Christianity, Race, and Sport

Jeffrey Scholes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000380071
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

This book provides a rigorously researched introduction to the relationship between Christianity, race, and sport in the United States. Christianity, Race, and Sport examines how Protestant Christianity and race have interacted, often to the detriment of Black bodies, throughout the sporting world over the last century. Important sporting figures and case studies discussed include:

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• the sanctification of baseball player Jackie Robinson;

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• the domestication of Muhammad Ali and George Foreman;

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• religious expressions of athletes in the NFL;

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• treatment of African American tennis player Serena Williams;

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• Colin Kaepernick and his prophetic voice.

This accessible and conversational book is essential reading for undergraduate students approaching religion and race or religion and sport for the first time, as well as those working within the sociology of sport, sport studies, history of sport, or philosophy of sport.

1 The sanctification of Jackie Robinson

Introduction

The film 42, a biopic of baseball player Jackie Robinson released in 2013, did well at the box office. Its success was somewhat unexpected, in part, because the film retold the well-known story of Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier in 1947. The plot unfolds in a straightforward, no-frills way that did not veer much from the 1950 original, The Jackie Robinson Story, which featured Jackie himself in the starring role. The 2013 film chronicles three baseball seasons; the first kicked off with Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, signing Robinson to a minor league contract with the Montreal Royals in 1945, Robinson joining the Dodgers in 1947, and culminating with the Dodgers’ loss to the New York Yankees in the 1947 World Series. 42 expectedly focuses on racial acrimony that Robinson faced as well as the heroism of both Robinson and Rickey as they made history. A triumphant story that, in Hollywood fashion, casts characters into Manichean roles and the good guy, of course, wins.

A relatively harmless, feel-good movie with a PG-13 rating, though, began to attract criticism from an unlikely group of people: those who claimed that the Christian faith of both men had been scrubbed from the script. These authors wish to “tell the whole story of Jackie Robinson” that will finally position his Christian faith as the sine qua non of his biography and therefore make religion the engine of racial progress. I argue that this attempt to provide a corrective to the secular narrative of Robinson’s life, while sincere, overly simplifies Robinson and more importantly betrays a certain Christian interpretation of race that is faulty. Yes, Robinson was a Republican who preached individual responsibility to his fellow African Americans frequently. But in his fervent desire for equal rights, Robinson also addressed structural barriers to quality for African Americans.

He was also a man of faith. Indeed, the shared Methodist faith of Rickey and Robinson helped seal the deal back in 1945. Rickey famously invoked Jesus in their initial meeting and asked Robinson to turn the other cheek when attacked by racists. But in his autobiography, Robinson describes, “one of the most important moments in my life,” the signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers, without mentioning religion or God at all except once: “Money is America’s God, and business people can dig Black power if it coincides with green power, so these fans were important to the success of •Mr. Rickey’s ‘Noble Experiment. ’ ”¹ Not once does Robinson interpret the events of his life, as expressed in his 300-page book, through a theological lens. And his reference to God is not the God he believes in but a chance to take a shot at Rickey. He concludes his book with three sentences that are understandably omitted from the later spiritual biographies. “I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a Black man in a White world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.”²

It is Robinson’s own minimizing of the role of religion coupled with his maximizing of the role that race played in his life that is conveniently left out of, glossed over, or erroneously reversed in the Christianized retelling of his story. Using insights from Michael Emerson and Christian Smith’s groundbreaking study of evangelicals and race, Divided by Faith, I will describe much of the criticism of the secular rendition of Robinson’s life as more of an expression of the preferred white evangelical perspective on religion and race. The hyper-focus on Robinson’s Christian faith is only encouraged when his own focus on structural racism is conveniently ignored.

Several of those desiring to make Robinson’s faith a (if not the) means by which we should appreciate his accomplishments, primarily the breaking of the color barrier, are avowed evangelicals; others are less forthcoming. Whether a practicing evangelical or not, those challengers of the secular narrative divulge a white evangelical orientation towards race. It is a stance that, by mischaracterizing the life of Robinson, maintains the status quo regards race relations—a stance that Robinson deplored. Finally, it is the structural obstacles to racial equality that, ironically, represent a form of disorder in the white conservative Christian mindset. If Robinson can be distilled down to a man who overcame staunch opposition with just his God-given pluck and faith, then he (and by extension all African Americans) fit harmlessly into the ordered society that is animated by this belief. But if institutions admit of throwing up barriers to success, no matter the moral fiber of the Black individual, then the comfortable idea that Blacks just need to believe that “God helps those who help themselves” loses credibility. While Robinson was drawn to Martin Luther King Jr. more than Malcolm X, Republican Nelson Rockefeller more than John F. Kennedy, and mainline Protestantism more than a progressive Black church, he was keenly aware of the limits of “bootstrap” solutions to the problems of the Black race—a fact that his spiritual biographers are reluctant to concede.

While true that Robinson’s “theology of responsibility” owes much to the Booker T. Washington line of thinking, he often invoked a W. E. B. Du Bois-like inspired call for institutional reform out of the other side of his mouth. It is not the mere invitation to readers to learn about Robinson’s strong faith that is the problem, but more, it is the Christianity that calls for individualistic moral responsibility that is attributed to Robinson in reductionist and revisionist fashion. It is a problem not only because it is inaccurate but also because it tends to smooth the edges of Robinson for white audiences. Many would prefer to absorb his story as one that tells of Robinson fighting his way through the color barrier instead of taking into consideration the messiness of race and its structural supports. If Robinson can be seen as a proponent of a Christian theology of responsibility that was seemingly essential to his survival of the 1947 and 1948 seasons in Brooklyn, then he is deemed a “credit to his race” rather than a fly in the ointment of the white fans’ sports world. In other words, this caricature of Robinson keeps the order in grand fashion since his entrance into the Major Leagues held the potential for large scale disorder.

To stress structural and institutional hurdles that resist the will of the strongest individual would force an admission that the cherished ordered society is upheld by something other than a majority of responsible individuals living out God’s will. Rather legal, economic, geographic, and political barriers to racial equality are disordering realities that threaten the conception of the ordered society. Robinson’s calling attention to these must be minimized or excised from his religious bio if he is to fit the desired metanarrative. In reality, the religion that he brings to the intersection of race and sports is one that simultaneously holds that God helps those who help themselves and that institutional barriers make helping oneself very difficult for African Americans.

The white evangelical toolkit

Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, in their Divided by Faith, set out to answer a pressing question: in the face of clear, extant racial inequality in the US in terms of income, education, housing, and incarceration rates, to name a few, and despite an overwhelming desire within the white conservative Christian community for racial equality, are there members of this community unwittingly contributing to the racial divide? They answer with a “yes” based on several defining features of the mindsets of most white conservative Christians that inform their orientation to race. First, Emerson and Smith assert that we live in a “racialized” society, “wherein race matters profoundly for differences in life experiences, life opportunities, and social relationships.” It is also, “a society that allocated differential economic, political, social, and even psychological rewards to groups along racial lines; lines that are socially constructed.”³ That we live in a racialized society marked by division along racial lines may come as a surprise to whites. This is because “racial practices that reproduce racial division in the contemporary United States 1. Are increasingly covert, 2. Are embedded in normal operations of institutions, 3. Avoid direct racial terminology, and 4. Are invisible to most Whites.”⁴ Or the racial inequality that is known all too well among people of color is largely subterranean for whites.

But this is not to say that white evangelicals have no concept of race nor can they respond to issues arising out of a racialized society when pressed. Emerson and Smith look to “cultural tools” that help individuals frame and interpret the world around them based largely on their background and cultural context. The culture of a white, cisgender, heterosexual construction worker in New York will differ from a Latina female physician in Scottsdale, and from an evangelical in Dallas, hence the toolkit that each possess for comprehending race will likewise differ. Still Emerson and Smith identify three general cultural tools in the white evangelical toolkit that help them understand the racial divide and what, if anything, there is to do about it. These tools are, “ ‘accountable freewill individualism,’ ‘relationalism’ (attaching central important to interpersonal relationships), and ‘antistructuralism’ (inability to perceive or unwillingness to accept social structural influences).”⁵ These three “-isms” are deeply intertwined and mutually supportive of each other. For instance, an overwhelming majority of white evangelicals contend that “individuals exist independent of structures and institutions, have freewill, and are individually accountable for their own actions.” If structures and institutions admitted to possessing the kind of power to prevent responsible behavior that is identified by individuals acting freely, then one would need to question the merits of individualism and its attendant freedom. Interpersonal relationships fit into Emerson and Smith’s schema in that people are “individually accountable to family, other people, and most important to God for their freely made choices.” While evangelicals have a low anthropology based on a belief in the doctrine of Original Sin, “they view humans, if they are not rooted in proper interpersonal contexts, as tending to make wrong choices. . . . For this reason, white evangelicals, as we see, often view social problems as rooted in poor relationships or the negative influence of significant others.”⁶

When forced to answer the question of race, white evangelicals use these three cultural tools accordingly. They “not only interpret race issues by using accountable freewill individualism and relationalism, but they often find structural explanations irrelevant or even wrongheaded.”⁷ Reliance on structural explanations for racial inequality in education, incarceration rates, health care, and wealth amounts to a denial of African Americans’ “own personal sin by shifting blame somewhere else, such as on ‘the system.’ ”⁸ More insidiously, institutions, especially the federal government, are often deemed guilty of exacerbating the problem of race rather than helping Americans overcome it. Emerson and Smith found that a large majority of white evangelicals accuse institutions such as the media and higher education of stoking racial hostilities and condoning cultures of dependency through welfare programs and unfair policies such as affirmative action.

Yet Cornel West counters, “structures and behavior are inseparable.”⁹ It is the separating of the two (often by denying the existence of the former) that brings only behavior to the forefront of the white evangelical mind. Emerson and Smith again: “Most white evangelicals, directed by their cultural tools, fail to recognize the institutionalization of racialization—in economic, political, educational, social, and religious systems. They often think and act as if these problems do no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The sanctification of Jackie Robinson
• 2 The domestication of Muhammad Ali and George Foreman
• 3 Pray the white way: religious expression in the NFL in Black and White
• 4 Dabo Swinney, universal whiteness, and a “sin problem”
• 5 Serena Williams and her two “gods”
• 6 The Black prophetic fire of Colin Kaepernick
• Index