Paul EmoryPutz: The Spirit Of The Game: American Christianity And Big‐Time Sports. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024; pp. 280.

For those of us who write at the intersection of religion and sports, the perpetual challenge is basic: what exactly are these two massive institutions that are interacting and how do they interact?Religion and sports occupy much terrain in the cultural landscape and therefore cannot help but bump into the other, though they often slide past each other in various directions and with varying degrees of friction.Religion or sports may be applying the friction in the hopes of slowing the other down and grabbing onto something to help itself.But in the case of religion trying to utilise something of sport for its own benefit, something of a religious core is usually altered, compromised, or sacrificed.Paul Putz, in The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports, wonderfully captures this tension (and its provisional resolutions) in the relationship between high-profile sports and Protestant Christianity in the United States with the first historical treatment of its kind.Putz wisely and uniquely begins his narrative at a critical juncture in the 1920s.Many pockets of American Christendom were reeling from a series of embarrassing episodes emerging out of the Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy all while college and professional sports were establishing themselves as force to be reckoned with.For the remainder of the century and into the next, Putz's book chronicles a tug-of-war between the material and cultural power of sport and the soul of Protestant Christianity through certain Christian figures and organisations managing the competition and guiding the dialectic.When sports were "winning," a spiritual counterbalance was called for.When overt piety seemed to overshadow play, recalibration was necessaryone that often emphasised the good that sports do in our society.Putz begins by challenging histories that place evangelical Muscular Christianity at the centre of the sport-religion merger after World War I by lifting up "Middlebrow" Protestants that figured much more prominently.The middlebrow protagonists of Chapter one, Alonzo Amos Stagg and Branch Rickey, were sports insiders who were "committed to an optimistic, big-tent Protestantism . yet still centered on white, middle-class men" (p.4).Their respective Northeast and Midwest Protestant upbringings enabled a more accommodationist approach to the rise of sports and helped them stay above the fray of the "Biblical Christianity vs. the World" battle that was raging (p.24).Each found a way around two primary criticisms of sports at the time: that they bred immorality (or were immoral themselves) and that they were getting too big.Stagg and Rickey's stance that sports should be, in part, lifted up for their ability to inculcate certain Christian values largely protected them from the scrutiny of doctrinaire critics as well as from the charge that they were slowing down the expansion of consumer capitalism (p.21).Moving chronologically, geographically, and socially to fundamentalists, white Southern Protestants, and black Protestants, Putz finds their demand that sports be a vehicle for evangelisation stood outside the dominant mainstream Protestant approach yet would rear its head in profound ways in the coming decades.In chapters three, four, and five, Putz relies heavily on the origins and early direction of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) to set the ground rules for any sports ministry in the post-World War II years and into the tumultuous 1960s.Putz positions the FCA (and its founder Don McClanen) as that which merges its own mainline denominational sensibilities and a kind of religious patriotism into the sports world while carving out an independent subculture for 428