Open religiosity by American athletes in the form of praising God for victories, kneeling in silent reflection after touchdowns, and participating in prayer circles with opponents after games has been a staple of collegiate and professional sports for the last several decades. How this phenomenon came to be is the subject of Paul Putz’s new book, The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports. Other scholars have documented the connection between religion and American sports, including several studies of the muscular Christian movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much less work has been done on the post-WWII period and the development of what Putz terms the Christian Athlete Movement (CAM) that witnessed Christian leaders seeking to use sports to promote evangelical Christian values, while simultaneously leveraging spirituality to transform American sports.

Putz argues that in the 1920s, mainline Protestants who subscribed to the theory of muscular Christianity, like football coach Amos Alonzo Stagg and baseball executive Branch Rickey, deftly accommodated and adapted their religious views to the changing cultural and commercial landscape of the decade. They reframed “commercialized sports as a form of middlebrow culture through which they could promote a vision for American society rooted in ‘traditional’ nineteenth-century values like self-discipline, industriousness, and personal faith while also incorporating supposedly ‘modern’ twentieth-century values of consumerism, cooperation, and pluralism” (2). The efforts of Stagg, Rickey, and other Protestant athletic leaders created a foundation that post-WWII Christian leaders, mainline and evangelical alike, harnessed to create important Christian athlete organizations like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) to promote their values and expand their reach.

By the 1970s, Putz finds that Sunbelt evangelicals predominately shaped the CAM “and helped to create the thriving evangelical subculture within big-time sports,” (141) by overseeing the creation of new organizations that eclipsed the FCA, the installation of chaplains employed in professional sports organizations in all of the major sports, and recruiting high profile sports figures like Dallas Cowboys head coach Tom Landry as spokesmen for their movement. The influence and greater profile of evangelicals within big-time sports paralleled that of evangelicals in the larger political culture of the 1970s. Indeed, Newsweek magazine dubbed 1976 “The Year of the Evangelical,” while that same year sports journalist Frank Deford coined the term “Sportianity,” to describe the “growing network of evangelical ministries gaining prominence in big-time sports” (113). During the last two decades of the twentieth century, evangelicals rose to prominence within the Republican Party, pushing the nation’s politics, though with uneven success, in a more socially conservative direction, while leaders of the CAM, like University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney with his Promise Keepers movement, used their high-profile position within big-time sports to promote conservative Christian values on a national stage.

Putz concludes that despite the growing size and influence of the CAM, success for evangelicals in sports remains tenuous. CAM leaders cannot create their own big-time sports, but rather have to adapt to the sports culture that already exists, which includes many secular and commercial influences anathema to conservative Christian values. Moreover, the CAM has become more theologically diverse and contested, while within sports, “new issues, especially those related to gender and sexuality, have become primary markers of identity and flashpoints of controversy as the Christian athlete movement seeks to maintain its access within the pluralistic corporate structures of big-time sports” (207).

Paul Putz is to be praised for offering a tightly argued and compact history of the growing influence of Christianity in American sports. This book is a major contribution to the field of sports history, where most works on the transformation of American sports in the twentieth century largely ignore the influence of Christianity. At the same time, Putz’s book adds to the historiography of twentieth-century American Christianity, highlighting many of the hidden connections between mainline and evangelical Protestants as they sought to adapt to and ultimately shape the course of big-time sports. Spirit of the Game also has much to offer readers of modern American race relations and the tenuous connection between white and black evangelicals. During the 1950s and 1960s, Putz chronicles how the FCA and other CAM leaders supported efforts for racially integrated sports teams. At the same time, these leaders resisted calls for broader systematic change in the leadership and structure of sports organizations that black athletes and civil rights leaders called for. This color-blind view of race that condemned overt racial discrimination but rejected positive government action to remedy past and current structural inequalities, mirrored that of the growing conservative consensus in politics of the 1970s. Despite these tensions, the number of high-profile prominent black Christian athletes increased in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet here again, the black-white Christian alliance remained tenuous. Putz offers the African American Hall of Fame Football player Reggie White as a case in point. When White openly condemned homosexuality as against the will of God, he received praise and support from white evangelicals. White evangelicals, however, denounced White when he castigated the policing of African American communities as racist. Similar responses in more recent years by white evangelicals to white quarterback Tim Tebow’s kneeling in praise of God for his football successes versus black quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling in protest of police brutality demonstrate that these conflicts are far from resolved.

In the end, Spirit of the Game offers much to students of twentieth-century American sports and religious history. Its clear prose, topical relevancy, and well-constructed argument should make it a welcome addition in undergraduate and graduate classrooms alike.