On a summer night in 1956 at a camp center in the mountains near Estes Park, Colorado, Branch Rickey took the podium. His task: to deliver an address to the 250 young men gathered for the inaugural Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) summer conference.
Well into his 70s, the aging Major League Baseball executive felt swept up in the moment. “If this group here tonight were to find themselves dedicated to a common cause,” he exclaimed, they could transform the United States “before the next generation is over.”
Rickey’s speaking role on the first night of the conference reflected his importance to the fledging FCA. Their relationship had begun in August 1954, when an unheralded 29-year-old college basketball coach named Don McClanen met with the baseball executive, sharing his vision for an organization of athletes mobilized to instill Christian values in America’s youth. “If athletes can endorse shaving cream, razor blades, and cigarettes,” McClanen reasoned, “surely they can endorse the Lord.”
When Rickey responded enthusiastically, McClanen had the final piece needed to launch his movement. The organization that became the Fellowship of Christian Athletes was born.
The significance of Rickey’s support for the FCA can hardly be exaggerated. Rickey had an elite sports pedigree. He had played in the big leagues and then carved out a long career in the front office, building championship teams with the St. Louis Cardinals and the Brooklyn Dodgers. The latter, under his direction, famously broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson.
Rickey was also a lifelong Methodist who remained committed to his faith. “I want to live the ideals of Christ every day, in business and on the athletic field,” Rickey explained. As the most prominent symbol of Christian faith in America’s most popular team sport, he was the prototype for the blend of sports and faith that the FCA sought to promote.
But the FCA provided something Rickey desired, too. In fact, a spiritual crisis in Rickey’s life the year before he first encountered McClanen had primed him to be on the lookout for something precisely like the FCA.
When McLanen came knocking on his door, Rickey saw something other than a no-name young man with big ideas and a bare resume.
He saw an answer to prayer.
Branch Rickey’s faith does not fit easily into the categories of “modernist” or “fundamentalist,” “mainline” or “evangelical.” One the one hand, he was a traditionalist who sought to follow the old-time Methodist religion passed down from his parents. Even as he made his way into professional baseball, he maintained his commitment to Sabbath observance, staying away from the ballpark on Sunday.
But he also supported ecumenical Protestant efforts to move beyond dogma and to find common ground on shared social issues. He read William James, the liberal philosopher of religion who located its power in the realm of personal experience. The church, Rickey believed, needed to help people see Jesus as a “live, dynamic force, willing to be put to the practical field test.”
The through line for Rickey’s faith, in both its traditional and modern forms, was that it needed to reach the individual person. In this way, his religious views were deeply tied to his view of America. He believed the country’s genius lay in the pioneering spirit of “rugged individualism.” By the 1920s, this led him to a growing concern with the influence of communism and socialism; collectivist systems, he believed, undermined the individual initiative that was necessary for the country to thrive.
Rickey’s suspicion of communism was heightened in the early years of the Cold War and the hysteria of the Red Scare. The entire country seemed to be on guard against the supposed threat of communism. In the minds of many Americans, it was lurking everywhere from the movie screen to the classroom—and, some believed, in the church as well.
In 1953, Rickey expressed his concerns to a Methodist official, asking about “the apparent socialistic tendencies” of some Methodist ministers and “the obvious identification of some of our theological professors with Socialism.”
Throughout 1953, Rickey’s worries about communist sympathizers within Methodism festered. Then, in November, Rickey’s faith received a shock. During lunch with his pastor, Robert Howe, and a Methodist bishop named Lloyd Wicke, the conversation turned to the Bible. Bishop Wicke, in Rickey’s telling, declared that the writers of the four Gospels offered contradictory versions of Jesus; he then informed Rickey that no one really believed that Jesus was born of a virgin.
When Rickey returned home, he reflected on Wicke’s comments, growing more and more disturbed. Was the bishop right? Was he mistaken to form his life around teachings found in a book full of contradictions?
Unable to sleep, pacing near the fireplace, he thought about throwing his well-worn Bible into the flickering flames. Rickey finally decided to lay out his frustration in a letter to Howe.
How could bishop Wicke, Rickey wondered, lead his congregation in reciting the Apostles’ Creed? How could he shepherd a Christian denomination when he did not believe basic Christian doctrines the laity took for granted? Rickey thought of his mother and father. “Neither of them would have been able to understand Bishop Wicke,” Rickey wrote, “but they always felt, I am sure, that they understood what Jesus said and by practicing what he preached they continuously increased their happiness and their belief in Jesus as the Christ.”
Rickey contrasted the bishop’s view of Jesus as a “social prophet” with his own view of a Jesus who “ministered to individuals, and right now.” The Sermon on the Mount, Rickey explained, “really makes me wish to be a good man—a better man. All of Matthew makes me believe that He is interested in me personally.”
Having vented his frustrations, Rickey ended his letter by resigning his membership from First Methodist Church.
Despite Rickey’s frustration, he stopped short of placing the letter in the mail. Rickey’s Methodist commitments were too strong, and the letter remained filed away with the rest of his papers.
Even so, it highlighted Rickey’s inner turmoil and his religious perspective. It revealed his continued focus on the practical usefulness of religion in an individual’s life. Rickey contrasted the bishop’s view of Jesus as a “social prophet” with his own individualistic conception of religion, highlighting throughout the letter what he called the “empirical knowledge” that grounded his and his parents’ belief in Christianity. By practicing their faith, they found it to be useful; by finding it to be useful, they found it to be true.
At the same time, the letter revealed the limits of Rickey’s pragmatism. Rickey was not a stickler for theological specifics, but for him Christian faith could only have practical meaning for an individual if it was grounded in core Christian doctrines about the deity of Christ and the reliability of the Bible. Rickey could not wholeheartedly follow a bishop who seemed to reject those beliefs.
In Rickey’s mind, more than his own Methodist faith was at stake—the future of the country depended on the continuation of personal Christian commitment. Theology and politics were intertwined. Bishop Wicke’s liberal theology and intellectualism could undermine America’s spiritual foundation and lead to communism.
Rickey’s shaken faith made him eager to connect with Christians who shared his approach to religion. In a letter to a friend a few months later, Rickey recounted it all: the lunch with Bishop Wicke, the letter he wrote but never sent, the distrust he felt for denominational leaders. “If I were ‘testifying’ in an old-time Methodist class meeting,” he reported, “I would close my remarks surely,—‘pray for me, my Christian friends, pray for me,’—and I would really mean it.”
Don McClanen knew nothing about this in April 1954 when he announced his FCA idea with a letter sent out to 20 prominent Christian athletes and coaches across America, including Rickey. The goal, McClanen explained in the letter, was to “provide an opportunity” for athletes and coaches “to speak and witness for Christ and the wholesome principles of good character and clean living to the youth of our nation.”
McClanen followed his letter with a summer road trip where he could make his pitch in person. In August, just before returning to Oklahoma, he met with Rickey in Pittsburgh. What was supposed to be a short conversation stretched for hours, ending with Rickey’s enthusiastic endorsement and support.
McClanen had the key leader he needed to provide respectability and legitimacy to his upstart organization. Rickey had renewed hope for the future.
By gathering Christian athletes under one banner, the founding of the FCA marked the beginning of a new era and the launch of a movement—the rise of a religious sports subculture that would come to define and shape what it meant to be a “Christian athlete” in the decades to come.
That subculture, in turn, was deeply shaped by the twin desires that motivated Rickey: finding an authentic faith that could speak to the everyday experiences of athletes and coaches, and connecting that faith with the destiny and direction of the American nation.
Paul Emory Putz is director of Truett Seminary’s Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor University. This essay is adapted from his book, The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports (Oxford University Press).
