“Knowing Christ is the best thing that has ever happened to me, although winning the US Open was a pretty good second.”
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Sport
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The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Sport , How Calvinism and Capitalism Shaped America’s Games, STEVEN J. OVERMAN, Macon, Mercer University Press, 2011
Overman sets the scene with the following description of the role of sport in America:
“We pay professional athletes as much as corporate executives and charge admission to watch them perform. America’s colleges sponsor teams of quasi-professionals at the risk of jeopardizing their academic integrity. Middle-aged Americans train with the intensity of Olympic athletes to compete in marathons and triathlons. Parents employ coaches to mold children into highly skilled performers and arrange the family schedule around their games. Sports fans routinely berate coaches and officials for failing to perform to expectations. Local communities bask in the victories of athletes and teams with whom they identify”.
He goes on to state that “four fundamental questions lie at the heart of the matter. Why do Americans feel guilty when they play for the fun of it? Why must we infuse games with high moral purpose? Why have we turned sports into rational goal-directed, work-infused activities? And why is winning so important?”
His basic thesis is that the Protestant ethic is the dominant social and cultural force which influenced American values and shaped the nation’s institutions— including sport. He has clearly bought into Weber. He argues that sport it a neat fit with the protestant ethic – and where it needs to be it can be stretched and moulded, it has been. Examples of this include:
• Ascetic practices, pushing yourself to the limit, playing in bad weather - inspired by the suffering of Christ and Paul’s metaphors to promote the ideal of the disciplined spiritual athlete.
• Competition – the roots of which are found in “Calvinism’s agonic view of life as a constant struggle in which few rise to the status of the elect”. Thus, American sport has corroborated the Calvinist concept “that many are called but few are chosen”.
• The concept of an American sport ethic is based on the supposition that sport incorporates values and behaviours characteristic of society at large. “The organizers of youth sport believe the child who plays by the rules will not, as an adult, cheat in business or cheat in his marriage…Thus does organized youth sport appear obligatory for families who wish to rear morally upright children”.
• Training for sport fits well with the work ethic. “People used to play tennis, now they work on their backhand”.
• Winning carries strong moral overtones. “Indeed, no goal in American sport has been more salient than that of winning, often at the expense of the intrinsic values of sport…When the child returns home from a game, the American parent’s initial question to the child is, ‘Did you win?’—not ‘Did you have fun?’ What started out as casual play and gentlemen’s games inevitably became contests where winning was indeed the only thing.
• Sport provides an opportunity to fill a basic need ingrained in the Protestant ethic: status through achievement. “The fear of losing, whether in business or sport, reveals the latent Puritan anxiety about being labelled a failure with all its moral implications”.
• Sport has to be instrumental: The military promoted experiences on the athletic fields as a way to prepare soldiers for the battlefield; only by linking sport to moral ends could Americans justify women engaging in recreational activities.
The author sees the change in attitude to sport as a case of “If you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em’ arguing that when “the authorities proved less than effective in suppressing sport, they resorted to an alternate strategy. The antidote to sport as rebellion was to appropriate sport for high moral purpose. The revisionists justified sport as a way to maintain health and to re-energize oneself in order to work again. Competing in sport was touted as a regimen to build character. With these accommodations, the gates were left open to incorporate sport within secular Protestant culture”.
He notes how the historical Puritan biases against play have given way in two directions:
(i) to the institutionalisation of organized sport and recreation whose purpose has been to inculcate traditional values and social skills; and
(ii) to serving the church through community outreach, fellowship, Christian education and fundraising. “In effect, organized sport has been appropriated for the promotion of an evangelical religious agenda”.
While not a central theme of the book, the author does a good job in educating those of us who struggle to understand American sports culture. His analysis of American college sports is fascinating. He suggests that “America’s colleges adopted a form of athletics that openly imitated professional sports while operating behind a thin veneer of amateurism” and comments on the absurdity of academic institutions being defined by the win/loss ratio of their football or basketball teams.
The way in which “a business ethic penetrated the fundamental structure of sport from top to bottom”, transforming sport into “into a profit-making enterprise fully integrated with the other major sectors of the economy”, helped me to understand how the Glaser family could commit the almighty gaffe – from a UK perspective – of referring to Manchester United as a “franchise” rather than a football club.
On page 184 he attempts to explain why American games have made coaching so important and developed multiple subs and complex calls in contrast to the “simpler” British games.
I loved his one liners:
“Calvin’s ghost still haunts the sports arenas and the playgrounds”.
“Soap-swimming Presbyterians”, the idea that if recreational bathers took a cake of soap along, swimming was not a waste of time.
Spurr’s dictum: “No true Protestant is able to do anything for its own sake.”
Overall a very readable and informative book.