Religion and Sport Scholarship: A Brief History Jeffrey Scholes The experiences that many derive from both religion and sport are perhaps the most profound in modern society. Both, in their different ways, conjure up irrational, yet profound devotion and commitment. Yet the contrast between religion and sport seems to summon our instincts: what could one have to do with the other? Sport appears to contrast significantly with our more serious pursuits, religion being one of them. Consequently, religion and sport are usually considered two cultural artifacts that are at odds or maybe even completely separate from one another. Though both undeniably exert an immense pressure on our institutions whether these pressures are financial, political, or cultural. The endeavor to clarify the relationship between the two, if there is one, is fraught with an overriding question, “how so, if so?” Thankfully, scholars have been wrestling with this question for decades. This essay seeks to assert that there is, indeed, a deep relationship between religion and sport that dates back three thousand years and sees its tenuous, though informative, association up to the present time. As an example of the relationship’s current currency, journalists have taken notice, and there are now multiple documentary series that attempt to get at the surprising affiliation between religion and sport.1 Yet simply declaring that modern sports fanship taps into religious forms of devotion or the other way—that religion exploits the popularity of sports today— doesn’t quite get at the longstanding relationship between the two. A look [End Page 29] into the history of religion and sport scholarship, I argue, can lend a needed glimpse into not only the ways that this topic has been understood but also can be a crucial means for comprehending current and future ways that sport and religion can be appreciated in relationship. Periods of Religion and Sport Scholarship I put forth that there are three periods that help categorize the scholarship around religion and sport. These periods are not wholly discrete by any measure; the boundaries that guard these periods are admittedly more porous than rigid. Older ways of thinking about the relationship between religion and sport still rear their heads, and as such, newer, more progressive approaches demonstrate a reliance on the foundational approaches. The spirit and content of this essay does not represent a hand slap (or to use a sports culture expression, a “Heisman”) to the scholarship of the past whatsoever. Still, there are general contours of these time periods that may aid us in identifying past patterns of thinking that, in turn, can make sense of the trajectory of future scholarship. The first period of religion and sport scholarship was surely inspired by the sudden and exponential rise of the attention paid to sports. With the explosive arrival of televised sport in the late 1960s that followed with the innovative Monday Night Football in 1970, sport, as a thing in the collective consciousness, went mainstream. What understandably followed was new interest in sports by academics, but it also raised a question: did sport possess religious qualities or was it even a religion itself? Thus, what arose was the beginning of religion and sport scholarship. A crop of scholarly and journalistic responses appeared in kind. Michael Novak’s book, The Joy of Sports (1976), Frank Deford’s long piece, “Religion and Sport” in Sports Illustrated (1976), and Allen Guttmann’s book, From Ritual to Record (1978) gestured to a novel and invigorated interest in sport as a serious category that could tap into theology, social politics, and history. Novak argues that sport is “somehow, a religion;”2 Deford contends that sport has replaced religion (and Christians are not handling it [End Page 30] well);3 and Guttmann argues that modern, rationalized sport had “sidelined” religion without offering any value judgment as to whether this was the right thing to do.4 All three, to varying degrees, begin with working definitions of religion and sport that then invite a way of talking about how they might relate. The literature that followed invited expansions on this theme as sport was likened to a kind of folk religion5 and a civil religion.6 Admittedly religion and...