Great article taking on women’s basketball, of all things, but bigger than that.
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Esolen:
It is to build up again what has been demolished. We may as well start in one area as in another—in the arts as in education, in sport as in our modes of prayer, in what we read as in how we order the hours of the day. But we must start.
Yes, and if we relax our fixation on enforced political quickies, we may give adequate time to building a culture in our own hearts, our homes, and our churches. That’s the path to building the culture. The results of that effort, if blessed and protected by God, would undoubtedly spill out into other realms, even our governance.
So, steady as she goes.
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Anothony Esolen is one of the best modern thinkers of our day. His books have been a huge blessing to me.
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Welcome to Sanityville.
Did you have any thoughts on this particular article? Anything that stood out to you? I’d love to discuss the article further, though I didn’t say much in my initial post.
Almost think that’s the key right there. Movement, but stability. Those two factors keep us on track. Too many of us are tempted to give up and retreat into passivity. It’s just too hard. Whereas those of us with ambition and energy are either immature or without needed principles. We must change it all, now!
The best lack all conviction
while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
Growth, but with temperance. ‘Steady as she goes’ indeed.
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Great article. I admire Esolen’s courage in writing it. I can’t remember ever reading such things in a conservative or social conservative publication. Everyone seems to want to protect girls sports from trans athletes, rather than asking if certain women’s sports are appropriate. I am grateful for President Trump’s executive order on women’s sports, but Esolen shows a more perfect way to go forward.
I shared this article with friends I expected to oppose it. No one has yet said a critical word. I think they must have been too busy, or just decided to stay quiet for other reasons.
The only other people I’ve seen be willing to criticize the premise of women’s basketball publicly are standup comedians: Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr and Norm Macdonald, among others. Standup gives the speaker plausible deniability that they don’t really mean to speak truth; they only wanted the laugh. Yet, it’s often a covert way many of us get at some truth.
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Okay @jtbayly, what do we do with this article? Where do we go from here? How does this help us positively? How does this help us begin to build something better?
I don’t disagree with the article, and I have found Esolen helpful in the past as well, but can we recognise that to those around us - in the world and in the church - he sounds mean and condescending. I don’t disagree with his analysis of basketball or the pathologies that have produced it. But how does this help us make something better ourselves?
And how does this article help us give something better to our daughters? What should we instead say yes to rather than Esolen’s no? What feminine alternatives are there to basketball? Is all sport then off-limits for the reason women’s basketball is critiqued? What can we train our daughters in, or are their instruction and proficiency limited to cooking, cleaning, and the production/rearing of children?
Granted, our larger Reformedish/evangelical Christian world loves to deride the scriptures which emphasise women’s responsibilities for hospitality and bearing children, but do we think those are women’s only responsibilities (I know you don’t @jtbayly, but might others here?)? How do we fight the temptation in our own hearts (let’s be honest now, men) to use Christian femininity as an excuse to shape our wives into creatures largely intended for our ease and enjoyment?
And there’s an apologetic component we have to consider as well. How does Esolen help us reach Bedford? How does Esolen help us reach a young couple from a trailer park? How does Esolen help us reach a single mother in section 8 housing? How does Esolen help us with the exhausted wife of multiple children who is starting to wonder how Reformed femininity differs all that much from an ISIS war bride?
Esolen is important, but we need more than this. How does this help us reach ordinary men and women and boys and girls in a world which looks nothing like Esolen’s portrait of the ideal? I already resent modern Christianity for getting rid of the monasteries. A quiet cell with the scriptures sounds like a piece of paradise (minus the whole abstinence bit). I’d so love to retreat to my study with my books and my principles and my lofty ideals and the absence of messy and ordinary sheep. But back on planet earth how do I help ordinary people make sense of the sexual confusion of our day without losing people who don’t have a Scooby what to make of something like Esolen’s piece?
I guess I’m asking, what do I do with this article? Women’s basketball isn’t going anywhere regardless of what I think of it. And even if I’m fully persuaded of his argument, is fighting women’s basketball going to help me love my wife and raise my daughters here and now, in this present world? Do I need to feel guilty if my daughters want to pick up a basketball or play an organised sport? If so what should I give them instead?
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I was thinking of many of those questions as well. I was left wondering if Esolen was actually wanting to say that all sports are off-limits to women.
I don’t think we must go as far as to say all women’s sports are bad. Rather, women’s sports are bad to the extent that they discourage and destroy godly femininity. In other words, there is a kind of women’s sports involvement which is bad.
Later this month, our church will have our annual kickball tournament (following the annual ice cream and pancake breakfast). Boys and girls and men and women of all age groups participate. We divide into four teams, each led by a father. Each team ends up with a comical mix of little kids, teenagers, mothers and fathers. Our pastor acts as the all-time pitcher and umpire.
As you can imagine, play is dominated by the young men and fathers. And we apply special rules for the girls and women. You are not allowed to throw the ball at females to get them out; they must be tagged with the ball. At the same time, young boys and women are allowed to run shorter bases (so we actually have two sets of bases). Of course, some of our women are fairly athletic, which introduces certain advantages for scoring, which plays into batting order strategy.
This ruleset ends up making for quite a good time. Everyone gets to participate, and it gets quite competitive. And somehow, at the same time, both masculinity and femininity are simultaneously promoted – and it’s in the context of a sport.
All this to say, there is sports, and then there is sports. Our women can be feminine without being dainty. I get the impression (though I haven’t studied it) that women’s sports in past generations understood this. It was the sexual revolution which precipitated women’s sports being made into a “I am woman hear me roar” affair.
When sports entice a woman to suppress femininity (e.g. her God-given cycle, and a quiet and gentle spirit) in order to compete, we have sinned.
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Haven’t read the article, so answering for myself. Basketball is a contact sport, and regularly bloody. So no, I can’t imagine why any Christian father would want his daughter learning, for instance, to post up. It’s not quite as bad as punching, but if you watch basketball, it’s a form of physical combat. We should be principled in the distinctions we make in our children’s work and entertainment (which is what sports are).
What we have to get behind us is our constant feeling that we must be vigilant to prove to everyone how not “sexist” we are. To start there is to fail before trying.
What is needed today is the recovery of sex-specificity—not the shaming or condemning of it. The man who thinks about God’s gift of male (responsibility) and female (lifegiving) should be able to lead his wife and daughters and sons toward greater understanding and love of their bodies/themselves through the sort of work and entertainment they choose. Love,
PS: Might also mention that playing basketball in the driveway or a pickup game or junior high school is a far cry from high school basketball (which I would object to, and forbid my daughter doing), and high school basketball a completely other world from college ball (which I would never ever allow even though she was now out of our home).
We’ve had an IU basketball starter in our congregation and her father was a homeschooling dad who was whole-hog in favor of his daughter posting up with the best of them, so I didn’t think I should contravene him by telling her he was wrong. He and his wife and family would visit the church, and there were larger fish to fry with that family than their daughter playing college basketball.
Still, I did talk and warn the daughter against all the lesbians she spent her life with, both at practice and games here in Bloomington as well as travelling and sharing rooms for road games. It was not the ideology of lesbianism I warned her against, but the sin itself. And not because she was so inclined. She wasn’t, but she was of course as vulnerable as all our children are to Vanity Fair.
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I think this is key for me—If nobody really much cares about the outcome of the game, it’s more of a game than a sport, and those can be healthy diversions for girls. Once sports start to get “competitive” (and that may have different definitions by the girl, but certainly applies by the time adjectives like “college” and “traveling” start showing up), you’re almost certainly into unhealthy territory.
To the point of the article, I think it’s remarkable that observations as obvious as, “competitive sports do girls and women no good and much harm” is a controversial opinion. Organized sports are obviously a stand-in for war, and having women participate is silly at best. And when you look at the numbers of women who have ruined their bodies in competitive sports, one is left with a great puzzlement that things have been allowed to proceed this far.
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