Religions Reviewed

• I was struck by G.O.’s remarks in on the opacity of the circumstances of the composition of the Vedas and Upanishads, and the origins of Buddhism. I found the scenario of ignorance that he presents remarkably similar to the inscrutability of ancient Hebrew religion and the origins of Christianity. To what extent is this a necessary feature of vigorously evangelizing religions like Buddhism and Christianity? Do they necessarily devour and bury their early contemporaries? (Or is the parallel ignorance a function of similar lapses of time?)
• Aren’t there alternatives to the “Knowledge is power” explanation G.O. gives on p. 86? Could one not also explain the claim of the Ksatriya sages as meaning that their esoteric superiority resulted in their (re)birth into positions of rulership? (I think so.)
• G.O. uses the character of “Jesus” as a defining instance of the “ethical prophet” as contrasted with the “ethical ascetic.” In his The Christian Myth (2003), however, Burton Mack outlines “The Case for a Cynic-like Jesus,” in which the Jesus revered by some early Christians (as documented in Q1 and the pre-Markan Jesus chreiai and pronouncement stories) looks more like a Cynic sage, and thus an “ethical ascetic.”  Is it possible that (in some cases, at least) the “ethical prophet” may arise from a transformation of an “ethical ascetic” figure, or vice versa? (I consider it feasible enough to ask.) Could this question give rise to a cross-cultural modeling enterprise likethe one in Imagining Karma? (It could, if the evidence were there.)
• G.O. asserts that celibacy creates a pathologized religious imagination working out its fantasies in sadistic hells, which subsequently serve as models for penal systems in this world (172-173). He gives a detailed and convincing Buddhist example, but with his mention of “the various Inquisitions,” is he perhaps not thinking more of Christianity? (Looks like it.)
• How does the term “eschatology” come to function in the sense that G.O. uses it? To what extent is G.O. (especially at the bottom of p. 260) engaging an idea of “Cosmos” in the sense presented in Eliade’s Myth of the Eternal Return. (I can’t quite tell.)
• G.O. several times says that Plato’s scheme has “people reborn with much the same character they had in previous existences,” (e.g. 274) but is this correct? (It seems wrong to me. In the Myth of Er, the lot-takers have been conditioned by their heavenly or hellish travels, so that the heaven-sent tend to be more foolish than before, and the hell-born to be wiser.)
• G.O. contrasts the epistemic shifts in religion to paradigm change in the physical sciences (per Thomas Kuhn). Is this a valid or useful distinction? (Over against his Newtonian/Einsteinian physics example, is Ptolemaic astronomy useful to understand modern astronomy? Is phlogiston chemistry “significant for understanding” modern chemistry? And what about the “paradigmatic” change of the original Druze community?)
• Beyond Good and Evil (Kaufmann trans.), aphorism 20:
  “That individual philosophical concepts are not anything capricious or autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection and relationship with each other…keep filling in a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies. [Quoted by G.O. 359-360] Under an invisible spell, they always revolve once more in the same orbit; however independent of each other they may feel themselves with their critical or systematic wills, something within them leads them, something impels them in a definite order, one after the other—to wit, the innate systematic structure and relationship of their concepts. Their thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a recognition, a remembering, a return and a homecoming to a remote, primordial, and inclusive household of the soul, out of which thtose concepts grew originally: philosophizing is to this extent a kind of atavism of the highest order.
  The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing is explained easily enough … [Quoted further by G.O. 353].” Now what about Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence”? What about Eliade again?

In this book, Obeyesekere works through a project of “comparative structural interpretation” (354), using simplified and idealized models of the processes described by rebirth doctrines within and among various cultures. One of his goals is to demonstrate that reincarnation “eschatologies” are not unique to Indic religions, as is sometimes supposed. The societies that furnish Obeyesekere with ethnological data are Vedanta and Upanishadic Hinduism, Theravada Buddhism, West Africa, Trobriand, Northwest Coast Amerindians, Inuit, Tlingit, Kwakiutl, Classical Hellenism (as Pythagoreanism and Platonism), “Heterodox Islam” (as Druzes and Ismailism), and Bali. He omits the kabbalistic metempsychosis of mystical Judaism, as well as some Australian and Asian cultures of reincarnation, noting that he is especially interested in those who hold beliefs permitting cross-species rebirth of humans. This latter idea he ties to the notion of “species sentience” (his term) and relates structurally to vegetarianism, by means of an endoanthropophagy (cannibalism) taboo.  

Obeyesekere distinguishes a “karmic eschatology” from the basic “rebirth eschatology” according to the presence of two features, which he groups under the process of “ethicization” of the reincarnation process. The first feature is a differentiation of post-mortem otherworld experiences based on the ethical status of the deceased. The second is the ethicization of rebirth per se, so that the ethical value of one life has the determinative effect on the identity and quality of the next life. (He notes that this latter feature correlates to a devaluation of animals, when compared to rebirth schemas that lack it.) Tied to this ethicization is the establishment of a salvation that lies outside the cycle of rebirth altogether. Obeyesekere also asserts a parallel process of “axiologization,” by which preexisting local values are conceptualized and universalized. While outlining his model of the “karmic eschatology,” he counters Western descriptions (or “inventions”) of Buddhism as essentially and originally “rational” (151 ff.).

Having constructed the model of Buddhist rebirth ideas, with reference to those of “small-scale societies,” Obeyesekere compares it to other cultures under his consideration. He also discusses instances of deviance from the model within Buddhism (e.g. 132), and variability within the other cultures. None are presented as static or uniform, but the structure(s) described by Obeyesekere serve(s) as a strange attractor around which the instances group themselves, according to “expectability” and its circumstantial thwarting. He emphasizes (e.g. 139) that “popular” features durably contradicting “pure” doctrinesare as likely to be survivals from the religion’s first codification as they are to be “contaminations” from a subsequent, alien source.

He explains that his methodological goal is to demonstrate that while cultures as wholes may be “incommensurable,” comparison of important aspects or dimensions of culture can be undertaken productively.

Jindra’s basic argument is that Star Trek, as the late 20^th-century popular culture brand with the greatest “depth and breadth of fan activity” (p. 160), is a clear and pronounced case of ‘cultural religion,’ in which a cultural object originally devised as commercial entertainment then autonomously takes on functional features of religion. He explicitly references Forbes’s formulation of this idea (171), citing the “Popular Culture as Religion” discussion in the introduction to Religion and Popular Culture in America, which in turn draws on the work of John Wiley Nelson to establish the concept. (14-15) Forbes singles out Nelson’s focus on the way in which ‘cultural religion’ brings into relief people’s dissatisfaction with their circumstances in contrast with a form of redemption or deliverance. The manner in which fans activate and interact with the utopian dimensions of the Star Trek scenario can certainly be construed in this fashion.

Although one might expect a more functionalist approach to religion to guide Jindra’s study, he instead proceeds in a largely phenomenological manner: identifying mythological, ideological and moral dimensions intrinsic to Star Trek; examining fans’ modes of social organization (with its roots in the prior history of science fiction conventions); discussing the devotional mode of pilgrimage, expressions in material culture, intellectual activities of canon delineation and linguistic elaboration, and rituals of imaginative fabrication and role-playing; and noting the tensions regarding interactions between the fans and the profane.

Primary sources Jindra cites include interviews with individual fans, and Star Trek literature such as The Star Trek Encyclopedia, The Star Trek Fan’s Handbook and Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual. I found his individual data reliable in themselves, but often a little thin in developing his case. For example, the matter of pilgrimage could have been illustrated more effectively with the Riverside, Iowa and
Vulcan, Alberta Trek towns (shown in the Trekkies film) as fan-produced pilgrim destinations, in addition to or instead of the Universal Studios Star Trek set. Additionally, conventions can themselves embrace many of the features and functions historically associated with religious pilgrimage, as occasions for immersion, exchange, and the mutual support of devotional dedication.

Near the outset of his article, Jindra offers almost in passing a rather peculiar reference to “the religious heart of society.” (159) It is not clear to me whether he is attempting to assert a sort of Durkheimian postulate in which religion would reflect and channel the essential values and energies of society; or whether he is instead claiming—more consistently with his later argument (161)—that the “heart” of religion has become sequestered from popular culture because of trends of social “differentiation” that confine religion to either private conscience or traditional institutions increasingly placed outside the political and economic mainstream.

Jindra pays special attention to the extent to which Star Trek relies on ethical and ideological mainsprings of American culture (163), and makes a closing assertion that Star Trek has in some manner been able to pick up where the American “civil religion” (theorized by Robert Bellah) had broken down from its exaggerated and intensified Cold War form. This observation, while arguably valid in itself, could serve as an interesting point of departure for more granular analyses of the cultural participation aspects of Star Trek fandom. In the original Star Trek series, the Klingons were a transparent allegory for the Soviets as a rival superpower—and the Romulans for the Chinese. In later decades, the peculiar popularity of the Klingons may reflect not only the sort of cultural disinhibition assigned to Klingons by fans (ref. remarks in the Trekkies film), but also perhaps a certain measure of nostalgia for simpler villains. In the geopolitical allegories of The Next Generation, the chief villain became the Borg, a power for assimilation and domination that reflected Americans’ anxieties about our own imperialist trajectory, in contrast to our idealized self-image in the United Federation of Planets.

A particularly acute insight of Jindra’s study concerns the paradox involved with such evidently religious devotion to a mythic world that has been itself founded on a rationalistic humanist ideal. (166) Although there are some examples of religious custom that emphasize a sort of pluralistic dignity for the exotic, “religion” per se does not fare well in the Star Trek universe; it is often represented as superstition and hidebound insularity. During the closing credits of Trekkies the standup comedian Rick Overton provides a comically exaggerated characterization of Captain Kirk’s reaction to the religions of extraterrestrial “natives” that is not far off the mark: “Your Bible is a lie! Everything you believe is wrong! Run! Freak out!” Jindra contrasts Star Trek with Star Wars fandom on a related point: Star Wars lacks “the realism and science found in Star Trek.” (168) In fact, Star Wars centers on a mystical religious elite of “Jedi Knights,” and—despite its timely if ham-fisted warnings about the corruption of republican government—strikes a primarily nostalgic and even reactionary tone, as opposed to the progressive futurism that is central to Star Trek. “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” versus “Space: the Final Frontier.” Recurring to Nelson’s ideas about dissatisfaction and redemption, one might observe these two superficially similar space adventure myths taking diametrically opposed ideological positions, yet both on those terms “religious.”

While I found the aspects I reviewed in the last two paragraphs especially interesting in light of what they can contribute to reflection on the essentially religious dimension of Star Trek fandom in particular, and the place it occupies in the spectrum of American popular culture, the paradigmatic value of the case study extends beyond Star Trek itself, and even science fiction generally, to the modes of participation and types of cultural production associated with subcultures that develop on a basis of mass-market entertainment products. Reading the study in conjunction with the Trekkies film led me to the conclusion that it would have been possible to make a much more persuasive case regarding the specifically religious nature of Star Trek fandom. (In particular, the many anecdotes regarding both miraculous and mundane healings identified with Star Trek participation were quite striking.) But the theoretical references and structure of Jindra’s study point to the ways in which that wealth of detail can highlight analogous features of ‘cultural religion’ in other instances of the fandom phenomenon.

This chapter defending Doniger’s comparativist methodology can also be read as a later reflection and enlargement on the “irreducible tension” described by Eliade, but using the poles of historicism and structuralism (rather than historicism and phenomenology). The structuralist approach includes Eliade’s “archetypes” (as “exemplary models” or “paradigms”), as well as Levi-Strauss’ structures. Doniger quickly and elegantly dismisses the idea that the work of identifying “archetypes” (or other “givens”) in inherently conservative, or even reactionary. In a discussion of diffusionist theory and “borrowing,” she concludes that while similarities in myth are more likely to be the result of borrowing than of independent parallel development, “Tracing the genealogy of a story is a mug’s game,” and “the lineage of a story does not explain its persistence.” (140-141) In this chapter, Doniger alludes to her larger project of arguing against the “dichotomization of thought,” (148) and she points to Ginsburg as someone who manages to integrate historicism and structuralism, and observes historicizing effort in Levi-Strauss’ structuralism (151), as well as issuing a defense of methodological eclecticism that would engage both poles. Other dichotomies which she finds potentially “distorting” include: homology/analogy, contextualist/comparativist, and fieldworker/textualist. She advocates making room for multiple interpretations of data (“textual pluralism”), and then proceeds directly to a plea for a diverse body of scholars working on shared material (“academic pluralism”), through her objection to a trend that groups (religions, races, genders) be studied only by “insiders” with vetted sympathies.

·         Doniger asks of Levi-Strauss, “what makes him insist that he is doing science” (147)? What indeed? Is that a rhetorical question?

·         At the very end of this chapter/book, Doniger indicates that nonscholars have more strategic flexibility than scholars. How does this square with her characterizations of Hunter and Sage in the earlier piece? (It seems almost like a reversal, to me. These “Hunters” are “nonpolarized,” and therefore have the both/and of Hunter and Sage behavior open to them.)

Doniger uses a myth from a medieval Sanskrit philosophical treatise to set up a dichotomy between Hunters and Sages, i.e. ordinary people who simply lead their own lives and scholars who pursue a vicarious understanding of other lives. She supplements this idea with a (false, she says) distinction between “head” and “heart,” and holds up her ideal of a scholar of religion as a “hunting sage.” She provides a couple of autobiographical anecdotes regarding how the “other people’s myths” that she had apprehended with her head managed to effect her heart as well. Then she sets out a “spectrum” between scholarly analysis of myths, and nonscholarly acceptance of them. Having concluded that the extremes of objective dispassion and subjective enthusiasm need to be shunned, she asks whether the scholar will most usefully adopt a sympathetic, hostile or neutral engagement with the object of study. She insists, “There should be a place for honest affect” (20) in scholarship on myths. She also provides a brief discussion of “relativism,” in which she distinguishes between moral relativism and ontological relativism, to the unspecified discredit of the former and the commendation of the latter. Finally, after positioning the scholar of religions between the hazards of cryptotheology and superrationalism, she returns to the “hunting sage” idea, and offers a defense of eclecticism.

• On p. 9, Doniger observes, “We can never know whether or not we have become trapped inside the minds of people whose consciousness we have come to share.” This reminds me of another metaphor to describe the scholar of religions: espionage, and in particular double agency. Do you work for your “native country” (personal perspectives and passions) or do you work for the country to which you’ve “defected” (academic expectations and standards)? (Answer: You do both, and each enables you to do the other.)
• Is there a “more modest, passive word” for eclecticism, for which Doniger expresses a desire (24)?
• Is religion still “the academic Scarlet Woman,” as Doniger asserts (18)? (It doesn’t seem so to me, but my data could well be skewed.)

These two chapters give different assessments of the development of “History of Religions”—a term Eliade uses to denote comparativist study of religion throughout history, rather than “mere” historical scholarship or historiography taking one or more religions for its object. (See his note on p. 54.) The first (Chapter 2) provides a survey and inventory of 20^th century accomplishments in the discipline. He inventories them under methodologies, dented as sociological, ethnological, psychological, historical, and phenomenological. Except for the last, he regards any of these methods as somewhat incomplete, and subject to reductionistic theorizing. In the second selection (Chapter 4), Eliade provides a narrative in which academic investigations of religion climax in a set of grand studies at the turn of the twentieth century, and then proceed into a “defeatist” decline, hampered by modesty of ambition, specialization in methods and subject matter, and the “fallacy of demystification.” Eliade provides exhortations for scholars of religion to assert the autonomy of the discipline, which is supposed to serve—according to him—in the role of “a total hermeneutics” which can contribute to “cultural renewal.” He concludes with a discussion of “the irreducibility of the tension between ‘phenomenologists’ and historians or ‘historicists’,” insisting on a balance between the two, but showing a stronger sympathy for the ‘phenomenological’ approach.

• On p. 19, after admitting that “there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ religious fact,” Eliade asserts that “the historian of religions … is supposed to concentrate on the religious signification of his documents.” What are these documents? (Religious scriptures, ritual transcripts, accounts of folklore, perhaps. Would they include other “documents” reflecting religious practices and beliefs, but composed without religious intent?)  How do we know that a signification is “religious,” outside of historical, sociological, cultural, and psychological indicators?
• The latter question of the previous point is again the problem of sui generis religion, which Eliade does not see as a problem. He champions the idea of a essential substance of religion on p. 25, and again on p. 58. What is Eliade’s “sacred”?  (It seems to be no more than a circumlocution for “God,” understood in a radically ecumenical sense.)
• I am a fond reader of Henry Corbin, and this is only a “talking point” if others in the seminar share this interest. I find it curious that Eliade considers Corbin a mere specialized Islamicist (30). Corbin, after all, compared Islamic mysticism to Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, and medieval Grail mythology, as well as modern Western esoteric religion. Corbin was also a theorist of comparative religion (e.g. essays in The Voyage and the Messenger). What about Eliade’s appraisal of Corbin on p. 36? Can one “deny that … Corbin has succeeded in disclosing a significant dimension of Islamic mystical philosophy”? (I am tempted to suspect that he created it, in the manner in which his writings lead one to understand it, mundus imaginalis and all.)
• Is Corbin assigning a quasi-prophetic status to the historian of religion as ‘hermeneut’ on p. 61? (It appears so to me!)
• It is fascinating to see Eliade call for the cultural assimilation of the non-Western world on p. 70! The phrase evidently did not have the valence then that it does now. What is the picture here? (Non-Western cultures are destined to extinction; ‘we’ rescue them through assimilation. “Word culture” is Western culture, plus the integrated features of what it has subordinated intellectually or materially.) This passage puts me in mind not only of Said, but of Baudrillard: ”Doesn’t every science live on this paradoxical slope to which it is doomed by the evanescence of the object in the very process of its apprehension, and by the pitiless reversal this dead object exerts on it? Like Orpheus it always turns around too soon, and its object, like Eurydice, falls back to Hades.” (Simulations,13-14.)

Another instance in which the further evolution of psychoanalysis led to religious manifestations is the work of Wilhelm Reich. Reich was a dedicated Marxist psychoanalyst whose initial work on “sex-economy” was very much in line with Freud’s remark, “that the two main points in the programme for the education of children to-day are retardation of sexual development and premature religious influence.” The younger Reich derided religion as “mysticism” and sought its origin in the perversion of sexual impulses. Later, however, after his alienation from Marxism and his development of a vital-force theory of “Orgonomy,” Reich saw fit to rehabilitate Christianity as a vehicle for his own ideas, and to identify Christ himself as his precursor. Ultimately, Reich became a martyr to his own cause, having been imprisoned in the
US for defying a court injunction regarding his research, and dying there of a heart attack in 1975.

For all that the religious character of psychoanalysis becomes more vivid in further developments of the tradition, its ingredients are already to hand in Freud’s work. The “care of souls” is the pastoral function in Christian religion, and equally a mission of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic institution, with its priestly class of analysts. Freud does not hold himself back from the pleasures of religiously-based rhetoric. For example, he writes that “the questions which religious doctrine finds it so easy to answer” … “might be called too sacred” to be addressed in a traditional, unquestioning manner. Taking a cue from the Dutch anti-colonialist Multatuli, Freud makes reference to “our God, Logos” slowly fulfilling the desires of mankind. And he sometimes shows a rather “religious” tendency (as he would perhaps describe it) to pick and choose among scientific theories for the sake of doctrinal coherence in psychoanalysis.

In one of his devil’s advocate passages in The Future of an Illusion, Freud remarks, “If you want to expel religion from our European civilization, you can only do it by means of another system of doctrines,” which would itself engender a functional religion, with all of the concomitant drawbacks. In replying to his own objection, Freud emphasizes the desired differences in his post-religious system: it is to be non-delusive and more capable of being corrected. It will be science, not religion. But Freudian psychoanalysis, for all of its scientific trappings, is already at some remove from the positivist territory of the physical sciences, as Argyle indicates by referencing it as a less “orthodox” form of psychology. It is no closer to, say, biology, than the monotheism of Moses was to the polytheistic religion of eastern Mediterranean antiquity. In effect, Freud’s proposal is that the superstitious religion of traditions focused on God should be replaced in the future with a scientific religion trained on the soul.

In The Future of an Illusion, Freud suggests as a germinal postulate of religion, “Life in this world…signifies a perfecting of man’s nature. It is probably the spiritual part of man, the soul….” The Greek for soul is psyche. Psychoanalysis, which set itself the task of diagnosing and treating the psyche (and not merely the conscious mind, nor the organic brain as such), seems to be a phenomenon in some measure tailor-made to supplement, supplant, or substitute for religion. Freud presented a clear claim that religion is a mass neurosis, not only in The Future of an Illusion, but also in his later work Moses and Monotheism.  To the extent that one sees the collective problem of religious ‘delusion’ as analogous to obsessional neurosis in the individual, one might take psychoanalysis, the custodian of techniques to address the latter, as a point of departure to cope with the former. And while he does not make light of the difficulty in coming to do without traditional religions, Freud insists on the desirability and even “fatal inevitability” of such “growth” in the human condition.

Freud himself occupies a status in the psychoanalytic tradition that merits the adjective ‘prophetic’. In both The Future of an Illusion and Moses and Monotheism, he reflects on his paternal concern for the psychoanalytic movement in the light of possible conflicts that might arise from his provocative writings on religion. In the latter work, he insinuates a comparison of himself to Moses as a “great man” and founder of a tradition. The psychoanalytic tradition claims a redemptive capability for individuals; as Michael Argyle represents it, “psychoanalysts believed that psychoanalysis could lead people away from neurotic conditions to freedom and independence.” Freud also claims that the monotheistic impulse was repressed by the earliest generations of Jews after Moses, only gradually returning after a period of latency. In a similar pattern, it seems that later developments of the psychoanalytic tradition permitted the religious impulse to surface.

     The psychoanalytic movement has a conservative element that maintains the secularist pretensions established by the professed “unbeliever” Freud and his early co-workers. But like venerable religious traditions, it has also endured the accretion of new doctrines, and the divergence of varying schools in a sectarian fashion. Perhaps the earliest and most overtly religious of these was that of the man whom Freud had first selected, according to Peter Gay, as his “successor who would carry the psychoanalytic dispensation to future generations,” Carl Jung.  Jung’s religious ideas were hardly the stuff of conventional Christianity. To say as Argyle does that Jung’s final book Answer to Job “is not popular with theologians” is something of a droll understatement of its heterodoxy, although the book’s first American publication was by the Pastoral Psychology Book Club in 1956. In contrast with Freud though, Jung, who confessed himself as a firm believer in God, if not a subscriber to a religious institution, was much more overt about his role as a quasi-religious figure. His Memories, Dreams, Reflections reads more like an autohagiography than a memoir, replete with accounts and interpretations of his portentous visionary experiences, which he calls “my personal myth.”  

     Some New Age and neopagan groups have adopted Jung’s collective unconscious with its archetypes as piece of metaphysical doctrine, or even integral to their theologies, and as Argyle notes, some of Jung’s ideas have been taken up by religious professionals for techniques of “spiritual guidance.” Argyle also points out that Jung was an influence on Mircea Eliade and other scholars of religion. Much of this influence on Eliade, as well as other major figures like Gershom Scholem and Henry Corbin, resulted from their participation in the “Eranos” circle that Jung organized. Jung even seems to have gone so far as to write religious scripture, in the form of his neo-Gnostic Seven Sermons to the Dead. Richard Noll has written two books in which he takes the evaluation of the religious dimension of Jung’s work to an extreme: The Jung Cult and The Aryan Christ.
 

Tomorrow, Part II…

With its overlapping subject-matter, this study by Price forms an interesting contrast to the one by James McBride. While McBride focused intensively on football as an exemplar for a huge range of phenomena that transcend the category of sport altogether (such as religion and domestic violence), Price is trained on the categorical question of the applicability of the notion of “religion” to the range of activities embraced by the idea of “sports” in American popular culture. Price avoids defining religion, although he eventually characterizes it as a product of male hysteria. McBride, on the other hand, dives right into definitional issues, in an article that amounts to a straightforward effort to provide a positive characterization of a form of popular culture as religion.

Another point of contrast between the articles is that Price not only instances sports other than football, he also seems to range more evenly over the various modes of spectator and athlete, amateur and professional.  He does begin with the Super Bowl, though. He instances the level of economic expenditure occasioned by that acme of American sports spectacle, noting that it surpasses the January expenditure of Americans on “traditional religious practices and institutions.” (p. 195) He could have brought in the economic theory of Bataille at this point. (See Chidester’s Authentic Fakes, p. 48.)

Although Price doesn’t bring up the theories of Mircea Eliade until the later part of the paper, (p. 202) he is obviously thinking in those terms from the outset. His portrayals of American sports emphasize the ways in which their activities organize time, space and identity. He points to the manner in which sports seasons and tournaments define the calendar for those who play and follow them, and he looks at how sports sanctify sites, create roles, and propagate rituals.

He cites theoretical support from three quite different fields: Deford the sports journalist, Edwards the sociologist, and Novak the theologian. (pp. 196, 198) As summarized by Price, Deford made a functionalist argument, while the other two both used attributional, phenomenological approaches to the category of religion. Novak emphasized homologies between sports and Christianity in a way that suggests a substantialist leaning. Even so, Novak has perhaps the profounder observations, regarding the characteristically religious factors of asceticism, self-overcoming, and perhaps even vocation that are evident in sports in an American culture that is, of course, predominantly Christian in its religious self-presentation. (pp. 200-1)

Price also observes out quite effectively the fact that the categories of sports and religion have overlapped considerably in various eras and cultures. (p. 196-7) This approach helps to overcome stubbornly substantialist or essentialist views of both religion and sports.

While McBride’s view of football seemed surprisingly resistant to issues of embodiment (perhaps believing that dis­-embodiment of the spectator made the spectacle more “religious”, Price is willing to discuss both individual embodiment and social incorporation as religious features of sports. (p. 201, e.g.) Similarly, while McBride does not consider the potential benefits of fan enthusiasm, Price looks at both the “fervor” of fans, (p. 205) and the transcendent experiential dimension of athletic performance. This distinction corresponds to the difference between religious adherents and religious “virtuosos.” For both categories (and across the distinction), he proposes the relevance of Czikszentmihalyi’s theory of “flow.”(p. 201) For the virtuosos, he might have referenced the work of Michael Murphy, a key figure of the Human Potential movement who has written two novels based on the comparison of golf and mystical traditions, and whose book In the Zone is expressly concerned with “transcendent experience in sports.”

The role of star athletes is one feature of the sports-as-religion framework that was repeatedly questioned and contested among the various theoreticians referenced by Price. Should they be considered to be the equivalent of clergy? Saints? Gods? (pp. 198-9, 205) I think this debate could be satisfyingly short-circuited by simply resting content with the term “hero,” while acknowledging its historically religious context. A hero is a semi-divine or quasi-divine figure, one who enjoys the special favor of a god or goddess, and who is a suitable object of veneration.  

Price’s preferred answer to this question, however, seems to have given the article its name: the “apotheosis” is the deification of the sports celebrity by the devotee, and/or the athlete’s transcendence of the usual bounds of human experience.

A real strength of the study is its willingness to raise counter-arguments to its thesis. One batch—from scholars who are neither scholars of religion nor theologians—is introduced early on (p. 197) and a final set of four raised from within the field are considered at the end. (pp. 207-8) During the closing discussion, Price comes close to shifting into the mode of “popular culture in dialogue with religion,” where critics have expressed concern about the moral integrity of sports, or their idolatrous potential if they are considered to be devotional venues. But he successfully maintains his premise that American sports are “quite simply…a form of popular religion.” (p. 209)

This paper could serve as a reasonable model for a parallel project at identifying the religious character of a significant sphere of popular culture, such as rock music for instance. Moreover, I for one would be quite comfortable citing it as a summation of the principal arguments regarding American sports as religion and settling in favor of that thesis.