Sports

Sports as Religious Phenomena

In his dissection of the cultural norms at work in the transition between true play, like running along the beach, and complex team sports like football, Allen Guttmann framed out sports as nothing less than a central institution in human life. Nor does this elemental importance of sports escape the awareness of sports fans: A television program on an American travel and leisure network pitches its focus on sports tourism as a universal lust: to understand a culture, one must play its games.

This advertisement taps cleverly into the popular Western perspective that the institutions of sports, like the institutions of religion, are meaningful at their cores because of a subjective internal experience and the ways in which sports, whether played or watched, manage or mediate that experience. The experiences of scoring a winning goal or cheering one's favored team to victory, to hear the accounts of those who lived them, often border on the transcendent. In many ways, the rules and [Page 1218]language of sports already structure the lives of citizens around the globe, much in the same way that the rules and codes of religion dominate the lives of their devotees as well.

Religion and sports are similar not only in that they provide for powerful subjective experiences and provide rules that structure those experiences; the ultimacy of these experiences also bespeaks of a basic cultural similarity between these two systems. Numerous scholars have sought to establish this fundamental sameness between two supposedly different spheres. Like the church, temple, or synagogue, a football stadium is a dedicated physical structure in which intentional and “ritualized” or habitual acts are performed, both on the field and among the spectators. Many sports fans disdain even wearing the colors of an opposing team, just as they promote their own colors as symbols of a social bond.

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