Two major changes in Protestant thinking and its contribution to sports

. Cite and explain the two major changes in Protestant thinking at the end of the 19th/beginning of the 20^th century that contributed to the new attitudes toward sports.

1. How do these changes link up with the social gospel movement and “muscular Christianity”?
2. How do these new theological concepts impact the perception and spread of sports in general and specific sports, in particular?
3. How/why did the South lag behind the North in their embrace of sports?
4. Finally, what specifics led to the explosion of college football (as opposed to other sports) as a sport completely embraced by the South in contemporary society/

A1.      The first major change in protestant ideology that changed their followers’ attitudes toward sports by the end of the 19^th century was Christian fundamentalism. Christian fundamentalism is seen as a direct retaliation to the concept of theological liberalism. IN its prime, the major changes that Christian fundamentalism brought to Protestantism was the fact that many of the previous ideologies already established in Protestantism were abolished, entire doctrines revoked, and biblical errors displayed that made many of the previously laid speeches and preaches by the leadership of Protestantism invaluable and unreliable. This brought drastic changes to Protestantism, which also meant that changes would be brought to the nature of reaction of Protestantism toward sports as well. The other major chant in Protestantism was Pentecostalism. Pentecostalism emphasized the importance of a direct communication method of oneself with God. Although this did not bring much effect toward the attitude of protestant followers toward sports, it split the animosity and misleading directions that Protestantism previously held of sports in its attitudes and readings.

These changes link up with the gospel movement and muscular Christianity as Pentecostalism was a renewal movement itself, and therefore, it encouraged as well as promoted numerous other movements alongside it so that there could be wide changes made to Protestantism in the benefit of its followers. On the other hand, muscular Christianity was brought in through the changes in the form of Christian fundamentalism since that change allowed the followers of Protestantism to become more knowledgeable about their religion, and allowed for the average follower to become more entitled to his own religion as well as more informative in terms of knowledge that he contained in relation to his religion. These new theological concepts impact the perception of sports in particular in the manner that they allow the average follower to look and understand the meaning of sports through a new perspective, one that allows him to look at factors that were never allowed to be discussed before in his religion.

The South lagged in terms of sports in the United States when compared with the North of the United States because the South was a protestant majority and Protestantism, at the end of the 19^th century, did not appreciate or promote sports. On the other hand, the North was more catholic in nature of religion and openly embraced sports as well as promoted sports for individuals as a meaning to maintain peace and gain personal meaning to their lives. College football had been practiced in the South before the wide explosion that drove the Entire South of the US to promote and support college football. However, the specifics that led to these explosions in college football in the West were the recent changes that had taken place in Protestantism, which deemed sports to be playable in the South, and promoted more ball games, which inadvertently promoted college football as the new movements and reforms in Protestantism became effective and impacted the South at last.