11. Sports and religion.

Beck, Daniel ; Bosshart, Louis

Developments in contemporary spectator sports reflect changes in our value systems. Individual values have become more important than social ones. Societies run the risk of being reduced to a collection of individuals who keep looking for personal perfection (great bodies, permanent stimulation--mood management and hedonism--and personal enlightenment). Nevertheless individuals remain social beings, looking for social networks. Due to different reasons (secularization, mobility, and the lessened importance of political institutions), sports have become community building institutions. To be a fan--like being a believer--means that individuals are members of a network that shares the same value system.

Sports have the potential to substitute for religions. Mass media create heroes and icons, gods for some people. Those athletes play the roles of super-humans in well orchestrated spectacles--spectacles with a clear liturgy (songs, national anthem, incantations, processions) and familiar rituals (rituals of community, conflict, separation, and reconciliation) in well looked after sanctuaries (the holy lawn of Wimbledon or shrines like halls of fame) along a calendar that is defined by big events like the Super Bowl. There is a time for preparation, performance, and celebration. Soccer, for example, has become a world-wide accepted replacement of different religions with goals as the main goal for many faithful supporters who regularly make a pilgrimage to special places where they worship a group of chosen ones like David Beckham or Zinedine Zidane. Quasi-religious elements like ardor, cultic actions, and ecstasy are part of experiencing a sense of community among sports fans. The mass media are ready and willing to make sure that those fans will always have something to celebrate.

The deeper link between sports and religion can be found in the fact that they both create "systems of sacred symbols that endow the world with meaning and value" (Chidester, 1996, p. 744) as well as opportunities to "figure the Gemeinschaft ideal" (Albanese, 1996, p. 736). Sports and religions alike are structured by clear rules and they both create a sense of the supernatural and superhuman. Believers as well as sports fans are willing to worship saints or heroes and are equal in the quality of devotion brought to the ceremony. Both sports and religions can create religious feelings of inspiration, arousal, and enthusiasm up to ecstasy. To sum it up with David Chidester: "The 'church of baseball' is much more than merely the rule book. It is a religious institution that maintains the continuity, uniformity, sacred space, and sacred time of American life" (1996, p. 745).

Sport events can be interpreted as religious performances that are full of symbolic and ritualistic actions, thus creating what Victor Turner called liminal experiences and "communitas," i.e., Gemeinschaft.

 The kind of communitas desired by tribesmen in
 their rites and by hippies in their 'happenings' is
 not the pleasurable and effortless comradeship
 that can arise between friends, coworkers, or
 professional colleagues any day. What they seek
 is a transformative experience that goes to the
 root of each person's being and finds in that root
 something profoundly communal and shared.
 (Turner, 1969, p. 138)

Fan clubs can be seen as "communitates" and sport events as "happenings." And the experience of belonging together and witnessing outstanding performances can evoke at least quasi or vicarious religious feelings. "Religious suggestiveness evoked by producers and participants in the culture of baseball" (Albanese, 1996, p. 737) shows that in this regard supply and demand fit perfectly well together. Another symbiotic relationship! Academic attention has focused more and more on the relationship between religions and popular culture:

 In contemporary American society, religion is a
 personal, highly individual matter. Yet throughout
 popular culture, particularly in sports and
 entertainment, communal values and dreams
 effervesce and form themselves into public
 mythologies and rites. (Goethals, 1997, p. 117)

With regard to sports the author goes on: "Various sports--basketball, baseball, football--and entertainment events provide a series of familiar liturgical calendars and sacred sites" (p. 120). Ove Korsgard sees the link between sports and religions in the fact that "sport is a ritual" (1990, p. 121).

And what is the role of the media in this context? They give access to those rituals. Michael Real sets the equation of "The Super Media Olympics as Global Mythic Ritual" (1989, p. 223). Olympics are considered as mythic ritual because they "organize meaning in a culture" (p. 224) and provide "mythic heroes for imitation" (p. 226). With much enthusiasm, Real comes to the following conclusion:

 Olympic media coverage provides a single event
 in which seemingly everyone in the world can
 share. The super media Olympics is the international
 tribal fire around which we gather to celebrate
 shared events and values. (p. 240)

Sports is a global vernacular religion, ruled and run by the Olympic Committee and mediated by the mass media!

References

Albanese, C. L. (1996). Religion and American popular culture. An introductory essay. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 59, 733-742.

Chidester, D. (1996). The church of baseball, the fetish of Coca-Cola, and the potlatch of Rock 'n' Roll. Theoretical models for the study of religion in American popular culture. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 59, 743-765.

Drucker, S. J. (1994). The mediated sports hero. In S. J. Drucker, & R. S. Cathcart (Eds.), American heroes in a media age (pp. 82-93). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Goethals, G. T. (1990). The electronic golden calf: Images, religion, and the making of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications.

Goethals, G. T. (1997). Escape from time: Ritual dimensions of popular culture. In S. M. Hoover, & K. Lundby (Eds.), Rethinking media, religion, and culture (pp. 117-132). Thousand Oaks, CA, London and New Delhi: Sage.

Higgs, R. J. (1995). God in the stadium: Sports and religion in America. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

Korsgard, O. (1990). Sport as a practice of religion: The record as ritual. In J. M. Carter, & A. Krueger (Eds.), Ritual and record: Sports records and quantification in premodern societies (pp. 115-122). New York: Greenwood Press.

Real, M. R. (1989). Super Media: A Cultural Studies Approach. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Turner, V. W. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Chicago, IL: Aldine.

Tyler Eastman, S., & Riggs, K. E. (1994). Televised sports and ritual: Fan experiences. Sociology of Sport Journal, 11, 249-274.

Williams, P. (1994). The sports immortals. Deifying the American athlete. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

Daniel Beck and Louis Bosshart

University of Fribourg--Freiburg (Switzerland)

email: daniel.beck@unifr.ch; louis.bosshart@unifr.ch