The Problem of Pleasure: Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion (review)

Dominic Erdozain has an important and fascinating story to tell and he tells it with real verve in The Problem of Pleasure: Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion. This story is an account of how British evangelical thought shifted from one untenable position, that recreation was inherently sinful, to another, that recreation was inherently spiritual. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries evangelical disapproval of worldly amusements amounted to a near-total ban on recreation, including sport. As Erdozain wryly observes, conforming to the obsession with prohibition even when trying not to, "only two of the forty-six pages" of George Burder's Lawful Amusements (1805) "discussed what might actually be 'lawful'" (72). Such a stance made evangelicalism repugnant to many outsiders and as the century advanced, its own adherents began to concede that they had condemned what the Almighty permitted.

Soon sport began to be positively commended as character-building and therefore an ideal, indeed almost automatic and inevitable, path to Christian spiritual formation. The new emphasis on the virtues of athletic games at public schools "located the concept of grace in the fickle soil of schoolboy pride" (111). Erdozain documents this sleight of hand—what he delightfully dubs "redemption-by-recreation" and " justification by manliness alone" (39, 38)—with devastating thoroughness. The most extreme examples are so over the top as to defy effective caricature. With the fictional Reverend Septimus Crisparkle, Charles Dickens mocked the association of sport with spiritual formation by mischievously describing how a "soft-hearted benevolence beamed from his boxing-gloves" (qtd. in Erdozain 155). This is easily topped, however, by the real-life reverend and missionary, C. E. Tyndale-Biscoe, who proudly boasted that when Indian men came to him and expressed interest in becoming Christian he refused to lead them to Christ until he had first tested their suitability by having them undergo "a boxing match with my gardener" (251). Given such a rite of Christian initiation, Erdozain's language of sport as sacrament does not seem overblown.

The primary case study is the secularization of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). Its original work was explicitly and overwhelmingly religious: "Sport was completely off the radar" (124). The latter, however, once let in, promptly started squeezing out the former. The YMCA went from reporting thousands of conversions to Christ on an annual basis to a drop-off so dramatic that officials quickly decided to save themselves further embarrassment by ceasing to record that statistic at all. Reports went from declaring the YMCA's goal for the men it serviced with the specificity of "personal union with the Lord Jesus" in 1880 to the vagueness of a desire "to enlarge the possibilities of men's lives" in 1920 (222). The churches followed suit, allowing their spiritual work to contract in favor of church-sponsored recreational activities. Here is one of many well-observed details that cumulatively make the case for this trend convincing: "The motto of the Congregationalist Guild, announced by R. F. Horton in 1890, was 'recreation, instruction, devotion'—in that order" (188). The Problem of Pleasure provocatively argues that secularization was literally church sponsored: "the process was initiated and executed by Christians themselves" (272). To the common argument that the church was made redundant because the government expanded into services it used to provide such as schooling and caring for the needy, Erdozain responds dryly: "The state did not take over prayer meetings" (200).

The Problem of Pleasure could have been improved by more attentiveness to secondary sources. Repeatedly, the reader thinks of an obvious monograph germane to a discussion and then discovers that it is not even in the bibliography. To take just two examples, Erdozain argues that conversionism is the true essence of evangelicalism without the benefit of D. Bruce Hindmarsh's The Evangelical Conversion Narrative (2005), and the theme of the churches moving from spiritual disciplines...