Sports As Religious Ritual

I  first started thinking about sports as religion when watching Wimbledon on television at a young age. Wimbledon, the prestigious tennis championship, with its proximity to London and with royalty in attendance, has a regal, reverential feel to it. The idea hit home for me in a commercial that aired during the tournament for the Wimbledon clothing line. The ad showed players diving for the ball and well-dressed spectators cheering while an announcer talked about how wonderful Wimbledon was. The ad ended with a wide shot of the crowd rising to its feet to applaud a point at Center Court, the famous championship stadium. The solemn narrator intoned, “If tennis is a religion, then this is its temple.”

In any discussion of sports as religious ritual, maybe Wimbledon – with its pomp, ceremony, and reverence – is a good place to start. For me, years now after I first saw that commercial, and after an adolescence as a sports-a-holic and a freelance sportswriter, I find myself asking some bigger questions about what is really going on inside the stadium, and examining my own place in the stands.

Of course, maybe a better place to reflect on this would be across campus at the Fieldhouse, not a house of worship. But I’ve found that it’s easiest for me evaluate the cultural practices and surroundings of sports when I take sports out of their natural context, take a step back and survey the scene. Besides, you can’t talk for long about what it means to cheer in the Fieldhouse without raising immediate questions about what it means to worship, in here.

First of all, what does it mean to talk about sports as ritual? The answer, I think, has something to do with how sports function in a culture. The word “ritual” derives from “rite,” which Webster defines as “a formal ceremony or procedure prescribed or customary in religious or other solemn use.” To use the term in relation to sports suggests that sports are something that bring a culture together with regularity, that proceed according to understood principles and prescribed rules, and engage the entire gathering if not directly, then at least indirectly, vicariously. I’ll defend that as a definition of what sports do in America today. 

Sports give us cultural rhythm, they unite us, they celebrate our ideals. They are a metronome constantly ticking, keeping the pace. Just as we go to church every Sunday morning, many of us watch football every Sunday afternoon, or every Monday night, or every Thanskgiving. Many of us grew up watching the baseball Game of the Week every Saturday afternoon. Next winter we will back to the Fieldhouse every other Wednesday night to watch basketball. 

Sports are ritualistic not just for their regularity, but also for their pageantry, their color, spectacle. Athletes and fans wear costumes and colors that have broad symbolic significance. There is chanting and singing, hand signals, formations of players, and other customs.

In sum, sports are a way for a culture to regularly come together to celebrate a common experience, to sing, to chant, to affirm common values, to experience something visceral through selected representatives who lead these customs on behalf of the assembly. If that sounds familiar, that’s also a definition I have for church. In fact, the only two cultural phenomena I can describe that way are church and sports. 

I once heard a scientist claim that sports crowds chant with musical consistency. He said that remarkably, more often than not, when fans respond to an opposing player’s completely missed shot with the chant of “air ball,” they do so on the same pitch every time – F, I think it was. The point is not the musical gifts of basketball fans, but rather what it says about the cultural characteristics of sporting events that a crowd of thousands of strangers can come together and spontaneously burst into song, without rehearsal, without a director, and, as this scientist claims, sing in unison on a consistent pitch. 

Ask yourself, why do we sing the national anthem before games? It may be appropriate at the Olympics or national championship events, but every last high school soccer game across the country dutifully begins with the national anthem. It seems to be a declaration that we are Americans and this is an American event. It’s the opening hymn to a service of American worship. 

So the place to start, I think, in talking about sports as religious ritual is to simply realize that the sporting event is a ritual. We feel funny saying that, we laugh nervously, but anthropologists and others who study human culture learn quickly to get over that and acknowledge how cultural events function in a society.

The next question is, why do we laugh at that? Why are we uncomfortable calling sporting events rituals? Why not accept this seemingly obvious cultural reality? Perhaps because we have been trained to think that sports are not important, a notion we should maybe rethink to some extent. The reason I’m uncomfortable about this subject when I look at my own life is that in this nation sport is American worship, not Christian worship. We sing the national anthem, not a Christian hymn, at the start of games. It is America we are celebrating at the stadium, not God, and I wonder how much we get this confused.

At their roots, sports and religion were in fact very mixed. The Ancient Olympic Games were founded in the eighth century B.C. as religious ceremonies. People from all around Greece would make a pilgrimage every four years to Olympia, the birthplace in Greek mythology of the god Zeus. And right there, in the middle of this religious shrine, which athletes and fans entered only after undergoing purification, they would hold footraces, wrestling, discus throwing, and the like. 

The Games were officially offered as a sacrifice to Zeus in his shrine. Beyond that, since the gods were believed to resemble mortals and to be strong and swift, mortals who themselves were strong and swift were considered god-like, and to watch them running and throwing was to get a glimpse of the gods. Victorious athletes were even allowed to erect statues to themselves at Olympia – a familiar phenomenon to anyone who has been to the United Center in Chicago and has seen the statue of Michael Jordan out front.

For centuries after the Ancient Olympics died out, religion for the most part kept its distance from sports, until the mid nineteenth century, when the Catholic schools helped lay the foundation for organized sports in America. Religious educators began introducing physical education into the curriculum as a way to build moral character. The movement was known as “Muscular Christianity,” and this is how organized sport in part came to take root in America, some 150 years ago in Northeastern private schools, before professional leagues came along and marketed the concept.

To return to the present day, and our problem of American worship and Christian worship, we can observe how discussion of faith and sports continue to be permeated by this notion of Muscular Christianity, the belief in a direct connection between physical strength and training and the spiritual life. Personally, I do not see this direct link between athletics and spirituality, and I worry that when we try to make this link, we make an accidental connection to American patriotism.

When a judge last fall banned praying over the loudspeaker before football games at public high schools in Texas, the resulting controversy seemed to stem from the expectation that prayer had an official, ceremonial place at the athletic event in a way it would not at other public events. When athletes come together to pray at midfield after a game, it has a ceremonial feel to it, and comes with the assumption that the playing field is a sort of religious shrine fit for praying in a way other public places are not.

When football coach Bill McCartney, for whom the concept of Muscular Christianity is alive and well, held Promise Keepers conventions in the Silverdome and Soldier Field, I was confused by the use of temples of football as temples of faith. The athletic context sent me mixed messages. It wasn’t just that these were big places for a big event, but that these were male places for a male event, and the athletic context suggested sports had special relevance to faith. I couldn’t find the line between athletic event and religious event. 

Imagine if Calvin’s 125th anniversary service, which was held yesterday in the Fieldhouse, had been led by the athletic department rather than the religion department and seminary. Without questioning the athletic staff’s faith, we might have been uncomfortable with their elevation to special ceremonial authority simply for their status as athletic instructors. The context would be confusing. While Promise Keepers as a whole was a positive movement, this was my problem: the assumption that a football coach had special insight into how to conduct ourselves in our spiritual lives and marriages  that others who were not football coaches would not have.

Or consider a religious athlete who visits a church youth group as a motivational speaker and says, “On the court I have to keep my eye on the ball. In life I have to keep my eye on Jesus.” This is usually accepted as having spiritually instructive value. The athlete is given spiritual authority for his accomplishments – because he is successful in basketball, he is fit to tell us about spiritual discipline. Muscular Christianity.

To bring this full circle in our consideration of the national anthem and American worship, I think the danger is that by mixing and matching Christian worship, church, and American worship, sports, we eventually come to mistake American values as Christian. Yet doesn’t Christian faith lead us to a very different view of the importance of physical beauty, money, manliness, sexuality, patriotism, and so on, than the view of these things which America celebrates through sports?  Unlike Greece at the time of the Ancient Olympics, America has no official religion, so what it worships through its cultural rituals are national values. Sports are not Christian worship, and I think we have to be careful about trying to make them so. 

Let me rush to clear something up. I am not saying that sports are irrelevant, unimportant, and have nothing to do with faith. To be sure, sports are part of the fullness of life, all of which is under Christ’s lordship and should in a general way be an offering of worship to him. It’s when we get more specific about that begin to run into problems.

I also do not mean to suggest that it is bad to for a culture to have mass rituals such as sporting events. Cultures need rituals to survive, to have identity, just as the church needs Sunday worship to define itself. Rather, the question I ask myself as a Christian sports fan is, at what cost to my Christian identity do I participate in American cultural rituals? Where do my Christian values start to clash with the values my country enforces through sports?

But again, overall, with these cautions in mind, we should be enthusiastic fans, looking for the beauty in the cultural expression of sporting events.  We may need to do a better job of monitoring our patriotic values and keeping sports in their place, but we can realize that this is still an important place. 

Especially in a telecommunications age, when cell phones and chat rooms replace face-to-face interaction, we need grand events when we physically come together. Humans are social creatures; loneliness is one of our worst fears. In an age of isolation, we need more crowds, more groups, more gatherings, not more chat rooms.  That’s why for me, church and sports are two of the most important parts of modern culture in the 21st Century. They’re two ways in which we still come together. I think that for their human value, they have a very interesting future in a digital age.

Ask a psychologist what watching football means to males who otherwise are uncomfortable interacting and showing emotion. Or ask a historian what Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in baseball in 1947, meant to race relations in this country. Sports unify, and, to some extent, we need them to. I think this should be said of the church as well – that it be a powerful unifying social force that leads us to congregate, celebrate unity, sing, and affirm common values. 

I still sort of blink when I remember the Wimbledon narrator who called the tennis stadium a temple, but I have come to recognize the ritual necessity and cultural identity of sports. Sports are a part of the whole human existence, all of which is our offering to God, part of the way we fulfill the Cultural Mandate as human beings. They should be put and kept in their place, but we can celebrate what this place is. As so much in society works to drive us apart, I hope our chanting and singing at games and in church, gets louder and louder. 

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