Review: Jocks for Jesus

In 1976, Frank Deford of Sports Illustrated coined the term sportianity to describe the evangelical Christian organizations rising within professional sports. In a series titled “Religion in Sports,” Deford described organizations like Athletes in Action, Baseball Chapel and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which made sports their ministry. Coaches and athletes alike prayed together before and after games, formed Bible studies on their teams, and spoke openly and fervently about their faith.

What Deford called sportianity, Paul Emory Putz calls the “Christian athlete movement” in his excellent new history of the subject. Putz is the assistant director of Truett Seminary’s Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor University. In The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports, he focuses on the relationship between Protestantism and major American sports but also offers interesting insights into the interactions of Catholic athletes with sportianity.

Much of the existing scholarship on American sports and Christianity walls off the “muscular Christianity” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries from the kind of organizations that Putz covers in his book. Proponents of muscular Christianity sought to curb the “overcivilization” of modern life by linking religion with strenuous play as a means of character-building. Think Teddy Roosevelt, the Y.M.C.A. and the Academy Award-winning 1981 film “Chariots of Fire.”

In the standard telling, religion’s role in athletic culture receded in the 1920s as sports became mass spectacle. Not so, says Putz. He demonstrates significant continuity between muscular Christianity and the sportianity described by Deford. 

Putz shows Protestant athletes during the 1920s confronting a world in which sports became a major commercial venture and finding their place within it. The connective tissue between muscular Christianity and the Christian athlete movement came in a network of laypeople and popular ministers he calls “middlebrow Protestants.” 

These middlebrows were generally Northerners and belonged to mainline denominations. They developed networks and influence that served as the building blocks for the major Christian sports organizations that emerged in the decades after World War II, particularly the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which was formed in 1954. While groups like the F.C.A., Baseball Chapel and Athletes in Action are strongly associated with evangelical Christianity, their roots lay in mainline Protestantism.

“Middlebrow” is not a put-down in Putz’s parlance. He means simply that these were not intellectuals like many previous Northern mainline Protestant leaders. Branch Rickey, general manager of the  St. Louis Cardinals and Brooklyn Dodgers, exemplified this middlebrow sensibility in the decades after World War I. Rickey, a pious Midwestern Methodist, spoke openly of Jesus and his desire to live the ideals of Christ but accommodated Sunday baseball. He believed sports, when informed by faith, played a role in character development and social progress, as exemplified by his signing of Jackie Robinson, which led to the desegregation of Major League Baseball. 

Rather than being a challenge to the church’s supremacy, major sports proved an avenue through which Christian athletes could continue to influence American life. The middlebrows and their institutional successors in the F.C.A. cultivated a “big tent Protestantism” uncluttered by doctrinal debate. Putz makes a compelling case that such theological diversity made the Christian athlete movement a uniquely contested space where people with many shared values could engage in a thoughtful give-and-take about issues of social concern, particularly civil rights. African American athletes played a prominent role in the Christian athlete movement beginning in the 1960s. Many Black athletes used the movement as a means to express their views on social issues related to race. 

A particularly noteworthy finding is the degree to which the Christian athlete movement pushed some formerly mainline Protestants in a more evangelical direction. This tendency became particularly pronounced in the 1960s, when evangelicals gained significant influence in these organizations.

The Christian athlete movement’s ecumenism included outreach to Catholics as early as the 1930s. For decades, such efforts were largely rebuffed. Catholics had cultivated their own athletic institutions, including the Catholic Youth Organization and top-notch interscholastic athletic programs at the secondary and college level. Catholic athletic institutions served many of the same ends as muscular Christianity. They cultivated classical virtues, demonstrated Catholic assimilation to American culture and served as a source of communal pride.

The Rev. Donald Cleary, a Catholic chaplain at Cornell during the 1950s, was one of the few Catholic figures to give the emerging Christian athlete movement a shot. But after attending a national meeting, Cleary expressed discomfort with the F.C.A., viewing it as too explicitly Protestant in orientation. He was offered the group’s vice presidency but turned it down. 

Professional football offers another interesting example of the interactions of American Catholics with the Christian athlete movement. Putz finds that professional football was slower going than the college game in embracing sportianity. The N.F.L. was centered in the Northeast for many decades. They played their games on Sundays, which was unacceptable to Sabbatarians. Moreover, many of the league’s foundational figures, including George Halas, Art Rooney and Tim Mara, were Catholics.

It wasn’t until the 1950s that sportianity gained influence in the N.F.L., as star players like Otto Graham and Dan Towler joined the F.C.A. Both men were Methodists and approached their faith with ecumenical, decidedly middlebrow sensibilities. But during the 1960s, the pro football players associated with the F.C.A. moved in a decidedly more evangelical direction. Protestant-oriented Bible studies and Protestant services before games became commonplace on N.F.L. teams (just as pre-game Mass had been for decades).

Some Catholics found space within the F.C.A. fold, most notably Roger Staubach. The Dallas Cowboys quarterback made it clear that he did not consider himself an evangelical, but he embraced the organization’s socially conservative messaging and spoke of his support for traditional values.

In recent decades, the most significant interaction of traditionally Catholic groups with the Christian athlete movement seems to be in professional baseball. Baseball Chapel, formed in 1973, developed a significant following among Latino players. Putz notes that several prominent Latino players who grew up in Catholic homes became evangelical Protestants and joined Baseball Chapel, including Albert Pujols, Mariano Rivera and Carlos Beltran.

Putz also gives significant attention to the role of women in the Christian athlete movement dating to the 1970s. By the mid-1980s, organizations like the F.C.A. had more female members than male, but women constituted little of the group’s leadership. He finds that sports ministries encouraged Christian female athletes to make their voices heard yet simultaneously advocated embracing traditional social structures.

Putz’s groundbreaking book focuses almost exclusively on football, basketball and baseball. Exploration of sportianity in professional and major college hockey in the United States would have added an interesting dynamic to the study, particularly as it relates to the intersection of Catholics with the movement.

In 1967 the National Hockey League started expanding beyond its traditional haunts in the northern United States and Canada. Professional hockey became a genuinely continental phenomenon during the 1970s, as the N.H.L. and the rival World Hockey Association brought the sport to such non-hotbeds as Atlanta, Houston and San Diego. At roughly the same time, college hockey in the United States became a major pipeline to the N.H.L. for the first time. 

Considering the demographics of professional and college hockey, it would be interesting to see what inroads the Christian athlete movement made in these spaces. Professional hockey almost certainly skewed more Catholic than professional football or basketball. Fully a third of the players in N.H.L. history hailed from predominantly Catholic Quebec or the equally Catholic Francophone regions of eastern Ontario. The areas in the United States that have produced the most professional and major college players (the northeastern United States and Great Lakes region) are also disproportionately Catholic. Moreover, many in the N.H.L.’s pool of international players hail from either predominantly Catholic or Orthodox countries in central and eastern Europe. 

Until the recent explosion of Latino players in professional baseball (from a little more than 11 percent in 1980 to more than 30 percent in 2022), the percentage of cradle Catholics in professional hockey was certainly higher than in big league baseball. 

Regardless of such omissions, with The Spirit of the Game, Putz has accomplished a fine work of both institutional and cultural history. He shows the simultaneous power and “precarity,” as he describes it, of Christians in major sports. There is no area of popular culture where more participants openly express their religious views than big time sports. At the same time, Christian professional athletes compete within explicitly secular institutions. While there are Christian book publishers, record labels and film companies, there are no professional Christian sports leagues.

This article appears in September 2025.

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