I have a limited aim in this little essay.  A tiny aim.  I am neither attacking Christian participation in sports as such, nor responding to all the arguments that Christians use to defend sports.  I address only one argument, and I offer a simple historical response that is admittedly broad and general.  I don’t prove or disprove anything.  I only step to the flagpole to raise high my banner, a banner emblazoned with a prominent question mark.

The argument that I’m responding to is this: Sports are good for young people, especially young men, because sports teaches courage.  Combat sports like football are better for this purpose than more finesse sports like baseball and basketball.  When you take your stance across the line of scrimmage from a beefy tackle who wants to chew you up and swallow you before grinding the quarterback into mincemeat, you need to buck up and be a man.  Young men who have learned to face tackles and linebackers grow up to be courageous in other ways.  Such, or somesuch, is the argument.

My response is, as I say, a simple, perhaps a simple-minded, one: When have Christians been more courageous – in the first through fourth centuries, or in the nineteenth through the twenty-first?  And, when have Christians been more deeply involved in sports – in the first through fourth centuries, or in the nineteenth through the twenty-first?

Let’s answer the second question first, since it’s somewhat easier.  During the early centuries of Christianity, the available sports available were gladiatorial shows, circuses, Olympic games.  So far as we can tell from the extant sources, Christians were repulsed by these sports for various reasons, and patristic writers regularly warned that Christians should not be involved either as participants or spectators.

The evidence regarding gladiatorial shows is representative.  Lactantius thought that spectators at gladiatorial shows were polluted by watching.  A man “who reckons it a pleasure, that a man, though justly condemned, should be slain in his sight, pollutes his conscience as much as if he should become a spectator and a sharer of a homicide which is secretly committed.” Romans “call these sports in which human blood is shed.” Fellow-feeling with other humans has departed when men watch a show and think “they are amusing themselves with sport, being more guilty than all those whose blood-shedding they esteem a pleasure.”

Many gladiators were prisoners condemned to the shows, and Tertullian italicized the irony of taking pleasure from the very men that are punished: “Why, the authors and managers of the spectacles, in that very respect with reference to which they highly laud the charioteers, and actors, and wrestlers, and those most loving gladiators, to whom men prostitute their souls, women too their bodies, slight and trample on them, though for their sakes they are guilty of the deeds they reprobate . . . . they doom them to ignominy and the loss of their rights as citizens, excluding them from the Curia, and the rostra, from senatorial and equestrian rank, and from all other honours as well as certain distinctions,” yet at the same time “have pleasure in those whom yet they punish.”

Of course, the gladiatorial shows were cruelly, murderously violent.  Would Tertullian and Lactantius have had the same reaction to American football?  I suspect so, but for my purposes it doesn’t matter.  The sheer fact that they disowned the sports of their day is enough.  I am not arguing, either, that the patristic evaluation of sports is correct.  I am only interested in the fact that they renounced sports.

Jump ahead to the nineteenth century, and we find a different Christian attitude toward sports.  Charles Kingsley, who with Thomas Hughes coined the term “muscular Christianity,” insisted on the moral and spiritual benefit of sports: “games conduce not merely to physical but to moral health.”  Rugby was ideally suited to the movement, since players inflicted and absorbed pain in equal measure.  Though Muscular Christianity as a distinct movement lost steam, one scholar has said that it “forged a strong link between Christianity and sport [that] has never been broken.”

Looking through the wrong end of the telescope, things look this way: Christians through the fourth century frowned on the sports of their day; with some interruptions and exceptions, Christians (evangelical Protestants included) of the nineteenth through the twenty-first embraced sports.

Now, to the second question: Which era produced more courageous Christians, more Christian courage?  Tallying up numbers would be impossible, but (again looking through the wrong end of the telescope) we may be state some generalities, generalities of perception if not of fact.

It is a truism in some sectors of the Christian world that evangelicals are wimpy, unmanly, cowardly.  This, note, is after at least a half-century of fairly massive evangelical investment in sports.  Do the test: Name three evangelical universities without sports programs (NSA doesn’t count).  Perhaps the critics are wrong and evangelicals are manly and courageous every last one of them.  But if the critics are right, then sports don’t seem to have cultivated courage in any noticeable way.  Contemporary evangelicalism combines (perceived) wimpiness and (empirical) acceptance of sports.

And the early church?  There were certainly cowards aplenty in the church during the first four centuries.  But there were martyrs aplenty as well.  Where did they get the courage?  Did the Christians who willingly plunged their hands into the flames learn courage by fighting animals in the arena?  Were the Christians who endured unimaginable torture sportsmen in their youth?  Pushing past the fourth century, did the White Martyrs of Ireland, or the hundreds of monks who ventured into pagan territories to preach the gospel, learn courage on the rugby fields of Eton?  No doubt some martyrs and other patristic heroes had participated in sports at one time or another, but if the patristic writers we know are representative (and they seem to be), most didn’t.  The early Christians had sources of courage that didn’t depend on helmets, shoulder pads, or leather balls.

Sketchy as it is, this is compelling enough, I think, to raise up my banner, i.e., my question mark: Is there any empirical correlation between Christian involvement in sports and Christian courage?