Amanda Smith: Today, sport and religion - merging the physical with the spiritual. Hi, I'm Amanda Smith, and for Easter on The Sports Factor, we're considering the Christian message through sport.

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Michael Chang: And last and most importantly, I'd just like to thank the Lord Jesus because without him I wouldn't have the talent to play and it's to him I give the glory. Thanks a lot, take care.

Garry Ablett: I'd just like to congratulate Hawthorn and I'd like to thank the Geelong Football Club, and I'd just like to thank God for making it all possible. Thank you.

APPLAUSE

Amanda Smith: Born-again Aussie Rules footballer Garry Ablett, and before that the tennis player Michael Chang, both proclaiming a higher authority to their sports success.

And later in the program, we're returning to the subject of 'muscular Christianity' - we've talked about this before on the program a long time ago, but because it's been an important ideology in sport, it's worth revisiting today I think.

And in particular today, we're concentrating on the "F"-words - Faith and Football. This week being not only Holy Week, but also the opening round of the Australian Football League season. And I'll be speaking with Peter Hollingworth, Archbishop of Brisbane and the number one ticket-holder for the Brisbane Lions Football Club.

But first, a couple of footballers, in the AFL and in that other creed, rugby league. Brad Mackay plays with the Illawarra Steelers in the Australian Rugby League. But it was while he was playing with St George a few years back that Brad became what he calls a 'real Christian'. He got into an argument with someone about creation and evolution that ended up with Brad feeling like he had no idea what he was talking about. Well like many sports leagues and clubs these days, St George has a team chaplain who Brad Mackay went to for guidance.

Brad Mackay: So I rang up the St George chaplain at the time and arranged a meeting. From that meeting onwards you know, I went to him with a lot of questions and with a keen ear to listen, and you know, one meeting turned into two and three and four meetings, and from that time on I was very interested in the Christian faith, and that's how it basically started.

Amanda Smith: So how did you feel about telling your team-mates that you'd found God. Did you or do you get razzed?

Brad Mackay: In a good sense I get razzed. I mean everybody gets razzed about anything that you could possibly do or say, I mean that's how nicknames start in clubs, and it's quite affectionate most of the time. But it was very hard I guess telling players, and also family and friends. But those are the changes that you face in life and you know, everybody took it quite well.

Amanda Smith: Well you, like other Christian athletes, have taken the opportunity when receiving an award for your sport to publicly acknowledge the role of God and Jesus Christ in your life, and in your sports success. Why that need to publicly acknowledge that?

Brad Mackay: Well we believe that it's a God-given ability and a God-given talent that we've got, and you know, if you receive an award for doing something that's good, we should give thanks for the reason why you've done that. And to give thanks to God is a good witness for other Christians or other people that are considering believing in God. So to give thanks is very important.

Amanda Smith: Well tell me about the time you had the opportunity to do that, because it's quite an interesting story.

Brad Mackay: Yes. Well you know, I certainly never prayed to God that he would make me a movie star or the best rugby league player of all time, but before leading into the Grand Final I sort of thought, well, God, if you give me the Man of the Match I'm going to stand up in front of everybody and thank you. Anyway it would have been a very difficult task to do, and it's very hard to pronounce your Christianity to everybody that's watching television. But after the game had finished and we recognised that we'd lost the Grand Final, I sort of thought to myself, Oh, well, you know, I don't have to give thanks to God now, I don't have to go through that. But anyway, one of the officials came over to me after the game and started whispering to me, 'You'd better come across to the podium; we've got a surprise for you.' So I walked over there, and as they were announcing the Man of the television. But after the game had finished and we recognised that we'd lost the Grand Final, I sort of thought to myself, Oh, well, you know, I don't have to give thanks to God now, I don't have to go through that. But anyway, one of the officials came over to me after the game and started whispering to me, 'You'd better come across to the podium; we've got a surprise for you.' So I walked over there, and as they were announcing the Man of the Match Award, I heard it was my name. So there I was stuck, I'd made a promise. So I got up there and right at the end of the speech I thanked God for giving me the talents to do that.

Amanda Smith: You say that football is your witness. What do you mean by that?

Brad Mackay: Well it says in the Bible that once you become a Christian you've got to go and you've got to try to tell people about the word of God, and you've got to try to express this so they at least get an opportunity to hear it. And I'm not a very good sales rep. I tried sales repping once, and I was atrocious. I used to go and try and hide more than anything, and I find that if I play football and if I play it well and if I play it clean and I play it very hard, well that's the best witness that I can give to God and to anybody.

Amanda Smith: Now you're involved in a sport that's seen tremendous upheavals over the last year or so, with the Super League business. Has the moral or ethical framework of your Christianity influenced the way you felt about that whole Rugby League/Super League battle?

Brad Mackay: I guess it did a bit. Because I'm a person (even before I was a Christian), a person that believed that a contract was a contract, or your word was your word, or a handshake was a handshake. And for some people they just basically signed another contract on top of a contract that they already had - because there were some very influential people at the time telling all the players, "No, no, we can get you out of this contract: it's not binding, we're going to buy out the club". And the actual club that I was with was going to cease being an ARL Club and change over to being a Super League club. So there were always ways to morally make out to yourself that it wasn't bad to do that. But I thought...I saw that as being as something of a wrong.

Amanda Smith: Rugby league player, Brad Mackay.

Music: ST. MATTHEW PASSION

Reverend Peter Nelson : I take a view that sport, at its very best, is a sort of window into heaven. Now I know that you can bring up all sorts of situations where this might not be the case, but I think sport at its very best suggests creativity, a great deal of joy, a great deal of freedom, and also where people lose consciousness of time, and where they are totally involved. And in a way it's a window into heaven.

Father John Woods: And I believe that for sports people to succeed - because they will have their successes, but also their failures - they have to implicitly within them, could I say, be bearers of the Easter mystery, which is essentially about dying and rising, and believing ultimately that the rising will overcome the dying. And in their attitude if you like, I believe there's a summation of what Easter's all about.

Amanda Smith: Sports chaplains, the Reverend Peter Nelson and Father John Woods.

Now, Stephen Lawrence is another footballer who holds a strong Christian faith. So strong that a couple of years ago he was tossing up whether to become a Catholic priest. Steve chose marriage and footy instead, completing a degree in theology while playing for the Hawthorn Football Club in the AFL, as well as working with a Christian counselling service. For Steve Lawrence, it's all part of one calling.

Steve Lawrence: Well on a general level I think that a person's spiritual life, their faith, is something that if it was real and part of their life, then it's going to touch all the aspects of their life. And that in fact the call for me as a person living in the world is to, however possible, Christianise wherever I am. And so in a football club - it's not probably the usual place in terms of the traditional notion that people have of football clubs - so in a way it's a bit unusual, and it is a challenge because of the nature of a football club.

Amanda Smith: Yes, well I wanted to ask you, you know, how easily you then fit into an AFL club? And are there things about the club culture that don't work for you, that you in fact find repellent?

Steve Lawrence: I think it's difficult for most young guys coming to a football club, especially at Hawthorn. At that time when I first came down, Hawthorn had just won a premiership in '86 and all of a sudden rubbing shoulders with the likes of Brereton and Dipierdomenico and so on, and I was pretty overawed by that as a 17-year-old kid from Brisbane. And I, like everyone, probably wanted to just to fit in, and I didn't go about advertising about my faith and so on, because I probably had an overly defensive notion as well that I might be persecuted or something. But it's become evident. All the guys down at the club know that I'm a Christian, and that I have particular values. And so at times, it can be quite interesting, particularly in certain areas that get discussed, especially with my work. I work in the area of sexuality and relationships education, from a value base - obviously a very broad field - but in essence it's the chastity message that where I work we promote when we go into schools. And obviously that's not only a counter-culture in the football club, but quite counter-cultural in our culture. But particularly in a football club, where sex has a big place in a lot of the locker-room talk. There can be a few funny moments, and at times I'm made to feel like a prude or something - 'Oh, don't say that because Stevie's there' or something like that, as if - I don't know what, I mean I'm married and have two kids, but sometimes there's a bit of fun that goes on. But at times I'd like to perhaps fit in more in some of that kind of locker-room banter, it's good to be part of the guys. But in that area I find that I really can't, or that I'm not willing to just because it would be a compromise really.

Amanda Smith: Is playing football a religious experience in itself for you, in the sense of the struggle, also the ritual, and the possibility of fall and redemption?

Steve Lawrence: Well if you want to take the cycle like that, it probably is, you can see the analogy anyway. Like I see that my playing football is part of my way of serving God. Like I pray about my football and put it in God's hands and pray that I'm going to play well. And in terms of the death and resurrection notion, right on Easter, there is that sort of thing, because when you go through a failure you can hit rock bottom and think 'Well it doesn't seem like there's any more. It doesn't seem like this is working out very well'. It's like any sort of experience in life where you hit rock bottom, it can often be a catalyst to going in the right direction or picking yourself up, and so in football it's been like that a little bit for me. Obviously at the end of - what season was it? '89 - I was really in that position where I was really on the brink and I needed to crack it into the seniors and I was criticised by a number of - oh well, I was told really 'You've got to get going' and so I put in a really big pre-season and the following year I played virtually all the senior games, and then the season after that was the premiership.

Amanda Smith: Well Steve, one of the central tenets to Christian faith is the whole thing of Jesus turning the other cheek, that is, copping abuse but not giving it. How do you reconcile that within the cut and thrust of Aussie Rules?

Steve Lawrence: That's a good question, because that's one I've really struggled with a lot, not only because of my faith but also because of my nature. My nature is not really overly aggressive or anything like that, I've got a more gentle or peaceful nature. You know I probably also just never wanted to get involved in any fights and all that sort of stuff. I don't necessarily agree that it's just copping abuse and not giving it. Obviously not giving it is part of it, but I don't think turning the other cheek means just be like a doormat. There are times in the New Testament where Jesus is shown to be extremely tough and uncompromising, and I can see the value of that, and it's taken me a long time to see the value of that. I feel that in football for example, and I'm coming more and more to this, and I'm working on becoming a more tough player. Obviously not going round sniping at players, but a harder player, and uncompromising in the way I approach the ball. Because of the nature of the game, which is a physical contact game, I mean you'd be stupid to think just because you happen to be Christian or have a gentle nature that you're somehow exempt from the laws of the game.

Amanda Smith: Stephen Lawrence, player with the Hawthorn Football Club.

Someone who also acknowledges the connections between football and faith is Peter Hollingworth, the Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane. Originally from Melbourne, Archbishop Hollingworth is now a part of the great Aussie Rules diaspora. And one of the ways he spreads the word is as the Number One ticket holder, and spiritual leader, of the Brisbane Lions' AFL team. How Archbishop Hollingworth got the gig with the Lions (formerly the Brisbane Bears) could be interpreted as a case of divine intervention.

Peter Hollingworth: Well that's an interesting story. At that stage they were on the bottom of the ladder. And they were playing at Carrara and a friend of mine, Professor Ross Fitzgerald, said to me, 'Would you like to come down and see a footie game?' And I said, 'I'd love to'. And what do you know, the Brisbane Bears (as they then were) actually won. And they asked me a second time, and they won again. So the next thing that happened is they said, 'How about becoming the Number One ticket holder?' And I did.

Amanda Smith: Well I must say I've seen some marvellous photos of you, Archbishop, with your Brisbane footie scarf draped over the pulpit, or the same scarf around your shoulders and framing your shining silver cross - the twin icons of the AFL logo and the episcopal cross, maybe. For you, is there a spiritual or a transcendental quality in football?

Peter Hollingworth: Leaving aside all the shyacking and the jokes, and of course there's lots and lots of that - you arrive at the footy ground and they say 'You got the telephone going, Archbishop? Are you in tune with him?'. And we joke about all that, but in actual fact, underneath it all, I think there is, or there can be. It's really a question like in all these things, an attitude of mind, and if people like to think about how religion relates to life or sport, there's an answer there if you want to find out.

Amanda Smith: Well I was interested to see an ad. in the Melbourne Age newspaper last Saturday that appeared not only on the sports pages, but also in the arts pages, in the literary section, and the ad. said in big bold type: We're giving away free Bibles on Sunday. And underneath that in much smaller type, it said: Get your Free Football Magazine in the Sunday Age. Now in a culture that portrays football as a religion, are there useful parallels that might be drawn between footy and religious faith?

Peter Hollingworth: Actually Elle McFeast asked me that question on the Gabba one night, when she was doing a whole thing on the footy game for ABC Television. And I said to her that I thought there were very real connections, and in fact the language is very similar. Words like 'dedication', 'commitment', 'team spirit' and all that sort of thing. And if there's a common language underneath all that, clearly there are some connections.

Amanda Smith: Well do sports people embody a Christian message - and I'm thinking about that comment made by Father John Woods, who's the chaplain of the Canberra Raiders Rugby League club - now I know he's a different denomination from you in both senses of the word - Catholic and rugby league -

Peter Hollingworth: Different religion too, isn't it?

Amanda Smith: But he made the comment that sports people are implicit bearers of the Easter mystery of dying and rising. Does that hold anything for you?

Peter Hollingworth: Absolutely. I think that if you can unpackage that statement, it carries a huge meaning. And I think that's what happens just about every time a player goes onto the football field or any other sporting field, where you have to give yourself totally to the cause, to the game, to your fellow players, and to empty yourself until you've got nothing left. And anyone who's played sport like that, knows that there's always something that happens to them, that gives them that extra transcending something to enable them to do better than they ever could have dreamt of. And that is like death and resurrection.

Amanda Smith: For spectators, Archbishop, is there in any way, a kind of existential element of football that can really be a sort of substitute religion?

Peter Hollingworth: John Northy, our coach, says 'You know, the crowds are just as important as the players. It's a total event'. And I think that's right. If you go back to the thing in the Letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament: 'seeing that we are comforted about with so great a crowd of witnesses'. And this is the whole idea of the sports field, and I suppose there's an analogy there about what happens in the end in the heavenly places - the great crowd of witnesses, who make up the heavenly host. I'm not suggesting for a minute that a contemporary AFL football crowd is anything like the heavenly host, but the witnesses are there, and they are participants. And they generate something of the chemistry and the excitement in the shouting and the barracking.

Amanda Smith: Well Australia is often claimed to be the most secular society in the world - since European settlement through to the present day - which might leave a spiritual vacuum that's met by sport, especially the big football codes. But what's your view on sport, on football, standing in as a civil religion, or as a folk religion?

Peter Hollingworth: I haven't quite worked that one out yet, Amanda. I think what you say is true, that there's been right from the beginning, a deep sense of cynicism about many aspects of organised religion, and I think it goes right back to the earliest days of settlement when people came here determined to break the nexus with the Old World and to build something new for themselves. That's one of the things about Australian Rules: they didn't take the old code or the old game from the Old World, they developed something new. And it does have some religious elements, and chemistry in it, there's no doubt about it. I wouldn't say that for example AFL or any other sport is a religion, but I would say that it does have some religious elements, and I think one of the challenges for the churches today is to find the words and the experiences whereby we can help people use what they love and enjoy and are familiar with, and help them to understand some of the deeper existential meanings behind it.

Amanda Smith: So does your association with the Brisbane Lions help you as Archbishop connect better with people?

Peter Hollingworth: Oh look, undoubtedly. That's the really great pleasure. To be able to be with ordinary people in crowd situations, barracking with them, alongside them, is something that you don't often get a chance to do. I think you need to be with people, and you need to be right across all the spectrums of faith and denomination. And when we're all there together, we're just all humans being barracking for the one cause. I always make a point of wearing my Archbishop's shirt, because I think it's important to be identified. The great thing is of course, it matches the Brisbane Lions' colours, which pleases me.

Amanda Smith: So football in a sense gives you street cred?

Peter Hollingworth: Well, yes - street cred. Well maybe it does. That's not why I do it, but if that happens well I think it's helpful because I think that we've got a lot of work to do in breaking down some of these negative images about the clergy as being wowsers and unconnected. I don't think it's true, but if people feel that, well I think we've got to demonstrate that that's not the case.

Amanda Smith: Archbishop Peter Hollingworth.

Now in 1857, Thomas Hughes' novel 'Tom Brown's Schooldays' was published. It's the story of life in the English boarding school of Rugby, where Thomas Arnold was the headmaster. Dr Arnold was an early exponent of the educational and religious philosophy known as 'muscular Christianity', which had a fair bit to do with the rise of organised sport in 19th century England. And it was of course, at Rugby School that the football game of the same name was born.

Reader: Tom's heart beat quick as they passed the great school field with its noble elms, in which several games of football were going on. And he began already to be proud of being a Rugby boy.

Amanda Smith: So just what is this thing known as 'muscular Christianity'? To explain, here's Timothy Chandler, one of the editors of a book called 'Making Men - Rugby and Masculine Identity'.

Timothy Chandler: Well it's a very complex notion which covers a vast array of ideas and ideals that were sponsored in Victorian England. The term itself was coined by an anonymous reviewer in the Saturday Review (one of those many periodicals published by the Victorians) in 1857, in a review of a book by Charles Kingsley called 'Two Years Ago'. And Kingsley was really the great exponent of 'muscular Christianity' - which was in many ways the ability to walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours while fearing God. And it was a movement that Kingsley and others fostered, which was an attempt to marry the two elements that E.M.Forster and others have since referred to as 'the beast and the monk'. The other elements might include chivalry, and other elements that were also in the novels of people like Sir Walter Scott, were also re-emerging in Victorian England.

Amanda Smith: Where did it come from, or in what way was this notion of muscular Christianity expounded?

Timothy Chandler: It was really - besides the novels of people like Kingsley, who were attempting to promote a hardiness, a manliness, amongst English youth - in some ways in contradistinction to what was seen as the effeminacy of the religious push in the Oxford movement and other things of the time. It was developed also of course around the redevelopment of the English public schools, and the enormous push towards organised games and sports that became such a big part of 19th century English upper middle-class education. So schools like Eton and Rugby, Winchester, Harrow, all developed organised games at this time and muscular Christianity became the ideology that underpinned the use of sports and games as educational tools.

Amanda Smith: Now I just want to return to the Christian part of muscular Christianity, Tim. The body is obviously central to all this, but for Christians the flesh is also weak. Was this movement an attempt to transform the body in a way from flesh to muscle?

Timothy Chandler: That's an interesting way of putting it. There's certainly the notion that the sins of the flesh are something to be avoided. And one of the ways in which you do that is to toughen the flesh to make it less weak. But also to exhaust individuals by having them play these physical activities in long and sturdy manner, so that they don't have the energy to get up to other more vice-like activities. And the kind of dichotomy is well portrayed in Hughes' 'Tom Brown's Schooldays' - with Flashman as the archetypical vicious individual, and Tom Brown obviously on the other side as the archetypical, upright, moral English Christian gentleman.

FX: Match in progress.

Reader: "Our ball!" says the praepostor rising with his prize; "but get up there, there's a little fellow under you!" They are hauled and rolled off him, and Tom is discovered, a motionless body. Old Brooke picks him up. "Stand back, give him air" he says; and then feeling his limbs, adds, "No bones broken. How do you feel, young 'un?" "Pretty well, thank you," gasps Tom, as his wind comes back. "Who is he?" says Brooke. "It's Brown, he's a new boy," says East, limping up. "Well he's a plucky youngster, and will make a player," says Brook. And five o'clock strikes. "No side!" is called, and the first day of the School-house match is over.

Amanda Smith: I'm speaking with Tim Chandler, who's Associate Professor in the School of Exercise, Leisure and Sport at Kent State University in Ohio. So, in talking about muscular Christianity, what problem was this fusion of physical with spiritual strength, trying to solve?

Tim Chandler: The mind/body dichotomy that was still very much part of 19th century thinking, (as some would argue still part of 20th century thinking,) was something that the Christians didn't know really how to deal with, I don't think. And one of the ways that they found of trying to unite these two was through physical activity and organised games, whereby you were seen to do good deeds on the games field, by being courageous and worrying more about your team than about yourself. So I think the element was there. Whether they really knew how to address that kind of dichotomy is unclear, but certainly in trying to overcome the sins of the flesh and promote the goodness of the soul in life's race (and its terms like 'life's race', the sporting connotation is very common in the literature of the time) suggests that it was seen as a kind of battlefield for the will as well as a games field to be played on.

Amanda Smith: Now "Tom Brown's Schooldays", Thomas Hughes' novel, you mention, and also you've mentioned Charles Kingsley - the other major work that was published around that time was Charles Darwin: "Origin of the Species", that was published in I think the same decade as "Tom Brown's Schooldays". Is that significant? Was that influential amongst the muscular Christianity movement?

Timothy Chandler: Very much so. Obviously Darwinism, and particularly social Darwinism, where the notion of the survival of the fittest and the need to be strong in order to display that fitness, were used also as part of the ideology to underpin what became something more than muscular Christianity. It almost became muscular chivalry, as the Christian element became less important in the 1870s and the 1880s. And Darwinism, in undermining Christianity and looking at evolution in rather different ways from the Biblical connotation, obviously helped reduce the Christian element of muscular Christianity and play up the manly, strength, fitness element of it. Yes, it was a very important and very significant piece of work, obviously, and in some ways continues to influence our views of fitness.

HYMN: I Vow To Thee My Country

Reader: And so was brought home to Tom for the first time, the meaning of his life. That it was no fools' or sluggards' paradise into which he had wandered by chance, but a battlefield ordained from of old where there are no spectators, but the youngest must take his side and the stakes are life and death.

HYMN: I Vow To Thee My Country

Amanda Smith: Stirs the heart, huh? And that was Rowan Atkinson with readings from "Tom Brown's Schooldays". Before that, I was speaking with Timothy Chandler from Kent State University in Ohio.

And that's The Sports Factor, Easter edition. Do join me, Amanda Smith again next Friday. Until then, cheers.

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The Sports Factor can be heard on Radio National, 8.30am Fridays (Repeated Friday evenings at 8.00pm).