sports and a megachurch

[lirazel]

A thing I have discovered about myself lately: I hate sports, but I really enjoy sports documentaries.

This surprised me, but I guess it shouldn't. My lack of interest in sports has always been about a) my completely disinterest in--actually, often it's stronger than that and becomes outright antipathy towards--competition (I just want everyone to win! Why can't everyone win???) and b) I find it boring to watch people do physical things--even things I can admit are very very impressive--unless those things are artistically-driven (think rhythmic gymnastics and figure skating, both of which are about artistic expression even more than they are about what bodies can accomplish).

If you don't care about competition or watching people do impressive things with their bodies...of course you're going to be uninterested in sports. Add to that the fact that sports are essentially narrative-less until they're over and you know who won (and which point people will construct a narrative around them) and I just get bored.

But sports documentaries are about people! Their relationships to each other! Their relationships to themselves! What you're willing to sacrifice to accomplish something extreme! (Even if I often think that they're crazy to sacrifice what they do, it's an interesting part of the human experience.) They're about society! And what things are important to us! And who we admire! And who we turn on!

All that to say I have watched a few sports documentaries lately and enjoyed the heck out of them.

Untold: Malice at the Palace is about...a riot at a basketball game? I guess? But it's about what caused that riot and how the narrative about it was constructed by the media and how the players involved ended up suffering for it even though they were far less culpable than the fans. I don't even remember this situation though I think it was back in 2004 and presumably it was all over the media at the time. Goes to show you how much I block out sports-related stuff from my mind.

Untold is apparently a 30-for-30 style sports documentary series on Netflix, and I've started one about a mob boss who bought his teenage son a minor-league hockey team (I don't think that's how they describe it? but that's essentially what it is) to run after he hurt himself and couldn't play hockey anymore. It's wild. I haven't finished that one yet, but I'll get around to at some point.

Last night during my dinner (the only time I really watch TV these days except when I'm on my treadmill) I started The Last Dance about the last season where the Chicago Bulls were any good. THE DRAMA, Y'ALL. This is like imperial palace level drama. At least the characters in this one I've heard of--as a kid growing up in the 90s, I of course could not escape Michael Jordan and Dennis Rodman and the Bulls' omnipresence. I had no interest in anything but Space Jam and its soundtrack at the time, but it's interesting revisiting that era.

And then there's Athlete A which is only...kind of a sports documentary. It's much more a systemic sexual harassment/fighting for justice documentary as it's about the girls/women who were abused by Larry Nasser, but it does involve sports. I can't say that I enjoyed it, because it's harrowing. But I appreciate it and was deeply moved by it. I cried a lot while I watched it, is what I'm saying. I do recommend it if you're in a mental space where you can handle something so deeply upsetting.



Here's where my post splits off in two directions.

Direction 1: Rachael Denhollander is prominent in the film as she was the first woman to come forward and accuse Nasser. She's also been making occasional appearances in a podcast I'm listening to called The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. If you were evangelical or evangelical-adjacent in the early 2000s, you instantly know what that podcast is about just by the title. If you weren't, it's about how a sexist, homophobic, egotistical, combative guy started a megachurch in Seattle, became one of the most famous Christians in the world, and then was "brought down" when people came forward and said, "You know what? That whole church culture was really abusive."

I knew a lot of the stuff in this podcast because we were all watching it happen via blogs (the late, great Rachel Held Evans was a major voice pushing back against Driscoll. In essence, it was blogs that held Driscoll responsible and resulted in the pushback against him). But the scope of this podcast is compelling. It's as much analysis of What's Wrong with White Evangelical Culture as it is about this specific church. If you're at all curious about evangelical Christianity, I think it's a great podcast to listen to.

It's also sometimes very frustrating because it's created by Christianity Today, which used to be THE big respected centrist evangelical magazine (think Billy Graham) but, as evangelical culture has shifted so far to the right, it's become increasingly under attack for being too liberal. Even though they are in no way liberal. So sometimes the approach in this podcast could be off-putting to someone who isn't an evangelical Christian. The criticisms from the left are legitimate and understandable. I still think it's worthwhile, and I'm glad it exists.

I'm so glad that CT is tackling this. I'm heartened by how willing they are to say, "Abusive dynamics are really common in evangelical culture today, and we absolutely have to understand why that is and do something about that." What I worry is that no one's going to learn anything from the story they're telling because progressive Christians will say it's too conservative and conservative evangelicals will say it's too liberal (compromised by the world, influenced by the culture, etc.). Which is a shame because I do think that most of the time the reporting is really good. There are moments, as I mentioned, that frustrate me, but the reporters are talking even to people who've left the church entirely and explicitly saying, "We can learn from these people's experiences." Which I so appreciate.

And I want to mention Rachael Denhollander again. I find her fascinating. She's still firmly in the evangelical tradition, but she has become a lawyer and committed herself completely to rooting out institutional abuse wherever she can find it including in churches (which is why she's often interviewed in the podcast). I admire the heck out of her work even if I wish she didn't still believe some of the things she does. I don't really understand how she can be so completely committed to protecting women and children the way she is and not go full-on feminist, but people are complicated. Her relentless work will save lives, and white evangelicalism desperately, desperately needs voices like hers. I'm sure she gets unbelievable amounts of hate and death threats, but I think she will make at least some kind of difference.



Direction 2: To pivot back to problems with sports and especially children in sports, I've been thinking a lot over the last couple of months about how absolutely gross it is that we let children participate in high-level and even professional sports. FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLDS SHOULD NOT BE AT THE OLYMPICS OMG. Part of my thoughts about this were prompted by Athlete A, which is a pretty compelling argument that this level of intensity in children's sports is always going to result in abuse. (Why did this go on for as long as it did? Because parents were so desperately for their children to succeed in the world of gymnastics that they trusted an institution they never should have trusted, and that institution was so committed to protecting itself that it was incapable of rooting out abuse.) The other thing that's got this on my mind is all the teenagers winning in tennis lately and also how frank all of them (and older athletes, too, Naomi Osaka in particular) are about the incredible pressure they're under and how their mental health is affected.

I have long, long believed that sports in the US should be severed from education. Schools from kindergarten through university should only have intramural-type sports. The sports complex in our culture is absolutely insane and I hatehatehatehatehatehate the way it warps education, especially higher education. I hate the way all these horrible white dudes are making millions of the work of teenagers (many of whom are black and/or from poor backgrounds). It's disgusting.

But I'm becoming even more radical re: sports and I think that there just shouldn't be these intensely organized sports for kids. They just shouldn't exist. You should have to be 18 to compete at the Olympics or go professional or anything like that. Children should only be playing loosely organized kinds of sports like your municipal soccer program that practices like an hour or two a week and is mostly about having fun.

So I really appreciated Anne Helen Petersen's article against youth sports. There are a bunch of negative things about the professionalization of children's sports that she doesn't even touch on, but what she has to say is good.

I don't know. Maybe elsewhere in the world other cultures have healthy relationships with sports for kids. Maybe it's possible for kids to compete at high levels without it turning abusive. But we certainly haven't figured that out here in the US.

Comments

[dolorosa_12]

I like watching sports a bit more than you, but I share your feelings re: sports documentaries. (I'm currently watching a multipart documentary about British football — i.e. soccer — in the 1990s, and it is wild. It goes into a lot of detail about how the sport culture intersected with the tabloid media culture and general celebrity culture of the era, and it's really fascinating.)

Regarding Mars Hill, I actually remember reading about that church (and Driscoll) back in the day. I am in no way evangelical, and I don't come from that background either, but I went through a phase of reading blogs by so many ex-fundamentalist, ex-quiverfull, and ex-evangelical American Christians, and even fifteen years ago these people were sounding the alarm about the toxicity of Mars Hill and Driscoll specifically, and the culture in general that had allowed them to flourish. I agree with you that it's good that criticism is also coming from within the community, although my perception is that whenever evangelicals criticise the darlings of the movement (or just whatever is held to be orthodoxy), the community turns on them and declares that those people were never real evangelicals to begin with.

I also agree with you re: sports for kids, and I say that as someone who was a competitive gymnast from the age of seven to seventeen. My coach in the final years of my time as a gymnast was an ex-Olympian who had competed at Atlanta — as a thirteen-year-old! She was only about five years older than me, but even at the time I could tell that this was a person who had virtually no education, and very few job prospects other than coaching gymnastics at a local club where she was paid minimum wage.

It's hard for me to decouple my own experiences as a child — I was really sporty and competitive, I loved sport at school and was good at long-distance running and swimming as well as gymnastics (although dreadful at team sports and anything that involved a ball, which I masked by being very energetic and enthusiastic) — from broader problems with children and sport. As with a lot of institutional stuff in childhood, it works very well for people who are good at the thing (whether that thing is 'being strong and physically coordinated,' 'having the kind of short-term memory that makes regurgitating facts in standardised tests easy,' or 'sitting still and focusing when surrounded by lots of distractions'), and is appallingly damaging for those who are not good at the thing, and cannot find an obvious strategy to mask the fact that they're not good at it.

The sports culture in Australia is a bit different to the US one — there's way less money in it, there's no such thing as lucrative college sports (sports scholarships are non-existent), and the idea of people who aren't parents coming to watch a high school football match would be considered absurd, but it's a sports obsessed culture in a different way. There's an expectation that everyone be fit and healthy and enthusiastic about sport (particularly about cricket, rugby and/or Australian football), and if you're not you're considered snobby or weird. Trying to achieve things, or being proud of achievements is considered arrogant, unless those things are sports-related. It's very alienating if you're not that way inclined.

[angelofthenorth]

It's not just sport. Chess and scrabble get ridiculous too

[lirazel]

Oh, yes, I didn't think of that because it's not something I see much of, but you're right.

I sometimes wonder if I have a fundamentally different experience of life than most people because I don't have the competitive gene.

[lirazel]

Ooooh, I bet that futbol documentary is so interesting! (In our house, we get around the football/soccer thing by just pronouncing the sport with the black and white ball with a Spanish accent. It works pretty well.)

Oh, man, the flowering of exvangelical/ex-Quiverfull blogs! I bet we were reading some of the same ones!

lthough my perception is that whenever evangelicals criticise the darlings of the movement (or just whatever is held to be orthodoxy), the community turns on them and declares that those people were never real evangelicals to begin with.
Yes, I have definitely seen that happen many times. Although I know there are some people who are really trying to change evangelicalism from within, it does seem that most of us are just abandoning it altogether and letting the most extreme elements take control. Which is sad, but I do not have the energy to keep fighting in that world anymore.

I knew you were a sports person, so I wondered if you might disagree with me. I was open to hearing that you did, but I'm not surprised that you don't.

I think kids should have many, many opportunities to be active and play the kinds of games they enjoy! Just because I didn't enjoy any of them doesn't mean other kids shouldn't! But it seems that human beings have a hard time just letting kids enjoy things and we keep wanting to turn them into Serious, Important Things, which is where all the problems arise.

works very well for people who are good at the thing (whether that thing is 'being strong and physically coordinated,' 'having the kind of short-term memory that makes regurgitating facts in standardised tests easy,' or 'sitting still and focusing when surrounded by lots of distractions'), and is appallingly damaging for those who are not good at the thing

Yes indeed! I'm terrible at the first things, very good at the other two, and I know how different everyone's experience is based on which of those you're good at and which you're not.

Thank you for sharing about Australian sports culture. That's really super interesting. I'm glad it's less monetized/connected to education, but I'd probably have an even harder time there since I am the opposite of enthusiastic about sports.

Trying to achieve things, or being proud of achievements is considered arrogant, unless those things are sports-related.

Well that's a hangover from your British past, I guess! That's such a weird pov to me and very unlike the US one. People brag about how hard they work all the time.

I'm curious--have you watched Athlete A? I just wondered how it might read from the pov of someone in the gymnastics world, even if you were on a different continent.

[theseatheseatheopensea]

I like to watch sports--I'm not a fan, but I do follow some futbol teams and usually watch the weekly matches, as well as the national team whenever it plays, the world cup, etc... but I am exactly like you when it comes to competition. I don't have a single competitive bone in my body, and really don't like that about sports. And I also don't like that it's such a lucrative thing for so many people, while many others are exploited by it. So it's a rather complex thing, and the human side of sports is really interesting--I'm glad to know that there are documentaries about this kind of thing.

As for the narrative in sports, I found that interesting to think about. I think they do have a sort of ephemeral narrative, for example, the one constructed by the commentators as a match is happening, and then the one you get when it's over, when it's discussed by pundits/newspapers/etc. And both can be wildly different!

I had no interest in anything but Space Jam and its soundtrack at the time, but it's interesting revisiting that era.

This is the most 90s sentence *ever*, and I love it so much! :D

[lirazel]

I think they do have a sort of ephemeral narrative, for example, the one constructed by the commentators as a match is happening, and then the one you get when it's over, when it's discussed by pundits/newspapers/etc. And both can be wildly different!

Yes, in theory I think it's interesting that the commentators are constructing a narrative on the fly, but in practice it just doesn't draw me in. Plus, often the narrative is just, "Who is winning?" which: boring!


This is the most 90s sentence *ever*, and I love it so much! :D

The film came out when I was in elementary school and the soundtrack was EVERYWHERE ALL THE TIME.

[seekingferret]

Okay, I freaked out for a minute about memories of the passage of time, but no, the Palace brawl was in 2004, not 2012. It was a HUGE DEAL at the time, I can still picture tabloid covers about it in my head.

[lirazel]

Woops! I wonder where I got 2012 from????

I find it really odd that I have zero memory of this cultural moment. Despite not following sports, I do most of the time notice when something Culturally Big happens.

[seekingferret]

Dunno, there's plenty of news things I miss for all sorts of reasons. I'm sort of the opposite of you, though, in that I like watching sports and I follow sports news but I don't watch sports documentaries too often largely because I feel like too often when it's about an event/team I already knew about there isn't enough new stuff to be interesting. The exception is when it's about a sports thing I previously knew nothing about.


Also, I don't know, as the captain of my college ultimate frisbee team I managed to participate in organized college athletics without it at all distorting my life in negative ways. We practiced twice a week for a couple hours, if someone had an exam the next day or whatever they skipped practice with no consequences, then every month or two we'd drive out to a tournament somewhere for a weekend and have fun losing to teams that took it a lot more seriously than we did. Clearly people in sports let the competitiveness get to them and do terrible things, but, like, I guess I just feel like people ought to be able to figure out how to find a balance that works at whatever level they're at.

[lirazel]

Oh, I'm totally fine with intramural sports. (I guess I shouldn't have said "totally disconnected" from education.) I just meant in the intercollegiate/inter-high school way that absolutely dominates many schools. I think it's terrible for education.

[lokifan]

This kind of thing is why I like Fred Clark. He's EXTREMELY critical of white evangelism, but as an evangelical himself, not dismissive of evangelicals trying to improve things (though he is sometimes like, weary in a 'good luck to ya but I've seen how this goes' way). As a British atheist he's helped me understand a lot!

I LOVE Helen Anne Petersen <3 LOL I was gonna recommend her as well until I got to the paragraph where you mentioned that piece! And I think she did an interview about what Christianity Today left out of that podcast, too.

[lirazel]

Yeah, Fred has been so important in my development as a person. I don't think that my journey out of evangelicalism would have been nearly as smooth as it was without him. He taught me that I can appreciate the things about my tradition that were good while firmly turning my back on the bad. And his readership are like the only people who don't have experience in evangelical circles that I really trust to talk intelligently about evangelicals because I know he's given them a thorough education!

Yeah, HEP's pretty great. I've been following her stuff since her Scandals of Classic Hollywood days!

[lokifan]

I don't think that my journey out of evangelicalism would have been nearly as smooth as it was without him. He taught me that I can appreciate the things about my tradition that were good while firmly turning my back on the bad

That makes a lot of sense <3

Oh man, I read some of those Scandals pieces but I didn't know that was her!