christianity they find more palatable. Mark Driscoll has suggested that the problem some Christians have with their brethren participating in MMA stems from their false, effeminate image of Christ.

“Their picture of Jesus is basically a guy in a dress with fabulous long hair, drinking decaf and in touch with his feelings, who would never hurt anyone.”456 Driscoll’s preferred iconography is of Jesus the carpenter, whose “cloth is dipped in blood” (Rev.

455 This debate about the feminization of Christ in Christian imagery can be traced back to the mid-19th century. See Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Edward Blum and Paul Harvey, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

456 Mark Driscoll, “A Christian Evaluation of Mixed Martial Arts,” November 9, 2011. http://pastormark.tv/2011/11/09/a-christian-evaluation-of-mixed-martial-arts.

197 19:11-18), a man who “took a beating” on his first trip to earth but will return “to hand them out to unrepentant sinners.”457 This manlier version Driscoll dubs the “Ultimate

Fighting Jesus.”458 Paul Burress, a former MMA fighter, son of pastor Joe Burress, and a pastor himself at Victory Church in Rochester, NY, echoes this when he says that Jesus’s original followers were “roughnecks,” defining meekness as “controlled strength,” and scoffing at the idea that “if you’re a Christian, you have to be a sissy.”459 In defense of his church’s “Easter in the Octagon” event, Pastor Tom Skiles mocks the image of “the

Christ with the long flowing hair,” and instead suggests that Christ and his disciples

“probably had teeth missing.”460 These images of Jesus are reminiscient of older muscular Christian presumptions about what kind of Christ is most attractive.461 Driscoll,

Burress, and Skiles simply present a 21st century version of the idea. Driscoll’s observation that Christ “took a beating” before returning to give out his own is in harmony with much of rhetoric of the “resilient” United States following 9/11.

457 Ibid.

458 Quoted in Brandon O’Brien, “A Jesus for Real Men: What the New Masculinity Movement Gets Right and Wrong,” Christianity Today 52 (2008): 48.

459 Quoted in Brownie Marie, “Pastor’s ‘Fight Ministry’ incorporates mixed martial arts; sees it as a counter to ‘feminised’ church,” Christianity Today, September 12, 2014. http://www.christiantoday.com/article/pastors.fight.ministry.incorporates.mixed.martial.arts.sees.it.as.a.cou nter.to.feminised.church/40591.htm.

460 Quoted in Keegan Hamilton, “Church Plans ‘Easter in Octagon,’ Says Pastor: ‘Jesus Didn’t Tap Out, He was an Ultimate Fighter,” Riverfront Times, April 3, 2009. http://www.riverfronttimes.com/newsblog/2009/04/03/church-plans-easter-in-octagon-says-pastor-jesus- didnt-tap-out-he-was-an-ultimate-fighter.

461 Warren Conant’s 1915 claim that “hard-fisted men… are not likely to be impressed or attracted by a feminine Christ,” is a perennial theme, more recently seen in Jerry’s Falwell’s declaration that “Christ wasn’t effeminate… Christ was a he-man!” Warren Conant, The Virility of Christ: A New View, 2nd edition (Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing: 2009 [1915]), 92-93; Falwell quoted in Michael Kimmel, Misframing Men: The Politics of Contemporary Masculinities (Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 23.

198 These comments represent a presumption found throughout Christian MMA subculture: The masculine qualities of Christianity – construed as virile, powerful, aggressive, competitive, and physically endowed – must be stressed (and perhaps exaggerated) if non-church-going men will find it worthy of their time, energy, and material resources. If Jesus is to be emulated, he must be a Jesus who already conforms to

(and approves of) the MMA lifestyle. The website for Pastor Nathan Kirby’s Rock City

MMA assures these men that even when they feel the “ground n pound at work or at school,” Jesus is their “ultimate Cornerman,” as they go through “the cage of life.”462

Dave Hatfield, an organizer for MMA at Victory Christian Fellowship in State College,

PA claims aggressiveness is next to godliness:

The Bible talks about the Lord being a victorious warrior and says we’re created in his image. I believe God has given each one of us a divine desire to conquer and overcome… We use our MMA outreaches to tap into guys’ natural desire[s] to conquer and compete and point them to their creator and the fact He has plans for them to become not only beloved sons, but also warriors for Him.463

Such language suggests that the spirit which animated the hymn Onward Christian

Soldiers is alive and well in 21st century American Protestantism.

Teaching Evangelical Masculinity in MMA

Aside from attracting new members and re-branding Jesus, MMA has also been construed as a means of teaching an idealized version of masculinity to male participants.

What is at stake for many of the involved pastors is the future of the faith. Beset by the

462 Quoted in Miles Adam Park, “Tales of Sporty Violence, Obligatory Doughnut Consumption, Pull-Up Contests, and Other Evangelical Things from the Midwest,” Religion in American History Blog, May 25, 2013. http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2013/05/tales-of-sporty-violence-obligatory_5468.html.

463 Quoted in Lee Warren, “Is MMA Compatible with Christianity?” The Christian Post, April 23, 2011. http://www.christianpost.com/news/is-mma-compatible-with-christianity-49947/. 199 anxious notion that the church is losing the battle for men’s souls, several Christian

MMA participants, spectators, and supporters turned to the sport as an antidote for many of problems of the modern church. Most of all, Christian MMA apologists hope the sport provides the necessary physical and moral training which will engender desirable masculine qualities in young men and boys who in turn will become the future leaders of both church and society: as pastors, lay ministers, businessmen, coworkers, patriarchal husbands, dependable brothers, and soldiers.

One hope, repeating aspirations found throughout muscular Christian literature, is that MMA will provide the necessary structure for moral living by teaching the values of discipline, hard work, and self-determination. Some ministries invite female congregants to participate in training (though few do and inter-sex competitions are infrequent) on the grounds that they too can benefit from the spiritual exercises of physical training and sporting asceticism. This is particularly the case with younger members. Professional fighter and Pentecostal preacher Jason Barrett says, “Young people need discipline in their lives, and mixed martial arts gives them exactly that.”464 Giving and receiving hits, kicks, eye-gouges, body-slams, cauliflower ear, chokeholds, arm-bars, groin shots, cracked ribs, broken noses and broken bones, in addition to the injuries common in sports training, are thus integrated into a disciplinary practice designed for preparing young people for the hardships of the adult world.

Thinking primarily of the males in these congregations, other supporters hope that

MMA participation will enable boys and young men to take over family responsibilities.

464 Quoted in Marty, “Blood Sport,” 47.

200 “The man should be the overall leader of the household,”465 according to Ryan Dobson, son of James Dobson and Vice President of his father’s “Family Talk” radio show. The reason so many men fail to take on this duty, Ryan Dobson suggests, is that the church has “raised a generation of little boys.”466 His hope is that masculinization efforts like

Christian MMA will reverse this trend. Virginia Beach pastor Preston Hocker said that he moved from the pulpit into the cage when he considered his then-inability to protect his family: “I was newly married, and had a real beautiful wife and heaven forbid anybody want to take her life or take her away from me. I wanted to know that I had the ability to at the very least defend her life.”467 For him, honing his skills in inflicting pain would enable him to fulfill his Christian duty as the protector of his family – something that has increasingly occupied the minds of American men in the post 9/11 world.468 Albert

Mohler hopes that these ministries prepare men for:

the most important fight to which a Christian man is called… the fight to grow up into godly manhood, to be true to wife and provide for his children, to make a real contribution in the home, in the church, and in the society… This means a fight for truth, for the Gospels, and for the virtues of the Christian life.469

The image of the masculine gospel of Jesus on the offensive reveals the sense of embattlement that is pervasive in American evangelicalism broadly and the gender

465 Quoted in Bill Forman, “Dobson 2.0: As the doctor leaves Focus, his son talks about a second coming,” Colorado Springs Independent, February 25, 2010. http://www.csindy.com/coloradosprings/dobson-20/Content?oid=1633735.

466 Ibid.

467 Quoted in Bob Woodruff and Ben Newman, “In Jesus’s Name, Throw Punches: ‘Fight Church’ Christian Ministries Believe in Fight Clubs.” ABC NEWS, October 3, 2014. http://abcnews.go.com/US/jesus-throw-punches-fight-church-christian-ministries-fight/story?id=25953786.

468 For a detailed discussion, see Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).

469 Albert Mohler, “Masculinity in a Can.”

201 coding of both familial and social salvation within MMA apologetic discourses.

Whatever the problems of society are, fighting preacher John Renken knows that “If we would raise our boys to be men, these kinds of problems go away.”470 For some

American evangelicals, MMA is a silver bullet for many of the nation’s gender troubles and global anxieties.

Stylization of the Body – MMA Aesthetics

Bodily style implies both the physical sculpting of flesh through a regimen of behaviors (body callusing, working out, aerobic exercise) and the ornamentation of the flesh. Judith Butler argues that "Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being."471 Hair, make-up, and clothing are the “reiterative” (repeated) and “citational” (drawn from) gender performances already present within a given cultural framework. Mainstream MMA culture has its own ornamental aesthetics of hair, make up, and clothing for male fighters that are often utilitarian and gender conforming – though not always. The majority of professional fighters have very short hair or nearly shaven heads, hairstyles that would pass military inspection and are reminiscient of the action movie masculine tough guy.472 While short hair may seem like a reject of “girly” bodily artifice, the reality is that it is as intentional and performative as curling or braiding. The industrialist architectural dictum that form

470 Quoted in Junge & Storkel, Fight Church.

471 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge Press, 1990), 33.

472 Action film stars Bruce Willis, Vin Diesel, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and Jason Statham immediately come to mind.

202 follows function applies here. Short hair allows the natural oils and sweat of the fighter to serve as lubricants, glancing away blows that might otherwise gain traction against a mat of hair and cause greater damage. Short hair also allows for a better view of cauliflower ear, a condition caused by repeated blows leading to hematomas and deformities, which are also signs of a fighter’s experience. Having a clean-shaven head may give the illusion of being above the concerns of effete men who use hair products, but it is no less a hairstyle conveying signs of the fighter’s identity.

Another, less obvious stylization involves putting on a “manly” type of make-up before fights – lube. Although promotional organizations like the UFC have tried to curb the practice, most fighters regularly apply Vaseline or some other slippery substance over their bodies before a fight, sometimes even the night before.473 This “greasing,” as it is known in MMA circles, allows petroleum jelly to seep into the fighter’s skin, so that by the time they start sweating during the fight they are covered in a thin, slippery layer that makes it significantly harder for their opponent to get a grip on them during a grappling bout. It also makes it easier for the fighter to escape from holds and bars before damage is done. Other fighters may take a warm bath to open their pores, douse their bodies with baby oil, and stand in front of an air conditioner to close their pores again, so that by the next day they are literally sweating baby oil. For a sport that many Christians point to as a necessary and positive sign of real masculinity in the modern world, it is also a sport that puts a high premium on “feminine” things like skin care and a carefully applied layer of

473 Such types of “greasing” are of dubious legality in the sport, as evidenced by the Nevada Athletic Commission’s rule barring only “excessive” greasing, the punishment for which is that referee removes the grease from the fighter’s body. See N.A.C. rules, ch. 467 “Unarmed Combat,” NAC467.528. Available at: http://leg.state.nv.us/NAC/NAC-467.html. This is also reminiscent of the oiling of pankration fighters in ancient Greece.

203 foundation. Also, because the trainer is generally the person who applies the Vaseline to the fighter’s body, this practice of one man rubbing another down with an old-fashioned sex lubricant doesn’t help MMA deflect accusations of homoeroticism either.474

While carefully crafted hair and make-up perform utilitarian functions in the ring, other means of stylizing the body outside of the ring also help convey signs of identity and ideology for both participants and spectators. MMA-specific clothing lines have commercialized the perceived connection between professional fighting and Christian masculine identity. The Jesus Didn’t Tap clothing line offers T-shirts, headgear, and other paraphernalia reinforcing the masculine asceticism of Christ, who, according to the company’s website, “didn’t quit after going through unimaginable suffering and pain when he was crucified on the cross.” Founded by martial arts enthusiast and former

Power Ranger Jason David Frank and former fighter Patrick “Bam Bam” Hutton, Jesus

Didn’t Tap clothing succeeds by wedding muscular Christian assumptions about Jesus with a conservative Christian fantasy about the protectionist role of the Christian male amid national political anxieties. With street and training clothes for both men and women, the company’s slogan promotes the notion that real Christians emulating their

Lord do not succumb to the demands of the flesh; they tough it out and fight through.

Two t-shirts in particular feature Jesus’s martial skills, presenting him as the exemplary fighter who bests the devil through submission. “Get a Hold of Your Life” shows Jesus putting Satan into a chokehold, while “Break Your Bad Habits” has Satan trapped in

474 Mark Simpson argued that MMA is “the gayest sport in America.” Many researchers have noted that the element of violence performs the valuable psychological function of distancing men gathering to watch other mostly naked men touch each other from its rather obvious homoerotic connotations. See Mark Simpson, “This if the Face of the Gayest Sport in America,” Out Magazine 17 (2008): 54-59; Michael Messner, “When Bodies Are Weapons”; Brian Pronger, The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). 204 Jesus’s arm bar. Another shirt, “Jesus Didn’t Tap - Neither Does This Country,” weds nationalism within macho Christianity, using the Crusader’s Cross to position Christian

MMA as a training program for the theo-political struggle between Islam and an imagined Christian America. These material artifacts of MMA evangelism denote the wearer’s membership in the body of faith and promote their hyper-masculine version of

Jesus, who is strongly aligned with American interests. As Justine Greve summarizes this reality, the MMA Jesus is “self-sufficient and strong-minded.”475 This is important because “When manliness is connected to fitness and to godliness, Jesus’s image imparts theological and ideological truths.”476 Jesus doesn’t tap because submission is a sign of weakness (and aligned with femininity and homosexuality). If Jesus is “the Ultimate

Fighter” and the object of Christian emulation, then real Christian men - American men - must always be dominant, never submissive, and by extension never effeminate or queer.

Such images also highlight the connections between masculinity, patriotism, and

American foreign policy within Christian MMA subculture.

Even presumably secular MMA apparel companies like Affliction Clothing draw much of their imagery from Christian symbols. Nails, thorns, and crosses are frequently given pride of place on Affliction clothing, right alongside skulls, flames, and other images which invoke “tough guy” Christianity. These clothes visibly inscribe commonplace assumptions about the relationship between manhood, Christian identity, and righteous suffering within an MMA context. Affliction Entertainment – the promotional arm of Affliction Clothing – advertises heavily at MMA events. As one New

475 Justine Greve, “Jesus Didn’t Tap: Masculinity, Theology, and Ideology in Christian Mixed Martial Arts,” Religion and American Culture 24 (2014): 167.

476 Ibid.

205 York Times reporter observed, the name Affliction Entertainment is a useful phrase that

“captures the hideous extremes of the sport,” noting the “carnivalesque” nature of the spectacle.477 Such was the nature of both the public execution of Jesus and the gladiatorial games, where suffering was on display for the world to see and enjoy.

Affliction Clothing (and more overtly Christian knock-off brands like Revelation Shirts) profit from this “hardcore” Christian imagery and allow buyers the opportunity to physically wear a banner advertising a particular interpretation of Christianity and promote a self-image that aligns with preconceived notions about their internal identity.

In other words, wearing these clothes allows for a type of identity performance and proclamation – of beliefs about Jesus the warrior, of the righteousness of persevering through suffering, of the toughness of true Christians, and of the tough, masculine nature of the faith itself.

These stylizations of the body – hair, make up, and clothing – are ways of performing identity. What I’ve attempted to make clear here is that these stylizations of the body, although sometimes serving utilitarian purposes, are every bit as concerned with decorating the body in specific ways that signify gender conformity as those manners of stylizing the body that are typically designated as feminine, effete, or homosexual. For an ostensibly hyper-masculine sport, at least one that Christian enthusiasts claim to be hyper-masculine, there is a lot of attention paid to how bodies are adorned and what kind of ideas those adornments may designate. Clean-shave male fighters (or fans) wearing t-shirts featuring barbed-wire-wrapped crosses perform a

477 Virginia Heffernan, “Blood Sport,” New York Times, March 11, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/magazine/15wwln-medium-t.html?_r=1. 206 specific ideology of masculinity, albeit one also occasionally slathered in lube and frequently pressed up against the bodies of other men.

The Body as Weapon

Hegemonic masculinity is rooted in displays of violence, in exercises of power relationships over women, over children, and over other men. Such structural forms of domination are reinforced through violence, thus, contrary to popular sentiment, violence is not anti-social. As Michele Toomey argues, “violence is not a deviant act; it is a conforming one.”478 White, cis-gender heterosexual males are actively encouraged to act violently as part of their performance of masculinity in contemporary American culture.

The thing that makes MMA so fascinating is that the violence is reciprocal.

Sports violence is an important crucible through which boys are socialized as men. Barbara Ehrenreich has contended sports are the primary vehicle through which

“dangerous masculinity”479 is taught. The quest for this kind of “dangerous masculinity” leads to boys and men treating their bodies as weapons, according to Michael Messner.480

Part of performing masculinity is being willing to endure suffering in the pursuit of victory. Toughing it out, playing through the pain, not quitting when it’s already unbearable, these are self-sacrificial qualities that partially define hegemonic masculinity in American culture. Being too in-tune with one’s body, to recognize it as a biological organism that requires proper care and maintenance to thrive, is too feminine a

478 Michele Toomey, quoted in Suzanne E. Hatty, Masculinities: Violence, and Culture (New York: Sage Publications, 2000), 1.

479 Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997), 117-131; 144-158.

480 Messner, “When Bodies are Weapons.” 207 characteristic for many in sports. Such an approach to masculinity resonates within an evangelical Christology emphasizing victory through defeat, the martyrological sacrifice of the individual’s body for the greater good of the social body of the Church, and valorizing bloodshed – the blood which was shed in a self-sacrificial act of crucifixion and the bloodshed that will occur in the outward displays of righteous violence that Christ will inflict upon sinners at the reckoning. MMA ministries aren’t antithetical to

Christianity – they are an opportunity for Christian men to display their conformity to a hegemonic masculinity defined (in part) by a Christian culture of sacred violence.

Being violent can be understood as one means through which men demonstrate their ability to conform to hegemonic standards of manliness. Pain, both given and taken, is an important biological apparatus for analyzing one’s place on the spectrum between the masculine and the effete. Paradoxically, Dale Spencer suggests, “in attempts to perform masculinities through violence, pain and injuries evince failures to adhere to the precepts of normative masculinity.”481 I would add that pain reception and injuries are not always failures to adhere to those standards; rather, pain reception and pain tolerance are important parts of performing masculinity, serving as demonstrations of one’s grit. Both

Spencer and Loïc Wacquant have respectively detailed how the body can serve as “a tool of inquiry and a vector of knowledge”482 in the sense of a scientific instrument for collecting data. The experience of receiving physical pain and injury is a masochistic path

481 Dale C. Spencer, “Narratives of despair and loss: Pain, injury, and masculinity in the sport of mixed martial arts,” Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health 4 (2012): 120.

482 Loïc Wacquant, Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), viii.

208 towards the awareness of one’s own conformity to or deviation from a normative masculinity grounded in expressions of physical and psychological force relationships.

In fact, exposure to pain has its own virtues as well, one of which is simply that dangerous activities are socially perceived as being more masculine. “The possibility of death,” says Christian Vaccaro, “raises MMA’s manhood quotient.”483 But exposure to pain in sports also has other meanings within evangelical communities. Rooted in fundamentalism’s suspicions of leisure pursuits, sports ministries did not receive critical welcome within evangelical communities until their utilitarian purposes were made evident. Play, for the sake of pleasure, was frivolity. However, Shirl Hoffmann notes that

“pain and discomfort are not incidental conditions of sporting competition; they are central, the indispensable relish for mellowing the raw taste of pleasure.”484 The risk of receiving pain, and the actual suffering inflicted upon the body through competition, contributed to the process by which sports became licit ventures for faithful Christians.

MMA pain is, then, corrective to excessive pleasure.485

Pain is also a key indicator of adherence to a hegemonic masculinity grounded in

Christian ideology. The kind of “Christ-like” masculinity mentioned earlier – a Jesus who doesn’t tap out, a Christ who, like the post-9/11 nation, takes hits and continues to fight – is defined through receiving pain and responding to it, creating a normative masculinity

483 Christian Vaccaro, Douglas P. Schrock, and Janice M. McCabe, “Managing emotional manhood: Fighting and fostering fear in mixed martial arts,” Social Psychology Quarterly 74 (2011): 419.

484 Shirl J. Hoffman, “Evangelicalism and the Revitalization of Ritual in Sport,” Arete: The Journal of Sport Literature 2 (1985): 63-87.

485 It is also a corrective against accusations of MMA as a form of torture. Torture is generally a process by which one party experiences all of the pain inflicted by an outsider. Sporting pain is mutually experienced, though not equally. Both involve intimate familiarity with the body of another, though certainly not any kind of tenderness.

209 in which experiencing and over-coming pain are interpreted within Christian MMA culture as part of being truly masculine. Christian MMA isn’t so much about reciprocal violence as it is a performance of masculinity defined through the torture one is willing to subject one’s body to in the pursuit of a great cause. The attitude that “suffering is triumph in waiting” has tremendous appeal among evangelicals – many of whom have long felt ostracized from the greater social body and who often perceive of their values and culture as being under attack – from liberalism, sexual revolution, feminism, and now, Islam. The Christian fighter who suffers pain and fights on anyway is demonstrating his adherence to this kind of “Christ-like” masculinity. John Eldredge’s call for the restoration of a “slightly dangerous” kind of masculinity aligns with the evangelical self- interpretation as an endangered culture representing an endangered American state requiring heroic Christian warriors.486 The collective suffering of the nation, of evangelical culture, and of Christian cage-fighters is demonstrative, performative, and affirmative. As Paul says to the persecuted in Romans 3:3-4, “We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.” The warriors for Christ in the Octagon embody Paul’s words, carrying with them the hopes that salvific masculinity, a “dangerous masculinity” of “self-sacrifice,” may still yet return to the church.

The Sacrifice of the Athletic Male Body

The great paradox of MMA ministries is that such displays of external violence

(acts which establish one’s place in a gender hierarchy) are ultimately built upon a self-

486 Quoted in Sally K. Gallagher and Sabrina L. Wood, “Godly Manhood Going to Wild?: Transformations in Conservative Protestant Masculinity,” Sociology of Religion, 66 (2005): 135.

210 sacrificial violence that reveals the body’s vulnerability. The destruction of the bodies of male athletes in the Octagon is a potlatch of the highest order. A potlatch, in the words of

David Chidester, is the “ritualized display, distribution, and sometimes destruction of valued objects in ceremonial occasions.”487 In MMA, the ultimate gift is the perfected male body exposed to violence. As physical specimens, MMA fighters are among the fittest athletes in the world. Theirs are the type of bodies many men strive for in gyms, are idolized in statues, erotica, and advertising. They are the ultimate embodiment of masculinity, apparently invincible. The destruction of these perfected bodies in fights is simultaneously economically productive for promotional companies but ultimately deletrious for the athletes themselves. As Michael Messner observes, one of the paradoxes of combat sports is that “top athletes, who are often portrayed as the epitome of good physical conditioning and health, are likely to suffer from a very high incidence of personal injuries, disabilities, alcoholism, drug abuse, obesity, and heart problems.”488

Far from establishing the invincibility of hard bodies, MMA exposes those bodies as the vulnerable, mortal biological organisms that they are. Cage fighting is a process of ritualized destruction, one in which the utilitarian potential of such bodies are disregarded in favor of their symbolic potential.

Georges Bataille’s “The Notion of Expenditure” shines some light on how destruction can invest material objects with greater value than their mundane economic uses. Bataille draws a distinction between two forms of economic activity, production

487 David Chidester, “The Church of Baseball, the Fetish of Coca-Cola, and the Potlatch of Rock 'n' Roll: Theoretical Models for the Study of Religion in American Popular Culture.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 64 (1996): 743-765.

488 Messner, “When Bodies are Weapons,” 212. See also Gregory H. Bledsoe, Edbert B. Hsu, Jerek George Gabowski, Justin D. Brill, and Guohua Li, “Incidence of Injury in Professional Mixed Martial Arts Competitions,” Journal of Sports Science and Medicine 5 (2006): 136-142.

211 and expenditure. In a material sense, production is the “minimum necessary for the continuation of life,”489 and is the normative model for powerful social systems in industrialized societies. Expenditure, on the other hand, is an economic model of excess and of destruction. According to Bataille, “the accent is placed on a loss that must be as great as possible in order for the activity to take on its true meaning.”490 Although the

Christian MMA ministries can produce amazing physical bodies, their true value lies in what those bodies can do: inflict harm, subject themselves to pain and anguish, and be sacrificed for the greater good (theologically or politically). As Elaine Scarry has argued,

“the self-flagellation of the religious ascetic… is not an act of denying the body…. [It is] a way of so emphasizing the body that the contents of this world are cancelled and the path is clear for the entry of an unworldly, contentless force.”491 Christian MMA ministries do not deny the body or its needs, nor do they transcend the body. They lift up the perfected athletic male body as a material artifact of faith – it is the object of desire, worthy of emulation, and the ultimate symbol of how MMA ministry enthusiasts and participants perceive of Christianity perfected. The production of such bodies in training, and their ultimate sacrifice through violence given and received, comprise a total system in which temporal and frail flesh and blood are invested with eternal and hardened symbolic value. This approach to thinking of the body destroyed reminds us that religions can be a “repertoire of cultural practices and performances, of human relations and exchanges, in which people conduct symbolic negotiations over material objects and

489 Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927- 1939, ed. by Allan Stoekly, trans. by Allan Stoekly, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minn. Press, 1985), 116-129.

490 Bataille, Visions of Excess, 118.

491 Scarry, Body in Pain, 34.

212 material negotiations over sacred symbols.”492 The self-sacrificial act of giving one’s body in Christian MMA ministries, or at least risking its destruction, is a negotiation of what it means to be a human being exercising the right to control the significance of one’s own body. Religious asceticism, like MMA, isn’t so much a practice of bodily denial, but bodily mastery.

The Psychosocial Function of Christian MMA

One the greatest strengths of religious studies is that it is a field in which humans can learn why certain beliefs – which are wholly irrational to outsiders – make perfectly logical sense for insiders. Once accepted, certain premises lead to other beliefs, compromising a total system with its own internal structures and ways of understanding the world. Although a great number of academics, priests, rabbis, pundits, politicians, and casual observers have denounced MMA as wholly anti-social and lambasted MMA ministries as a perversion of the faith, few such critiques have come from those already successfully integrated into the muscular Christian world of 21st century American evangelical sporting culture. As Randall Stephens and Karl Giberson have detailed, evangelical communities have their own centers of knowledge production which often run afoul of secular society.493 Even though elite academics of evangelical Christian persuasion like Higgs and Hoffman question the wisdom of adapting combative

American sporting culture for evangelistic purposes, other, more popular, truth speakers from the American evangelical community – Lucado, Mohler, Driscoll, Falwell, Dobson,

492 David Chidester, Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 46-47.

493 Randall Stephens and Karl Giberson, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 213 Eldredge, etc. – have defended the Christian warrior culture of post-9/11 American

Protestantism. What outsiders fail to grasp is that displays of the violent capabilities of the Christian warrior perform a valuable psychosocial function for a particular subset of

American males at this particular moment in time.

In the wake of 9/11, in response to a chorus of theologians and other men’s ministers calling for a return to “dangerous masculinity” defined through fighting, in response to the perceived deleterious forces of docilizing sentimentality, feminism, and foreign aggressors, MMA ministries offer a (largely) homosocial space for Christian men to be physically and psychologically molded into models of hegemonic masculinity invested with soteriological significance. For those on the inside, such para-church ministries provide Christian men opportunities to reclaim their manhood, and that of the church and the nation.

For men who believe the institutions of modern society have an over-civilizing or emasculating effect, MMA provides a powerful corrective to such constraining forces. At the same time, participating in cage fighting rebukes the social imperatives toward docility and repudiates progressive visions of a society that transcends violence (in fact, this is one of MMA’s greatest pleasures). Cage fighting reminds the audience of the sheer

Hobbesian horror of a world in which the primary arbiter is physical strength. It reminds the audience that the police state is necessary to prevent the type of violence displayed in the Octagon from spilling over. Christian MMA ministries reinforce the idea that the survival of the faith – and of American society in general – is dependent upon the judicious use of righteous violence. This is made all the more obvious in light of Preston

Hocker’s claim that his MMA work is for the protection of loved ones, John Renken’s

214 self-image as all-American Christian crusader and involvement with Ft. Campbell’s

Combatives team, and the numerous articles of Jesus Didn’t Tap merchandise that frame

MMA as a training regimen for Christian patriotism.

Although many critics of Christian MMA rightly focus on the disconnect between

Jesus’s non-violent lifestyle and that of a cage-fighter, few acknowledge the distinct overlap between the Octagon and Jesus’s crucifixion. Such criticisms often reflect a presumption that “what is religious is inherently good, and therefore cannot be violent,” or the inverse presumption that “violence is inherently bad, therefore it cannot be religious.” One of Kent Brintnall’s key arguments in Ecce Homo, echoing earlier feminist theologians like Mary Daly and Rebecca Parker, was that “Christians have fled from the abyss opened by nails and spear for the saner, safer religious imaginary of salvation.”494 By espousing theological discourses that “focus[ed] exclusively on love, forgiveness, or reconciliation,” many Christians failed “to grapple with the messy details of the event.”495 Brintnall demanded that attention be paid to the “content of the crucifixion,” which is “the brutalization, humiliation, and degradation of a male body.”496

Christian soteriology, like MMA, is grounded in broken bodies. Evangelicalism’s focus upon a personal relationship with that broken body, and its iconographic and hymnological emphasis upon that body’s blood and the torture it endured, make perfect sense within an MMA framework. Both are meaning-making systems that invest broken

494 Kent Brintnall, Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-In-Pain As Redemptive Figure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 22.

495 Ibid, 131.

496 Ibid. 215 male bodies with theological significance. For insiders, the sport is legitimated not in spite of its violent nature, but because of it.

216 CHAPTER 6 – CONCLUSION

As the preceding case studies have shown, overt displays of athletic male bodies in sports evangelism have played an integral part in efforts to convey religious messages about masculinity to young men. Merging faith with spectacle, these athlete evangelists have demonstrated that the artful showcasing of their flesh is just as important to their

Christian message as pre-game prayers, on-field performances, off-field testimonies, and genuflections. The sculpting of the body, its staging and adornment, and displaying its strength and sexual allure are frequent strategies of signifying one’s successful internalization of gender norms and promoting evangelical ideologies of masculinity through sport.

For the athletes, such performances are reassuring opportunities to demonstrate their commitment to a specific set of beliefs and practices about Christian masculinity and their own conformity to it. As the previous chapters showed, many performers and audiences members believe such displays repudiate the negative characterization of

Christianity as a sissified or feminized religious tradition, which they perceive to be commonplace within secular discourse. That audience members interpret these performances of masculinity as visible affirmations of the manliness of the faith supports

Robert Orsi’s argument that “the corporalization of the sacred” transforms bodies into

“the bearer of presence for oneself and others.”497 Such displays are powerful means of re-branding the faith as the religious tradition of the strong, virile, and righteously violent.

497 Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 74. 217 What stands out most prominently in these case studies is how these revelations of cis-gendered male bodies in action (mostly white, mostly heterosexual) have functioned as ancillary arguments in support of political ideologies frequently favored by conservative Christians. The Power Team’s form of Hard Body Christianity during the

Reagan era demonstrated the moral/physical might of born again white Christian men, itself a more palatable self-image of national strength than that offered by Jimmy Carter, who had accused the country of having a “crisis of confidence.” Power Team rhetoric concerning the influence of Satan echoed Reagan’s language concerning the evil empire of the Soviet Union. Finally, the performers utilized tropes, iconographies, and feats of strength featured in fantasies of masculine power from the realms of comic books, professional wrestling, and the action cinema.

High-profile athletes like AC Green, Reggie White, and David Robinson used their social capital to lend support to the abstinence movement in opposition to comprehensive sexual education, symbolically joining ranks with the mid-1990s abstinent ministries like Silver Ring Thing, True Love Waits, and Pure Freedom. This continued a long history of Christian athletes speaking out against the perceived sexual excesses of their era. However, it was Tim Tebow and Lori Jones – the children of the

1990s abstinence programs – whose strategic bodily revelations (and the social media frenzies about those images and their subject’s participation in a sexualized commercial culture) who affirmed those program’s assurances of the sexual allure of outspoken virginal Christian youth and who carried those program’s messages about married sex being the best sex.

218 And as the last chapter showed, the rise of mixed martial arts entertainment and

MMA ministries over the first two decades of the 21st century offered self-styled

Christian warriors opportunities to answer the call for a return to a violent masculinity deemed necessary and redemptive in the era of the war on terror. MMA leaders’ decision to promote the sport as a proving ground for testing claims about the individual combatant – how deadly he or she could be, or how much pain they could endure before emerging victorious – tapped into a niche-market desire that was only exacerbated after

September 11th. The underlying us/them logic presented by proponents of these ministries also mirrored that of national leaders who successfully lobbied for “taking the battle” to

Iraq before “they” brought the fight to “us.” Far from innocuous, these displays have often drawn from and perpetuated political ideologies of hawkish foreign policy, individualistic/moralistic solutions to systemic domestic issues, and aggressive imperialism.

What also stands out is the extent to which such efforts target adolescent boys and young men. From animated TV shows, to the apotheosis of Tim Tebow into the image of a Marvel comic hero,498 athlete evangelists have demonstrated remarkable familiarity with and adept command of the tools and material artifacts of youth culture. To this we can add the dozens of ghost-written autobiographies of evangelical athletes written for tween and teenage boys published by Thomas Nelson, Tyndale House, Zondervan,

498 In January 2012, Marvel Custom Solutions produced three stills of Tim Tebow as a hero in the Marvel Universe, right alongside Thor, Iron Man, and the rest of the Avengers who’ve dominated the box office for the past decade. Marvel Custom Solutions spokesperson Bill Rosemann: “Like the Marvel heroes who pull off last minute victories, Tebow has fans around the world on the edge of their seats and believing that – in our own lives – when time is running out and all looks lost, we can dig deep inside and use our various strengths to triumph over insurmountable odds.” Michael McCarthy, “Here’s Marvel’s new superhero: Tim Tebow,” USA Today, January 4, 2012. http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gameon/post/2012/01/check-out-marvel-comics-new-superhero- tim-tebow-espn-denver-bronocs/1#.V7CLAJMrJok 219 Barbour, Multnomah, Bethany House, and Baker Books, and the various sports-themed films on Pureflix dramatizing the faith of Tebow, Reggie White, Eric Lidell, and Bobby

Bowden, perfect viewings for youth ministries and young men’s gatherings. Clothing lines, comics, teddy bears, television, movies, stage shows, biographies, fiction books… there is no end to the cultural productions targeting young men.

So, what have we learned about the type of masculinity on display in these ministries? It is interesting that as much as evangelicals have asserted their separation from worldly or secular culture, these ministries have opted to demonstrate evangelical

Christianity’s conformity to and mastery of the dominant paradigm of American manhood found in androcentric entertainment. Being adept in the use of force and being able to withstand a fair amount of physical pain are obviously of some importance in these enterprises, as is presenting oneself as sexually powerful and as an object of sexual desire (whether as a pre-married abstinent or as a faithfully married male). What also stands out is the rhetorical assertion of the “naturalness” of masculine aggressiveness coupled with a sports theology that asserts that proclivities towards violence are God- given, not the byproduct of years of socialization, coaching, and training that leads one to act violently towards others. This carries the corollary of ignoring the pain inflicted against one’s own body, perpetuating the idea that men are to rise above the needs of the flesh in service to the masculine spirit. From Warren Conant’s Virility of Christ to Mark

Driscoll’s uplifting of the Christ with a robe dripped in blood, the most ardent supporters of sports evangelism have claimed that Christian masculine identity is first and foremost a call to act violently.

220 Why does this warrior/strongman image resonate within American evangelicalism in the contemporary world? As the previous chapters have shown, these ministries have often carried with them a rhetorical sense of embattlement against a feminizing and liberalizing “other.” For over a hundred years, the advocates of sports evangelism have castigated “sissified” Christianity, variously accusing feminists and doting mothers, racial and religious minorities, effete men of the liberal Protestant persuasion, and the LGBTQ community of corrupting American culture. These evils, of course, can only be overcome by a return to the social systems of masculine leadership and domination implied in John

Renken’s statement that these issues will go away “when we raise our boys to be men.”499

Such sentiments/resentments seem to have greater political purchase in periods of social destablization for white middle-class men. The calls for a restored Christian masculinity at the turn of the 20th century in America corresponded with fears over the docilizing effects of late industrial capitalist managerial labor. Later, second wave feminism, the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, and the advent of Title IX legislation precipitated the revival of muscular Christian gendered rhetoric in the 1970s and 1980s.

More recently, the ascendancy of the service economy over the “masculine” economic sector of manufacturing in the late 20th/early 21st century have reduced many men’s opportunities to take on bread-winner responsibilities. Also, the ascendancy of a black man to the office of the President, possibly to be followed by the first female president, has also corresponded with calls from evangelical Christian leaders for (white) men to restablish themselves in the political arena. The increasing number of voices valorizing the murderous deeds of Joshua and other Hebrew Bible conquerors as archetypes for

499 Quoted in Fight Church, directed by Daniel Junge and Bryan Storkel. DVD. Film Harvest Studios, 84 minutes, 2014. 221 Christian manhood that have arisen amid the war on terror speaks to the pervasive fears of national (in)security and the self-image of white male evangelicals as soldiers in God’s army in an epic battle of good and evil in a thinly-veiled symbol of a clash between the chimera of a unified Judeo-Christian, white, Western European and Northern American society and an imaginary unified Muslim, brown-skinned, North African and Middle

Eastern society lurking on the edges of Europe and slowly infiltrating America.

What is at stake in insisting that the urge to act violently, to maximize one’s musculature through bodybuilding, to display sexual prowess and virility, are essential parts of Christian masculinity? Though this has not be a genealogical account of the displays of the male body in sports evangelism, this research has at least partially answered Butler’s call to “investigate the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, [and] discourses with multiple points of origin,”500 and how those identity categories are inscribed onto bodies. The recurrent nostalgia for a “true” Christian masculinity characterized by innate aggressiveness is evidence that such aggressiveness is not innate to the male sex; rather, it is culturally coded within an evangelical Christian conception of gender which reinforces existing beliefs and attitudes about sexual difference and sex roles. Were aggressiveness such an innate part of “the masculine design,” as John

Eldredge has claimed, it would not be necessary for men’s or sports ministries to claim and reassert this belief ad nauseam.501 Furthermore, as Bulter has argued, such attempts

500 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity (New York: Routledge Press, 1990), xi.

501 John Eldredge, Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secrets of a Man’s Soul (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2001), 10.

222 to remove gender ideologies from their contextual, historical points of origin are tactics of sustaining imbalances of power between the sexes.502

Certainly, some of this “true” Christian masculinity can be traced back to

American mass culture. In her award-winning account of middle-class American men’s frustrations with the world, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, Susan Faludi suggested that consumer culture has increasingly transmitted the message that “male anger” is part of being masculine, and that this “ornamental culture encouraged young men to see surliness, hostility, and violence as expressions of glamour, a way to showcase themselves without being feminized.”503 This corresponds with Michael

Messner’s interviews with athletes, which repeatedly showed that many male athletes view such acts of violence, particularly those sanctified within a sporting context, as a performance of masculinity which conforms to acceptable standards of male behavior.

“In some men, their anger gives them confidence that they are maintaining a strong, aggressive, independent, and fearless gender identity. In short, their anger is an emotional verification that they are successfully conforming to the dominant masculine stereotype.”504 The interviewees also revealed a persistent “strong need to naturalize their capacities for aggression and violence”505 (either biologically or as a God-given talent).

Through displaying aggressive behavior and showing skill and grace in the act of

502 Butler, Gender Trouble, 141.

503 Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: Perennial Press, 2000), 37.

504 Michael Messner and Donald F. Sabo, Sex, Violence & Power in Sports: Rethinking Masculinity (Freedom: The Crossing Press, 1994), 72.

505 Ibid. 223 inflicting harm upon others, contact sport athletes can establish their place within the gender hierarchy.

Yet, even as the influence of American mass culture has undoubtedly shaped the contours of evangelical Christian masculinity discourses, it must also be noted that the desire to attract violent men to the Christian faith, or to instill a fighter’s mentality in the men already in the ranks of the faithful, has an extensive historical precedent. Western

European Christian luminaries called on the “mighty men of valour” to carry the banners of the cross into the Crusades against Muslims, Jews, and Byzantine Christians. Victorian muscular Christian sentiment built upon and fed into a concern for training the sons of

England to take positions throughout the British colonial empire. In our own time, the most vocal advocates of a return to a violent Christianity masculinity and supporters of

MMA ministries (sometimes one and the same) have also been the among the leading

Christian voices that supported the Bush administration during the invasions of

Afghanistan and Iraq. A century’s worth of muscular Christian advocates have viewed sports as an arena in which boys could increase their manhood through honing, internalizing, and displaying the urge to dominate and the killer instinct so lauded in competitive athletic culture, particularly through the manly arts of boxing, football, and cage-fighting. Western Christian athletic history is pock-marked by the sanctification of murderous, exploitative, and colonizing efforts of European men over and against the bodies of black and brown peoples. Not unlike their counterparts of ancient Greece,

Christian athletics have often been the handmaiden to warfare.

Finally, we also see that the beefy male athletic body – with its powerful, well defined muscles, aesthetic allure, and political significance – is not a manifestation of

224 supposed internal masculine nature; it is a socially produced symbol of masculine identity, the possession of which signifies personal conformity to the dominant representation of masculinity. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, the work of transforming bodies “produces systematically differentiated and differentiating habitus. The masculinization of the male body… perhaps more than ever, demands a considerable expenditure of time and effort.”506 This effort signifies one’s personal internalization of the gendered paradigm of distinction and domination between the sexes – written on the flesh. Such bodies also symbolize the social conditions of production, including eating habits, access to nutritional foods, the time investments necessary for intense athletic training, and access to the medical care necessary to stave off normal illness or to recover from significant injury. If big muscles and a hunky look are part of being a good athlete evangelists, so too, it seems, is having the economic and social capital which allows for the production and maintenance of that physique. Though this patriarchal perspective is typically associated with those lacking class privilege, it is evident that the “perfected” body image presented in these ministries is one that betrays a certain amount of wealth/access. Even as Power Team or Christian MMA ministries might recruit from among the working classes, their target audiences/participants are more frequently the sons of well-to-do suburban churches, just as the corporations which have monetized evangelical sport fandom often target the disposable income of college-educated single men under the age of thirty-five.

To this we might also add a recollection of the manifold ways masculinity is conveyed as an ornamental characteristic of manhood in sports evangelism. As the

506 Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 55-56. 225 preceding chapters have shown, great attention has been given to stylizations of the body within these ministries. Power Team members and promoters carefully designed the all-

American jumpsuits and tank-top shirts that they wore (and strategically took off) in their performances, aligning themselves with national pride and allowing them to showoff their biceps, triceps, and deltoids – upper-body muscles which have been iconographically aligned with masculine identity from comic books to the propaganda posters of World War II. The liberal application of bronzer by Power Team members betrays further aesthetic concerns, just as the slathering of lubricants and baby oils by

MMA fighters reveal a utilitarian need to keep the skin moisturized. Tim Tebow’s underwear advertisements and the aesthetics of Jesus Didn’t Tap or other Christian MMA clothing lines are episodes in a storied history of commodifying masculinity in men’s clothing. Though gender is not something one can “put on in the morning,” it is something which is socially legible, suggesting the necessity of adorning, stylizing, or otherwise modifying one’s body in order to successfully transmit one’s gender identity to others.

This research on the sports evangelism contributes to the growing research on lived religious practice and how embodied practices shape, strengthen, and publicly perform belief. Athletics are venues of bodily performance, and the evangelistic potential of the athletes under discussion here has largely come through displaying their bodies, whether as loci of divine strength, as sexual objects, or as weapons in the war between good and evil. Numerous scholars beforehand have been critical of this relationship.

Frank Deford’s 1976 summation of Sportianity as a “thoroughly evangelistic [use of]

226 sport as an advertising medium”507 is often regarded as the first of these critiques.

Athletes are being used to sell the faith in the same way they might endorse Wheaties,

Reebok, and Nike – or their own promotional materials, Jockey underwear, or Jesus

Didn’t Tap t-shirts. Shirl Hoffman notes the base physical nature of such endorsements:

The celebrity pitching the gospel, like the celebrity pitching athletic shoes, must embody an attractive image, and in the athletic world, this means that he or she must be a winner…. Intentionally or not, sports celebrities end up selling faith not on the merits of Christ’s image or message but on the strength of their own.508

Physical attraction and successful athletic performance combine to create a potent hybrid of sexual and social capital spent in the service of the faith.

So, we are left with a form of Christian masculinity that is commodified, or in

Faludi’s language, “ornamental” masculinity. If they are endorsing Jesus and selling the audience on a particular understanding of what it means to be to be a Christian male, or what a Christian male body is supposed to look like, they do so deploying the most profitable means tested by American commercial culture, rebranding and repackaging the faith for a niche market audience. That these ministries have been so successful suggests that there is a strong desire for consecrated, nationalistic machismo in the spiritual marketplace of contemporary middle-class and upper-middle class white Protestantism.

I have tried throughout this research to examine why these displays of the male body make sense within the logic of the communities which have produced and consumed them, and why such performances have resonated within the broader American evangelical community. While readers might be tempted to dismiss these ministries as

507 Frank Deford, “The World according to Tom,” Sports Illustrated, April 26, 1976, 54-69.

508 Shirl J. Hoffman, Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), 232; 234. 227 simplistic “jock theology,” hypocritical for chastising America’s sexualized commercial culture while also participating in it, or for critiquing popular culture as a negative influence while utilizing its narrative forms, tropes, and iconography to promote certain beliefs and attitudes about what it means to be a Christian, or to dismiss MMA ministries as an abominable perversion of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, to do so would largely miss the point of such ministries and the psychologically soothing and sociologically orienting function they perform for a certain segment of American evangelicalism. Such dismissals ignore how these ministries establish and maintain hierarchies that have real- world consequences for religious, ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities. They also fail to grapple with the consequences of showcasing masculinity to young men as a project of exerting physical dominance over others and overcoming personal obstacles through use of force and sanctify acts of harm – against self and others – as laudable Christian practice. The evangelical male athlete’s body carries an additional symbolic corpus of theo-political significance.

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