When Rituals Fail: Confessions of Doping in Elite Sports

In the nineteenth century, Protestant reformers declared: Sport builds character. They described sport as ethically valuable and as an experiential tool to teach values and cooperation. However, sports have long raised ethical challenges when it comes to fairness in competition. This article examines controversies over performance enhancing drugs and pays attention to the rituals of confession at play for those caught doping. Nineteenth-century revivalist Charles Finney formalized a ritual practice that became known as the “anxious bench”. Finney would demand that a sinner sit on the bench, separated from others because of their sinfulness, and confess their sinful ways in order to re-devote themselves to God and goodness. Turning to steroid use in Major League Baseball and Lance Armstrong’s doping scandal, I consider how rituals of confession based on the anxious bench failed to redeem these athletes because the athletes themselves resisted the premise. Rituals of confession preserve an underlying ideology that sport is morally valuable. When these rituals fail, they reveal less noble structural motivations that lead to doping in the first place like monetary reward, intense pressure to perform, and the entertainment demands of elite sport.

China's ‘Christian General’ Feng Yuxiang, the Evangelist Jonathan Goforth and the Changde Revival of 1919

General Feng Yuxiang (1882–1948), China's ‘Christian General’, had already been a Christian for about six years before he decided systematically to evangelise his troops while they were stationed in northern Henan. He was convinced that Christianity would save his men and, in the process, would save China. To this end, Feng invited the Canadian missionary Jonathan Goforth (1859–1936) to hold a remarkable series of revivals in the late summer of 1919. During these revivals, which were modelled on the work of the evangelist Charles Finney, Feng himself broke into prayer in front of his men, and eventually 507 of Feng's troops were baptised. By the time of Goforth's second visit to Feng – a little over a year later – over 5,000 of the 9,000-man brigade had been baptised. This study will rely on Goforth's journal from 1919, Feng's own diaries, and other material to see how Goforth and Feng worked together to Christianise a significant segment of Feng's army. So did the ‘Christian General’ ultimately form a ‘Christian Army’ or even an indigenous church? Did Goforth's revivals in Feng's army have any long-term effect? Was Feng a convinced Christian, a Chinese patriot or simply an opportunist? This study seeks to answer these questions. 1

Education and the Creation of Capital: or What I have Learned From Following the Money

In the Fall of 1840, twenty-four-year-old Clarissa Pengra journeyed from a small town in western New York to the growing city of Syracuse to take up a new teaching position. She began by heading north by carriage on a plank road to Rochester, where she would catch a canal boat east. Arriving in Rochester in the evening, after what she described as “an unpleasant ride,” she decided to spend the night at a boarding establishment rather than at the home of a family friend, “in order to be convenient for the boat in the morning.” While in the city, she finished her “shopping,” a term she had never used in the context of her rural hometown. Already, Clarissa had traveled a social and psychological distance. In the hours, weeks, and months that followed, her sense of dislocation would continue. At 6 a.m. on the morning after she arrived in Rochester, she boarded the canal boat for a trip that would take 24 hours, ending in Syracuse the following day “before daylight.” On the boat, Clarissa encountered whist-players, whiskey drinkers, and a follower of the Calvinist evangelist, Charles Finney, each in his own way somewhat at odds with her own principles and ideas. With respect to the trip as a whole, she expressed a sense of adventure, tempered by a hint of anxiety. “I have left home and friend,” she wrote in her journal, “and for the present must learn to depend upon myself.”

‘I Will once more shake the heavens’: the 1762 Revival in Wales

The Evangelical Revival in eighteenth-century Wales actually consisted of a number of separate ‘great collective spiritual outpourings’, as John Walsh described them, which seem to have been completely spontaneous and unplanned. By the nineteenth century, periodic revivals had become accepted as a characteristic of Welsh Nonconformity, but were perhaps increasingly less spontaneous. Historians have suggested that arranged revivals became more common in a Welsh context as a result of the influence of the ideas of Charles Finney in the 1830s and 1840s. Daniel Rowland’s first biographer, John Owen, condemned this as a ‘forcing system’ which he thought was ‘calculated only to increase the number of unsound professors’. In contrast, Owen emphasized the genuine unplanned nature of the eighteenth-century revivals. This paper examines the origins and influence of one of those unplanned revivals which occurred between 1762 and 1764, the first general renewal of Calvinistic Methodism in Wales after its initial beginning in the 1730s and the model for the future revivalist tradition.

The Reorientation of American Protestantism, 1835–1845

In March 1835 Charles Finney told a gathering in New York City: “If the church will do all her duty, the millennium may come in this country in three years.” This statement has often served as an epigram for the era, the motto of that movement for revivalism and social reform that, having already swept the churches, was to so infuse the culture with its moral imperatives as to make a Civil War against slavery inevitable and the hegemony of evangelical Protestantism secure. On this reading Finney's declaration marks the midpoint in a story of triumph—triumph for revival religion, and triumph for a nation that aspired to righteousness.

Supply-side and Demand-side Revivalism?

The revivalism connected with what we now call the Second Great Awakening was well established on the American landscape by the 1830s. Having observed the impact of camp meetings and itinerant preachers, particularly in the Far West, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that, “Here and there, in the midst of American Society, you meet with men, full of a fanatical and almost wild enthusiasm” (1847: 142). Yet Tocqueville's discomfort with frontier revivalism was hardly universal. By the late 1820s, many Americans recognized the recruiting success of western Baptists, Methodists, and Christians, and young men like Charles Finney modified their camp-meeting techniques for use in eastern churches. Although his methods shocked many hard-core Calvinists, Finney's New Measures soon overwhelmed the quiet, traditionalist revivalism of Nathaniel Taylor, Asahel Nettleton, and Lyman Beecher. As Finney and his associates gained wider acceptance throughout the nation, they also moved the Second Great Awakening from its formative stage, described by Nathan Hatch (1989), to a mainstream stage described by William McLoughlin (1978), Paul Johnson (1979), and numerous other historians (e.g., Ryan 1983, Roth 1987, C. Johnson 1989).