According to a recent estimate from the Aspen Institute, youth sports in the U.S. bring in about $40 billion a year. Naturally, The New York Times responded to this news by publishing an article, with this subtitle: “An American obsession is attracting investments in baseball fields, volleyball courts and football camps, intensifying the gap between families with means and those without.”

There is, indeed, an unhealthy obsession with sports in the West, and the money that is now required to “get ahead” in youth sports is absurd and unreasonable. But this should not cause American families to throw in the towel and abandon the world of athletics altogether. Sports have always been one of the more important and obvious means for restoring Western civilization by appealing to excellence.

Sports are connected in important ways to virtue and morality, two things America is in desperate need of today. Every baseball field, volleyball court, and football camp ought to be ordered in ways that suggest those two ends. In her famous book The Greek Way, Edith Hamilton writes about the Olympic games and their effect on culture:

The Greeks were the first people in the world to play, and they played on a great scale. All over Greece there were games, all sorts of games; athletic contests of every description … contests in music, where one side outsung the other; in dancing … games so many that one grows weary with the list of them. … Wretched people, toiling people, do not play.

Athletic contests, music, dancing—these are things that the Greeks undertook to assist in the building of virtue and improvement of their society.

“Music and physical training,” Plato writes, is “for the body and the soul … in order that these might be in harmony with one another” (Republic 411e). “Athletic powers,” according to Aristotle, have everything to do with “the excellences of the soul” (Rhetoric 1361a1).

Modern man, so anesthetized by the morally relativistic, hedonistic, and now technologically addicted culture, has no concept of the soul-deep nature of athletics. We, like the Greeks of old, place great emphasis on athletic contests and music, but collectively we have become a “wretched people, toiling people.” We know this because our institutionalized sports (as well as our music industry) walk in lockstep with the morally corrupt culture.

Entire leagues actively push the LGBTQ agenda; men are allowed to compete against women simply because those men have delusions and identify as female; and women play brutalizing sports that destroy their femininity. Worst of all, even on the Lord’s Day, which used to be reserved for rest, the chaos persists and events like Super Bowl Sunday are held in higher regard than Easter.

The answer to a sports culture that breeds vice and immorality—and, on top of that, exploits the earnings of middle class families who only want what’s best for their kids—is  not to blame the sports themselves. Instead, we should condemn a culture that improperly understands the purpose of sports and cannot recognize virtue, let alone organize activities meant to advance virtue in our youth. Blaming sports for our cultural rot gets us dangerously close to the  extreme Puritans in the 16^th and 17^th century embraced when they banned play and recreation on Sundays and warned against the playing of sports in general. Athletics, Lincoln Harvey notes in his book A Brief Theology of Sport, was judged by the Puritans “more trouble than it was worth.” This is the definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Today’s extreme, which is just as bad, is to idolize sports. Think, for example, of the IMG Academy approach. For just $70,000-$90,000 a year, you can send your teen to a private boarding school that places sports at the center of their education. Unfortunately, though, whatever may be said for that kind of focus in the abstract, this model of education in practice is doing what all secular education today does; that is, it conforms to the world.

IMG’s curriculum makes no mention of God, virtue, or truth—three realities required to make sports a worthwhile part of any curriculum. This is why IMG’s leaders have no caution about the fact that the NCAA can now pay millions of dollars to 17- and 18-year-olds. This revolutionary and controversial change in collegiate athletics is not only something IMG has no problem with, but advocating for it has been part of the school’s long-standing mission.

This is the reason IMG’s VP of athletics bragged that the school has been consulting with colleges in preparation for the change, and  it is also why IMG’s director of football was elated, saying, “This is a chance for us to flex a muscle that makes us different.” The muscle that makes IMG “different” is the very muscle that contributes to the American obsession with sports—an obsession that would be good if it stressed the right things. But the muscle that IMG boasts about does not stress the right things, and so, for the moment, it very much works against the restoration of Western civilization.

American families do not need to spend over $1,000 a year (which is the average) in order to ensure that their child has a “leg up” on the competition. Nor do they need to abandon sports altogether in protest of this absurd new norm. Competition and fitness are good for those who understand that these things are designed to be means to an end, and that end is the cultivation of a “soul [that] magnifies the Lord” (Luke 1:46).

There is a way to play sports and build virtue. There is a way to use athletics to strengthen one’s soul. And there is way to achieve health and fitness while improving the spirit of a Christian culture. This is the task for the 21^st century athlete.