Theology, Disability and Sport

Social Justice Perspectives

Nick J. Watson, Kevin Hargaden, Brian Brock, Nick J. Watson, Kevin Hargaden, Brian Brock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781351215084
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

This ground-breaking book provides fascinating insights into the fast-emerging body of research that explores the relationship between sport, theology and disability within a social justice framework. In the shadow of two major sport-faith events that fore-fronted the theology of disability sport, the Vatican's international conference—Sport at the Service of Humanity and the Inaugural Global Congress on Sports and Christianity York St John University, UK, at which Dr Brian Brock led a thematic strand on the topic—this book provides a foundation for further research and practice. This text is a timely and important synthesis of ideas that have emerged in two previously distinct areas of research: (i) 'disability sport' and (ii) the 'theology of disability'. Examples of subjects addressed in this text include: elite physical disability sport—Paralympics; intellectual disability sport—Special Olympics; equestrian sport; church, sport and disability, and; theologies of embodiment, competition and mercy. This book, written by leaders in their respective fields, begins a critical conversation on these topics, and many others, for both researchers and practitioners. The chapters originally published in the Journal of Disability and Religion and Quest.

The Culture of Sport, Bodies of Desire, and the Body of Christ

Benjamin S. Wall

ABSTRACT
The culture of sport plays a persuasive role in the shaping of cultural conceptions of identity, the body, and what constitutes being human. The author gives a cultural exegesis of sport to highlight its authoritative influence on societal ideation about the body, and how society views, values, and valorizes ability as a dominant attribute of what constitutes being human in particular. Running in the foreground of this article is a theological critique of the ways in which the dominant portrayal of the body within sport is marked with homogeneous proportions of ableist expression, representing the able body as ideal and normal; a representation that is at odds with the place of other bodies that constitute the body of Christ, the church. Central to these aims is the hope that bringing to light ableist visions of human flourishing implicit in and enforced through the cult of sport can both foil any further cultural conversion of Christians to its spirit and power and provide a lens by which Christians can distinguish “the uniqueness which ought to be the expression of their faith” (J. Ellul, 2012, p. 28).

In 1969 French philosopher and theologian Jaques Ellul published Violence (Ellul, 2012), wherein he situates the radical claims of the gospel in dialectical tension with the powerful dynamics of violence. Unless violence can be revalued in the light of the gospel and fundamentally reconditioned by its love then violence, according to Ellul, is irreconcilable with the characteristic spirit of Christ and the uncompromising demands of Christian discipleship and worship. Due to the power we give it over us violence in all its cultural mimesis is nothing less than a pure substitute for God. Commenting on this idolatrous exchange, concretized in late modern Christian forms, Ellul (2012) wrote,

What troubles me is that Christians conform to the trend of the moment without introducing into it anything specifically Christian. Their convictions are determined by their social milieu, not by faith in the revelation; they lack the uniqueness which ought to be the expression of that faith. Thus theologies become mechanical exercises that justify the positions adopted, and justify them on grounds that are absolutely not Christian. (p. 28)

At the center of Ellul’s analysis lies a criticism relevant to the subject of this article; namely, the spiritual naiveté (at best) and acedia (at worst) of Christians who derive great confidence and epistemic delight from the deforming sacramenta of cultural rituals and rites. The sequelae of such cultural fanaticism is not only the idée fixe with what is en vogue but also the rising power and influence of cultural icons to which Christians indiscriminately genuflect. Rather than being formed in and through the sacramental rites of the body of Christ, Christians are susceptible to acquiesce in the deforming rites of the haut monde. Ellul (2012) identified this “sociological conformism” as a “conversion of Christians to the spirit of power” (pp. 39–40). At this juncture it is vital to note that this inglorious exchange of the boundless goodness of the Son of Man for the common goods of the populace is not exclusive to a secular age. Christians have always been prone to offer a sursum corda to a novel demiurge (Gnosticism), Emperor (Constantine), ivory tower (Scholasticism), commonwealth (democracy), City upon a Hill (America), or glitterati, supplicating their favor in exchange for fanatic devotion. Whether it is a foreign ideology, current trend, governing polis or authority, or a prominent figure or force, conformity to these objects of desire involves the attachment of our affections to their accompanying ideals, illusions, pretensions, and values as well as the ways of life they enjoin. Along with our affections, we give the objects of our desire power over us, enabling them to inform and influence our view of the world and the ways in which we behave therein for better or worse.

Singing the body able body athletic

One of the many objects of desire that has won the heart, mind, and soul of many societies is sport. Sport possesses a primary place within the quotidian fabric of life for many cultures worldwide. For many people, sport is the common object of their love. Similar to the weight that is St. Augustine’s love, sport, for many, is their love, and wherever they are carried, it is some sport(s) that carries them (Augustine, 2012, p. 416). Embodied within this object of desire—sport is a persuasive signification that plays a powerful role in the shaping of cultural conceptions of identity, the body, and what constitutes being human. In what follows, I give a cultural exegesis of sport to highlight its authoritative influence on societal ideation about the body, and how society views, values, and valorizes ability as a dominant attribute of what constitutes being human in particular. Running in the foreground of this article is a theological critique of the ways in which the dominant portrayal of the body within sport is marked with homogeneous proportions of ableist expression, representing the able body as ideal and normal; a representation that is at odds with the place of other bodies that constitute the body of Christ, the church. Central to these aims is the hope that bringing to light ableist visions of human flourishing implicit in and enforced through the cult of sport can both foil any further cultural conversion of Christians to its spirit and power and provide a lens by which Christians can distinguish “the uniqueness which ought to be the expression of their faith” (Ellul, 2012, p. 28).

The body that is predominantly cast within sport is an able body characterized by muscular power, physical strength, ability, speed, endurance, mobility, and coordination. With all its ableist features the able body is represented throughout sports culture as iconic, ideal, and desirable. Year after year more men and women are added to the iconic list of greatest athletes of all time on the basis of their athleticism. Their athletic feats signified by victories, championships, medals, and awards are part of the process by which these athletes receive public acclaim. Integral to this ongoing ritual of recognition and remembrance is the prevailing emphasis on their prized bodily abilities—power, strength, and determination combined with their size, speed, and stamina.

Serena Williams has and continues to reign at the top of the Woman’s Tennis Association. For more than a decade, she has proven to be one of the most dominant female tennis players in history. At 5′9″ and 155 lb, Williams is an awe-inspiring athlete who occupies an exceptional space within a historically White-dominated sport. Since her first No. 1 ranking accomplishment in 2002 Williams has victoriously secured the No. 1 rank for a total of 309 weeks and counting; 186 of those weeks are consecutive. Among her many feats are four Gold Medals, 22 Grand Slam titles, and the most Major Championship wins by any tennis player in the Open Era. Though these triumphs play an important role in the scaling of Williams’s eminence, the tour de force of each of these athletic achievements is essentially determined by the athletic performance of her able body—her ageless dominance (Bialik, 2016) fueled by her prodigious power and speed (Fein, 2016) combined with her ability to consistently place powerful shots with great accuracy and the mental prowess that undergirds (Robson, 2012) these able-bodied attributes. Commenting on her appearance and ability Esther Lee, Williams’s Physiotherapist, said,

Take it from a pro, Serena is blessed with a solid, hourglass, athletic build with muscle mass. It suits her game, which is all about power. Every one of her strokes requires a chain of balanced muscular events that begins at her feet and goes up through her legs and through her core and spine. She finishes with her really strong arms, making impact through the ball. That transfer of power is a sight to behold. (ESPN, 2009)

Although her Black body lacks conformity to those worthy and desirable norms envisioned by individuals and corporations who associate whiteness with the good life—a disabling exclusion within a sport that has historically linked its value to its whiteness (Rankine, 2015)—the standard by which Williams has been iconically distinguished from the others pivots on a valuation of her able-bodiedness and puissance.

Similar to the scores of athletes who precede, compete alongside and with, and will succeed her, Williams’s able-bodiedness plays an essential role in not only her athletic successes but also the shaping of cultural visions and obsessions concerning what type of bodies and accompanying attributes ought to be celebrated as constituting an aspirational life. This is not to deny any celebration of Williams’ athleticism, accomplishments, or gifted bodily attributes or abilities. Nor do I desire to lay blame on any one or group of athletes as being the governing influence that shapes society’s demand for normalcy. Per the foregoing account, Williams serves as a paradigmatic example of how sports culture ascribes value to and glorifies the social performance of both the form and function of able-bodiedness (Reynolds, 2008). “Bodies practice culture” (Dolmage, 2014, p. 89) and sports culture sings the body athletic (Ain, 2012).

In autumn of 2009 ESPN began to visualize the ritual of singing the ethos of the limitless power, strength, and ability of the body athletic in their “Body Issue,” which would prove to be the best issue, in terms of advertising, in the month of October since the ESPN The Magazine launched in 1998 as well as one of the top best-selling issues in many years (Rovell, 2009). Commenting on the production of the 2009 edition, Ain (2012), ESPN The Magazine “Body Issue” reporter, wrote,

The Magazine has long been fascinated by athletes’ bodies. We’ve photographed them, written about them, extolled them … We think of the following pages as a celebration and an exploration of the athletic form. We also just thought it would be cool to look at our sports heroes up close and, yes, personal. How else to fully comprehend the ultimate keys to their success? In working with the many dozens of men and women who participated in this project, we were reminded that the variety of physiques possessed by the world’s greatest athletes is limitless. There is strength in the slightest of women, grace in the largest of men. Most of all, though, we were struck by their courage. In all sorts of ways—from our most provocative photographs to our groundbreaking human genome experiment to our wincing examination of the damage the body endures—we asked our athlete partners to share their vulnerabilities as they’d never done before … Adrian Peterson, can we borrow your shoulders? Imagine the brick walls we could break through with those things. Hey, Dwight Howard, how about your arms? What heights we could reach. And Serena Williams, wanna (sic) lend us your abs? We’ve always admired your core strength. Yes, the best bodies in sports grab us because they can accomplish things we can only imagine. In all their shapes and sizes, they are, quite simply … bodies we want. (para. 1–2; emphasis added)

This account is predicated on a set of assumptions about the body, reality, and power, all of which are based on the presumption that the body athletic with its unmatched strength and ability to accomplish what is reasonably expected without limit or boundary is ideal and desirable. For Ain and the multitude of people (e.g., sportscasters, reporters, subscribers) who participate in and are influenced by the vision of human flourishing championed by the culture of sport, the appearance and performance of ability are culturally distinguished as objects of desire—the bodies we want (Ain, 2012). Within his doxological praise of the body athletic, Ain located attributes of power and ability in relation to a collective desire (i.e., bodies “we” want) using the metaphor of singing to describe society’s visual fascination with the body’s ability to endure and overcome injury, impairment, and vulnerability. This Gloria Ad Corpus reveals how sports commentary functions as a persuasive agent for creating conceptions of the body. Correspondingly, Ain’s recalling of the human genome experiment in such a way as to suggest some relation between icons of the body athletic and the gene not only reveals the influence of DNA in the shaping of social imaginaries but also how this “genetic imaginary” (Franklin, 2000, p. 189; Stacey, 2010, p. 9) within the culture of sport shapes cultural fantasies of bodies relative to established societal values and norms—“the notion of progress, human perfectibility, and the elimination of deviance” (Davis, 1995, p. 35). Bodies of desire within society “drive fantasy; fantasy demands realization; realization produces material effects” (Samuels, 2014, p. 186). One of the material consequences of the Gloria Ad Corpus within the culture of sport is the neurotic obsession with ability as a dominant attribute of what constitutes being human—able-bodiedness without end.

Because sport is so deeply embedded in the wider society, its dominant representation of able-bodiedness as ideal affects the character and development of the larger social imaginary, particularly its values concerning bodies and their relation to the human flourishing. The value of the body athletic “reflects common assumptions about a community’s sense of the good, how i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Editor Dedications
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Culture of Sport, Bodies of Desire, and the Body of Christ
• 2. Outside Horses, Inside Men: Equestrian Sport, Disability, and Theology
• 3. Sport, Theology, and the Special Olympics: A Christian Theological Reflection
• 4. “You Shall Not Murder”: Atos at the Paralympic Games
• 5. Messengers of Hope: A Boy With Autism, His Church, and the Special Olympics
• 6. Running for Jesus! The Virtues and the Vices of Disability and Sport
• 7. From Team Hoyt to I’ll Push You: An Embodied Prophetic Message
• 8. Calling for a Time-Out: The Theology of Disability Sport and The Broader Understanding of Competition
• 9. Embodying Compassion: Disability Sport and the Mercy of God
• 10. Sport, Theology, and Dementia: Reflections on the Sporting Memories Network, UK
• Index