The Emergence and Evolution of the Study of Sport and Religion

Abstract

The Emergence and Evolution of the Study of Sport and Religion Joseph L. Price When we begin to map the development and status of the interdisciplinary area of studies “sport and religion,” we find that its boundaries have been shaped by multiple, sometimes competing factors: the use of sporting metaphors to describe spiritual acts and, vice versa, the use of religious rhetoric to describe athletic feats; the embrace of sports as a means of outreach by faith communities; the exercise of sport as a spiritual discipline; theological reflections on the significance of play; ethical reflections on competitive violence and efforts to gain competitive advantages; and the function of sport as a civil religion, to name some of the most prominent cartographical entries. In short, the field has few straight lines and no right angles. As one way to locate the origin and plot the expansion of this interdisciplinary territory, let me intertwine the story of developments in my course “Sport, Play, and Ritual” (introduced in 1984 and offered 25 times before my retirement) with a broad survey of literature in the field, most of which has been issued during the history of my course. When I launched the course and published my first essay on the subject, I did not expect to devote a significant portion of my career to participating in the growth of this creative area of study. My interest in the possible relation between these two passions—religion and sport—had been whetted twenty years earlier when as an early adolescent I had been given a copy of The Goal and the Glory,1 a collection of devotionals by representative all-star athletes, including childhood favorites Bobby Richardson [End Page 17] and Rafer Johnson. At that time, I was unaware of the concept of “muscular Christianity,” an orientation toward faith and sports exemplified in the athletes’ testimonies. A decade later in a respectful, three-part series in Sports Illustrated, Frank Deford dubbed this blend of sports and religion as “Sportianity.”2 However, my enthusiasm for developing an academic course on sports and religion drastically differed from this evangelical ratification of sport. Instead, my interest had been piqued by several works on the theology of play, particularly those by Robert Neale,3 Harvey Cox,4 and Hugo Rahner.5 But the most significant work for stimulating my interest and the course was Michael Novak’s theological celebration, The Joy of Sports.6 Novak interprets Americans’ devotion to sport as one manifestation of civil region that involves a spiritual sense and set of religious rituals. Novak maintains that sports are liturgies without creeds and that they appeal to the human hunger for an experience of transcendence. In that regard he asserts that to experience victory is to taste immortality, and by contrast to experience defeat is to sample the certainty of death. He also identifies other ways that sports function as a religion. They offer a sense of sacred time and sacred space that occurs in a defined space where special rules apply and when governed by a different measure of time; an experience of suspense or mystery about the outcome of a game or performance; an athlete’s possible ascetic orientation in preparation for a quest toward a perfect performance; an experience of awe in response to unbelievable plays and beautiful, physical feats. Because of his penetrating theological analysis and his expansive consideration of [End Page 18] team sports, it is fair to credit Novak with having issued the charter for the academic study of sport as religion.7 During the development of my course, I teamed with a colleague whose expertise was in the sociology of sports. While we searched for resources to recommend to students, we were dismayed to learn that The Joy of Sports was out of print, but we were able to compile a bibliography of various works about the ancient Olympic games that were performed in honor of and for the entertainment of the gods, Native American rites like that of Black Elk’s account of Tapa Wanka Yap (throwing the ball), essays on Sumo wrestling that explained the sacred significance of salt rituals and the Dohyo, and various analyses of martial arts...