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The Problem of Pleasure: Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion (Studies in Modern British Religious History)
Dominic Erdozain
Boydell Press, 2010
304 pp., $99.00
Timothy Larsen
Book Notes
Overcorrection: Evangelicals and Sports in Victorian Britain
Although he does not cite Neil Postman, Dominic Erdozain's thesis is that the churches in late 19th-century Britain amused themselves to death. The background is the earlier evangelical war on pleasure. Evangelicals disproved of most forms of recreation—even sports were censured as unbecoming to the earnestness of a Christian man.
Evangelicals therefore gained a reputation for being killjoys, and eventually even they came to feel that some of their flat bans were untenable. Erdozain's real story is about the disastrous overcorrection. With remarkable rapidity, evangelicals went from lifting the prohibition on sports to facilitating recreation through official church programs to replacing the real work of the church with entertainment.
The change happened with pernicious subtlety, sometimes literally without people hardly noticing, but Erdozain is able to produce before-and-after shots as dramatic as any ever touted by a weight-loss company. His favorite case study is the YMCA. Who now remembers that it initially did not even contemplate offering sports but rather saw evangelism as core to its mission? Prayer meetings and the spiritual work of the Y declined precipitously. One branch eventually came up with the clever idea of simply shifting their recreational activities so that they now appeared in their annual report under the old, dwindling heading "religious influences." The churches themselves followed the same path to play: the laity shifted in mass from participating in prayer meetings to enjoying church-sponsored recreational activities. So many ministers talked so enthusiastically about how sport builds character and can be done to the glory of God that they really did convince themselves that this was the spiritual work of the church. Too late did people begin to wonder how lads can play soccer unto the Lord when no one has ever bothered to catechize them about who God is.
Timothy Larsen, McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, is the author of Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth Century England (Oxford Univ. Press). His new book, about the Bible in the 19th century, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Copyright © 2010 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.
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Mr. Sandy Finlayson
In the 19th Century Free Church of Scotland, James Begg, who was the most conservative of men theologically, worked tirelessly for the amelioration of the dreadful living and working conditions of his parishioners. Part of his social reform platform was the setting up of Saturday evening concerts so that people would have a place to go for recreation and entertainment that would keep them away from the pubs. When Begg was criticized for setting up “worldly entertainments” he replied that these concerts were …”in fact exerting, a powerful influence in elevating the tastes of the people, taking them from the pollution of the dram-shop, and giving them a taste for the ennobling pleasures of literature and science and religion.” Begg would have wanted nothing to do with replacing church activities with entertainment, but he did see that there needed to be a proper balance of the spiritual and the secular.
Alister Chapman
Dominic Erdozain is a scholar with an eye for the big picture and the ability to explain it with vim. So I am glad to see his book in print, and look forward to more. Sports and catechesis can go together, of course. In the 1940's, John Stott ran a youth club in London where he taught boys the gospel and coached their soccer team.
Jason Byassee
I'm glad to learn of this book from Tim. It's amazing how trenchant Postman still is, though he was just talking about network television. The church's slide into infotainment is even more troubling, and it's hard to figure how we can reverse that.
Jon Vickery
I like Larsen's last line. As one of the early evangelicals put it, the fundamental defect in the world is low thoughts about God--not want of recreation. Thanks for the review.
Andrew Tooley
Thanks for this review Tim. I've been looking forward to Dominic's book for a little while now. Your last sentence rings true in the present. While living in Edinburgh the church we were attending wrestled with the idea of how to use sport as a vehicle to talk about God.
Doug Sweeney
Though this book treats Victorian Britain, it hits very close to home. Larsen is right. It does and should remind us of Neil Postman's best-selling Amusing Ourselves to Death. It also reminds me that Postman hasn't gone far enough. It's not just electronic media that are distorting our view of reality and distracting us from the more essential elements of the good life. It's the culture of entertainment--much of which is created right here, in North America--that is now the real opiate of the people. Doug Sweeney
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