Religions Reviewed

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.