The Culture of Sport, Bodies of Desire, and the Body of Christ

ABSTRACT

The culture of sport plays a persuasive role in the shaping of cultural conceptions of identity, the body, and what constitutes being human. The author gives a cultural exegesis of sport to highlight its authoritative influence on societal ideation about the body, and how society views, values, and valorizes ability as a dominant attribute of what constitutes being human in particular. Running in the foreground of this article is a theological critique of the ways in which the dominant portrayal of the body within sport is marked with homogeneous proportions of ableist expression, representing the able body as ideal and normal; a representation that is at odds with the place of other bodies that constitute the body of Christ, the church. Central to these aims is the hope that bringing to light ableist visions of human flourishing implicit in and enforced through the cult of sport can both foil any further cultural conversion of Christians to its spirit and power and provide a lens by which Christians can distinguish “the uniqueness which ought to be the expression of their faith” (J. Ellul, 2012, p. 28).

KEYWORDS:

• body of Christ
• disability
• para-able
• sport
• vulnerability