Middlebrow Protestantism

In 1979, a player for the Baltimore Orioles named Pat Kelly hit a home run and raised a finger in the air. A reporter later asked whether Kelly had meant to taunt the opposing fans. “I was pointing to my savior in the sky,” Kelly replied. “I was giving thanks to God almighty.”

This gesture is now ubiquitous in sports, as unmistakable in its import as the sign of the cross. That it was novel just forty-five years ago is a testament to the growth and success of the Christian athlete movement. Made up of groups such as the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Athletes in Action, and Pro Athletes Outreach, this para-church effort has bucked secularizing trends, asserting a place for religion in public life by tying sports to Christianity. In doing so, it has shown the continuing power of a frequently overlooked religious tendency, what Paul Putz, a historian at Baylor and author of the new book Spirit of the Game, calls “middlebrow Protestantism.” Often derided, when not simply ignored, middlebrow Protestants in fact played a central—often constructive—role in America’s religious history.

Conventional accounts of American Protestantism in the twentieth century turn on contrasts between modernism and fundamentalism, between a mainline establishment and populist evangelicalism. Middlebrow Protestants weren’t entirely at home in either of these groups. “They didn’t tend to fit the stereotype of the mainline elite intellectual who’s writing books and pushing for reform,” Putz tells me in an interview. “And they also didn’t fit the revivalist who’s preaching brimstone and fire and trying to get souls saved.”

Instead, middlebrow Protestants embraced a pragmatic creed that saw Christianity less as a summons to individual salvation or social transformation than as a guide to living a better life—as a spouse, parent, and member of the community. Theirs was a tolerant, optimistic faith. It placed less focus on doctrinal points than on a certain cultural sensibility rooted in the mores of the Midwest, where many middlebrow Protestants had their roots. Its paragons included Branch Rickey, the baseball manager and devout Methodist from Ohio who signed Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers; Tom Osborne, the soft-spoken Nebraska football coach and Methodist Sunday School teacher; and John Wooden, the Indiana-born basketball guru and Disciple of Christ who taught that small-town virtues like industriousness, cooperation, and self-control were crucial to scaling the “pyramid of success.”

What made these Protestants “middlebrow” was their response to the rise of mass culture and consumer society, one of the major elements of which was a sudden surge in the popularity of spectator sports. Leading modernist thinkers of the twentieth century tended to be uncomfortable with the crass commercialism of major sports. Fundamentalist leaders, for their part, worried that sports detracted from sabbath observance. Middlebrow Protestants adopted a more open attitude. They saw sports as an arena in which the virtues they valued—discipline, hard work, tolerance, and fair play—could be pursued and developed. They discovered an elevating function in mass culture. They thought a ballplayer could direct the eyes of men heavenward.

This uplifting sensibility was present in other middlebrow projects, such as the Book of the Month Club and Reader’s Digest. It received religious expression in magazines like Guideposts and books like Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. But its most significant legacy may be in competitive athletics, where religious ideas were integrated with notions of individual self-improvement and gradual social change.

When Putz began researching the origins of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which was founded in 1954, he realized that the common assumption that it had emerged “as part of this Billy Graham fundamentalist turned neo-evangelical movement” was wrong. The speakers at its initial conferences—men like Amos Alonzo Stagg and Phog Allen—didn’t dwell on stories of personal conversion. Rather than stressing the sinfulness of man, they took an optimistic view of the possibilities for individual and communal improvement. They attended churches that were part of the Protestant mainline.

In this way, the founders of the FCA were typical of middlebrow Protestantism more generally. Representing a soft form of triumphalism, middlebrow Protestants rejected racial segregation, anti-Semitism, and anti-Catholicism, while believing that their own cultural and religious traditions should carry the day. Putz summarizes their attitude: “We’re Protestants and therefore we’re tolerant and we’re inclusive and we invite these other religions to engage with us.”

In accordance with this ecumenical confidence, the FCA included Catholics and Mormons from the outset. Fr. Donald Cleary, a Catholic chaplain at Cornell University, served on the FCA’s advisory board. Vernon Law, a professional baseball player and Latter-Day Saint, spoke at FCA camps. Though these men were exceptions to the Protestant rule, they were an important indication of the sort of Christianity the FCA sought to promote—one that was self-consciously broadminded and tolerant.

In the 1960s, middlebrow Protestants began to seek out new allies among evangelicals—a seeming turn to the right, best understood as an attempt to consolidate a cultural consensus that was suddenly weakening. Bourgeois Americans, confronted by protest movements and countercultural experiments, had to decide how or whether to preserve old ways. “A lot of middlebrow Protestants supported racial inclusion,” Putz says. But their confidence in the basic goodness of America, and commitment to a bourgeois vision of society, made them resist forms of black politics that cast America as fundamentally unjust. They turned “against the mainline Protestant leaders’ . . . more revolutionary methods and tactics.” When they did so, they discovered a neo-evangelical movement, led by Billy Graham, that had softened its hard edges and now presented an appealing face of conventional American religiosity.

The career of Michigan State athletic director and football coach Biggie Munn illustrates how middlebrow Protestants responded to social change by finding common ground with evangelicals. Munn, who attended the liberal and interdenominational People’s Church in East Lansing, in the 1950s became a central figure in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. “I could not find any testimony of [Munn] giving his life to Christ,” Putz tells me. “There’s nothing there that’s sort of traditional evangelical.” Instead, Munn championed typical middlebrow ideas such as the importance of church attendance and the idea that football can cultivate character. Significantly, Munn was a racial progressive. “His Michigan State football teams [were] integrated more quickly than others,” Putz says. “They [had] a reputation for having more black players than other teams in the Big Ten.”

But in the 1960s, when black players at Michigan State demanded more black coaches, Munn reacted negatively. “I will resign my position as Director of Athletics when I am told who I have to hire and who my coaches must play by the athletes themselves,” he declared. “I have always been for fair play and equal rights no matter what color or creed.” By the end of the decade, Putz tells me, Munn was “writing about how Billy Graham represent[ed] his view of America.” This convergence was effected by a common cultural sensibility, rather than by shared ideas of what it meant to be saved.

Not all middlebrow Protestants sought to preserve the middle-American sensibility. Some affiliated with the counterculture and began (as the historian Stephen Prothero has noted) to pioneer the ideal of being “spiritual but not religious.” Phil Jackson, the legendary coach of the Chicago Bulls, exemplifies this trend. A Pentecostal preacher’s son, he began to incorporate Native American elements into his spirituality in the 1970s. Later, as a coach, he taught his players Lakota war chants and decorated the Chicago Bulls’ locker room with native totems. Though the content of his belief had changed, his pragmatic understanding of faith remained the same. He sustained a conventional middlebrow Protestant belief in spirituality as an aid to athletic performance, even as his spirituality became highly unconventional.

Eventually, that unconventionality itself became conventional. By the time of Jackson’s greatest prominence as head coach of the Bulls in the 1990s, non-traditional spirituality had become a mark of bourgeois assimilation for the upper stratum of the middle class. It was a structural replication of middlebrow Protestantism’s connection between spirituality and success, for those who wanted to shed the middle-American cultural sensibility—who thought of themselves as highbrow. As Jackson put it in his book Sacred Hoops, Native American motifs gave him “a way to talk about the spiritual aspects of basketball without sounding like a Sunday preacher.”

Certainly, middlebrow Protestantism had its limits. Though it saw itself as pluralistic, it was tied to a middle-American culture shaped by definite racial, religious, and class dynamics. It could not accept the far-reaching critique of American society advanced by some black Christians. Its pragmatism was implicitly opposed to any dogmatic form of Christianity. Its doctrinal vagueness allowed it to be absorbed into conservative evangelicalism on the one hand and Oprah Winfrey liberalism on the other. But it is possible to see something admirable in its aspiration to be accommodating, while remaining loyal to a cultural and religious inheritance.

Today the bourgeois culture and pragmatic spirituality that middlebrow Protestants hoped to promote by means of sports have fractured into competing tendencies. And yet the aspiration toward the middle retains an appeal. Witness this year’s presidential campaign, in which one party selected as its vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz, a Midwestern man who proudly identified as a football coach while excoriating his opponents as “weird”—appealing to the middlebrow valorization of normality, even as he championed policies that undermine the culture in which the middlebrow sensibility took shape. The other party nominated for president Donald Trump, whose primary religious influence is Norman Vincent Peale, and who shows a keen interest in sports. Trump claims to have been Peale’s “greatest student of all time,” and perhaps he was, but he lacks the quiet self-assurance that marked middlebrow Protestantism at its zenith. If he is an exemplary middlebrow Protestant, it is because he embodies a tradition that knows it has lost its cultural centrality and must assert itself in less reserved terms.

In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump went on a podcast and praised one of the great representatives of the middlebrow tradition. “So, Tom Osborne was a great coach and he was a silent coach,” he told his hosts. “Boy, I tell you that guy was a good coach for years.” Osborne—lean, dignified, irenic—represents the past of middlebrow Protestantism, and Trump and Walz represent two visions of its future. It is hard not to feel that something great has been lost.

Matthew Schmitz is a founder and editor of Compact.