Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all

Hear, O sons and daughters of time, the voice of Joyce Carol Oates, who spoke with fire when she declared: “Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity, all the more trenchant for its being lost.” In these words there is a lament and a hymn, a recognition of something ancient that still flickers in the modern world. She points to a truth that the ring is not merely a place of sport, but an altar where rituals of strength, endurance, and honor are enacted—rituals once woven into the fabric of manhood, but now fading in the haze of forgetting.

The origin of this wisdom comes from Oates herself, a writer of rare intensity, who explored the violence and poetry of the human condition. In studying boxing, she saw more than fists and blood. She saw myth, sacrifice, and the vestiges of a religion—a system of meaning that once taught men how to suffer, how to struggle, how to conquer not only opponents but themselves. And though the modern age has abandoned temples to such rites, the boxing ring remains as a sanctuary where the echoes of that old faith still resound.

Consider what she calls the “lost religion of masculinity.” In ages past, men were shaped by trials of body and spirit: the hunt, the battlefield, the clash of warriors. These ordeals demanded courage, discipline, and mastery over fear. They were rites of passage, affirmations of a man’s place in the order of life. Yet in the world of comfort and machines, such trials are no longer required. The religion of struggle has been forgotten, and with it, a dimension of manhood that once bound fathers to sons and warriors to tribes.

But in boxing, we glimpse its remnants. Here, two men stand exposed beneath the lights, stripped of every disguise but their courage. The crowd watches as they enact the drama of will against will, flesh against flesh. It is not brutality alone, but a pageant of discipline and spirit, where the body becomes a text, and pain is the ink with which the story is written. To witness it is to glimpse a time when such trials defined manhood, and to feel the ache of what is missing in a world that has forgotten.

Let us recall a story of the great Muhammad Ali, who stood not only as a boxer but as a prophet of this lost religion. When he faced George Foreman in the heat of Zaire during the “Rumble in the Jungle,” he was not only fighting a man, but confronting the very essence of fear and mortality. Ali, battered and weary, employed the rope-a-dope, enduring punishment with patience and cunning, until the moment arrived when he struck and triumphed. That victory was not only athletic—it was spiritual, a testimony that manhood lies not in brute force alone, but in resilience, strategy, and heart. Ali’s struggle was a liturgy of this lost faith, celebrated upon the altar of the ring.

The meaning, then, is profound: boxing is not merely entertainment, but a symbolic remembrance of an older world where suffering forged identity, and victory was sacred. In its survival, we see both the hunger of the soul for meaning and the poignancy of its absence elsewhere. The ring is holy ground, for it allows men to enact in ritual what the modern world denies them in life: the trial of courage, the reckoning with mortality, the celebration of endurance.

And now, O listeners, what lesson shall we draw? Though the religion of masculinity may be obscured, its wisdom need not be lost. Seek trials that test you, not to harm but to strengthen. Discipline your body, that your spirit may be tempered. Confront fear, not by hiding but by standing in its presence until it bows. And above all, do not forget that manhood—or indeed, humanity itself—is not forged in comfort but in struggle, in the willingness to endure and to rise again.

Therefore, let Oates’ words be a torch. Do not shun the celebration of struggle, nor dismiss the rituals that remind us of who we are. Whether in the boxing ring, in the mountains, or in the challenges of daily life, find your altar of courage. For though the old religion may be fading, its spirit yet burns, waiting for you to take it up and live it boldly.