Many readers will find much of interest in William J. Baker's Playing with God: Religion and Modern Sport; however, those who enjoy it most will be those who use the word “modern” to describe things that happened a rather long time ago. The cover jacket is adorned with a glossy color photograph of a football team at prayer. The introduction opens with mentions of 1950s high school football, Deion Sanders, and ESPN and ends by describing a recent “Faith Night” at a minor league baseball park. This slick packaging encourages an inference that the word “modern” in the subtitle refers to modern sport in the sense of “recent” or “contemporary,” rather than, as the word is used here, designating anything that is not ancient. Baker's consideration of religion and modern sport begins with the ball games of medieval churchmen, then moves to the rugby fields of Victorian England's public schools and the gymnasiums of nineteenth-century American YMCAs, before eventually finding its way to the commercialized arenas of late twentieth-century sport.

The misleading packaging is particularly unfortunate since this is a worthwhile book, but mostly to the extent that it focuses on the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The first two-thirds of the book include a great deal of first-rate history. In these chapters, Baker chronicles changes in Anglo-American Christians' attitudes toward sport and changes in the nature of sport itself. The focus is primarily on American Protestants, although Baker spends time on other religious groups such as English Protestants and American Catholics as time permits. The later chapters—those focused on more recent times—are weaker. The chapters on Jewish and Islamic athletes read like a series of episodic and somewhat superficial biographies that are not well integrated either with earlier sections of the book or with each other.

Baker's book relates how an American religious establishment that once condemned sport came to embrace it. The Puritans were suspicious of sport, which they associated with old Catholic feast days and pagan fertility rites. Puritan magistrates in England and North America tried to outlaw these games along with the vices of drink and gambling that accompanied them. They were never completely successful in this effort, but most Protestants remained suspicious of sport for centuries. Until the early nineteenth century, most American religious authorities treated sport as, at best, a frivolous waste of time and distraction from prayer and work and, at worst, a means of entry into more serious vices of gambling, drunkenness, and debauchery.

Eventually a few ministers began to take an interest in sport. The lead was taken by liberal, urban ministers, such as Henry Ward Beecher and Moses Coit Taylor, who adopted the notion of “muscular Christianity” from the English public schools. These reformist ministers, confronted by the increasing challenges of industrialized society, were forced to take new approaches to new social problems. One set of challenges was the pollution, poor food, and overcrowding typical in cities of the day. Another perceived problem was the increasing effeminacy of urban men who no longer were hardened by work in the fields or forests. A regime of regular, physical exertion looked like the perfect solution to both.

Until the mid-nineteenth century, muscular Christianity did not spread far beyond liberal pulpits in the northeastern United States. It remained more of an ideal than a practice. Another English import, the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), was able to popularize and democratize the ideal. The YMCA was founded in London in 1844 as a center for “Bible study, prayer, and missionary work” and to provide young men an alternative to the billiards room and the theater (47). By the 1850s, YMCAs existed throughout the United States and Canada, and American YMCAs offered a greater array of services than those in England, including reading rooms and lectures. Although there was initial resistance, recreational activities, including sport, became standard programming at most YMCAs. By 1890 about four hundred YMCAs in North America opened gymnasiums. YMCA chapters sponsored competitive teams, hired professionally trained physical directors, and equipped state of the art gyms where Christian men could learn masculine virtues and other young men could be introduced to Christian virtues. In most cities, YMCA exercise and sports programs were wildly popular and became the focus of Christian life for many young men. After Chicago White Sox outfielder Billy Sunday converted to Christianity in 1887, he refused to play any more games on Sundays. Instead, he preached at the YMCA.

At first, most churches focused on the soul and let the YMCA take care of the body, but they soon become more directly involved with sport. This was partly due to the obvious success of YMCA sports programs in attracting young people to the faith and partly due to new theological influences. Social Gospel teachings convinced ministers that their churches had a moral duty to serve the people's basic needs, and some of these ministers concluded that the need for recreation was among these. They further concluded that if churches did not meet this need, less wholesome venues—such as the tavern and the betting track—would. Along with food pantries and job training, some churches began to offer simple amusement including checkers, chess, and gymnastics. By the end of the century, many large, urban churches sponsored basketball leagues and were constructing gymnasiums and even bowling alleys. Muscular Christianity finally was endorsed by most of the nation's mainline religious establishment.

Still, Christians still did not universally embrace sport. Evangelical Protestants, especially in the South, refused to give their blessing to recreational sport and refused to do so until many years later. The urban revivals that began in the 1940s and 1950s were led by a new breed and media savvy revivalists who exploited the new technologies of radio and television. This new breed of preachers quickly recognized the mass appeal of sport, particular to young potential converts. It was no accident that these crusades, led by figures like Billy Graham, were usually held in sports stadiums. Preachers used a language reminiscent of a halftime pep speech and kept “score” of the number of converts. Sports heroes gave testimony and sometimes performed athletic feats for the crowd. Track star Gil Dodds was a favorite; he offered witness at Youth for Christ events, including a 1945 youth rally at Soldier Field Chicago that attracted 65,000 (194). By the 1960s, evangelicals had successfully blended faith and sports into a package that sportswriter Frank Deford dubbed “Sportianity.” Organizations like the Sports Ambassadors and Athletes in Action sponsored teams that traveled the world to play ball and preach the Gospel. Evangelicals came to embrace professional sports as well: by the 1970s, evangelical coaches and players in professional sports league had become outspoken about their faith even in that great den of inequity, the professional sports locker room. According to Baker, the prominence of religious demonstrations in professional sport today—including players huddling in prayer on the sidelines or making the sign of the cross after hitting a home run or catching a touchdown pass—can be traced back to the efforts of evangelicals who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, first brought religion into professional locker rooms.

Readers who are interested in nineteenth-century and—to some extent—early-twentieth-century history will find more of interest in this volume than interested in more recent events. Baker's account of the changing relationship between religion and sport in the earlier period is well researched and informative. However, the absence of a similarly thorough and thoughtful treatment of contemporary religion and sport is frustrating, especially since so many of Baker's themes from earlier times could have been extended to recent history. In the nineteenth century, Christians turned to sport partly as a means of evangelism and partly to counteract social and cultural forces that they believed were making men more effeminate. In contrast, Baker presents the more recent embrace by evangelicals of sport as essentially a marketing ploy that has paid off well, but Baker is less sensitive to the contemporary concerns of Christians about the state of manliness in our culture. We live in the era of the metro-sexual male, and evangelicals believe that contemporary culture is more likely to celebrate men who are emotionally vulnerable, self-conscious about physical appearances, and ambiguous about their sexuality than those who embody the traditional Christian masculine ideal. The Promise Keepers organization, led by former University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney, is one well-known manifestation of the effort to keep traditional manhood robust and relevant. Christian men today continue to look to sports heroes as models of their own faith because they, like earlier Christians, are in search of models by which to live lives that are both Christian and manly. None of this is addressed in Baker's book. Playing with God is a worthwhile book that does many things well, but it is surprising and disappointing that the author does not complete his study with a demonstration of how the complicated relationship between religion and sport continues to evolve in the present day.