“Knowing Christ is the best thing that has ever happened to me, although winning the US Open was a pretty good second.”
Revival as cultural spotlight: The strange case of Rugby Football and the Welsh Revival of 1904-05
Return to the book list for this category.
Dominic Erdozain, in eds. Kate Cooper and Jeremy Gregory, Revival and Resurgence in Christian History, Studies in Church History, volume 44 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008), pp. 275-285
The approach in the article is to use revival to explore sport. Perhaps its most important contribution is the way it challenges the view expressed in Fields of Praise that rugby was singled out for particular condemnation in the Welsh Revival. Erdozain argues, “on the contrary the revival leaders went out of their way to avoid negative comments on the habits and lifestyles of the young.” and that “very few of the revival leaders ever preached against sport”. He suggests that several examples cited in Fields of Praise of negative comments on sport were from before the revival”.
He further writes: “For a generation Christian leaders in Wales had criticized and often condemned rugby football, yet it took the altogether more benign atmosphere of the revival to substantiate a sense of sport’s challenge to Christianity”.
I was surprised at the assertion that “in England sport had meshed strongly (if not always neatly) with late-Victorian Christianity”. To be this seemed rather generalized, and less true of evangelicals than of liberals.