Sacred Spinebusters, Transcendent Toe Holds: The Confluence of Religion and Professional Wrestling (Part One)

Last updated on: June 5, 2014 at 8:23 am by Guest Contributor

Sacred Spinebusters, Transcendent Toe Holds: The Confluence of Religion and Professional Wrestling (Part One) 2014-06-05T08:23:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

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Professional wrestling: oh, how I love it!

I love its glitz, its glamor, its over-the-top, in-your-face bluster. I love that it presents itself as a hyper-masculine testosterone-fest and yet its wrestlers prance around in bedazzling costumes, wear more makeup than Tammy Faye, and play-act in melodramas too outlandish for even the daytime Soaps. Above all, I love the skill, artistry, and even beauty of its violent faux-fighting.

Now, I understand that a declaration of love for professional wrestling is probably not something many would expect from a college professor with a PhD in Religion. It’s sort of like admitting you’re addicted to Mob Wives or The Jerry Springer Show, or that you obsessively troll the internet for news about Kimye, or that you are, in your true heart of hearts, and despite everything that happened in 2013, a Belieber. In other words, saying you love of pro wrestling is like confessing an affinity for the kind mindless, morally debased trash culture that is responsible, apparently, for the collapse of Western civilization.

The occasion of the confession of my love of pro wrestling is the very recent DVD release of Ultimate Christian Wrestling, a documentary about an evangelistically oriented Christian professional wrestling promotion. The film, which screened in the Tribeca (2007) and New Orleans (2012) film festivals, follows three Ultimate Christian Wrestling (UCW) wrestlers “and their attempts to balance faith with the overwhelming amount of problems and insecurities that modern living throws at them,” according to the film’s Kickstarter page.

Unfortunately, the Georgia-based wrestling outfit featured in the film is now defunct, as is a different, South Carolina-based Christian wrestling group depicted in an earlier documentary, Wrestling for Jesus. The quirky genre of Christian professional wrestling, however, is actually thriving: there are a handful of independent Christian wrestling organizations scattered throughout the country, but mostly centered in Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas. They all share the same goal of spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ through the medium of professional wrestling – a missionary objective characteristic of the Evangelical community from which these organizations emerge. And with the media buzz generated in each city in which the Christian wrestling documentaries have screened, there is now more awareness than ever of this small, but fascinating slice of American Evangelicalism – a place where the seemingly diametrically opposite worlds of religion and pro wrestling collide.

Of course, we who are – or once were – fans of professional wrestling have long been aware of the confluence of religion and wrestling (even if we wish the two would remain separate). We grew up watching wrestlers like The Sheik unroll a prayer mat in the wrestling ring and engage in parodic salat before his matches; we watched Brother Love, the unctuous Jimmy Swaggart wannabe, tell the irate crowds every time he performed, “I looooove you!”; and more recently we watched “The Pope” D’Angelo Dinero, a Creflo-Dollar-esque preacher, big on bling and popular with the ladies, smooth-talk his way through his interviews. None of us, moreover, will forget the most memorable, if not financially lucrative, fusion of religion and mainstream wrestling: the anti-Evangelical wrestler, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, and his extraordinarily well marketed “scripture,” Austin 3:16.

These, in fact, are now very heady times for those of us who count ourselves fans of both religion and wrestling, for not only is the documentary Ultimate Christian Wrestling now available on DVD, filming has also recently finished on a new full-length feature filmabout “a professional wrestler who becomes a small town pastor and moonlights as a masked vigilante fighting injustice.” The film, A Masked Saint, which is based on the real life story of wrestler-turned-pastor Chris Whaley and features Hall of Fame pro wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper, is slated for an October 2014 release.

Religious professional wrestlers? Professional wrestling caricaturing the religious? Movies about ex-wrestler Baptist pastors? What in the world is going on here? Isn’t religion about myth and ritual, transcendence and the sacred? And isn’t pro wrestling about spinebusters and toe holds, belligerence and bluster? What does the one have to do with the other?

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