"Football is not a matter of life and death, it is more important than that."
Towards a Biblical theology of sport
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James A Mathisen
A paper to the annual meeting of the Association for Christianity, Sport, Leisure and Health, Wheaton, 2002
His starting point is an assertion that “we have no theology of sport come up or at least know biblical theology of sport, as distinguished from a systematic theology”, which was a reasonable assertion in 2002.
Part of the problem he feels is that evangelicals in USA “have virtually organized their faith around the issue of communicating the gospel…[and] characteristically subordinate the task of first-order thinking to tasks that seem to affect more tangibly the lives of people at large”
He suggested that the American evangelical version of Muscular Christianity was “more utilitarian and extrinsic in its attitude towards sport, more practice-orientated and less idealistic in its strategies and more closely linked to American protestant revivalism.”
He suggests that a parallel aphorism to ''sports build character'' of the original muscular Christians, has become ''sport enhances the gospel'' or ''sport helps save souls'' for modern evangelicals; “If the original myth of Muscular Christianity was manliness, morality and health, the modern one is pragmatic utility, meritocratic democracy, competitive virtue, heroic models and therapeutic self-control”.