Jesus Christ was a sportsman.” Or so claimed a preacher at one of the regular Sporting services that were held throughout the first half of the 20th century in Protestant churches all over Britain.

Invitations were sent out to local organisations, and sportsmen and women would attend these services en masse. Churches would be decorated with club paraphernalia and cups won by local teams. Sporting celebrities – perhaps a Test cricketer or First Division footballer – would read the lessons, and the vicar or priest would preach on the value of sport and the need to play it in the right spirit. Occasionally, the preacher would himself be a sporting star such as Billy Liddell, the legendary Liverpool and Scotland footballer.

Since 1960, however, the trajectories of Religion and sport have diverged dramatically. Throughout the UK, attendances for all the largest Christian denominations – Anglican, Church of Scotland, Catholic and Methodist – have fallen by more than half. At the same time, the commercialisation and televisation of sport has turned it into a multi-billion dollar global business.

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Numerous high-profile sporting stars talk openly about the importance of religion to their careers, including England footballers Marcus Rashford, Raheem Sterling and Bukayo Saka. World heavyweight boxing champion Tyson Fury credits his Catholic faith with bringing him back from obesity, alcoholism and cocaine dependency.

Yet it is sport, and its “gods” like Fury, that attracts far greater devotion among much of the public. Parents are as anxious today to ensure their children spend Sunday mornings on the pitch or track as they might once have been to see them in Sunday school.

But to what extent is the worship of sport, and our regular pilgrimages to pitches and stadiums up and down the country, responsible for the emptying of churches and other religious establishments? This is the story of their parallel, and often conflicting, journeys – and how this “great conversion” changed modern society.

When religion gave sport a helping hand

Two hundred years ago, Christianity was a dominant force in British society. In the early 19th century, as the modern sporting world was just beginning to emerge, the relationship between church and sport was mainly antagonistic. Churches, especially the dominant evangelical Protestants, condemned the violence and brutality of many sports, as well as their association with gambling.

Many sports were on the defensive in the face of religious attack. In my book Religion and the Rise of Sport in England, I chart how sport’s advocates – players and commentators alike – responded with verbal and even physical attacks on religious zealots. In 1880, for example, boxing historian Henry Downes Miles celebrated novelist William Thackeray’s stirring descriptions of the “noble art” while also bemoaning religion’s attempts to curb it:

[This description of boxing] has lines of power to make the blood of your Englishman stir in days to come – should the preachers of peace at-any-price, parsimonious pusillanimity, puritanic precision and propriety have left our youth any blood to stir.

Yet around this time, there were also the first signs of a rapprochement between religion and sport. Some churchmen – influenced both by more liberal theologies and the nation’s health and societal failings – turned from condemning “bad” sports to promoting “good” ones, notably cricket and football. Meanwhile the new Muscular Christianity movement appealed for recognition of the needs of “the whole man or whole woman – body, mind and spirit”.