Machen saw the encroaching menace of the National Football League, which held its first championship game (later to become the Super Bowl) eight months later. Interestingly, Machen argued against “commercialized” Sunday sport not from the First Table, but from a sort of natural law/common good perspective.

Machen loved football. In fact, during his days as a grad student in Germany, he said it was just what the war-like Germans (many of whom still engaged in dueling with swords in the early 20th century) needed. After mentioning the facial scars of dueling academics, he said:

“Indeed, I have come to the conclusion that the two institutions which Germany most needs are (1) The Sabbath; and (2) American football, with the idea of real sport, which it brings with it.”

Note the priority of the Lord’s Day! It seems that Machen detected the Germans’ propensity for war and aggression, a tendency that would bloom again on a national scale twice later in the century at the cost of millions of lives. His time in Germany was marked by a spiritual struggle with liberal theology, but also by homesickness…for football:

When I see a vacant field on one of these autumn days, my mind is filled with wonder at this benighted people which does not seem to hear the voice of nature when she commands every human being to play football or watch¹ it being played. I have a positive longing to see a football game, and not being able to see one, the next best thing is scores.

Donald Graham, a student at Westminster from 1929-1930, says the ever-generous Machen was not just a football fancier, but an evangelist for it:

Machen gave out 25, 35 tickets for the football games at the University of Pennsylvania…every Saturday through the sporting season, the football season.

Finally, Machen sounds like an SEC football fan from Alabama, Georgia, or Tennessee, where Saturday weddings in the fall still get the old stinkeye:

Football continued to fascinate him and when a cousin’s wedding was set for a Saturday afternoon, he complained that “if I were going to get married I should certainly choose some other time than Saturday afternoon in the middle of the football season.”

Machen loved football, but very clearly, he loved the Lord’s Day and the church much more.

(Most quotes above are from the Stonehouse biography.)

Here’s the original post on Machen throwing a flag for Lord’s Day encroachment by professional football:

Machen wrote a letter to a notable politician on April 20, 1933. Just as he saw what was coming with fascism in the 1930s in Europe, so Machen saw the encroaching menace of the National Football League, which held its first championship game (later to become the Super Bowl) eight months later.

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