The “Athletics Question”: An Age-Old Dilemma with New Dimensions

Schools today often ask about the “athletics question.” What do we do if our girls’ team faces an opponent with a male athlete? But the best response requires stepping back and contextualizing this modern question within a longer history and a larger debate.

Athletics reside at the heart of American culture, and even American schools. They have for decades. But it arguably goes back even farther. From chariot races to gladiatorial games to March Madness, college portals, and Super Bowl Sunday, sports have consistently generated fame, profit, and obsessive attention throughout Western civilization.

Christian educators have long wrestled with the appropriate response. What is the rightly ordered place of sports in human life? In the formation of human persons? A paradox, perhaps unsurprisingly, characterizes the Christian ethos of athletics. On one level, Christians reduce the significance of sports. By placing them in proportion to man’s transcendent end, Christian schools temper the tendency to near-idol worship. But here comes the paradox. This proper contextualization also involves a thoughtful elevation of sports’ formative power. Christians recognize a unique capacity to help human persons attain their true end.

To succinctly summarize the wealth of Christian reflection on athletics is a herculean task. Its roots can be traced to St. Paul, including his letters to Timothy and the sports-obsessed Corinthian church. He uses athletic competition as a metaphor for the Christian life. Rather than an opportunity for self-seeking and self-glorification, sports offer athletes a mini-universe—a microcosm—of human existence. Athletes discover a land of rules, organized conflict subject to rightful authorities, and fixation on an end that orders all decisions. This demands, in the context of team sports, interdependence. It calls for virtue: courage, fortitude, patience, prudence, even temperance. Success often requires character formation, at least to some extent. The athlete can find, in the universe of play, the pathway to a life well lived. This transforms the competition into an instrument of God’s glory and a witness to the power of Christian formation, which redeems humanity from its fallen, selfish tendencies. Particularly in recent centuries, Christians have then contemplated the practical implications of this thinking in light of unique cultural contexts.

The same is true today. We now find ourselves in a new unique cultural and civilizational moment. Can a young man, who identifies as a young woman, compete in women’s sports? Conflicting answers lead to raging social divisions. The millennia-old “athletics question” now takes on a new dimension. It possesses increased social tension and, in some cases, legal consequences. The response of Christian educators no longer merely deals with the question of formation, right thinking, and the proper integration of sports into curricular goals and understanding. This is significant enough. But it also involves the potential for legal disputes.

Just ask Mid Vermont Christian School. Its high school girls’ basketball team came up against an opponent with a male athlete. The school declined to play. Mid Vermont felt that its participation would have recognized the validity of the competition, in direct contradiction to its religious beliefs. Mid Vermont believed playing would communicate acceptance of the legitimacy of the young man’s, and the opposing team’s, declaration: a biological male can become a girl and compete in an all-girls event. And this would not only communicate a contradictory message to its students and school community; it would have compromised the fairness, and safety, of the competition itself. It could not capitulate.

The state of Vermont responded by excluding the school, in its entirety, from the state athletics association. Represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, Mid Vermont challenged the state’s decision, arguing it violates the school’s First Amendment rights. The case was recently argued before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and a decision is pending. The legal analysis does involve some unique questions that may vary by jurisdiction. But the implications for the school’s religious liberty are obvious.

What can be done?

Schools can seize this unique moment as an opportunity to bear witness. This not only involves bearing witness to biological reality. It involves an artful articulation of the role of sports in human life and the mystery of human existence more broadly. This is another manifestation of the age-old “athletics question.” A school can begin to offer a response through the development of school policy.

Policy formation always involves an evangelical opportunity. We could analogize the process of policy creation to the trivium: grammar, logic, rhetoric. Schools need to first deeply understand what they believe (grammar). Then they need to consider how these foundational convictions shape all aspects of operations (logic). Finally, they need to articulate it with clarity (rhetoric).

Start with foundational documents. Schools should carefully cultivate a distinct Christian identity in their legal infrastructure. This involves a thoughtful articulation of the school’s religious purpose, mission, and convictions in governing documents. What does the school believe about God and the human person He created?

Christians reject gnostic and dualistic concepts of humanity. We do not divide the human person into separate parts. Each individual is a composite of body and soul, and both are good. Any effort to deny the unity of body and soul, suggesting distinct identities in conflict with one another, rejects the integrity of God’s intention. God did not create any individual with an inner sexual identity at odds with a biological reality. Rather, the fall produced conflict and division at every level of human life: division between man and God, man and creation, man and man, and man and himself. One’s rejection of his or her own body has these same origins. But in Christ, we discover the hope of reconciliation. He makes all things new. And He invites us to recognize the lies that wedge themselves into our existence and to follow Him on the pathway to healing. This, in many ways, is the task of education: to lead forth into the fullness of life that God intends for us to possess in Christ.

That might offer the grammar. Logic comes next. How does this theological foundation inform the purpose of athletics in Christian education? And, by extension, what is the role of single-sex competition in advancing that purpose?

Christian tradition offers no shortage of fodder for contemplation. We have already explored some of it in this short article. But just spend a few minutes researching what Pope John Paul II had to say about athletics, or even the Jesuits as they re-fashioned education in the sixteenth century. Although by no means exhaustive, we might distill these themes into a few overarching concepts: honorable rivalry, character formation, friendship, God’s glory, and public witness.

Then apply those concepts to the purpose of single-sex competition. Most immediately, consider the need for honorable rivalry. A school does not sort students into a men’s team and a women’s team because all those people happen to think the same way about themselves. That renders the distinction arbitrary. A school might as well sort people into teams based on their favorite color or flavor of ice cream. They sort them into separate teams based on a real physical distinction that preserves the integrity of the competition. This advances the purpose of fairness and, in most contexts, safety. A competition that rejects this concept, in favor of internal or personal identification, renders a primary goal of single-sex competition obscure and meaningless.

But this concept goes further. Sports teach students the significance of rules. One of the rules of single-sex competition is that it is, well, single-sex. A school’s participation in a competition that ignores this reality requires one of two things: either acknowledge the validity of a rule imposed by the association that directly contradicts both the religious convictions and actual purpose of single-sex competition, or communicate to their student body that some rules don’t matter. As stewards of a religious and educational mission, neither option is viable.

The emergence of a male victor in a female sport thwarts additional purposes of single-sex competition. In creating men’s teams and women’s teams, or having men’s competitions and women’s competitions, a school acknowledges God-ordained differences and celebrates them. God is glorified in each competition for His creativity in establishing two different physical forms of the human person. If a male body wins a female competition, this purpose and celebration is directly undermined.

The school also speaks a word to the community, its students, parents, and faculty through its athletics program. The program should bear witness to its formational mission and religious convictions. School participation arguably communicates agreement or acceptance. This, too, could result in directly undermining the program’s public testimony.

And the list could go on.

Here is the point: A school should develop clarity of vision, both theologically and practically, surrounding sports. And then it should write it down. The issue involves far more than a modern moral or political question. An athletics policy should address the sports program in its totality, including its vital relationship to the school’s educational and religious mission. It should then address the role of single-sex competition within that context, including the events in which it will or will not participate as a result.

This admittedly leaves many questions unanswered. For example, how can the school tactfully and practically implement this kind of policy? As noted, the legal analysis could vary from circumstance to circumstance, so competent legal counsel should be consulted. And the way courts will view these policies in specific contexts also remains open.

But begin here: deep thinking, prayerful reflection, and clear articulation while engaging an age-old dilemma that now surfaces with new dimensions and questions. At the very least, the school will approach this unique moment with clarity of conviction and deliberate decision-making, prepared to bear witness to a watching world.

 

Patrick Piccolo is Legal Counsel, Deputy Director of Church and Ministry Alliance at Alliance Defending Freedom