How Religion Shaped Football

You are in for a very stimulating and thought provoking discussion with a very insightful man named Dr. Randall Balmer, as we chat about his book on the topic of American sports, football at the forefront, alongside religion over the past 150 plus years. Listen in as I think you will enjoy it.

The interesting concept of Religion helping to develop our modern day sports in North America is at the heart of a new book by Dr. Randall Balmer titled “PASSION PLAYS: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America”. It was just recently released by the University of North Carolina Press / Ferris and Ferris Books, on September 20, 2022.

It starts with the basic premise that before they were the revenue-generating behemoths that they are today, each of our most popular professional sports—baseball, football, basketball and hockey—carved a place for themselves and inspired North Americans from coast to coast. Their origins are inseparably interwoven into dynamic social changes that took place from the mid 1850s to the mid 1950s. A time frame when Americans and Canadians sought to define themselves, using common vocabularies, shared assumptions, and the assurance of camaraderie after decades of nativism and religious sectarianism. In turn, each sport developed certain characteristics, meanings, sacred spaces, game-day rituals and liturgies that bridged religious boundaries and pushed its appeal well beyond that of a pastime to something much, much more. 

Dr. Randall Balmer reveals how religion and the emergence of team sports in North America became infinitely interconnected in his book “PASSION PLAYS”. Balmer argues that sports allow us to set aside our everyday concerns, if even if only for a few hours, just as religion diverts our attention from this-worldly matters to the transcendent. For many, these sports provide the lure of an alternative universe affording both an escape and a sense of community amid a world perceived as disordered and unfair. At a time when the centrifugal forces of race, ethnicity, religion, economics, media, and politics are attempting to tear us apart, the stadium offers a civil surrogate that accepts all comers. 

PASSION PLAYS thoroughly examines this escapist subculture that has its own standards, rules, language, values, heroes and villains, order and outcomes, rituals, and sacred spaces, while simultaneously functioning as an engine for social change. Our society no longer has a common background, so we seek community in sport. And we find it there. In such a gorgeously multicultural society such as that in North America, perhaps it's not surprising that sport has emerged as a “must attend” meeting ground that so completely stirs our passions. On Sundays, and every other day of the week.

Balmer gives us insight into the Springfield YMCA, a Christian school that harbored sports innovators like James Naismith and Amos Alonzo Stagg to support his theory. The good Doctor takes us deeper than that as well explaining his theory that each of the four major American sports are symbolic metaphors of different aspects of life. Basketball for instance he argues in symbolic of Urban life; Football a metaphor of war and the battlefields; Hockey is representative of; and Baseball has its symbolism associated with

His theory is intersting how religion influenced our sports today, and ironically how now sports have