Is a girl playing football un-Christian?

After months of waiting on the sidelines, Kacy Stuart was finally going to get the chance to play football with her team, the New Creation Center Crusaders.

She had practiced hard but nothing could’ve prepared her that night for the moment the opposing team read a pregame statement over the intercom.

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RICH ADDICKS / raddicks@ajc.com/Staff

Kacy Stuart, 14, is the kicker for the New Creation Center Crusaders.

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RICH ADDICKS / raddicks@ajc.com

‘I was the first female in Henry County to score points on the football field,’ says Kacy Stuart, 14, with her mother Angie.

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Kacy, a 14-year-old freshman, didn’t hear the entire statement, but it was these final words, a quote from Romans 12:2, that took her by surprise: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”

The passage, while vague to some, has been interpreted by others as a warning against Christians conforming to un-Christian ways of the world. In the case of Kacy, its about girls playing a physical sport with boys.

“I just stood there with a straight face,” said Kacy, just days after East Atlanta Mustangs coach Alan Hawkins’ statement was issued. “We didn’t really care.”

The incident has touched off discussions about the historical use — or misuse — of Scripture to justify all sorts of things. In this case, religious scholars say that the leap from ancient Hebrew doctrine to contemporary sports is a rather big one. There isn’t anything in this verse or the book of Romans opposing female football players, they say.

“A woman playing football is a far cry from what the Apostle Paul could’ve been thinking of in the book of Romans,” said Fred Niedner, an ordained Lutheran pastor and theology professor at Indiana’s Valparaiso University.

Hawkins, who issued the statement, was not available for comment. His wife, responding to a reporter’s call, said he has suffered a death in the family.

Scott Johnson, coach for the New Creation Crusaders, said he “proofed” the statement before the Oct. 18 game “and believed it wasn’t derogatory against” Kacy, kicker for the Christian school’s team.

He did, however, try to soften the blow to Crusader fans.

“We went through the crowd and told our people to be silent,” said Johnson. “I wanted us to be respectful.”

Love of the game

Kacy Stuart has loved football for much of her life. It wasn’t until seventh grade, however, that she ever considered playing the male-dominated sport.

“My P.E. teacher saw me kick and asked me to kick a football,” Kacy recalled recently. “I hit the back of the wall.”

You need to be on our team next year, her physical education teacher told her.

The football team, she asked?

Yeah, you’re a natural.

One year with the Union Grove Middle School Wolverines, Kacy said, changed her life.

“I was the first female in Henry County to score points on the football field,” she said.

She knew then she wanted to play through high school. When the family moved from Henry County to Spalding County, the Crusaders welcomed the Skipstone Academy freshman. For two months before the start of the season, Kacy practiced with her teammates. She participated in drills and even played a scrimmage game.

The Crusaders were posing for a team photo when Kacy learned Hank St. Denis, executive chairman of the Georgia Football League, which sponsors football for boys who home school or attend Christian schools, had booted her off because she was a girl.

St. Denis has declined comment.

“I’m sorry, I don’t have time right now,” he said when contacted recently.

The league did, however, reverse its decision, after a lawsuit was threatened.

“She’s a good kid,” Angie Stuart said of Kacy. “She’s not this mean girl who wants to prove a point. She’s an athlete who wants to kick.”

Lesson in tolerance

Kacy and her mother believed the struggle to play was finally over when the Crusaders played the Mustangs. The opponent didn’t protest Kacy playing, but they wanted to read a statement before the game.

Johnson said he discussed the statement at length with the Mustangs’ Hawkins and made it clear he didn’t agree a woman couldn’t kick a football, but he hoped by letting them read the statement he could teach Hawkins tolerance.

Johnson said Hawkins believed strongly that men should honor women, not hit them. Scholars say that the problem with using Scripture to justify one’s actions is that 98 percent of the time it is Scripture taken out of context.

“You can justify slavery with Scripture if you pull out a handful of verses as your authority,” said Brent Plate, a visiting religious studies professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. “You can justify a male-dominated view of the world or you can justify an egalitarian view.”

Plate said, for instance, Galatians 3:28 states, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

“If someone had pulled that out a long time ago,” he said, “we would’ve had a very different relationship in the United States to issues of slavery and patriarchy.” Niedner said the biggest danger is using the text for a purpose for which it was never intended.

“It’s a little like being careless about the medicine in your medicine cabinet,” he said. “If you don’t use them for the purpose intended, you end up with unfortunate consequences.”

Niedner and other scholars cautioned, however, that this doesn’t mean the Bible is never useful in guiding one’s actions.

“The Scripture is a resource for helping us live our lives faithfully but it requires a process of interpretation,” said Thomas Long, Bandy Professor of preaching at Emory’s Candler School of Theology and long-time Presbyterian minister .

Long said that much of the time people decide what they want and then find verses in the Bible to back that up.

In the case of the female football player, he said the use of Romans 12:2 indicates, perhaps, the Mustangs believe that a girl on a football team is part of the feminist agenda which could be seen as worldly or un-Christian.

And that, Long said, is part of a larger Christian view that the world is changing and not for the good.

Christians are on the defensive about being asked to accept things that they believe run counter to their faith, he said, and so they’re drawing a line in the sand.

“I have some sympathy with the need for Christians to be careful about their identity in the world,” Long said. “We’re asked to present ourselves a living sacrifice, to take up suffering and … to live a life of Christ. That’s what’s going on in that Scripture. Not opposing a girl playing football.”