PASSION PLAYS

A brief but insightful cultural history of American sports that links religious elements to the rise of organized games.

Balmer, the chair of religion at Dartmouth, argues that the four major American team sports—baseball, football, basketball, and hockey—link to social and cultural movements in play at the time of their foundings. There were industrialism, imperialism, entrenched (and anti-immigrant) nationalism. There were also technological developments such as the railroad and the telegraph, which “made both intercollegiate and professional leagues possible, allowing the travel of teams from one community to another and news about the contests to filter back to hometowns.” An imported British movement called “Muscular Christianity” also held, in essence, that a weak Christian soldier wasn’t going to win the war against evil for God. Balmer’s case studies are interesting and well documented. Though football was the product of Protestant schools after the Civil War—one that had the martial impulses of warriors on the battlefield—it was quickly adopted by Catholic schools such as Notre Dame, helping reduce some of the distance between the two strains of faith. It’s interesting to note, too, that James Naismith, hailed by one coach as an “inventor of basket-ball, medical doctor, Presbyterian minister, tee-totaler, all-around athlete, non-smoker, and owner of vocabulary without cuss words,” was both a college chaplain and a coach. Balmer discerns a fascinating link between hockey’s penalty box and the Catholic Church’s confessional booth, where a sinner can “acknowledge and atone for his transgression.” He doesn’t always effectively forge links between religion as such and sport, but he provides plenty of useful insights on the role of zeitgeist, as when he aligns football in the South to the desperate need to reestablish a sense of manhood following the defeat of the Confederacy. He also contrasts North America’s growing urbanism to the implied pastoralism of baseball and its contemporaneous vision of a “Garden of Eden, a lost, halcyon paradise.”

An engaging look at the historical conditions surrounding America’s secular, on-field religions.