Passion Plays
How Religion Shaped Sports in North America
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn’t help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. Houses of worship once railed against Sabbath-busting sports events, but today most willingly accommodate Super Bowl Sunday. On the other hand, basketball’s inventor, James Naismith, was an ardent follower of Muscular Christianity and believed the game would help develop religious character. But today those religious roots are largely forgotten.
Here one of our most insightful writers on American religion trains his focus on that other great passion—team sports—to reveal their surprising connections. From baseball to basketball and football to ice hockey, Balmer explores the origins and histories of big-time sports from the late nineteenth century to the present, with entertaining anecdotes and fresh insights into their ties to religious life. Referring to Notre Dame football, the Catholic Sun called its fandom “a kind of sacramental.” Legions of sports fans reading Passion Plays will recognize exactly what that means.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This entertaining history examines the religious and cultural roots of baseball, basketball, football, and hockey. Dartmouth religion professor Balmer (Bad Faith) provides a whistle-stop history of the four sports and highlights some of their quasi-religious features, discussing how hockey's spread among Catholic communities coincided with the addition of the penalty box, which draws on the Catholic principles of penitence and absolution. Balmer also suggests that the development of competitive team sports in the latter half of the 19th century reflected a growing concern about men becoming feminized as they started taking more "sedentary" office jobs because of the Industrial Revolution, giving rise to the "Muscular Christianity" movement that "valorized robust, athletic Christians" and spawned numerous church athletic leagues. The author's most thought-provoking contention is that "increased passion for sports in recent decades has, for many, displaced traditional expressions of religion," and he posits that the appeal of religion and sports lies in their affinity for rituals and authoritative texts that impose rules on a disorderly universe. The illuminating insights into how sports reflect the historical periods and communities in which they developed will change how fans see the games. This one is a winner.
