A visitor from 200 years ago, landing in England in late autumn 2022, might be forgiven for thinking that Christianity had given way to a new cult centred on large screens in public houses with a 90-min-ute long service of two halves conducted by 22 well-coiffured players and a kind of whis-tle-blowing peacekeeper – and that bread and wine had been replaced by large quantities of cold lager. Is football, then, the new reli-gion? Has it replaced a dying Christian-ity? After all, Hugh McLeod reminds us, when Liverpool manager Bill Shankly reflect-ed on whether football was a matter of life and death, he famously concluded that it was “much, much more important than that”. In this highly entertaining, inform-ative and balanced volume, McLeod, a lead-ing historian of modern English religion, offers a comprehensive account of the chang-ing relationship between sport and religion over the last couple of centuries.
The story is both fascinating and complex. First, there is the question of what sport is. For a long time sport, like most things in Eng-land, was divided between the classes. For landowners and gentry it comprised “the un-speakable in full pursuit of the uneatable” – with its caricatured image of the ruddy-faced hunting parson more in his cups than his cassock. And for the lower classes it encom-passed various riotous activities from throw-ing stones at cocks to unregulated charg-ing after bulls or balls, and pugilism, all accom-panied by excessive drinking and gambling.
Through the 19th century, particularly under the influence of Evangelicals, there were efforts to control such activities through a kind of “puritanic warfare” – animal cruelty was outlawed and boxing and gambling were increasingly regulated. At the same time, churches began to see that sport could be redeemed: instead of encouraging debauchery it could build up character. In public schools sport was to be suffered for the sake of manliness and the Empire. And in the growing cities, it could become a way of reaching the great unwashed who proved so difficult for the churches to reach. Football teams were set up by Anglicans (Fulham and Manchester City) and Nonconformists (Aston Villa and Everton) and rival Church leagues kept boys off the streets. The YMCA set up gyms, and energetic young clergy organised boxing clubs.
Gradually things began to change. Wom-en’s sporting activities had been relegated to the occasional game of tennis or croquet. With the advent of the safety bicycle women’s exercise was increasingly liberated – and put beyond the control of the churches (as was the case with foxhunting, which carried on regardless even when condemned by the vast majority of clergy). As the 20th century wore on, so the grip of the churches on sport declined. Sundays became the day for sports fixtures, and the reach of the churches into leisure gradually disappeared. In resp-onse, while McLeod is clear that sport is not quite a religion since it lacks a transcendent dimension, it has taken on many religious characteristics, including the provision for the interment of ashes at football grounds; similarly, individualistic sports such as running and cycling have taken the place of the asceticism of even the harshest forms of Christianity.
In today’s post-Christian environment, sport has become a place where individual religious sportsmen and women, often Evangelical, but sometimes of other religions altogether, seek to share their missionary message, often to the confusion of colleagues and press. Along-side this, where once they might have used the Established Church, governments of all colours have used sport as a way of building up national identity and solidarity. Apart from a few reflections on Liverpudlian identity and Gaelic sports and frequent mentions of Protestant anti-Catholicism, Catholics do not feature prominently in McLeod’s story, but it’s worth asking why we know that John Paul II was a footballer, that Benedict XVI supported Bayern Munich, and that Pope Francis lives in a permanent state of suffering for San Lorenzo in Buenos Aires. Perhaps human identity is tied up with football after all – at least for media-savvy pontiffs.
The Revd Dr Mark Chapman is professor of the history of modern theology at the University of Oxford
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