Today every major league baseball club and more than
100 minor league teams arrange nondenominational
religious services each Sunday morning at the ballpark
before the afternoon game. Approximately 50 percent
of all major league players attend these sessions of
prayer, Bible reading, and homily. As the Fellowship of
Christian Athletes and other evangelical sports groups
thrive, chaplains have become a fact of modern life for
professional sports teams of all kinds.
Displays of piety abound at every level of sport and
in every discipline, from amateur high schoolers to
elite professionals, from the golf course to the boxing
ring. Signs with biblical references sprout like mushrooms among the fans; coaches and athletes participate in highly visible pregame and postgame prayer, in
pious gestures of supplication, and in televised nods to
God for games won. Religion and sport march hand in
hand, each reinforcing the other.
Old Gods and Games
Although now manifest in a uniquely modern form,
this union of religion and sport is nothing new. Excepting rare moments of antagonism, sport has always
been closely aligned with religious mythology and ritual. Through ceremonial dances and competitive
games, the ancients sought to appease their deities in
order to win fertile wombs, good crops, successful
hunts, and victorious wars. Native Americans surrounded various kinds of ball games and foot races
with religious ritual; Central American Mayans and
Aztecs built elaborate stone courtyards adjacent to
their religious temples.
Ancient religious myths often explained the origins
with stories about competitive games. For example,
some Central and South Americans accounted for the
existence of the sun and moon with a tale about a ball
game that took place at the dawn of civilization. Twin
brothers challenged the gods to a game. The brothers
lost the game, then their heads on the sacrificial altar.
One of the heads was placed in a tree, and it began
spurting a stream of sperm when a young virgin
passed that way. Impregnated, the girl bore twins. Once
they were grown to young manhood, the twins challenged the gods to yet another ball game. This time the
gods lost the game, whereupon the severed heads of the
two original twins ascended into the heavens and became the sun and the moon.
Ancestor worship joined fertility rites to produce
funeral games in honor of deceased kinsmen and
chieftains; commemorative festivals kept fame alive. In
a portrayal of Greek life around 1000 B.C.E., Homer’s Iliad gives a richly detailed account of some funeral
games held in honor of a Greek soldier slain in battle at
the gates of Troy. As young warrior-athletes engaged in
chariot races, boxing and wrestling matches, and discus and javelin throws, they affirmed life in the face of
death.
In Homer’s rendition, the gods took active interest
in the events. Like modern athletes who chalk up wins
or losses to “the will of God,” those ancient young
Greeks blamed or praised the gods depending on the
contest’s outcome. An archer supposedly missed his
target because he had failed to promise Apollo a sacrificial offering. Presumably, Apollo begrudged him victory. When a chariot driver dropped his whip in the
midst of a race, he blamed Apollo for knocking it out of
his hand but thanked the goddess Athena for helping
him retrieve it.As early as 1000 B.C.E., athletes looked to
the heavens for assistance. Eager to win the prize for a
foot race, Odysseus charged down the stretch praying
to Athena, “O goddess, hear me, and come put more
speed in my feet!” Hundreds of local religious-athletic
festivals thrived around the Greek-influenced rim of
the Mediterranean, each one in honor of a Greek god.
They appealed to Artemis to help them in the hunt, to
Poseidon when they sailed the seas, to Aphrodite in
matters of love. The Greeks firmly believed that all the
gods, whatever their specialty, looked with favor on the
male warrior virtues of physical strength, agility, and
endurance, skills best taught and practiced in athletic
contests. By the 5th century B.C.E., four major festivals
dominated the Greek athletic circuit: (1) the Pythian
Games at Delphi in homage to Apollo, (2) the Isthmian
Games honoring Poseidon at Corinth, (3) the Nemean
Games in Nemea, and (4) the Olympic Games at
Olympia, the latter two in the name of the mighty Zeus.
Reckoned to be a vigorous warrior god who cast
thunderbolts like javelins from the sky, Zeus bestrode
the Greek Pantheon just as surely as the Olympic Games
dominated the athletic circuit. Sometime around 1000
B.C.E., myth and ritual established him the patron deity
at Olympia. The actual origins of the Games are unknown, but one legend depicts Zeus and a rival god,
Cronus, engaged in a wrestling match in the hills above
Olympia. Zeus won, inspiring religious ceremonies and
quadrennial athletic contests as testimonies to his
prowess. By the supposed authority of Zeus, athletes,
trainers, and spectators were guaranteed safe passage
every four years to Olympia, even in times of war.
Once they arrived at Olympia, athletes had to swear
by Zeus that they had been in training for the past 10
months and that they would play fair and obey all the
rules. If they broke their oaths, they were required to
pay fines, which went toward the building of statues in
honor of Zeus. During the 5th century B.C.E., a huge
temple was erected of local limestone for the worship
of Zeus. Shortly thereafter the most famous sculptor of
the day, Phidias, constructed a magnificent statue
seven times larger than life, encased in gold, silver, and
ivory. It had Zeus sitting on a throne in the inner chamber of the temple. Admirers thought it one of the Seven
Wonders of the World; critics complained about its outlandish size. If Zeus stood up, they noted, he would
poke his head through the roof.
Of the five-day program of Olympic events fixed
during the 5th century B.C.E., athletic contests consumed only two and a half days. The entire first day
was devoted to religious rituals—a kind of prolonged
opening ceremony when religion mattered more than
patriotism or commercial glitz. Athletes and their
trainers offered oaths, prayers, and sacrifices to Zeus.
They presented gifts at the statues of past Olympic victors who had been deified, at the shrines of various
lesser gods, and especially at the altars and statues of
Zeus. Well into the first evening, Olympic participants
marched in solemn processions and sang hymns of
praise and devotion.
Then came a full day of athletic contests: chariot
races and horse races in the morning, the pentathlon
(discus and javelin throws, a broad jump, a sprint, and
wrestling) in the afternoon. At sunset, however, attention shifted back to religious activities. By the light of a
midsummer full moon, a ram was slain and offered as
a burnt sacrifice to the accompaniment of prayers and
hymns. The following morning, priests led Olympic
judges, Greek city-state officials, athletes and their
kinsmen, and trainers in a colorful procession to the altar of Zeus, where 100 oxen were ceremoniously slain.
The oxen’s legs were burned in homage to the gods;
their carcasses were roasted for a big banquet on the
last day of the festival.
However, long before the Greek Olympics ended in
the 5th century C.E., faith in the old gods waned to such
an extent that Olympia’s religious trappings lost much
of their original meaning. Other gods beckoned in the
Greco-Roman world. The Romans largely took their
gods from the Greeks, changing merely the names. In
Roman hands, Zeus became Jupiter, but Jupiter was
never associated with competitive sport. Although
Rome’s “bread and circus” days were also based on ancient religious festivals, religion and sport momentar-ily parted company in the brutality of the Colosseum
and amid the gambling frenzy that surrounded the Circus Maximus.
Sport and Spire
Early Christians largely accepted Greek athletics. The
apostle Paul frequently mentioned them to illustrate
the spiritual race to be run and the incorruptible prize
to be won by Christians. Roman sport was another
matter. For well over two centuries, Christians were unwilling participants in Roman spectacles. Thrown into
the arena as punishment for their unorthodox religious
beliefs, they inevitably lost the Lions-versus-Christians
game. Yet, even when the persecution ceased, Christians continued castigating Roman sport’s “pagan” basis, its open association with gambling and prostitution, and its inhumane brutality.
With the collapse of the Roman Empire, the interaction of religion and sport shifted to northern Europe.
Ancient games such as German kegels (bowling), French
soule (association football), and the stick-and-ball
games of Irish hurling and Scottish shinty all had religious associations akin to the competitive fertility rites
of Native Americans. Light toyed with darkness, warmth
with cold, and life with death in the pre-Christian
mythologies of Europe. Muslims enlarged the pot in the
8th century when they brought old Egyptian fertility rituals across the narrow neck of the Mediterannean into
Spain. For several centuries Muslim, Christian, and preChristian practices blended harmoniously, especially
around the annual rites of spring renewal that Christians called Easter.
Various forms of ball play became integral to Easter
season ceremonies all over Europe. Colorfully garbed
French priests near Paris chanted a traditional liturgy
and passed a ball back and forth as they danced down
the church aisle celebrating springtime signs of Christ’s
resurrection. An archbishop near Lyon regularly led a
ball game immediately after an Easter meal. As late as
1165, a theologian at the University of Paris protested
church-sponsored ball play at Poitiers and Rheims. It
derived from old pagan customs, he insisted. He was
right, of course, but no one seemed to share his alarm.
The medieval church provided a time for parishioners to play. For six days of the week peasants and
household servants worked. On Sunday they were expected to worship at the village church, yet no puritan
pall hovered over Sunday. After the morning sermon
and sacraments, villagers lounged or played in the afternoon. Since the church’s holy days aligned with ancient seasonal holidays, villagers also played at festive
occasions around Easter, during the harvest season,
and at Christmastime. Italians regularly scheduled
palio (horse races) on several of their many saints’
days; each spring in England, peasant football thrived
around the food, drink, music, and dance of Shrove
Tuesday, just before the onset of Lenten austerity.
The church provided space as well as time for play.
In those villages that had no commons, the churchyard
or cloisters often served as the venue for mass recreation. Spires and stained-glass windows served as
backdrops for wrestling matches, juggling exhibitions,
and board games. A 14th-century English clergyman
unintentionally admitted the popularity of these practices when he attempted to banish “dancing, playing at
quoits [throwing iron rings onto a peg, similar to the
American frontier game of horseshoes], bowling, tennis-playing, handball, football, stoolball, and all sorts
of other games” on church property.
Medieval football, an ill-organized, uncodified
game with no physical boundaries or limits on team
size, required open countryside. That land was also
owned by the church and rented out to wealthy landlords, who traditionally turned it over to peasant sport
shortly before spring crop-planting and just after the
autumn harvest. English and French clergymen frequently complained about property being damaged by
hordes of drunken football players. A few critics
pointed to the roughness of the game. In 1440, for example, a French bishop denounced football as a “dangerous and pernicious” activity that caused “ill feeling,
rancor and enmities” under the guise of “a recreation
pleasure.” He forebade football games within his diocese. Medieval church leaders looked more benignly on
upper-class sport. Like modern ministers who cater to
early Sunday morning golfers, priests happily dispensed “quickie” communions at the break of dawn to
aristocrats eager to get to the fields for hunting and
hawking. Bishops sat jowl to jowl with the castle crowd
at ceremonious jousting contests. Churchmen especially looked with favor on royal (“real”) tennis, for the
game apparently originated with French monks, abbots, and priests in monastic and church cloisters as le
jeu de paume (literally, palm game). Players hit a small
ball with their open hand over a rope stretched across
the middle of the space available. They played the ball
off walls and onto sloping roofs that efficiently kept the
ball in play.According to legend, a French king visited a
monastery, saw a game of tennis, and so admired that
he had it copied in his royal palace. The term tennis
court probably derives from the game’s early location in
the courts of European monarchs.
Renaissance churchmen enthusiastically linked
tennis to the Renaissance ideal of well-balanced mental and physical skills. The Christian humanist,
Desiderius Erasmus, a former monk, lauded tennis as
an ideal game for exercising all parts of the body; England’s Cardinal Thomas Wolsey arranged the construction of an indoor tennis court for King Henry VIII
at Hampton Court.An Italian monk, Antonio Scaino da
Salo, produced a treatise in 1555 that established the
first simple set of written rules, a standard court size,
and a scoring system. Tennis was “the most appropriate
sport for the man of letters,” Scaino insisted.
Puritans Make Their Mark
Protestant reformers gave a more mixed message about
sport. Martin Luther encouraged his followers to participate in “honorable and useful modes of exercise”
such as dancing, archery, fencing, and wrestling. For his
own exercise, Luther engaged in the old German game
of bowling. When the bowling ball banged against the
pins, it reminded him of the Christian’s duty to knock
down the Devil. John Calvin, too, enjoyed bowling. He
also played quoits, but he was critical of most other
sports. Zealously devoted to the task of cleaning up the
morals of the city of Geneva, he saw sport as a hindrance to holy living. Most games seemed too intimately associated with carnal pleasure on the one
hand, idleness on the other. Competitive games also
meant gambling and desecration of the Christian Sabbath, two of Calvin’s great taboos. For Geneva’s public
policy as well as for private piety, Calvin was quite prepared to lump most sports with thievery and prostitution, and to ban them all.
Protestant exiles from England, Scotland, and Holland flocked to Geneva, where they imbibed Calvin’s
ethical mandates as well as his theological beliefs. Most
of all, they partook of his supreme self-confidence derived from believing that each human being acts as an
agent of divine redemption before acquiring eternal
bliss. Returning home, they put their shoulders to the
task of moral reform. English Calvinists led the way.
Their zealous crusade to purify both church and society provoked people to call them Puritans.
This sect represented no monolithic bloc of opinion
or practice. They often disagreed with each other over
specific evils that needed to be eradicated, and ministers sometimes preached one thing, while their congregations did something else. When a puritanical
preacher denounced “wakes or feasts, may-games,
sports and plays, and shows, which trained up people to
vanity and looseness, and led them from the fear of
God,” one could be sure that many people in England
were still finding pleasure in these traditional pastimes.
Popular or not, folk games closely resembled old
pre-Christian fertility rites and Roman Catholic holy
days, inspiring the Puritans all the more to suppress
them. They first tried moral preachments in the home,
at church, and in the marketplace. When sermonizing
met with negligible success, they went after the political means of reform. Much like the recent political
moves of the radical right in the United States, English
Puritans in the early 17th century put themselves forward as city councilors, mayors, and members of Parliament. They also seized positions of power in the
army, and rode that horse to victory in a civil war that
appropriately began while King Charles I was on the
links of Leith, near Edinburgh, playing golf.
Briefly in power for a decade or so during the mid-
17th century, the Puritans appointed army officers to serve as guardians of public morality. They struck at
the heart of old church festivals and folk games by leveling fines and imprisonment against any display of
public intoxication or gambling and against any desecration of the Sabbath. People, however, clung to their
playful ways. Rigid prohibitions occasionally stirred
hostile protests. According to a report from an Essex
village, when the local Puritan vicar began the Sunday
morning service in the parish church, “the people did
usually go out of church to play at football, and to the
alehouse and there continued till they were drunk, and
it was no matter if they were hanged.”
This rural resistance to Puritan reform finally triumphed. English villagers continued living out their
lives in seasonal cycles with periodic festivals and
games compensating for times of intense agricultural
labor. Puritanism, largely confined to urban merchants
and business classes for whom moral discipline and
the work ethic made sense, did revive in Victorian England, but it was much too ethically rigorous for the
more traditional, casual life of pre-industrial England.
In the end, only the Puritan Sunday survived the
Restoration of 1660. Until late in the 20th century, Sunday became sacrosanct in a fashion uniquely English,
free of public amusements and sports as well as commercial activity.
Puritanism also met with mixed success in the English colonies of North America. Passions waxed and
waned against activities reminiscent of old village pastimes. Moreover, in their prohibitions against gambling
and Sunday amusements, New England divines were
joined by Pennsylvania Quakers and New Netherlands
Dutch Calvinists. Only those diversions that demonstrably led to the fulfillment of one’s “call” to work
found favor in earnest American eyes. Eighteenth-century Bostonian John Adams phrased it best: “I was not
sent into this world to spend my days in sports, diversions, and pleasures.”“I was born for business; for both
activity and study.” The Great Awakening, a religious
revival in the mid-18th century, produced an even dimmer view of sports, as did the Second Great Awakening
early in the 19th century.
Muscular Christianity
Rapid industrial and urban growth fostered a reassessment of the relation of religion and sport in Victorian
England and the United States. Medical as well as
moral concerns prompted liberal Anglicans Charles
Kingsley and Thomas Hughes (author of Tom Brown’s
Schooldays) to articulate a “muscular Christianity” for
Britain; Boston Unitarians Edward Everett Hale and
Thomas Wentworth Higginson did the same in the
United States.All the while, a new international organization, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA),
added health programs and competitive sport to its
pietistic, evangelical purposes.
Sport and recreation programs became central to
the social gospel espoused by turn-of-century liberal
churches. Ministers as diverse as Washington Gladden,
a Congregationalist pastor in Columbus, Ohio, and
William S. Rainsford, rector of St. George’s Episcopal
Church on the Lower East Side of New York City,
nudged their churches to sweeten the gospel with
church gymnasiums and bowling, softball, and basketball teams sponsored by the church. The movement for
urban parks and public playgrounds, too, stood high
on the social gospel agenda.
In Chicago, social gospel was primarily associated
with the Roman Catholic Church. By 1910, Chicago’s
Catholics boasted the largest church-sponsored baseball league in the United States; two decades later,
Bishop Bernard J. Sheil founded the Catholic Youth Organization, to use boxing and basketball to prevent juvenile delinquency. During the 1920s, a nearby little
Catholic college, Notre Dame, emerged as a national
football power. Religious and sport mythology mingled
freely in the virtual canonization of All-American halfback George Gipp and coach Knute Rockne.
For American Jews, too, religious traditions blended
with the immigrant need to adopt sport as a means of
Americanization. Jews especially took to the favorite
immigrant sport of prizefighting, frequently with the
Star of David emblazoned on a boxer’s trunks. Less predictably, they also competed enthusiastically in the
YMCA game of basketball, particularly around New
York City. To become fully American, however, the “national pastime” of baseball was essential. Many Jewish
authors feature baseball games and allusions to the
game in their stories. Two Jewish baseball stars—Hank
Greenberg in 1934 and Sandy Koufax in 1965—established themselves as ethnic heroes by refusing to play
ball on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur.
Until shortly after World War II, Protestant evangelicals refrained from mixing religion and sport. Southern
Baptists and Methodists especially had a long history of
hostility toward competitive sports. They saw college
athletic contests as occasions for raucous partying; they
viewed professional sport as a Yankee invention for purposes of gambling, strong drink, and desecration of the
Sabbath. After 1945, however, southerners took the lead
in yoking sports to evangelical Protestantism. North
Carolinian Billy Graham initiated the practice of having star athletes publicly “share” their conversion experience. Graham appropriately thought of his evangelistic
organization as a “team” and frequently used sports
stories and metaphors in his sermons. For purposes of
association as well as mere space, he selected famous
sports venues like Yankee Stadium and Madison
Square Garden for his early crusades.
Mixed with Cold War rhetoric and a market mentality that hawked Jesus as if he were a breakfast cereal or
bar of soap, this marriage of sport and born-again religion produced several new organizations. Sports Ambassadors (founded in 1952), the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (1954), and Athletes in Action (1966) are
merely the top three of many booster groups that capitalized on athletics as a means of winning converts to
Christ. These organizations catered primarily to high
school and college athletes, but, by the 1960s, the evangelical spirit had also invaded professional locker
rooms. It began with National Football League (NFL)
teams, then moved to major league baseball. By 1975,
every major professional football and baseball team
employed a chaplain or at least scheduled religious services of worship prior to Sunday games.
A small but prominent group of athletes have
turned from Judeo-Christian traditions to a Black Muslim allegiance to Allah. Heavyweight champion Cassius
Clay led the way in the 1960s, changing his name to
Muhammad Ali. College basketball giant Lew Alcindor
similarly converted to Islam and took the name Kareem Abdul Jabbar. In 1995, boxer Mike Tyson emerged
from prison wearing the garb and speaking the language of Islam. Racial pride apparently weighs heavily
in the decision to become a Black Muslim.
Religion has certainly weighed heavily in the history of sport through the ages. Religious folk have frequently supported and even lauded sport as a cohort
that supports social cohesion and moral principles.
Sometimes they have protested sport’s specific violations of current religious principles; occasionally they
have lambasted sport in its entirety.Yet never have religion and sport been totally separate or indifferent to
each other.
—WILLIAM J. BAKER
Bibliography: Baker, William J. (1988) Sports in the Western
World. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Higgs,
Robert J. (1995) God in the Stadium: Sport and Religion in
America. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Hoffman, Shirl J., ed. (1992) Sport and Religion. Champaign,
IL: Human Kinetics. Levine, Peter. (1992) Ellis Island to
Ebbetts Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience.
New York: Oxford University Press. Novak, Michael.
(1976) The Joy of Sports: End Zones, Bases, Baskets, Balls,
and the Consecration of the American Spirit. New York:
Basic Books. Oriard, Michael. (1993) Sporting with the
Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture.
New York: Cambridge University Press. Prebish, Charles S.
(1993) Religion and Sport: The Meeting of Sacred and Profane. Westport, CT: Greenwood.