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Health & Fitness

Branch Rickey was a Christian

Did you know that the man who was most responsible for integrating Major League Baseball was compelled to act because of his Christian faith?

Branch Rickey, then Manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, signed the first African-American to play major league baseball because he believed it was God's will. Rickey selected Jackie Robinson, a Christian, among a talented pool of African-American baseball players, because he believed Robinson would need guidance from scripture to survive the ordeal that was likely coming his way. The following dialogue from the movie 42, illustrates the point. I watched the movie for the first time last night.

In a 42 scene between Rickey and the manager of a rival team, we discover what motivated Rickey so deeply that he would risk everything for this cause.

“You think God likes baseball, Herb?” Rickey asks the fellow manager.
Herb asks Rickey to explain what in the world he means by that statement, to which Rickey passionately replies, “It means someday you’re going to meet God, and when he inquires why you didn’t take the field in Philadelphia against Robinson, and you say it was because he was a Negro, it might not be a sufficient reply!”

In this powerful clip from 42, Robinson displays the Christian ethic, turn the other cheek, which came from spiritual guidance offered by Rickey.

This is from Wikipedia:

A public speaker in his later years, on November 13, 1965, Rickey collapsed in the middle of a speech in Columbia, Missouri, as he was being elected to the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame. He had told a story of physical courage, and was about to relate an illustration from the Holy Bible, "Now I'm going to tell you a story from the Bible about spiritual courage," he said. Rickey murmured he could not continue, collapsed and never spoke again.

I am a pretty good student of baseball. For most of my younger life I would have been considered a devout fan of the game. Like a lot of young boys I could recite every baseball statistic known to man. Why didn't I ever know this about Branch Rickey? Perhaps many of you are better informed than me, but I don't remember learning this in school or church, nor did I ever see this fact recounted in any of the documentaries written about Jackie Robinson. Maybe it was always there and I am choosing to notice it now.

But perhaps this omission represents the desire from media-driven secular America to downplay the religious motivations of some of our leaders, and particularly white male leaders when they are acting in a truly righteous way. Today we prefer our heroes to be minorities or women. The latter is an unpopular point of view but it stands out in this story. It is surprising that the makers of 42 allowed this aspect of the story to be depicted in the screenplay. Good on them for including it.

Branch Rickey integrated Major League Baseball in a phenomenal act of spiritual courage because he believed God demanded him to do it. This was a voluntary act of social justice. Rickey believed God would judge a man negatively if he failed to share the field with an African-American player and he said so publicly. He believed God would give him the strength to fight the public battles that would ensue after he signed Robinson. He selected Robinson in part because he knew he was a Christian, and that Jackie would need to rely on spiritual sustinance from God and guidance from scripture in order to survive the ordeal he was sure to confront. Branch Rickey was a conservative white man engaging in an act of social justice because of his Christian faith.

Secular Progressive forces in popular culture, academia, and mass media continue to downplay religious motivation in favor of other psychological motivations, but they ignore the fact that religious motivation has been behind most of the social progress throughout history. Remove religious motivation from human psychology and we create a vacuum. Some religious people also do awful things in the name of religion. But far more often religious people do great things because they wish to honor God.

Rickey was one of them. You could be too.

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