Hugh McLeod, Religion and the Rise of Sport in England

Excerpt

Hugh McLeod’s new book examines the relationship between religion and sport in England from the late eighteenth century to the present. It begins with an English ancien régime based on the Church and the gentry whose joint involvement in a calendar of field sports and parish festivals brought them together on high days and holidays. Sometimes they overlapped. Half church parson, half hard-riding squire, the “Squarson” was a familiar figure, but the gradual rise of an Evangelical movement in Great Britain and its North American colonies changed this relationship. As opposed to sport as they were opposed to everything else that stood in God’s way, Evangelicals were united in their disgust at a gentlemanly sporting elite who gambled and frolicked, and a lumpen peasantry who did the same. These deplorables used to stand for old Tory England and an Evangelical alliance of Anglicans, Methodists, Baptists, Unitarians, Teetotallers, Abolitionists, Sabbatarians, home missionaries, foreign missionaries, school-masters, Bible-bashers, the self-righteous, and the very posh members of the new Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals now made it their mission to save them, and their country, from themselves. …