Group Hopes to Reclaim Martial Arts’ Original Intent: To Live a God-Centered Lifestyle
Meagan O’Neill, The Ledger, March 11th 2006
A chorus of “Yes, sir” echoes through the First Baptist Church in Osceola, Wis., every Thursday evening at exactly 6:15. That is when the Rev. Dr. Kent Haralson calls the Master’s Warriors to order. Congregating before their sensei, the members start the weekly Seigi Bushido Ryu training with an opening prayer. Throughout the two-hour session, in addition to sparring, punching and falling, the class will also have Bible study and closing prayers. This is karate with a Christian kick.
“The majority of martial arts schools are now secular, teaching just punching and kicking,” said Haralson, who also co-founded the Gospel Martial Arts Union and is chairman of the College of Christian Martial Artists. “We are trying to reclaim martial arts’ original intent: to live a God-centered lifestyle and to have great power under great control.”
Martial arts of all stripes – from tae kwon do to jujitsu – are on the rise. Fueling that growth are instructors like Haralson, a born-again evangelist, who incorporate Christian theology into practices grounded in Eastern philosophies like Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism. Christian martial artists fall into two categories: martial artists who happen to be Christian and Christians who use martial arts to bring “unchurch” people closer to Christ, in the process reinterpreting their craft’s history.
Master Luke Fraser, 27, is co-owner of Gold Medal Family Karate in Cherry Hill, N.J. With his wife, Ashlee, 21, Fraser runs a thriving tae kwon do and hapkido program for students of all faiths. While there is no formal prayer or Bible study at Gold Medal, Fraser, who accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior at age 7, brings Christianity into his lessons regularly by discussing his Christian lifestyle during “mat chats.”
“My purpose should always be the same, to introduce Christ,” Fraser said on a recent Saturday morning. “When I say things, as the master, it is an unspoken law that I am trying to portray a way of life I would like students to come to live.”
His methods have proved effective, religiously speaking. Since 1998, he said, three people have been saved or accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior, right there in his dojo. As both the director of the Mighty Warrior Ministries and the chaplain of the Christian Black Belt Association in Michigan, the Rev. John Porta’s tactics are more transparent. With free trial classes and public demonstrations in Okinawan karate, he encourages the curious to pass through his church’s doors. Once enrolled, students of his ministry program have to pass a series of physical and biblical tests to graduate to the next belt.
“The goal,” Porta said, “is to prepare them to have a walk with God through a disciplined martial arts program and Bible study.”
Like Christianity’s Holy Trinity, martial arts are also triune in nature, cultivating the body,
mind and spirit. True martial artists, religious and secular practitioners agree, must develop all three aspects to claim mastery over their craft.
The Christian motivation for developing a martial artist’s physical skills is simple: self-defense. “This is the body Christ gave me, to live for him and share him with the world,” Fraser said. “I am adamant that Christians need to be able to protect themselves and their families rather than be pushovers.”
But Eastern methods of training the mind and spirit cause the born-again contingency’s hackles to go up. “A lot of parents don’t like the bowing,” said Jeff McLaughlin, an instructor of Chinese kempo and the founder of the International Network of Christian Martial Artists, which has its headquarters in Spring Dale, Ark.
“They see it as a type of worship,” he said. Consequently, McLaughlin has eliminated bowing from his lessons as well as modified how meditation is introduced, because “the Eastern way says to completely empty your mind, and then you open yourself up to the dark forces.”
For non-Christian martial artists, McLaughlin’s suggestion of “dark forces” is more amusing than threatening. While they are open to different interpretations of the history of martial arts, many traditional practitioners warn that being too philosophically inflexible challenges the fundamental nature of martial arts.
“Anything dogmatic doesn’t work in martial arts,” said Jon Davis, a hapkido instructor in Santa Monica, Calif. “It’s too rigid. A martial art should go with the flow, be like water.”
According to born-again instructors, it is their Christian duty to equip their students with the skills to protect themselves physically and the discipline to use those skills judiciously so that they can fulfill their responsibilities to God spiritually. But many struggle in the beginning to reconcile their Christian identity with their passion for a practice inherently violent and deeply grounded in Eastern philosophy and religion.
For Scot Conway, a born-again Christian and owner of Guardian Martial Arts in Spring Valley, Calif., it took years of independent research in Christian martial arts to overcome this quandary. Conway, who developed a system called guardian kempo, suggests that the Eastern martial arts are “mostly incomplete” but not exactly wrong.
“The fundamentalist perspective I was taught,” Conway said, “was if it is not Christian, it is necessarily evil. So, in practicing the Eastern martial arts, I was told I was doing something evil. I had to learn more about what people were telling me to avoid, and began asking deeper questions. The paradoxes I learned as a martial artist are resolved in the Bible.”
Referring to Old Testament passages and listing Adam, Abraham and Jacob among the first martial artists, Conway argues that martial arts or “military arts” originated in Mesopotamia during biblical times and can be traced throughout history along the trade routes right into Okinawa, Japan. For Christian martial artists, this rationale bolsters their belief that their craft complements their Christian roots. After all, martial arts, as chronicled by Conway and his colleagues, have Christian roots themselves.
“The more you know about martial arts, the less of a conflict there is,” Conway said. “The deeper you go, the closer to Christianity you find that you are.”
