Christians and College Athletics

If you’re an incom­ing fresh­man, trans­fer stu­dent, or grad­u­ate student–welcome!

I just ran across an inter­est­ing arti­cle talk­ing about the rela­tion­ship between Chris­tians and col­lege sports, a rela­tion­ship which can be summed up in the phrase [Recent scan­dals] may lead the faith­ful to ask a new ques­tion: Should a Chris­t­ian stu­dent think twice before get­ting involved in high-pro­file col­lege sports like bas­ket­ball or foot­ball? What kind of val­ues will he or she learn in that set­ting?

Dur­ing the late nine­teenth and ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, this ques­tion would have been unthink­able. Why? Because col­lege sports was imbued with an ide­al called “mus­cu­lar Chris­tian­i­ty.”

This was the belief that phys­i­cal activ­i­ty and sports, espe­cial­ly team sports, devel­oped char­ac­ter, fos­tered patri­o­tism, and instilled virtues that would serve their participants—and their par­tic­i­pants’ God—well in lat­er life. In oth­er words, team games taught their own high eth­ic, and that eth­ic could and should be a Chris­t­ian one.

Read the whole thing and learn about the ori­gins of the YMCA, bas­ket­ball and the Olympics.