This being “Smashville,” we took in a Predators game the other evening, thanks to Vet Tix, which supplies tickets to prior-service military folks (a service I’ve also used for Vanderbilt football games). The Vancouver Canucks were our opponents, and there was a fair amount of smashing that went on, especially with body-checking against the boards. But there were fisticuffs as well. (You know the old saw: “I went to a fight the other night, and a hockey game broke out.”) In this photo, two players are duking it out, their discarded gloves lying on the ice. We were watching a rerun of the altercation during a play stoppage. Rather than bury this spectacle, hoping we’d forget this breakdown in decorum, the Preds ran it for our entertainment. But, of course, we Christians were loathe to watch, right? Not so fast.

I’m particularly tuned in to this question since I’ve found myself advising on a doctoral dissertation entitled “An Ethical Evaluation of Participation in Mixed-Martial Arts (MMA) Competition.” Really, I am. And I think it’s a worthy topic for investigation, especially since MMA fighters have used their platforms to offer Christian testimony. Tackling such issues is what we do in normative ethics—sizing up the rightness or righteousness (or lack thereof) of anything that humans are into, from identifying as trans to eating veal to tithing to waterboarding to voting for Trump or Clinton to recycling to using CRT as an analytical tool. And it turns out that a lot of people are into MMA, either as participants, promoters, equippers, or spectators.

The writer, Josh Holler, has been a Marine and is keen on MMA. As he’s begun to explore the phenomena, he’s noted that the Bible makes favorable use of fight metaphors and that care is given to the safety of the MMA fighters along the lines of protocols put in place to protect football players, such as outlawing helmet-to-helmet spearing. Still, some I talk to give me a sort of “Are you crazy?” response. “Of course it’s sub-Christian, outside the realm of acceptable behavior for regenerate, Spirit-filled people.” They share the conviction of the newspaper publisher in Charles Sheldon’s novel, In His Steps (from which we got WWJD), who stopped taking ads for prize fights once the Lord got ahold of him.

With a background in aesthetics, I brought up a discussion topic from that field. Along with scrutiny of “the soul of art” and “the soul of the artist,” we also take a look at “the soul of the beholder.” What does that painting or movie or concert do to and for the person who views or attends it? Yes, MMA is a contest, but it’s a form of entertainment. And a lot has been written regarding the moral impact of such matters. From Tertullian to Timothy Dwight and beyond, Christian leaders have had harsh words for the theater. And not just Christians. Plato thought Greek tragedies corrupted the populace, teaching them to be drama queens and hysterics in their own right. Aristotle disagreed. He said that following Oedipus and Antigone through the agonies of cruel reversal helped us to expunge some of our anxiety—catharis. And the argument has proceeded right along through the centuries.

On one hand, the Christian might say that MMA doesn’t meet the standard of loveliness upon which we are to think (Philippians 4:8), that it stirs up a spirit of wrath and strife, counted among the works of the flesh (Galatian 5:19-21), and so on. But one might say the same about aspects of football, which evangelicals are keen to follow. And isn’t there a place for battering competition in a world where physically courageous manliness is declining. The Marines thought so (as did my infantry instructors in the Army), who scheduled pugil stick fights to help ready us for close combat. In this connection, I’m reminded of an anecdote I read in Reader’s Digest in my high school days: An American diplomat took his Russian counterpart to an football game in the DC area, and, after watching the proceedings for a while, the visitor lamented that his country could never beat us if we were ever to go to war. He was going on the conviction that if our nation’s young men were engaged in such crash-bang sports, then we were raising troops who wouldn’t be intimidated, but rather willing to go into harm’s way, and with powerful effect. So one might argue that Christian humility is a matter of restrained strength rather than default ineffectuality.

Well, it should be interesting to track along with and nudge Josh as he works through this topic. As for the image on the Preds’ screen, yeah, we watched and weren’t ashamed to do so. Maybe it was a pointless, petulant, even thuggish fight. But perhaps it was a man’s standing up against a cheap and dangerous shot, drawing an important line in the sand . . . or, in this case, on the ice. On this model, we can understand that the malefactor’s behavior was not simply a personal affront, from which one could turn the other cheek. Rather, it could be an assault on the team and the integrity of the game, and for that, you need not limit your response to a smile and a “Bless you, Brother.”