Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports
Tom Krattenmaker’s recent Onward Christian Athletes (2009) explored the efforts of the Christian Right to join Evangelical Christianity with professional sports. Here Hoffman takes a slightly different approach to what is essentially the same subject, tackling the relationship between faith and sports from a more ideological perspective. He suggests that while Evangelical Christian groups are forging connections with sports (because sports is a high-profile platform), they really don’t understand the nature of sports. He explores the fundamental paradox of joining sports (which encourages and celebrates success) to religion (which “consistently stresses the importance of losing”). The essential problem, he says, is that, in harnessing itself to sports, the Christian community doesn’t really have a clear sense of its goal or a coherent plan to achieve it. As a result, sports are becoming, in many ways, a mockery of Christianity, a superficial set of rites and behaviors with no spiritual or philosophical foundation. Many readers may disagree with the author’s thesis, but even they will agree that he supports it abundantly and argues it well. --David Pitt