I don’t know how many articles or thinkpieces you might have read that draw connections between the technique of cricket and the foundations of western religion, but I’m about to add a number to that tally. Consider it my duty as a former pastor with an unhealthy love of the game of cricket. What started for me as a throwaway analogy that I used passingly in a single conversation with a friend has turned into something more nuanced (if only slightly). What could something as specific and niche as cricket technique possibly have to say about Christianity?
Like a lot of people in Australia, I grew up playing cricket. Whether you enjoy watching it or, like my wife often says, you think it’s only possible positive trait is that it is a decent opportunity to have a drink in the sun with your friends, cricket is an important social and cultural image in Australia. It connects us to our general identity of sporting excellence, and its roots go all the way back to our colonial ties with Britain.
As a young kid, when a cricket bat was first placed into my hands, I was always afraid. It wasn’t the fear of failure that would eventually end up having such a huge impact on my batting as I got older and played higher and higher levels of the game. It was something much more basic and primal.
I was afraid of getting hit by the ball.
When you grow up playing cricket, a large amount of time at training is spent on forging your technique. Like a lot of sports, cricket is a technique-heavy discipline, especially when it comes to the art of batting. You are always tinkering, always adjusting. Is my backlift starting too high? Is my stance too wide? Does my head fall over to the off side? Do I need a trigger movement across the crease to get my head in the right position? Are my hands reaching out from under my eyes too much? There is always something to tinker with on the technical side of batting, and only cricketers know the true depths of obsession this quest for technical perfection can lead you to.
But for all of the focus on technique, I think one crucial element of batting is often forgotten about when teaching young kids the fundamentals of batting. By ignoring this foundational part of the game, we are actually leaving a hidden and primal flaw in the game of young cricketers around the country. It isn’t a problem that can’t ever be fixed, mind you. But it is a problem. That element is the fear of the ball.
When you are afraid of being hit by the ball, when you are afraid of the pain and discomfort it will inflict upon impact (never mind the shame and embarrassment of getting hit in the first place), your technique revolves around protection and preservation, not intent and proactivity. In reality, being hit by the ball rarely inflicts any real, lasting damage or pain. Sure, you will occasionally get hit in the box, a universal cricketing experience that brings everyone together in a perfect synthesis of sympathy and hilarity. Once I even got a deflection off my gloves up into my throat, leaving me unable to breathe for a few moments. But at least 95% of the time you get hit on the pads, gloves, helmet or otherwise, it is a glancing blow that might sting initially but is overall largely inconsequential.
When it comes to western Christianity, certainty is something I have become increasingly suspicious of. Whilst there are certainly a number of core truths that I am willing to assign a level of certainty, there is a much larger number of theological clauses and doctrines that I am very happy to hold loosely. If I am completely honest, the older I get the less that I can be certain about.
This is poison to a lot of western Christianity. The more and more fundamental you get, the less room there is for uncertainty. Your questions – however well-intentioned and founded in honesty – are actually signs of a lack of faithfulness. Reasonable doubts and their resultant questions are not accepted, not exactly because they are qualitatively “false,” but because if they are allowed the air and breathing space to grow into new, exciting and progressive thought then the borders drawn by doctrine or denominations are no longer stable. Once those questions are allowed to be asked, the power is taken from the institution and handed back to the individual in their pursuit of the divine.
Because of this, Christians across the western world are being taught to fear the ball. Faith and discipleship is being formed around the technique of not being hit, rather than having positive intent. Rather than learn what it feels like to ask a tricky question and cope with the tension of not having the answer immediately, we design our faith around avoiding these questions all together.
There is something to be said about getting a pair of batting pads on young cricketers and asking them to feel the impact of the cricket ball on the pads without attempting to hit the ball. In doing so, you are able to experience getting hit for what it is. It isn’t a life-threatening or scary prospect anymore. You have experienced it already, and you survived. Now that you have had that experience, you can begin to build a technique around defending well and scoring with intent, not just trying not to get hit.
In the same way, I think we need to be encouraging young Christians to allow questions of doubt to hit them on the pads. If we really are people of faith that want our discipleship to be road-tested and rugged, we cannot expect to go through life avoiding big questions of doubt and uncertainty. We cannot bury our heads in the sand like that, because the longer you do so the easier it will be for one bad life experience to force you to ask that one question that causes the entire house of cards to collapse. If we really do believe in God, then we cannot seriously avoid questions because of the suspicion that they might challenge our ability to live faithfully. If anything, we should have the opposite approach. Bring our questions to each other and to God, not for the sake of finding holes or shortcomings in our faith traditions, but for the sake of strengthening each other and adding new textures and dimensions to the way we live out that faith.
Once you get hit on the pads a few times, you will realise that it really isn’t that bad after all. Then you can start to live a life of faith and discipleship with a posture of flourishing and positivity, not one of avoidance and fear.
Jonty writes about film, narrative and culture on his Substack, “Postcards from the Abyss”.
