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• Michelle Legro

  Turn the Other Cheek

  Tags:

  blood on the altar,

  boxing,

  Jesus,

  religion,

  ultimate fighting

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  The gentlemen boxers of the Young Men’s Christian Association would have been pleased to make the acquaintance of this new incarnation of faith-based fight clubs: a church cum mixed martial arts facility in Nashville called Xtreme Ministries, profiled in this week’s New York Times, which practices a combination of bare-knuckle fighting, wrestling, and kick-boxing and whose motto is “Where Feet, Fist and Faith Collide.” The website Anointed Fighter, explains that this kind of faith-based fighting isn’t against an exterior Satan, but one on the inside, rewriting the mantra used among recruits in basic-training: pain is Satan leaving the body. “Myself, Arch-Enemy to my soul, my weakest training partner, my deadliest adversary, my inner voice. Tapping Out.” (Jesus, the ultimate fighter, would never tap out. And yes, you can get that on a shirt.)

  Around the turn of the twentieth century, certain religious scholars were concerned that over the last thousand years, Christianity had become feminized and that Jesus had become nothing more than a bearded lady—his image everywhere in soft focus, the Son of God gazing down placidly on his parishioners or raising his face with a dewy eye to the heavens.

  The Muscular Christianity movement, responsible for the spread of YMCAs across the country, wanted to reinstall Christ as the warrior-prince who every major general, king, or emperor had looked to for guidance for centuries. “Men like a leader who can ‘get mad clear through’ at the right time,” Warren Conant wrote in his 1915 book The Virility of Christ. "[They want someone] who can ‘roast’ and ‘score’ the other side, saying the things tremendously which they would like to say but know not how; who can beat down and silence all reply by sheer force of personality. That is exactly what Christ did.” Christ didn’t just spend his time sitting on the mount recounting the ways we can all play nice with each other. Never forget that when Christ got in the temple he got angry—and he got even.

  Conant reminds his readers that Nazareth was a rough place for rough men, and that Christ’s physical appearance, which had been so freshly scrubbed over the centuries, was actually quite hearty thanks to his sometimes brutal desert surroundings. This was no Adam padding around the Garden of Eden, this Jesus was a spiritual ancestor to Mad Max, roving the desert in search of water to turn into wine. For Connant, this Christ had far more in common with contemporary roughhousers like Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway rather than monks weaned on one wafer a day:

  Christ was of athletic physique for he had worked all his life, and he lived in a climate presenting alternations of heat and cold which, although not as extreme as ours, were favorable to health and vigor. Accustomed to climb the hills about Nazareth he acquired the springy step and free, swinging stride of the mountaineer. As most of his traveling was done on foot of course he was a great pedestrian.
  
  When Christ met a man, that man however dull knew instinctively that he stood in the presence of no ordinary person. There were the commanding pose and carriage, the piercing eye, the thoughtful brow; every movement, look and gesture speaking of reserve power, physical, mental, and moral. To an ordinary man the first impression would be overawing, to an extraordinary man a challenge, were it not for the kindly smile which immediately softened the expression; the strong, resonant voice vibrating with sympathy and good-fellowship; the words so fitly chosen for each one's case.
  
  That Christ's voice was resonant and of great carrying power was a necessary consequence of his practice of preaching in the open air to audiences of five thousand and upward. And that proves another fact in regard to Christ's physical appearance —big lung capacity and therefore a well developed torso.
  
  If it had been the custom in Palestine to shake hands Christ would have grasped your hand firmly with a persuasive warmth, while those wonderful eyes read your very soul. For he loved to touch people. Everything human interested him. His regard for you had nothing impersonal or abstract about it, his first object was contact, solidarity…If he were in the flesh today he would be equally at his ease in the millionaire's mansion or in the slum tenement, in the factory or on the ranch.

  February 5, 2010
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