Football is in the midst of a massive injury crisis. San Francisco’s Chris Borland retired before he had even reached his prime, leaving millions of dollars in future paychecks on the table. The National Football League has agreed to a $1bn settlement to help pay the medical costs of retired players dealing with debilitating neurological injuries.

This is a scene that plays out once every 30 or 40 years in America. It happened in 1905, when around 20 players (estimates vary on the exact figure) died in game action. It happened again in the 1930s, when so many players were getting hurt that the American Football Coaches Association felt it necessary to begin an annual survey of player injuries. It happened in 1968, when 66 players were either killed or paralyzed on the field, an epidemic that forced the creation of official equipment standards and led to the birth of the hard shell plastic helmet still in use today. And it has been happening once more over the past half-decade, as the damage hidden under those hard helmets has been revealed in the form of CTE diagnoses and other mental health issues now rampant among former NFL players.

There has never been any question about whether or not football is a painful and violent game. Controversy only comes when we begin to question whether the game is worth the battered bodies and busted brains it routinely produces. As such, it seems more accurate to call what is happening now a crisis of faith in football and its violent ways. And while America’s faith in football has occasionally been shaken, as it appears to be now, it has never been broken.

The strength of America’s faith in football can be traced back to its origin in the Muscular Christian movement of the 1800s. The Muscular Christians strongly believed in the formative power of athletic competition, that by participating in games and sports young men would be instilled with positive character traits. The Muscular Christians had particular concerns that America’s men were becoming “soft” and thus placed higher value on games that created a few bruises in the process. In 1868, a year before Rutgers beat Princeton in the first ever college football contest, one American Muscular Christian wrote, “there is a precious discipline in danger ... I consider no man educated who is not educated to meet danger, grapple with it, and conquer it. And any system of gymnastics which leaves out danger is an emasculated system.”

The most prominent of the American Muscular Christians was Theodore Roosevelt who was football’s biggest cultural supporter around the turn of the 20th century. He is widely credited with “saving football” following the aforementioned 1905 crisis. Roosevelt, who had a son on Harvard’s football squad at the time, decried some of the game’s most excessive violence at a time when the flying wedge on kickoffs routinely left bodies strewn across the field and Yale defenders were drop-kicking Harvard punt returners after fair catch signals.

But Roosevelt was clear that the violence wasn’t an unintended consequence of football; rather, it was why football was so appealing to him and the Muscular Christians in the first place. “The sports especially dear to a vigorous and manly nation are always those in which there is a certain slight element of risk,” Roosevelt wrote in 1893 for Harper’s Weekly. “It is mere unmanly folly to do away with the sport because the risk exists.” And although Roosevelt acknowledged there were problems with football in 1905, he believed the problems lay not in the game itself but in its poor stewardship. “Because I believe in the game, I want to do all I can to save it,” Roosevelt told a number of coaches and athletic directors at a football summit he convened that year. “And so I have called you all down here to see whether you won’t all agree to abide by both the letter and spirit of the rules, for that will help.”

Roosevelt and the rest of football’s advocates truly believed in the healthful and beneficial properties of football’s violence, as long as it could be reasonably constrained. “The rough play, if confined within manly and honorable limits, is an advantage,” he wrote in a letter to Walter Camp in 1895. US Senator Henry Cabot Lodge wrote the next year that “the time given to athletic contests and the injuries incurred on the playing field are part of the price which the English-speaking race has paid for being world-conquerors.” As Michael Perelman and Vincent Portillo detailed at CounterPunch, the Muscular Christians were steadfast in their belief that football produced the warriors necessary to maintain an empire, and similar sentiments were seen among the British Muscular Christians who advocated for youth participation in rugby.

This faith in football’s violence is detectable in every response to the injury crises of the past. Roosevelt claimed the 1905 deaths weren’t caused by football but by improper adherence to its rules. The American Football Coaches Association claimed in 1933 that many of football’s injuries were caused by “poor leadership.” The solution to the 1968 crisis was tougher helmets and anti-spearing rules. And the solution to today’s crisis pushed by USA Football, the sport’s governing body, is Heads Up Football, which claims to teach proper tackling and make the sport “better and safer.”

All of these solutions maintained and will maintain football as a sport in which men crash into each other at high speeds. No amount of leadership or equipment or technique can make the tremendous forces football players are regularly exposed to safe. To believe in any of these solutions is to believe in the inherent value of football’s violence, much in the same way the Muscular Christians did.

There has been lots of talk about the “death of football” since the discovery of CTE put football’s head injury problem in full focus at the end of the past decade, particularly as lawsuits pile up and the NFL enters into multimillion dollar settlements with former players. For the NFL, a business pulling in $9bn per year, such settlements are a pittance, a sum the league can recoup in two weeks of game action.

Instead, when it became apparent CTE and concussions were going to become a long-term public relations problem for football, the NFL’s biggest concern was American mothers and their faith in the game’s safety. Dr Bennett Omalu, a forensic pathologist who discovered the first known case of CTE in former Pittsburgh Steelers lineman Mike Webster, was confronted by an NFL doctor as he pursued his research. Omalu recalled the conversation for the documentary League of Denial. “Bennett, do you know the implications of what you’re doing?” the league’s doctor asked. “If 10% of mothers in this country would begin to perceive football as a dangerous sport, that is the end of football.”

The problem is, football has to remain dangerous if it is to remain true to the values of the Muscular Christians who created and promoted it. Consider what Baltimore Ravens head coach John Harbaugh wrote in an affirmation of his faith in football, titled Why Football Matters.

“This game asks a young man to push himself further than he ever thought he could go. It literally challenges his physical courage. It shows him what it means to sacrifice. It teaches him the importance of doing his job well. We learn to put others first, to be part of something bigger than ourselves. And we learn to lift our team-mates – and ourselves – up together.”

It’s a wonderful sentiment, but what of all the players left behind with broken bodies and broken brains? Who lifted up Kosta Karageorge, the Ohio State lineman who killed himself after texting his mother his concussion symptoms had become “an embarrassment?” Who lifted up Joseph Chernach, a former high school football player who committed suicide at age 25, was found to be suffering from CTE, and said his symptoms made him feel “worthless?” What about Junior Seau, Dave Duerson, Jovan Belcher, Ray Easterling and Paul Oliver, all former NFL players who have committed suicide within the past five years?

As far as I can tell, there are only two ways to maintain faith in football when confronted with the damage it leaves in its wake. You can avert your eyes, something the news and lawsuits surrounding CTE and concussions are making more and more difficult on a regular basis. Or you can blame the people. Blame the coaches for teaching the wrong technique. Blame the players for applying it incorrectly. Blame the schools for buying improper equipment or eliminating mandated prayers. Anything so that when forced to explain the next Kosta Karageorge or Junior Seau, there’s something to point to other than the fact that he played football and his brain and body were subjected to the game’s brutal beatings.

“Millions of young men have learned lessons in football that they could only learn through playing this game,” Harbaugh’s essay states. “Football has saved lives. That is why football matters.” This is America’s faith in football’s violence distilled to its purest form. Football’s unique violence is not an unfortunate byproduct, it is what has made football into America’s most popular and most celebrated sport. As long as football’s disciples believe its brutality creates the great American male, and as long as American sports fans buy into that faith, football will continue to leave broken bodies and broken minds in its wake, just as it has for the past century and a half.