Sport and Religion: The State of the Field

Abstract

Sport and Religion: The State of the Field Rebecca Alpert My own interest in the field of Religion and Sport began when I read the interview I did for Bill Freedman’s 1998 More Than a Pastime: An Oral History of Baseball Fans. Most of my reminiscences were about my childhood connection to the Brooklyn Dodgers. I talked about why Jackie Robinson’s breaking the color line was central to the development of my progressive political values, and how those values had been shaped by growing up in the Jewish community in Brooklyn in the 1950s. Thinking about that connection made me curious about why I automatically associated baseball and being Jewish. So I began to do some research about Jews in baseball. A key moment in that process was attending a panel on the edited volume The Faith of Fifty Million: Baseball, Religion, and American Culture at the American Academy of Religion in 2002. It was sponsored by the Religion and Popular Culture Group and featured panelists Randall Balmer, Donna Bowman, and Joseph Price, with responses from the editors, Christopher Evans and William R. Herzog II. While sitting in the audience it occurred to me (and a couple of Jewish sports fans who sat with me) that the absence of a discussion of Jewish contributions to baseball was a glaring omission. There wasn’t even an acknowledgement that Meyer Wolfschein, the fictional character to whom F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby) was alluding in that famous quotation about playing with the faith of fifty million, was modeled on the Jewish gambler Arnold Rothstein. And more, there wasn’t any reference to the antisemitism that erroneously blamed the 1919 Black Sox scandal on Jewish interference. Bringing Jewish concerns into that conversation seemed like an important contribution to make. I began to write about baseball and Jewish identity and became involved with groups like Jewish Major Leaguers and the [End Page 3] Society for American Baseball Research. In those spaces I met people who welcomed my musings about Jews and baseball and helped me with research questions. I gave papers on Jewish themes at a variety of baseball conferences and published them in Jewish and baseball journals. I became acquainted with the works of Jeffrey Gurock and Steven Riess who had been writing about the history of Jews and sports. The questions I was asking eventually led me to work on my own monograph, Out of Left Field: Jews in Black Baseball, that was published in 2011. In the process I became more curious about the broader context of religion and sports—were Jews always left out of the conversation? I started reading, beginning with Michael Novak’s classic 1976 work, The Joy of Sports: Endzones, Bases, Baskets, Balls, and the Consecration of the American Spirit. I read works by Allen Guttman, Robert Higgs, Joe Price, Tara Magdalinski and Timothy Chandler, Charles Prebish, and Clifford Putney. This was a rapidly developing field. Was there a way to bring these voices together and broaden the conversation to include Jewish voices too? Trolling through the program book of the American Academy of Religion in 2006, I noticed an additional meeting, “Forum on Sports and Religion.” It was described as a place where: Writers and researchers on the relationship of sports and religion meet to discuss their books, works-in-progress, and current research. All are welcome to join the general discussion about this relatively new area of cultural and religious studies. (AAR Program Book, Additional Meetings 2006, 44) Panelists included Joe Price, Eric Bain-Selbo, and editors from Mercer University Press, the sponsor of the meeting and publisher of a book series on sports and religion responsible for several of the works listed above. I was intrigued and attended the session. I joined them again in 2007 for conversations focused on football, in 2008 on the Chicago Cubs, and on sports films in 2009. By then the field had begun to explode, featuring new works by Craig Forney, Joe Price, Eric Bain-Selbo, William Baker, Steve Overman, Robert Higgs and Michael Braswell that explored the intersection of sports and religion and engaged in a debate over whether sports could be considered a religion...