Audio only:
Is it sinful to watch MMA? In this episode Trent examines Fr. Mike Schmitz’s arguments against MMA and reveals when it is sinful for Christians to watch this sport.
Transcript:
If Christians are called peacemakers, then is it okay for them to watch people punch each other in the head or choke another person into a submission? That’s the issue that’s raised when people say Christians should not support mixed martial arts or MMA. But other people say there’s nothing wrong with it, and in fact, Christians should be more involved in athletic combat sports. In today’s episode, I’m going to give my thoughts on the matter, but I will talk about one circumstance where Christians definitely should not watch MMA. There’s a particular circumstance where that would be wrong, but there’s other circumstances where it would be right. Before I get to that though, we’ll need a little bit of background.
What is mixed martial arts or MMA? The term mixed martial arts comes from a review of the first ultimate fighting championship hosted in 1993. It pioneered matches where fighters could use different styles to engage one another, and in the early years, you had some pretty wild matchups. Like what happens if a sumo wrestler fights a kickboxer? The answer is the sumo wrestler goes down pretty fast. Or what happens when a little guy named Royce Gracie fights the same kickboxer using a style we call Brazilian jujitsu? The answer is that Gracie closes the distance so that the kickboxer’s kicks can’t hurt him, and focuses on grappling to use a choke hold to force him into a submission. Now, 30 years later, MMA has evolved so that most fighters learn a mixture of kickboxing, jujitsu, and wrestling in order to maximize their effectiveness in the ring or the octagon.
I’ve trained in Muay Thai kickboxing until I tore my ACL a year ago, and I hope to get back into it, but I’ve been doing jujitsu on and off during that time while I’m healing. I’m not very good. I’m literally one rung above a training dummy, but it’s fun, I enjoy it even when I get hurt. Now, jujitsu isn’t as violent as MMA because you’re not allowed to punch or kick the other person, and there can be some brutal injuries in mixed martial arts. I’ll admit some of the matches are hard to watch, but is it wrong for Christians to watch MMA or even participate in it? I was especially interested in these two videos from Father Mike Schmitz who summarizes his essential objection to MMA.
Before I share that though, I need to add a Father Mike is awesome disclaimer here. He’s done a tremendous amount of good for the church. My son and I love listening to Bible in a Year with him, so this video represents a minor disagreement I have with him because as I’ve said overall, Father Mike is awesome. I love the work that he does. With that being clear, here’s his objection to watching MMA as a form of entertainment.
There is nothing that is noble about dominating someone or beating another human being into submission for someone else’s entertainment.
Now, I agree with Father Mike when it comes to doing this to innocent people. It’s wrong to watch videos of random attacks against innocent people you might find on the internet because you enjoy watching people get attacked and you get a thrill out of it. This isn’t entertainment. These are crimes of assault and battery that do take away a person’s dignity, so people shouldn’t be watching them for thrills.
But what about when two people agree to a fight with fair rules? When I engage in jujitsu or role with someone, we aren’t beating each other with our hands and fists, but one of us may be dominating the other person. In this case, my coach who is a black belt is absolutely dominating me, and while there is pain and discomfort, I haven’t lost my dignity, even if it’s a little embarrassing sometimes. That’s because every time someone better than me dominates me and has good sportsmanship and is willing to teach me what I can do better, I learn more. This is how I learn to not be dominated in the next fight or not be dominated if someone tries to attack me out of nowhere on the street.
Now you might say it’s okay to be educated by this like me, but it’s wrong to be entertained by watching someone else be dominated. But I don’t feel that way. If someone watching this gets to see what jujitsu is like, how good black belts are, and how every black belt started as a white belt, I think that’s great. I haven’t been dehumanized. I find it very dignifying to learn from my other coaches both in class and when I watch them compete in competitions where they dominate someone else. Like here where my coach gets a sweet flying arm-bar on his opponent. It’s fun to watch, and even his opponent would say, this is good for human dignity, not opposed to it.
I think what most people are squeamish about with MMA are the strikes and kicks more than the grappling, even though grappling and throwing like what you might have in judo causes injuries too. But more importantly, other sports have the same, if not more risk of injury. MMA fighters wear light gloves while boxers wear heavier gloves, and the heavier gloves allow them to have more head strikes against the hard skulls of their opponents. And football players with helmets are at even more risk of head injury. Father Mike also says this.
I think about this story Saint Augustine recounted in his book Confessions. Saint Augustine’s problem was lust, right? One of his problems was lust. He had a friend whose problem was violence. This friend who was a convert to Christ, he was obsessed with the gladiator arenas. At one point, he and some of his non-Christian friends were walking by an arena and they said, “Let’s come on in, let’s go watch.” And he was like, “I’m not going to go. I’m not going to go.” They said, “No, come on in. You’re going to love it.” He said, “Fine, I’ll go, but I’m not going to look. I’m not going to watch.”
He went in and he kept his eyes down, like knowing I know what happens here. I know what they’re doing right now. I know as a Christian, I don’t want any part of it, but he said there was a moment when the crowd cheered in such a way that he knew what was going on and he wanted to see it with his own eyes in the arena and he looked up and it was in an instant that what Augustine calls the blood lust returned to him, and he was cheering the victimization. He was cheering the dominance. He was cheering the violence of one human being against another human being just as much as any non-Christian who was there in that arena.
I agree that if you watch MMA because you enjoy seeing other people getting hurt, then you shouldn’t watch MMA because you have blood lust or lust for violence. This is definitely one circumstance where Christians or anybody for that matter, shouldn’t watch mixed martial arts. But that’s a you problem, not an MMA or a martial arts problem.
To give another example, if you look at Renaissance art because you enjoy seeing naked people and it makes you feel aroused and excited, then you shouldn’t look at Renaissance art. But that’s a you problem, not a Renaissance art problem. But if you enjoy combat sports because you appreciate the skill on display and the commitment to athleticism, then it can be a healthy thing for Christians to enjoy watching or participating in. In response he made to his original video, Father Mike boiled down his essential objection to watching mixed martial arts.
Human beings have dignity. Violence strips a human being of dignity. Violence as entertainment has no place in the life of the Christian.
My response would be this. Violence itself is neutral towards human dignity. It’s not always wrong. I mean, what is violence? Most definitions say something like the use of physical force to cause injury to something. But when a surgeon cuts open a person’s chest for open heart surgery or amputates a gangrenous limb, that’s a violent act. The body suffers injury and needs time to heal afterwards, but the violence is justified. Or when the police wrestle a suspect to the ground who is resisting arrest, they don’t harm that person’s dignity, even though they commit violence, as long as the violence or force they use is not excessive. Raping an evildoer or torturing him would take away his dignity, but proportional violence to subdue him actually respects his dignity because we’re keeping him from committing more evil. This also applies to sports since other contact sports involve acts where you know you’re going to cause the other player pain and possibly injury.
Think about when a football player tackles someone on the field. If tackling someone in a fight would be considered violent, isn’t this also violent? Hockey would be another example where fights are expected. I mean, to me, this just looks like mixed martial arts are boxing on ice. The question isn’t, is the act violent? Lots of things are violent that are not immoral. The question is, is there a proportionate reason to justify the violent act?
When it comes to MMA, a few of those reasons might be that it encourages people to learn or value non-lethal means of self-defense and disabling attackers if they’re forced into a fight. Or it celebrates human creativity, athleticism, health and sportsmanship. And here I actually agree with Father Mike with one of the points he was trying to achieve in his original video.
All that last video was trying to do was propose that there is a line, right? Maybe the line goes to boxing. People wrote to me and said, “More people die boxing than doing MMA.” Like, okay. More people get serious brain damage playing professional football than MMA. I don’t know. I wasn’t trying to establish how far the line went. All I was trying to offer was that there is a line somewhere.
He’s absolutely correct. There is a line to be drawn where consensual acts of violence between two people cannot be justified. In the 12th century, the Second Lateran Council banned jousting, saying it condemned, “those abominable jousts and tournaments in which knights come together by agreement and rashly engage in showing off their physical prowess and daring, and which often result in human deaths and danger to souls. If any of them dies on these occasions, although penance and viaticum are not to be denied him when he requests them, he is to be deprived of a church burial.”
During the Middle Ages, several popes and ecumenical councils banned dueling or fighting to the death. The Council of Trent said, “the detestable custom of dueling, introduced by the contrivance of the devil, that by the bloody death of the body, he may accomplish the ruin of the soul, shall be utterly exterminated from the Christian world.”
Acts of entertainment where there’s a good chance people can be killed, are incompatible with human dignity. I’d also say this is true of other engagements where there’s an unreasonable risk of serious injury. Things like underground street fights where there are no rules. Even in MMA, there are rules governing what is allowed and a set of moves that are prohibited because they’re too dangerous. I also wouldn’t support watching competitions where people simply endured severe pain and injury, like seeing how many nails they can drive through their hands. It’s also why I’m not a fan of slap fighting where contestants just compete to see who can endure harder slaps from the other person. I think this one probably goes over the line into being unacceptable because now this isn’t about celebration of skill in combat where you can dodge punches as well as receive them. It’s just about tolerating injury.
I agree with Father Mike that when we seek out entertainment, we have to make sure what entertains us never violates the dignity of the people who are involved. But I’d say MMA is on par with the amount of violence and risk one would find in boxing, football, rugby, and other high intensity sports. So if there are proportional reasons to justify those activities, then they also justify MMA. That doesn’t mean everybody has to watch or that there aren’t individual examples where behavior in the octagon is over the line, just that MMA doesn’t seem like a moral hazard we have to worry about because we have enough of those in the world as it is.
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