Football reigns, football is king …In Odessa, it's God, country, and Mojo football.
—School board member in Odessa, Texas, Friday Night Lights
It is Odessa, Texas, and the kickoff between the Odessa Permian Panthers and the Midland Lee Rebels swiftly approaches. “Outside the Midland High band, dressed in its purple and gold costumes, play[s] the national anthem. An announcer's voice then [comes] over the public address system, asking the sell out crowd of eleven thousand to rise for the prayer, which everyone eagerly [does].”1 This illustrates the ceremonial triad of God, America, and football occurring in high school stadiums throughout America every fall Friday night.
John Lennon was criticized for saying that the Beatles had become more popular than Jesus. Well, the Beatles were long ago eclipsed by football, which is now America's most popular cultural icon. On scores of Sundays many fans “sacrifice” attendance at church for opportunities to attend a professional football game. On ESPN the Super Bowl has become an American holy day complete with sermons and cult rituals from sunrise until kickoff. We are regaled with stories of how these teams have pilgrimaged to the holy land. Sunday evening services are rescheduled around the Super Bowl as it draws all Americans together. It has become the Church of Football, or more cynically the First Church of the Last Down.
Though American Christianity seems steamrollered by this national zest for football, conflict with American Christianity is not the only way of understanding their relationship. Many have proclaimed a sacred alliance between the two. Football players proclaim their religious conversions, crowds call upon God before games, and teams have organized Bible studies and chapels or meet to pray at midfield after the contest. Who has not heard a football celebrity endorsement of Jesus by Deion Sanders, Reggie White, Tom Landry, and others? The parts are so seamless that one cannot tell where the service ends and the games begin.
What have various philosophical thinkers said about the nature and value of religion that can help us analyze this practice of what is often called a civil religion? Are there moral conflicts that make an oxymoron of the term “Christian football player”? And if so, how does a Christian who plays football deal with these conflicts?
American Civil Religion
The relationship between public religion and football could be considered an expression of civil religion. The modern concept of civil religion originated in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's (1712–1778) Social Contract. He says the following about civil religion:
Religion …can be divided into two categories, the religion of the man and the religion of the citizen. The first, without temples, altars, or rituals, and limited to inward devotion to the supreme God and the eternal obligations of morality, is the pure and simple religion of the Gospel, the religion of the citizens is the religion established in a single country; it gives that country its Gods and its special tutelary deities; it has its dogmas, its rituals, its external forms of worship laid down by law; and to the one nation which practices this religion, everything outside is infidel, alien, barbarous; and it extends the rights and duties of man only so far as it extends its altars. Such were the religions of all the early peoples; and we might give it the name of civil or positive divine law. 2
Rousseau believed that in the ideal society the social contract was between humans and not between a person and a government. He writes, “Each of us places his person under the supreme direction of the general will, and the group receives each individual as an indivisible part of the whole.”3 Rousseau was critical of traditional Christianity because unity in civil society was disrupted by revealed religion, as it created conflict through intolerance; but by drawing on the strength of a civic religion (the religion of the citizen, as described above by Rousseau), relational harmony could be improved. He believed the basic religious ideas that could perform this unifying social bond were considered universal and could be summarized in three dogmas: as a general belief in an infinite God, as belief in an afterlife where justice prevails with virtue being rewarded and vice punished, and tolerance in religious affairs.
Robert Bellah revived interest in this topic in his 1967 essay “Civil Religion in America.”4 Bellah describes how Americans embrace a common “civil religion” in the Judeo-Christian tradition with commonly agreed-upon beliefs, values, and rituals. It binds the nation's most deeply held values with transcendent meaning.
Civil religion frequently includes offerings of public prayers or invocations of God in political speeches or ritualistic recitations of oaths and pledges or a politician's irreligiously saying, “God bless America.” It can be called a sociological practice of the folk religion of a people or culture that often includes ritual expressions of patriotism. Prayers prior to football games alongside the national anthem fit this image perfectly. Civil religion has no real moral impact but, rather, reinforces the nationalistic values already embraced.
Football as Civil Religion
Civil religion reigns in American sport and, in particular, in football. The religion is so prominent that many fail even to see it. For civil religion involves social approval of such religion without concern for content; thus it embraces an anti-intellectual approach to life. Certain events, such as wars or Pearl Harbor or 9/11, foster its emergence. Far too often it finds expression in ways like those portrayed in Odessa, Texas. Odessa is described as “still a place that seemed on the edge of the frontier, a paradoxical mixture of the Old South and the Wild West, friendly to a fault but fiercely independent, God-fearing and propped up by the Baptist beliefs in family and flag, but hell-raising, spiced with the edge of violence but naive and thoroughly unpretentious.”5 Here there is a divorce between religious ritual and genuine Christian living. Even the church signs in town provide football-inspired messages such as, “HOW DO YOU SPELL DEFENSE? MOJO.”6 Such “cheerleading churches” can subtly diminish their prophetic social function. People are capable of clinging to football as if it possesses an innate sacred value, as if there were nothing else in life, so that watching the game in Odessa becomes a “quasi-religious experience.”7 But of course this is Texas, and in Texas, football is religion; who hasn't heard the joke that Texas Stadium was built with an opening in the center so that God could watch the Cowboys play?
This passionate combination of religion, nationalism, and football extends beyond Texas, however. Andrew Miracle and Roger Rees, in their book Lessons of the Locker Room, describe how throughout the country, high school football delivers a series of ritual events that demonstrate a community's shared “beliefs about particular ways of thinking and feeling. These myths …are cultural blueprints for understanding our society…. Ritual is sacred because it denotes a special time in which we do things that confirm the importance of deeply held beliefs…. High school sport …has these characteristics, whether boys’ football in Texas or girls’ basketball in Iowa.”8
Paul Brown Stadium in Massillon, Ohio, is known as “the Temple,” but high school is not the only place where the football experience seems religious. Colleges and universities also participate in this sacred pageantry and reenact these holy rites. “Every fall weekend thousands of students and alumni drape themselves in sacred colors, bear on their bodies images of their religious totem …in their journey to houses of worship [football stadiums], to sing hymns and participate in rituals”9 and to cheer the gods of spectacle. The holiest event is homecoming, which provides a sense of place and history. It affirms a sense of belonging, of membership in the tribe. Football is seen as social cement to instill American and ultimately religious beliefs, values, and foundations. At the most intense religious level, the following might occur:
During the crucial moments of the game, especially a game that is perceived to be particularly important and is closely contested, players and spectators are as one; the individual gives way to the collective. Hundreds or thousands of voices become as one. Almost simultaneously, many individuals may experience ecstasy, that is, an altered state of consciousness, a tremendous natural high. It is the force of public ritual that gives sport the kind of cultural power usually attached to religion. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz notes with regard to religion, it is a system that acts to “establish powerful, persuasive and long-lasting moods and motivations” by “formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” Sport has done this for American culture in a way that traditional religion could not.10
This is obviously an expression of the civil religious ideas held by a wide cross section of Americans. There is an invoking of God to be on our team or an assumption that he is for our nation. Is there a criterion to distinguish good religion from bad religion when civil religion is involved?
The Sacred Prominence of Football
Prior to replying to the question of whether the mix is good or not, we have to ask why football has risen to such sacred prominence. First, the number of games is very limited. There are too many baseball, basketball, or soccer games to create a social civil religion. Every Super Bowl is a one-game, winner-take-all event equivalent to the seventh game of the World Series. With only five to eight home football games a year, a team can establish a historical familial tradition that unites the people in a common bond. Going to the stadium becomes a pilgrimage, and the pregame meal is a time of preparation, festivity, and feasting where communion is experienced with other tailgaters. The game is the service, with the national anthem and opening prayer serving as a call to worship. The final gun begins the benediction as the players shake hands (invoking God's blessing or curse on one another) upon leaving the consecrated turf; some elect are joyous about their standing and others are remorseful that they, the reprobate and rejected, have fallen short.
Existential Experiences in Football and in War
Football players seem to need religion more than the athletes who participate in less demanding activities. More than most team sports, football is governed by emotion. Football shares with warfare similar emotions. It is not emotion run amok but passionate sentiment. The really good player must have some fire in his belly because of the extremely strenuous nature of the game. It is a game of intense bodily contact that at times can become violent. There are numerous hard collisions in the game. An athlete must be mentally and emotionally prepared to assault and be assaulted. To face this boldly without fear, knowing that he is in a dangerous situation, the football player may well call upon God and even depend upon God for safety and protection. It is hard not to seek transcendent meaning while under the threat of being smashed by a fast 320-pound lineman.
Many war images are used in football. In an old monologue, George Carlin comments that in football you blitz, bomb, spear, shiver, march, and score with players possessing nicknames like Tank, the Assassin, Hacksaw, and Mean Joe Green. This is the language of war with the nicknames of warriors. The physical punishment, threat of serious injury, the emotional intensity, and exhausting strain can prompt an emotional outpouring by the football player. As longtime NFL coach Vince Lombardi stated, “I firmly believe that any man's finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle—victorious.” The football game can be a truly existential experience where one experiences the absurdity of the threat of injury or even of personal destruction—an experience not unlike that of the combat infantryman. There is a need for eternal strength and for a confidant to whom to pour out one's emotions. This frequently is God. This also makes the football player more interested in the valiant knightly approach to religion than the caring shepherd motif.
Does God Belong in the Game?
Robert Higgs, in his book God in the Stadium, begins with the observation that “wherever we look in American society we see links between sports and religion and even the confusion of one with the other…. They have served one another and have become almost inseparable.”11 He describes this partnership and argues that this mixture has not been good because sports and Christianity are ostensibly incompatible because of the negative effect of sports on Christianity, as sports present the archetype of the Knight over and against the model of the Shepherd. He states “that to modernize Jesus is to muscularize Him and the culture of our time, and to muscularize is to militarize, as the long alliance of military drills, exercises, sports, and religion in the United States amply illustrates.”12 Higgs seems to want to eliminate this perverting combination and remove religion from sport. This is certainly an understandable perspective. Much of what has been produced by this amalgamation has been detrimental. It is my contention, however, that this problem could be remedied, not by seeing sports and Christianity as incompatible, but rather by approaching sports in general and football in particular from a Christian worldview rather than an experiential, fragmented civil religious viewpoint. The problem is not their incompatibility or an imbalance of focus, but rather that the way they have been united has distorted religion and harmed football.
A Worldview Approach to Faith and Football
Martin Marty, a prominent historian of religion, concludes that religion primarily serves two functions: it provides a message of individual salvation, telling us “how to get right with God,” and it is a “lens for interpreting the world.”13 Many do not think it is possible to provide an interpretation of the world, a philosophy of sports, or a Christian philosophy of football. But the failure to do so creates a two-worlds mentality resulting in the compartmentalizing of life into the sacred and the secular. Civil religion is conducive to both compartmentalization and superficial unity. It places demands upon certain specific ritualistic behaviors and thereby lessens or precludes understanding and growth of authentic faith that encompasses all of life.
It is impossible to make civil religion a prophetic pulpit for rebuking the sins of a populace or its institutions, because civil religion exists to make them (in this case patriots and football fans) feel sanctified in themselves. This particular temptation is tailor-made for the mind of the athlete. Most of contemporary American Christianity restricts religion to the heart (pietism) and makes religious belief largely irrelevant to real life, including to the games we play. There can be a prayer before the game over the loudspeaker, but who ever heard of anyone being impacted by such a prayer? The obscenities screamed at refs, the dehumanization of opponents and officials, and the encouragement to provoke a violent collision that eliminates the opposing team's best player do not testify to a sanctified audience. The same crowd that prays may moments later be cheering as the opponent's quarterback lies mangled on the gridiron. Prayer can create the illusion of having sanctified the proceedings, but the civil religious context keeps the religious from impacting the secular in any meaningful way. When such bifurcation occurs in the academic community, a religious anti-intellectualism is created. With regard to sports, thinking slides toward pragmatic morality (or immorality).
Beyond football, consider my personal academic experience in a graduate course in pastoral counseling. The intellectual approach was like any other therapeutic counseling program except that we were taught to pray with each client before each session. Of course the prayer could comfort the distressed. But its perfunctory nature did not necessarily sanctify what followed. There was little or no discussion about approaching the subject matter in a theistic manner or from a Christian framework to determine its congruence with Christianity. No one dared ask whether there is an ethical problem in using active-listening methods to fake empathy.
My experience in that context seems analogous to the public prayer before a game. This public prayer ends up supporting the public/private dichotomy. Without a Judeo-Christian interpretation of the sport and its trappings, there cannot be a consistent approach to sport or to the ideal character profile of the athletes, and there is no basis for how to properly evaluate how the game is played or when to cheer a worthy opponent. The Christian coach or Christian football player is seen simply as someone who prays with the team, practices good values off the field or decent sportsmanship on it, and provides a testimony when the camera appears on him. Seldom do we hear anyone calling the sport into question from a Christian ethical framework.
Christianity should be a visionary anchor from which to critique a culture's social structures. Civil religion shows respect for religion, but because of its cultic tendencies, it denies any real relevance to anything substantive. It is pseudofaith with an emotional response without any challenge to lifestyle, morality, or other daily practices. This type of tokenism even allows non-Christians to participate in quasi-religious activity with impunity and without principled demands set before them. This Worldviews author Nancy Pearcy states: “In Christian schools, the typical strategy is to inject a few narrowly defined ‘religious’ elements into the classroom, like prayer and Bible memorization—and then teach exactly the same things as the secular schools. The curriculum merely spreads a layer of spiritual devotion over the subject matter like icing on a cake, while the content itself stays the same.”15
restricts faith to the religious sphere while adopting whatever views are current in [Christians’] professional or social circles. We probably all know of Christian teachers who uncritically accept the latest secular theories of education; Christian businessmen who run their operations by accepted secular management theories; Christian ministries that mirror the commercial world's marketing techniques; Christian families where the teenagers watch the same movies and listen to the same music as their nonbelieving friends. While sincere in their faith, they have absorbed their views on just about everything else by osmosis from the surrounding culture.14
The professor and the coach were once considered examples of moral integrity, but that day has long passed. As the gap widened between personal piety and learning as its own end, teaching and coaching began to fail the student and the player alike, causing them not to approach life from a Christian worldview. Civil religion emerged to fill this spiritual vacuum, minimizing values yet allowing football players to continue to feel as if they are practicing some valid form of Christianity. When Christianity becomes restricted to the public prayer over the speaker system at a game or a rote team prayer in the locker room, then there is no impulse, much less urgency, to explore the riches of a thoroughgoing Christian worldview that could actually transform the athlete and the contest. No longer is there Christian thinking that attempts to give the truth about the whole of reality or a viewpoint for interpreting every subject matter, including football. To lack a Christian worldview is to lack “any sense of how Christianity functions as a unified, overarching system of truth that applies to social issues, history, politics, anthropology, and all the other subject areas”16—including sports and football. It creates a sacred/secular split that Martin Marty describes as the Modern Schism, saying that “we are living in the first time in history where Christianity has been boxed into the private sphere and has largely stopped speaking to the public sphere.”17
Civil religion surrounding football events trivializes authentic religious practice. Jesus commanded his followers to love God with heart, strength, and mind. This means there must be a distinctively Christian way of thinking that would involve understanding football from a Christian vantage point while entering into the fun and excitement of the game on its own terms as a legitimate activity. Is it possible there could be something truly redemptive in sport and in football? Indeed, if God has everything to do with everything, then he has everything to do with football.
“How can a simple prayer harm anyone?” a fan asks. Though one may pray and express dependence upon God for the contest, a verbal expression of faith prior to the game is not enough. It may only reinforce civil religion. God is interested in sport because it is part of life, and no part of life is divorced from God. A worldview approach is needed for sport and for football. The Christian football player should be different, not just because he leads the team in prayer, but because he thinks and applies his faith to the game.
Spiritual growth would include character development and candid renunciation of dehumanizing immoral elements and practices. It goes without saying that the Christian football player should be a good person as a role model, but he should also think deeply about applying his faith to football. He must examine violence, language, the role of anger, respect for opponents and officials, the value of the activity, and how to make the sport morally good. A Christian view of football rejects the view that the purpose of the game is to obtain fame and money or exemplify selfishness and greed. It is not to create an idol of the fame and money made or to be selfish or greedy. The avarice and egoism in football must be questioned.
The Love of the Game
The Christian philosopher Augustine (354–430) describes how evil is a disordering of our priorities. Every object is a legitimate object of love, but we must not expect more from it than its nature can provide. To fail in this creates evil. What a person loves, and how he or she loves, will determine the character of life. Consequently, the whole person is to be loved more than just the body, while God is to be loved more than the self. Hence, virtue, Augustine says, is a form of “rightly ordered love,” while vice is disordered love.18 The more the affections are distorted, the more cancerous evil becomes.
Football is one of the lower things in life. It is not as important as pure religion, family, and character. Yet it has muscled into a position of great prominence, often trumping these objects of affection. Civil religion seems to affirm this trumping. The cause of evil in the limited microcosm of sport is an expression of the cosmic cause of evil. The athlete craves some limited good in an absolute way and is enslaved by his disordered longing. The body is valuable, but virtue is more valuable. And if this is so, we must love the body and love virtue more. A sense of virtue, including humility, sportsmanship, and love and respect for the opponent (loving one's neighbor) are aspects of sport that ought to be considered more important than a public generic prayer before a game.
Other questions that ought to be pursued from a Christian mindset could be: Should playing with pain be viewed as a badge of courage? How should one approach the desire to intentionally harm an opponent? Is there a place for verbally abusing a player, a coach, a referee? Are not values more important than winning? How should one evaluate issues of race or of economic prosperity? What responsibilities do athletes have as role models? Look at the coaches in Super Bowl XLI, Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy. These are men of strong Christian character. Concerning his victory in the Super Bowl, Dungy stated, “I'm proud to be representing African-American coaches, to be the first African-American to win this…. But again, more than anything, I've said it before, Lovie Smith and I are not only the first two African-Americans, but Christian coaches showing that you can win doing it the Lord's way. And we're more proud of that.”19 Both men are soft-spoken, God-fearing coaches who demonstrate that one can get to the top of the coaching profession without being a miserable human being, without being a raving, screaming, paranoid, lunatic, workaholic madman. They are men of humility, men of God who never trash-talk. And the greatest shock is that they actually do put their families first.20 They know the proper priority of sport, instead of worshipping at its feet. Dungy's Christian beliefs carry over into how he treats his players (his respectful, non-yelling approach) and how he carries himself. Because of his lack of ego, Dungy can say of Smith, “I'm so happy for Lovie, who does things the right way, without cursing and shows things can be done differently. We give God all the credit.”21 Both want people to know that who they are on the inside is what matters most.22
Conclusion: The Best of All Possible Games
In the book Season of Life, Jeffrey Marx probes the philosophy of football of the coaches at Baltimore's Gilman High School, including former NFL star Joe Ehrman, who is now a pastor. They are coaching in a climate where they are limited in speaking about their Christian faith directly to the players; nevertheless, they approach their coaching as Christian men and are thinking “Christianly” about football. In that regard they consider their most important responsibility to be teaching these young men how to become “men for others.” As the boys take the field, the following exchange is heard:
“What is our job as coaches?” he [Joe Erhman] asked.
“To love us,” the boys yelled back in unison.
“What is your job?” Joe shot back.
“To love each other,” the boys responded.23
Their goal is to teach these young men to love each other, to live in community, and to serve others. Ehrman states, “So I am part of a football program in Baltimore, and we use this as our base philosophy. Our understanding is that sports—football—is nothing more than a context to help connect with boys and teach them, one, a clear and compelling definition of what it means to be a man. Second is to give them a code of conduct for manhood. And the third is to help them figure out what their own unique, transcendent cause should be or could be in this world.”24 This is congruent with the Shepherd rather than only the Knightly archetype, and combining these creates a holistic approach that does not invalidate the game of football. This is a consistent Christian worldview approach that does not see football as an end in itself but as a means to a greater end. It does not negate proclamation, but it makes personal faith more important and sees it as a deeper well than civil religion. This holistic approach has the power to transform men and in the process raise football into the “best of all possible games.” In this way, then, the gridiron can truly be holy ground.
Notes
1. H. G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 175.
2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (London: Penguin Classics, 1968), 181.
3. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 61.
4. This chapter was first published in the journal Daedalus (Winter 1967). Many others have since written upon this topic, including Martin Marty, Sidney Mead, R. C. Wimberly, and John F. Wilson.
5. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights, 32.
6. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights, 47.
7. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights, 182.
8. Andrew W. Miracle Jr. and C. Roger Rees, Lessons of the Locker Room (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994), 13.
9. David Hackett, “Is Gator Football a Religion?” http://clasnews.clas.ufl.edu/clasnotes/alumninotes/00spring/hackett.html, 1.
10. Miracle and Rees, Lessons of the Locker Room, 20.
11. Robert J. Higgs, God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 1.
12. Higgs, God in the Stadium, 333.
13. Quoted in Nancy Pearcy, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2005), 35.
14. Pearcy, Total Truth, 33.
15. Pearcy, Total Truth, 37.
16. Pearcy, Total Truth, 33.
17. Quoted in Pearcy, Total Truth, 35.
18. Augustine, City of God (London: Penguin Books, 1984), 637.
19. Dave Daubenmire, “Faith Triumphs over Race,” http://www.newswithviews.com/Daubenmire/dave59.htm, 2.
20. Mike Bianchi, “Character, Not Color, Defines Dungy, Smith,” Orlando (FL) Sentinel, http://www.orlandosentinel.com/sports/columnists/orl-bianchi2807ja, 1.
21. Richard Land, “Faith by Example—Dungy, Smith,” http://erlc.com/article/faith-by-example-dungy-smith, 2.
22. Daubenmire, “Faith Triumphs over Race,” 4.
23. Jeffrey Marx, Season of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 3.
24. Marx, Season of Life, 34.