Former Senator Ben Sasse recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal about football’s historic role in shaping young men at the high-school and college levels. His observation is timely: playing the game and watching it are profoundly different experiences. Not all young men are equipped physically to play football, but America unfortunately, now has far more boys watching football than playing. Even the sandlot and little league games have lessons to teach. There are certainly other “warrior” sports.
Across cultures and throughout American life, four major institutions have helped form the character—and, one hopes, the virtue—of young men: faith, family, work, and war. Few men, including myself, have experienced all four directly. Yet these institutions are often connected. Each has traditionally demanded effort, sacrifice, delayed gratification, self-control, and responsibility. Each, in its own way, helped guide boys toward manhood.
The primary responsibility of parents raising sons is to prepare them to become good husbands and fathers. Scripture teaches that, regardless of our station in life, we will always confront sin and remain in need of God’s mercy. Family teaches obligation, love, and duty. Work forges character and grit. War, in its broadest sense, has imposed an obligation to protect family and community; at its best, it has taught men to harness strength in the service of others.
Our world is, in many respects, safer and more comfortable than any previous age could have imagined. Ancient and medieval societies would marvel at the relative ease of modern life. Yet that ease carries costs we often fail to see.
Today, less than of Americans serve in the military, and fewer than will ever serve. The distance between most citizens and the burdens of national defense has become vast. Almost as important, fewer than of teenage and college-age men hold part-time or summer jobs. Young women in that age group are now more likely to work than young men.
I had summer jobs in a lumberyard and a meat-processing plant. In both places, I worked alongside men twice my age—men who worked hard and took pride in supporting themselves and their families. They had spent their lives learning the hard realities of earning a living and making sacrifices for those who depended on them. Had I not worked beside them, my respect for working men and women in this country would be far less deeply rooted.
Part of growing into manhood is learning to discipline natural strength, aggression, and competitiveness, and to direct them toward self-sacrifice, focus, service, and constructive purpose. Football can offer one setting for those lessons. The pain of training, the extra play, the next effort after failure, the goal-line stand—these teach that rewards come through action, perseverance, and responsibility, not merely contemplation or institutional bureaucratic excuse-making.
As Senator Sasse wrote in the closing paragraph of his article:
“The Apostle Paul never picked up a blitz. He never recovered an onside kick. But he taught that suffering produces perseverance, and perseverance produces character. And that’s something that will be rightly cheered under Friday night lights all across the country this fall. Paul was in the more important business of saving souls. The gridiron offers no eternal comfort, but East of Eden we’ll always need strong and selfless men.”
Those lessons do not have to be learned on an athletic field. A boy may learn them by working beside his parents on a farm or ranch, learning a trade from a father or mother, caring for younger siblings, serving in his church, or accepting a demanding job. But he must be given real responsibilities—and he must understand that there is always a “why” to accompany the “what” and the “how.”
We should begin deliberately reteaching these lessons to young men. Athletic fields are a good place to start—but they should not be the only place
