Onward, Christian nose tackles

By golly, I keep finding vindication.

No less a source than the august Christian Century featured not one, but two blogs on the subject of football this week, specifically on the Richie Incognito issue (addressed in this blog here).  First, one Arthur Remillard, a religious studies professor at a school in Pennsylvania, took up the issue, decrying a culture of "muscle men" in the NFL (placing Incognito in that category) and lamenting the lack of a genuine "warrior culture" in said league, by means of some "wait, what?" exegesis on a verse from 2 Samuel and a call for a culture that "prizes achievement and teamwork but not at the expense of human dignity."  Today Carol Howard Merritt took up the theme, questioning how a supposed "warrior culture" dedicated to "the protection of the weak and the advancement of all righteous causes" really fits into football at all, and questioning how the violence of the sport can be thought of as redemptive or palliative at all.

I wonder if the two might be talking past each other a little bit.  To be clear, Remillard is criticizing Incognito's apparent behavior towards Jonathan Martin.  Still, I have to admit I find the gorefest of 2 Samuel 2 an odd place to appeal for a cure for a "muscle-headed" locker room culture.  Who exactly are the "weak" in football -- I mean, in the game itself?  Is this some back-door way of calling Peyton Manning or Tom Brady a sissy?  I can't quite see how the concept fits into the on-field nature of football.

Remillard also cites a British publication (nineteenth-century vintage?  I have not been able to find it) which speaks for the "muscular Christianity" of that era in claiming that "a man's body is given to him to be trained and brought into submission, and then used for the protection of the weak." Now the initial clause there seems to be a variant reading of Paul's claim in 2 Corinthians 9:27 that "I punish my body and enslave it," but Paul does so not for any "protection of the weak," but "so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified" (NRSV) in an extension of the running metaphor employed in previous verses.  (Paul also notes that "athletes exercise self-control in all things," an assertion that looks downright comical in light of the decided lack of self-control found among numerous athletes on road trips, or where PEDs are concerned.)  Paul has very different ideas about "the weak" in this passage than his nineteenth-century "muscular Christianity" appropriators seem to understand.

Off the field, who is "weak" in connection to football is laceratingly clear at times, and their lack of protectors is largely ignored or brushed aside.

December 1, tomorrow as I write this, is the one-year anniversary of a murder-suicide involving an NFL player.  While the event drew a great deal of media coverage at the time, one won't necessarily hear much about it aside from this uneven ESPN article, which makes clear that the Kansas City Chiefs, the team for which Jovan Belcher played at the time he killed his pregnant girlfriend and then himself, are not entertaining thoughts about the event at all.  Indeed, the team has imposed an omertà on the event that would make the Mafia blush with shame.  Kasandra Perkins is not allowed to register on the radar of the Chiefs.

I guess, in the broader, off-field scope of the game, Kasandra Perkins would count as "the weak."

Merritt cannot separate the violence inherent in the game on the field from the violence of the culture that consumes the game as entertainment, and points to the lack of celebration of those who practice peace.  This is an eminently good and even pastoral concern.  The historian in me (or perhaps it's the hymnologist in me) can't help but observe that English-speaking Christianity has a long way to go to undo a couple of centuries' worth of damage done by its popular theology, i.e. its hymnody.

Consider this list:

"Am I a soldier of the cross?'

"Arm these thy soldiers, mighty Lord"

"God is keeping his soldiers fighting" (an old Salvation Army hymn)

"Onward, Christian soldiers"

"Soldiers of Christ, arise"

"We are soldiers of Christ"

That is an incredibly selective list, limited by the presence of the world "soldier" or some variant thereof (and only a limited selection of those hymns).  Because Net Hymnal doesn't include it, the list doesn't cite "Soldiers of Christ, in truth arrayed," the "seminary hymn" of my previous school of record that I don't talk about anymore.  And that list doesn't include such gems as the World War I-vintage "Over the top for Jesus," apparently seeking to generate an image of Christ vaulting out of some trench in France.

My point (and I do have one) is that the Christian church -- mainline, evangelical, you name it -- has been marinating in hymns bristling with warfare imagery for quite a long time, and such imagery as reinforced over and over again for decades or even centuries is going to color the way Christians look at the culture around them.  Football plays into that warfare mindset in a way no other sport can match. Consult George Carlin's classic baseball-vs.-football routine for a quick reminder of how that works.  "Aerial assault."  "Bomb."  "Field general."  Linemen struggle in "the trenches."  It was pretty much inevitable that a church that has a long track record of "Onward, Christian soldiers" is going to be attracted to the warlike cadences of football, and it's not going to stop just because a few mainline denominations stop singing those hymns.

I doubt Remillard and Merritt are really as far apart as they seem; nobody is nominating Richie Incognito as Christian Century's Man of the Year.  What I fear is that the church has eyes that are so colored with our own fascinations (present or past) with the imagery of battle that it may not be able to see with clarity the inherent problems with a sport that is both so intrinsically violent and so proud of its violence.  We may be so caught inside our own history that we cannot find the voice or the words to speak to the degradations practiced by player upon player, or visited upon players in their retirement years as brains fail and lives unravel, or upon spouses or girlfriends or children suffering physically or emotionally.  We just may not be able to find a place to stand to speak with integrity when confronted by the Richie Incognitos or Jovan Belchers or Kasandra Perkinses or Junior Seaus that trouble our religion-like fandom.  And we may end up mute in the face of a thing that looks awfully, tragically like injustice.