Team Spirit: U.S. Sports Mania Called Folk Religion

Millions of Americans will engage in an annual national ritual on Thursday: ushering in the New Year by watching football, including that “granddaddy of them all,” the Rose Bowl game in Pasadena.

For many, such sporting events have taken on a religious quality, conferring meaning and cohesiveness upon their lives.

In fact, sociologists and religious scholars say sport is fast becoming America’s newest folk religion.

“For growing numbers of Americans,” observes Charles S. Prebish of Penn State University’s religious studies program, “sport religion has become a more appropriate expression of personal religiosity than Christianity, Judaism, or any of the traditional religions.”

Prebish cites terms that athletes and sportswriters regularly use: faith, ritual, ultimate, dedicated, sacrifice, peace, commitment, spirit.

And James A. Mathisen, professor of sociology at Wheaton College, an evangelical school in Illinois, notes that the Big Game in university life and professional football’s Super Bowl spectacular are “in fact a ritual expressing and communicating a secular religion of the American dream.”

The Big Folk Event

“If I were to show a visitor to the United States a single, recurring event which has come to characterize American folk religion, the Super Bowl would be it,” Mathisen said in a paper presented in Washington last month at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.

For starters, said Mathisen, the annual Super Bowl is “strategically located in our calendar year.” During a 10-week period, there is Thanksgiving, Advent, Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year’s Day, Epiphany--”what is sacred and what is secular? Does it matter for most Americans, including many (who are) religious?”

Juxtaposed among the days and seasons, Mathisen continued, is “a bewildering array of sports and games,” which he sees as a carefully orchestrated convergence of nationalistic television entertainment and ritualistic spectator sport, culminating with the Super Bowl in late January.

In his presentation, “From Civil Religion to Folk Religion: The Case of American Sport,” Mathisen said two American myths typically dominate the Super Bowl scene:

“The founding of the nation, which is portrayed in the ritual action of the game itself, and the fantasies, hopes and innocence of the nation, which are characterized by activities preceding the game and usually marking its half-time interlude.”

Priest-sociologist Andrew Greeley has suggested that there is a powerful religious component to all public sports spectacles. This, he said, is introduced by “the human need to turn the game into a ‘mimicking’--from the old Greek word mimesis , which means dramatic imitation--of the war in heaven between the forces of good and the forces of evil.”

“We enjoy drama,” Greeley observed, “only when we can identify with one side or the other and invest the struggle with some kind of mild cosmic dimension. . . . There are always the good guys and the bad guys.”

Football is an ideal metaphor for the faith, a young Texas Baptist discovered 35 years ago.

Jarrell F. McCracken, a talented athlete, wrote and recorded an unsophisticated script that equated football with “The Game of Life.” Jesus was the head coach and “Average Christian” was the quarterback. The bottom line of the sermonizing allegory was that if Christians follow their heavenly blockers and skirt the evil defenders, they make it safely to the big end zone in the sky.

McCracken’s record sailed through the goal posts, boosting his Word Inc. music and publishing company in Waco, Tex., into a multimillion-dollar business eventually bought out by Capital Cities/ABC Inc.

‘Drop Kick Me, Jesus’

More recently, country singer Bobby Bare recorded a hit song that pleads: “Drop kick me, Jesus, through the goal posts of life.”

But even serious scholars, like historian James T. Baker, point out that football has all the trappings of cultic celebration: colored banners, fanatic supporters, the cosmic sphere, “even its own mini-skirted vestal virgins to fan the flames.”

“But far more important,” wrote Baker, “it acts as a religion by teaching its followers how to order their personal and professional lives. For those who play, it is an educational act, an immersion in truth.

“For the rest of us, who are too small or too clumsy or too old to play and have to watch from the stands or before television screens, it is not unlike a Latin High Mass performed by professionals for the edification and instruction of those deemed by the Heavenly Commissioner unworthy to participate personally.”

In his paper on American sport as folk religion, Mathisen traces distinctive myths, values and beliefs of sports that “are accepted on faith by great masses of people . . . from the President of the United States down to the most humble bootblack.”

“For example, if I believe the myth that ‘sport builds character,’ then I will guide my children toward youthful athletic participation with a virtual untestable certainty that without experience as a shortstop or as a left wing, their lives will be morally deficient,” Mathisen said at the Washington meeting of several hundred sociologists, psychologists and religious scholars.

“Further, I will infer that the ‘character’ of successful adult Americans who happen to have participated in sport at some point in their lives is what it is as a result of comparable participation in sport. Selective perception guarantees that I will interpret biographies in terms of the ideology and mythology of sport. Not to do so would be a demonstration of lack of faith and of irreligion.”

Taken for Granted

Mathisen asserted that being a sports fan and being religious are both “taken-for-granted, American thing(s) to do.” But sports enthusiasts may have allegiance to one particular sport not unlike their allegiance to a particular religious denomination.

Another aspect of sport as folk religion, according to Mathisen, is its evoking the senses of history and tradition. Thus, athletic halls of fame preserve the “sacred symbols and memorabilia which encourage us to rehearse the contributions of the saints who have moved on.”

At the same time, records, or standards established by past heroes, function “not unlike the sacred writings and the historical accounts of any religious group, providing a timeless, normative guide by which later disciples’ accomplishments are judged.”

The Olympic Games are a special case of folk religion merging sport, nationalism and politics, Mathisen points out, quoting Avery Brundage, who presided over the International Olympic Committee for 20 years:

“The Olympic Movement is a 20th-Century religion, a religion with universal appeal which incorporates all the basic values of other religions, a modern, exciting, virile, dynamic religion.”

An outstanding example of this, according to Mathisen and Prebish, was the so-called “Miracle on Ice,” the U.S. ice hockey victory over the Soviet Union during the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, N.Y.

The game, played on a Friday evening, was “one of those rare folk-religious festival events when all America stopped to participate,” Mathisen said, noting that living rooms, taverns and university TV rooms were crammed with viewers.

As E. M. Swift wrote in Sports Illustrated magazine at the time: “It was an Olympian moment, the kind the creators of the Games must have had in mind; one that said, ‘Here is something that is bigger than any of you.’ ”

Act of Salvation

To Mathisen, the 4-3 gold medal victory by the underdog “good guys” of the West was a quintessential folk religious happening that “provoked a display of unabashed nationalism and . . . served as a focal point of national redemption.

“Americans who had never seen a hockey game and who didn’t know a cross-check from a face-off still affirmed that something special, an episodic act of salvation, had occurred.”

Prebish agreed that sentiments generated by the game were “quite as ultimate as anything that occurs in a traditional house of worship.”

But Shirl J. Hoffman, head of the physical education department at the University of North Carolina, says a nagging question remains: Can sport be sanctified to symbolize Christian devotion and glorify God?

Athletes, coaches--even university alumni--have not found it easy to combine Christian spirituality and ethics with a competitive sports philosophy that says winning is everything.

Hoffman, author of the book “Imaging the Divine: Sport and Play in Christian Experience,” finds a paradox in the fact that sport symbolizes the morality of traits like self-reliance and teaches that hard work will be justly rewarded, while Christian theology is dominated by the “radicalism of grace--the first shall be last and the last, first. . . .

“We must be careful not to delude ourselves into thinking that God in any way cares about the outcome” of a game, Hoffman wrote in Christianity Today.

“Those who feel that God especially cherishes winners--or that a win somehow glorifies him more than a loss--have theologically reduced God to a spectator who sits on the sidelines caught up in the surprises of the contest.”