Centre College Class
Looks at Sports and The Sacred

by Ray Waddle

Roll Tide ... War Eagle ... Go Ole Miss and MSU ... All hail Volunteers and Vanderbilt ... and bless the Kentucky Wildcats ..

Are these innocent cheers for victory — or pious pleas of devotion to the "religion" of sports?

At Presbyterian-affiliated Centre College in Danville, Ky., students probe intriguing connections between modern sports mania and faith passions, all in the name of better understanding the world of religion.

The course, "Basketball as Religion," has received national attention on National Public Radio, Paul Harvey and other media.

"In Kentucky, when I say I'm teaching ‘basketball as religion,’ everybody gets it," says David Hall, Centre religion professor.

"UK basketball is where Kentuckians get their sense of unity. But really the course is a way to trick students into learning about religion."

The course challenges students to expand their notions of the sacred beyond Sunday morning churchgoing. The idea is: religions share certain traits, such as a primordial story, a set of rituals, and a feeling for sacred space. In an era of globalization, students learn the way religion is expressed in other cultures and in everyday society, possibly even sports.

"I see sports as much more complex now; I'd never seen sports correlate with religion so well," says senior Aaron Smith of Louisville.

"If aliens flew over a stadium during a game, they might think a religious service is underway."

A heavy dose of reading exposes students to articles such as "The Super Bowl as Religious Festival," "Catholics and Sport in Northern Ireland" and "Myth and Ritual in Professional Wrestling."

"There's been a lot of research on sports as part of our civil religion," Hall says.

In America, civil religion includes moral symbols that provide civic glue and communal identity for a spiritually diverse nation — elements such as the Pledge of Allegiance and reverence for the Founders and the Bill of Rights.

Baseball, too, has been part of that civil religion a long time, Hall suggests. "Americans are really religious about baseball," he says.

For millions of fans, baseball's spring training represents the annual rebirth of hope and community. A journey to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., is like a pilgrimage to a shrine. The World Series has aspects of hallowed ritual.

"I am a member of that religion," Hall confesses. "I'm a Chicago Cubs fan. I have a soft spot for the underdog."

Since the 1950s, though, baseball has had to make room for other spectator passions in the collective American heart — football, basketball, pro wrestling, NASCAR, golf. Aggressive merchandising, 24/7 news coverage and celebrity-watching have made sports a looming daily national presence.

Despite modern sports' muchcriticized excesses — the big money, the drugs, violence, and gambling climate — waves of scholars try to make sense of the games' soaring appeal.

"Religion is something we organize life around," Hall says. "It's the map that gets you through the day. Sports becomes that for some people. If their team loses, it affects the whole week."

One argument says sports today have sacred power in people's lives. Stadiums function like cathedrals, star players pose as deities. The Super Bowl trophy is a holy grail. Face painting is a tribal ritual. Retail jerseys become holy relics. Coaches are high priests. Sports scribes are keepers of the flame.

"In America, quite simply, sports constitute a form of popular religion," writes Joseph Price in From Season to Season: Sports as American Religion, one of the books used in the Centre class.

Ben Durham, a junior from Louisville, said Hall's course was alert to ways that the sacred and the profane make contact in this world.

"It's not about showing that basketball takes the place of religion," says Durham, a double major in religion and music. "We used sports to apply different aspects of religion to life."

Ultimately, Professor Hall says, a "basketball as religion" course aims to appreciate how others find religious meaning in their lives.

"The sacred can take many forms," he says. "People are less likely to kill each other if they understand how others experience the world. And I hope to engender a little more tolerance ... among UK fans ... for the University of Louisville."

(Ray Waddle, a Nashville writer, is author of Against the Grain: Unconventional Wisdom from Ecclesiastes.)