Wrestling (with Many Interests)

Monday, August 3, 2026

“Therefore,

Their sons grow suicidally beautiful

At the beginning of October,

And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.”

~From “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” by James Wright

Happy Monday, my friends! Recently, I discovered that a friend of mine was born and lived the first few years of his life in my hometown. If that wasn’t a fun enough coincidence, it turns out that our parents worked and volunteered together and, after almost 30 years, still remember each other. While my friend moved with his family when he was barely school age, he remembered a few spots that elicited good memories for me. Though born in Columbus, OH, I lived in Cambridge, OH, from the time I was one year old until I left for college 18 years later. The county seat of rural Guernsey County in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, Cambridge was one of those places that wasn’t particularly exciting when you’re young, but, upon reflection, was a good place to grow up.

Though I might try to deny it, I was raised as a red-blooded, All-American kid. My family might not have been particularly patriotic (we flew a US flag sometimes) and I was far from the rough-and-tumble, athletic image of most of the other boys, but we were involved in church and you could bet that an Ohio State football game would be on TV each Saturday during the fall. I quickly developed a love of contact sports, particularly football, wrestling[1], and lacrosse. If you can’t, legally, hit someone what’s the point of the sport? We’ll come back to that in a moment.

There’s something about the teamwork, the discipline, and the sheer physical commitment that I find compelling. The fact that men who compete in these sports are often the epitome of masculine beauty and my type is the proverbial icing on the cake. Yet the one sport I actually chose to play, back when I actually had a body that could be talked into competing, was track and field (emphasis on the “field”[2]). No contact. No collision. Just me, the concrete throwing circle, and whatever I could make my legs and arms do.

I’ve never quite known what to do with that tension, and it’s taken me a long time to admit that it’s not just a quirky biographical detail. It’s a window into something I wrestle with more broadly. Like many Queer cisgender men, part of my story involves trying to fit in with the straight guys. I too had to come to terms with the dual dynamics that, one, I might never find a place in those heteronormatively masculine spaces, and, two, everyone in those spaces was making it up in the moment, some men just find it more natural than others.

The more difficult part and a dynamic that has become harder in the last five to ten years is that many of the young men who compete in the sports I love most (wrestling, football, and lacrosse) come up through athletic cultures that are often deeply aligned with hypermasculine expressions of Evangelical and Orthodox Christianity, and with white Christian nationalism. I don’t say that as an accusation against every athlete, coach or athletic program. I say it because it’s observably true in the United States. I would be lying to you and to myself if I tried to pretend otherwise.

White Christian nationalism is no longer a fringe eccentricity or an underlying, but largely secretive current of American life. It is one of the great sins of contemporary Christianity, an unholy fusion of faith, national identity, and toxic masculinity that distorts the gospel into something closer to conquest than to love. I’ve spent years of my life, in ministry, education, and my own soul, working to name it, repudiate it, and root it out. And still I find myself, cheering for young men who are being formed by exactly the cultures I dedicate so much energy to opposing.

I don’t always know what to do with that. When I was working at Rosemont College, I served as the chaplain[3] for the men’s lacrosse team. In that role, I had an immediate way to intervene with young men before they became too woven into the tapestry of white Christian nationalism and to help them find ways out of the toxic masculinity bred into them. For myself, I’ve tried to resolve these tensions dozens of different ways. I’ve told myself the sport itself is neutral and it’s only certain cultures around it that are corrupted. I’ve told myself that my appreciation for the athleticism doesn’t require endorsing everything the athlete believes. I’ve told myself that loving something complicated is simply what it means to be a person formed in one culture while trying to be transformed by another. None of these resolutions has fully satisfied me. Each one feels a little bit like something I’m telling myself so I can keep watching Saturday football without doing any more soul-searching.

Maybe that’s the most honest place to leave this. I don’t think every tension in our lives is meant to be resolved into tidy coherence. We’re meant to wrestle with some tensions for a long time, maybe for the rest of our lives, and the wrestling itself, the refusal to either fully let go of what we love or fully stop questioning it, might be more honest than any conclusion I could manufacture here.

I can’t tell you I’ve made peace with loving these sports while opposing the ideologies so often bound up with them.

Is there a tension in your own life between something you love and something you’re working to repudiate, that you’ve never fully resolved and maybe never will?

Let us pray: God who wrestled with Jacob through the night and did not let him go easily, meet us in our own unresolved places. We don’t ask you to make every tension tidy or every contradiction comfortable. Give us instead the honesty to keep wrestling, the humility to keep questioning what we love, and the courage to keep naming what’s false even when we’re not ready to fully let go of what surrounds it. Bless us in our struggle, and do not let us go until we have what we need. Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there's anything I can do for you.

Faithfully,

Ben +

[1] Let’s be very clear here: I’m a fan of Olympic style wrestling not the shameful and deeply problematic “professional” wrestling which is and was the original scripted “reality” TV.

[2] I competed in shot put and hammer throw at Sewanee.

[3] Spiritual presence, non-athletic mentor, and team dad rolled in one.

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