“Knowing Christ is the best thing that has ever happened to me, although winning the US Open was a pretty good second.”
Popular Belief and Practice,
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Popular Belief and Practice, Studies in Church History Vol 8, G J Cuming and D Baker, eds (Cambridge: CUP, 1972),. S Mews 'Puritanicalism, Sport and Race: A Symbolic Crusade of 1911' pp. 303-31
This is a review of one chapter, rather than of the book.
In July 1910, Jack Johnson, the American negro defeated James J Jeffries, at Reno, Nevada, for the heavyweight championship of the world. The film of the fight was widely shown in cinemas on the UK. Plans were made for Johnson to defend his title against the British champion, Bombadier Matt Wells in London, in October the following year.
FB Meyer, Secretary of The National Free Church Council and a prominent Baptist minister led a campaign to have the fight banned. Speaking to the International Brotherhood Conference, he said that, "God had led him, so he profoundly believed, to endeavour to put down the proposed fight. They had an opportunity to raise the conception of sport and to uphold the true ideal of Christian manhood untainted by brutality".
Even Winston Churchill Home Secretary at that time wrote to his wife "I have made up my mind to try to stop the Wells-Johnson contest. The terms are utterly unsporting and unfair". (Page 330)
Before the case had concluded the owners of the freehold of Earls Court (the venue for the fight), the Metropolitan District Railway Company obtained a court injunction stopping the Earls Court company from allowing the fight to go ahead. Ironically the judge who granted the injunction was Mr Justice Lush, a member of Regent Park Baptist church (Page 329)
The campaigners had a number of different objections to the fight - its brutality, the number of women spectators (Page 311) and the fact that one boxer was black and the other white. The brutality issue was at the heart of their argument: "we venture to ask all ministers of religion to reflect the matter on the coming Sunday with the view of arousing the conscience of the nation against a spectacle in which two men do their utmost to batter one another, not in self-defence nor to protect the weak but for high stakes and ... to gratify the craving for the sensational and the brutal which is inconsistent with the manhood that makes a great nation". (Page 320) [Source Times 16 September 1911]
Rev F Luke Wiseman of Birmingham Wesleyan central mission said of the screeing of the film of the first fight in cinemas, "It has no redeeming, artistic, scenic, educative or social value It is wholly brutal disgusting and demoralizing" (Page 312)
Meyer's use of the "race card" seems shocking to us 100 years later. Meyer wrote: "the present contest is not wholly one of skill because on the one side is added the instinctive passion of the negro race, which is so differently constituted from our own, and in the present instance will be aroused to do the utmost that immense animal development can do to retain championship". (Page 328)
The article raises the question as to why the Free churches should decide to object to boxing in 1911 and not previously. The author suggests: "One answer would be a conviction that championship contests with the enormous sums of money involved were morally worse and offered greater threat to moral integrity than ordinary boxing matches. At another level an answer might be found in the psychological necessity of victory for the Free Church Council movement". (Page 313) and "Here was a safe nonpolitical issue which was almost certain to secure the unanimous support of Free churchmen throughout the land". (Page 316)
The writer concludes: "Meyer had reason to be pleased with the results of his efforts. For the first time in many years, a public morality campaign initiated by the Free Churches had succeeded". However, it was a short lived one-off victory. After 1911 the legality of boxing was never to be tested again. (Page 330)