"Milchama Neged Superbowl"

"Americans may not know who their god is, but you can be sure most know who their team is." ---R. Albert Mohler Jr.

Who’s Got Game?: America’s New Religion by Mary Lou Sheffer
(in Sport and Religion in the Twenty-First Century)
This concept of sport as a religion is not necessarily new. As far back as the first Olympic games, which historians believe began around 776 B.C, the concept of sport as religion existed. The first Olympics were portrayed as religious events and regarded as a sacred festival of games and sport. Flags, drums, dances, songs/chants, and feasts all accompanied ancient religious/ sport rituals. During these religious events, “the drummers beat their drums like those possessed and this it was believed signified the presence of the spirits who were the determinants in the results of the contest” (Obare, 2003, para. 3). According to Edwards (1973) and Coakley (2001), sport shares numerous essential features of religion including formal statement of beliefs, testimonies that bring fullness and satisfaction to life, saints (or idolized people), ruling patriarchs (coaches), hierarchal/high council (NCAA or referees), reliance on scribes (records and journalists), seekers of the kingdom (fans), shrines and/or cathedrals, and symbols of the faith (trophies/souvenirs).
In addition, sport possesses a messianic-millenarian ideology. Berger (1967, p. 69) defines messianic-millenarian theodicy by “relativizing the suffering or injustice of the present in terms of their being overcome in a glorious future.” In this sense, players and fans look for redemption in the upcoming season. Chicago Cubs fans’ infamous expression, “Wait till next year” exemplifies this type of redemption ideology in which hope springs eternal. The ending of each sport season wipes the slate clean and provides a chance to start anew, rekindling hope for a better season, a better tomorrow.
In Chidester’s last two points, sacred place of home and sacred time of rituals, sports and religion are somewhat united. Repeatedly, sports stadiums are referred to as sacred cathedrals and viewed as reverent sacred places. In this sacred space, followers adhere to and experience the sacred time of rituals. Whether it is the singing of the national anthem, the traditional seventh inning rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at Wrigley Field, or the official tossing of a coin at the beginning of a football game, ceremonies and traditions are mainstays in modern sport. Older ballparks, such as Wrigley Field and Fenway Park, are often venerated for their age.
Through sport, children learn basic skills such as cooperation, self-esteem, altruism, loyalty, self-control, and obedience. Gatz, Messner, and BallRokeach (2002) argue that values and skills learned through sport help children develop socially and emotionally, and further serve to prepare an individual for the rest of life. Sport teaches acceptance of authority and initiates routines. In this manner, sport becomes a transmitter, translating societal goals or meanings from one generation to the next. Parents instructing or coaching their children is a prime example of such behavior. Sport becomes a “symbolic liaison” that Berger (1967, p. 132) refers to as an “ancient lineage [that is] grounded in the very antiquity of kinship institutions.” This “symbolic liaison” is another way of defining Chidester’s religious characteristic of heritage. As one generation instructs the next in the traditions of sport they ensure that this heritage is continued. Sport, like religion, binds communities together. Furthermore, sport influences our understanding of fair play and integrity, thus helping to shape the social order.
Although sport is not a theological religion, it does constitute a civil religion. As a civil religion, sport is a social institution that not only educates, but also provides structure and moral support for its members. As a possible consequence, as interest in sports continues to grow, it could cause a loss of dependence and interest in theological religion. According to the Barna Research Group (2007), 66 percent of Americans polled contend that traditional religion is losing its influence in society. A 1993 study by Hadaway, Marle, and Chaves (1993, p. 750) found that “church attendance rate is one-half what everyone thinks it is.” Other influences range from increased scientific knowledge, urbanization, and increased secularism (Presser and Chaves, 2007). According to the director of the Center for the Study of Religion, Robert Wuthnow, “We [Americans] are in some ways a very religious country, especially compared to Western Europe. But we’re of two minds, and the other mind is that we really are pretty secular” (“How many,” 2007). Devotion to sport adds to this secular division. In some instances, devotion to sport has replaced or simulated devotion to traditional religion. For example, baseball player Buck O’Neil said that baseball had become his religion (Burns, 1994). Whether this devotion is made consciously or unconsciously depends on the individual. This shift in devotion to sport has influenced cultural standards or practices. In response to increased social desires to participate or attend sporting events, churches have altered the timing of religious events. Numerous traditional denominations have altered Sunday services to accommodate sport congregations’ need to witness the kickoff.

Is American Football a Religion? (2019)
Football in America is without a doubt a very powerful faith. We prepare for Sunday. We often dress up, or even go further than that, painting our faces and bodies the colors of the Lord we choose to worship. And there are rituals; complicated, nervous expressions of devotion, where belief is internalized, as though without performing this sequence of prayers you are betraying your God.
And it is not only on Sunday. On Saturday many people declare themselves followers of their favorite messianic college team, seeking to discover the new Jesus who will save their own faltering NFL team in the future while maintaining a cultish loyalty to whichever school they attended sometimes in the increasingly distant past. (By the way, if you have not seen it, there was a drunken stooge in Philadelphia who vowed that he would eat s*** if the Eagles won the Superbowl. When the Eagles finally won, this fool scooped up a handful of horses*** lying in a mound on the street, which was filled with a Mardi Gras-like celebration of joy, and he smeared it all over his mouth to the rhapsodic, almost spoken in tongues encouragement of his fellow worshipers. If this is not religious devotion than nothing is.)

Why the NFL Has Become a Religion by Bobby Brooks (2010)
Have a special ritual on Sundays? Get dressed up in teams colors? Go to the game to worship your team? You may be in the fastest growing religion and not even realize it.
As the NFL regular season nears, passion for the sport is at an all-time high. One look at the ratings will tell you that the NFL is king in the sports atmosphere.
For millions of people, September ninth is like Christmas Day while the entire month of August feels like Christmas Eve.
So with fan fever approaching a frenzied state, I ask the question—is the NFL a religion? Below I outline why I believe it is.
Language
Attend a game or eavesdrop by the water cooler and you will hear many of the same words and phrases used by fans as you hear in church. Examples include:
"I have faith"
"I worship Peyton Manning"
"I have to do my game-day ritual"
"I'm a dedicated Steeler fan"
"I've suffered for years"
"I pray they win"
"I am committed to the Bears"
The language of a specific sub-culture is directly linked to the identity and knowledge of that group and if you belong to this organized chaos, you know what I am talking about.

Ceremonies and Celebrations
Ceremonies are a yearly tradition to recognize and honor the team, city, and the group of followers for reaching their goals. At the centerpiece of the NFL religion is the idol of worship—the Vince Lombardi Trophy.
Whether it is handing out Super Bowls or a trip to the White House, these ceremonies often follow a script and mark the significance of the ultimate achievement in the NFL.
Winning a Super Bowl is also followed by a massive celebration where thousands of faithful followers get together to commemorate the event.

Stadiums
Stadiums resemble a place of worship much in the same way as a church or cathedral. Devoted fans come together to pray for a win and cheer on their heroes.
These spectators also display a deep glorification for players, their achievements, and the teams they belong to.

Behavior
The behavior of NFL fans often has striking parallels with religious traditions.
Singing of the national anthem is similar to singing at church. Spectators will wear team colors, jerseys, carry banners and flags. Teams use icons and mascots. Collectively, fans will chant in unison—such as booing or cheering, do the wave, or clap.
Transformative experiences
Attending an NFL game can have the same emotional and influential affect seen at religious gatherings. It is a great escape from normal life as people dress up, paint their face, and make signs to identify with a team.
With the power of mass communications such as television and radio, one can experience this every Sunday as millions of people break away from regular matters or problems.
For many, the NFL has become a religion of its own as people all over the country and the world continue to establish a growing community of fans.
As a fan myself, I can only pray my team does well this year.

Team Spirit: U.S. Sports Mania Called Folk Religion by Russell Chandler (1986)
“For growing numbers of Americans,” observes Charles S. Prebish of Penn State University’s religious studies program, “sport religion has become a more appropriate expression of personal religiosity than Christianity, Judaism, or any of the traditional religions.”
Prebish cites terms that athletes and sportswriters regularly use: faith, ritual, ultimate, dedicated, sacrifice, peace, commitment, spirit.
And James A. Mathisen, professor of sociology at Wheaton College, an evangelical school in Illinois, notes that the Big Game in university life and professional football’s Super Bowl spectacular are “in fact a ritual expressing and communicating a secular religion of the American dream.”
“If I were to show a visitor to the United States a single, recurring event which has come to characterize American folk religion, the Super Bowl would be it,” Mathisen said in a paper presented in Washington last month at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.
[...]
But even serious scholars, like historian James T. Baker, point out that football has all the trappings of cultic celebration: colored banners, fanatic supporters, the cosmic sphere, “even its own mini-skirted vestal virgins to fan the flames.”
“But far more important,” wrote Baker, “it acts as a religion by teaching its followers how to order their personal and professional lives. For those who play, it is an educational act, an immersion in truth.
“For the rest of us, who are too small or too clumsy or too old to play and have to watch from the stands or before television screens, it is not unlike a Latin High Mass performed by professionals for the edification and instruction of those deemed by the Heavenly Commissioner unworthy to participate personally.”
In his paper on American sport as folk religion, Mathisen traces distinctive myths, values and beliefs of sports that “are accepted on faith by great masses of people . . . from the President of the United States down to the most humble bootblack.”
“For example, if I believe the myth that ‘sport builds character,’ then I will guide my children toward youthful athletic participation with a virtual untestable certainty that without experience as a shortstop or as a left wing, their lives will be morally deficient,” Mathisen said at the Washington meeting of several hundred sociologists, psychologists and religious scholars.
“Further, I will infer that the ‘character’ of successful adult Americans who happen to have participated in sport at some point in their lives is what it is as a result of comparable participation in sport. Selective perception guarantees that I will interpret biographies in terms of the ideology and mythology of sport. Not to do so would be a demonstration of lack of faith and of irreligion.”

Sunday is for Football by Nicholas Frankovich (2015)
More Americans will watch the Super Bowl this Sunday than go to church, to judge from recent Nielsen ratings and studies of church attendance. In that respect, this weekend is like every other weekend during football season.
The NFL is more popular than organized religion by two measures: the number of us who make time for it in our lives, and the amount of time we make for it. Consider that 34 percent of men and 18 percent of women spend six or more hours a week watching professional football (to say nothing of college games), according to an Adweek/Harris poll in 2011. Six hours is a lot. The typical church service lasts only about one hour, and the best estimates based on headcounts — not, as in Gallup, on self-reporting — are that less than 20 percent of American adults put in any pew time at all on the Christian Sabbath.
Note that the decline of organized religion in the West has coincided with the rise of modern organized sports, whose genesis was mainly in British and American schools in the 19th century. While Matthew Arnold wrote elegiacally of losing his faith (“The sea is calm tonight . . . ”), outside his window his students were practicing theirs on the playing fields of Rugby. More than a century later, religion and sports still occupy the same seesaw, tilting ever further in the same direction: religion down, sports up.

Sport as a Religious Phenomenon by Gregory Sapp
Fans of any sport may perform rituals before, during, even after games as part of the act of participating in the sport. Warren St. John recounts his season of traveling with fans on their way to the University of Alabama’s football games during the fall of 1998. St. John tells the story of being with two Bama fans who traditionally eat “Bama Bombs” (cherries soaked in pure grain alcohol) before the game for good luck. Describing the passing out and eating of the “bombs” before leaving the recreational vehicle for the game, St. John refers to the ritual as “Communion for fans.”^[13] Fans of all sports participate in rituals that attempt to manipulate the outcome of the contest, to maintain order in their sports world. Ritual is clearly a dimension of sport as it is of religion.

IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD
THE MEEK SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH—BUT THEY'RE UNLIKELY TO TAKE HOME THE LOMBARDI TROPHY THIS WEEK. HOW CHRISTIAN ATHLETES RECONCILE THE CULTURE OF FOOTBALL WITH THE TEACHINGS OF THEIR FAITH
by Mark Oppenheimer
It's clear that for a substantial number of athletes and coaches, there is no tension between being a Christian and being an aggressive athlete. On the contrary, many of them argue that football builds character and thereby makes a man more of a Christian—a commingling of faith and football now accepted by fans.
But what if, instead of bringing a Christian culture to sports, these evangelists allowed the coarseness, idolatry and materialism of sports to infect players' faith? Church and pro football both revolve around Sunday, and 50 years into our national experiment of mixing the two, it is not clear that faith has won the day. In fact, some Christian athletes and coaches are starting to recognize that football, at least as it is currently played, may be bad for one's soul.
Even if a player could Christianize the strip club, he can't cover up the central irony of big-time football: The sport with the biggest Christian presence, the most famous Christian athletes (the Tebows, the Kurt Warners) and the deepest penetration of chaplains, ministers and Bible studies is quite likely to corrupt a player's Christian values.
Since 1987, Sharon Stoll of the University of Idaho has surveyed more than 90,000 student-athletes on their moral reasoning in matters such as fair play and sportsmanship. Her research shows that athletes on average score lower than the general student population on tests of moral reasoning, and athletes in "male, revenue-producing contact sports" are the most deficient of that group.
One major reason for their moral indifference, writes Stoll, is that in the culture of male team-sport athletics, "the opponent is not seen as an honorable opponent but rather an obstacle, of little worth, to be overcome." This dehumanization of the opponent is amplified by the rules of football. Stars in all sports are rich and worshipped as heroes, but only football adds to the money and adulation a level of violence and physical domination that is deeply at odds with Jesus' message.
Football corrupts its fans too. A study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2011 found that in cities where the home NFL team was upset on game day, there was an 8% increase in male-on-female domestic violence. In Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer, his book about Alabama football fandom, Warren St. John tells the story of a couple who skipped their daughter's wedding to attend the Tennessee game. Asked why he would do such a thing, the father responds, "I just love Alabama football, is all I can think of." That's an extreme example, of course, but nobody who follows the college game can deny that many superfans put their devotion to football ahead of family.
These are the kinds of stories that horrify Shirl James Hoffman of the American Kinesiology Association. Hoffman is the son of a Baptist minister, and he played and coached college basketball. But he wants Christians to reclaim their heritage as sports skeptics. As he wrote in his 2009 book, Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports, a century ago the Christian community "was still ambivalent about whether sports were legitimate leisure pursuits for believers." While "the Christian worldview is based on an absolute, immutable, justice-loving God," the culture of sports "is based on material success." For the players, and for the fans: Tickets for Sunday's Super Bowl are fetching well over $2,000 on StubHub. How would Jesus spend that kind of money?
But Americans have made their peace with the sport, to the point that some feel no shame preferring the sacrament of football to the actual sacraments on Sundays. That nobody seems even to notice the conflict between obligations to one's church and to one's team is the inevitable product of 50 years of sports evangelism: the work of organizations such as the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, founded in 1954, and Athletes in Action, which was started 12 years later as a wing of Campus Crusade for Christ (which now goes by the indie-rock name of Cru). The people who run these ministries say sports should be subservient to God, not the other way around, but they have participated eagerly in the deification of sports in American culture, acting as if someone faced with the conflict between sports madness and godly obedience can simply step away from it, like declining a penalty when your team is way ahead. Which, in a sense, their team is.
Both FCA and AIA were founded in an era in which evangelicals realized that they could no longer remain ambivalent about sports: Americans were not going to give up big-time athletics, or even question its primacy. Donnie Dee, a former NFL tight end who is now FCA's executive director and COO, described the fellowship's origins by saying that its founder, Don McLanen, "noticed in the newspaper that professional athletes were endorsing a product, and he felt if they could endorse a product, why not a way of life?" Evangelicals gave up trying to transform the culture and decided instead to use it.
What about the concussions, the broken bones? The abuse meted out to the bodies God gave us? "You know," Dee says, "football is football. You can get hurt walking across the street." That is the mantra of these ministries: Sports are self-contained moral universes. It's O.K. to break bones if it's for sport. Football can't be subjected to the moral claims that pertain to other aspects of life.
"A lot of the Christian thing," Hightower continues, "is putting the you before the I, and in football you're sometimes taught to be selfish, to do what you have to do to get ahead, by any means necessary. You have to stop and ask yourself: Am I a football player who is a Christian, or a Christian who is a football player?"

The ‘Religion’ of Football: Searching for the Rightly Ordered Soul
By Timothy P. O’Malley, Ph.D. (2023)
One such evening, the youth were asked to reflect on the idols in their lives. They stood before money and were queried: Where do you choose mammon before the kingdom of God? A young man (not from our parish) who took a dollar from the pile of cash answered that question not only in word but in deed. If you can’t serve God and mammon, you can at least serve mammon.
The young men of Our Lady Help of Christians Parish were more attracted by the collection of sports equipment. Where in your lives have sports become an idol? I saw them pick up the football, and then immediately shed tears! At last, I thought proudly to myself. They recognize that their obsession with athletic prowess exceeds what is necessary for human flourishing. They understand the need to re-order their desires.
We assembled in the room after the session, and I waited to hear about their Augustine-esque religious conversion precipitated by the evening devotional. My hope was at once dashed when the first young man, holding a football in his hands, began to cry out: “Men, make sure that you never forget how brief your high school football career will be. How I wish that I could go back and start again.” Sigh, I thought to myself. What could have been an occasion of memento mori, recognizing the brevity of our lives, became an act of nostalgia.
These young men, of course, were not born with such idolatry. It was passed on, the result of Sundays watching the then-dynastic Patriots and participating in the obsessive commentary that followed each game during the season. Sports radio in Boston could take a three-hour contest and analyze each moment as if it was sacred Scripture itself. Remember when Bill Belichick took that one timeout right before halftime? What was revealed in this moment? What meaning did it possess for your life? How might it foreshadow what is to come?
Of course, the young men and women of Boston are not unique. American football functions to many citizens in the United States as a de facto religion. In 2022, the NFL made $18 billion while occupying our collective attention on Sundays, Mondays, and not a few Thursdays. Individual college football programs make hundreds of millions of dollars, while also offering us a spectacle to watch on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays (and Sunday and Monday during Labor Day weekend). What would high school be without a football game on Friday night under the lights, young men clashing with their neighbors across town, while dreaming of future revenue made from playing a game they love?

Football really is America's religion. That's what made the NFL protests so powerful. by Tara Burton (2017)
We can trace the roots of American sports culture back to the British colonial tradition of "muscular Christianity”
To better understand how American sports culture developed, we should turn to Victorian England, where “muscular Christianity” originated as backlash to the culture of the time. The rise of the middle class and the development of industrialization meant that your average Victorian gentleman wasn’t exactly physically active. And Victorian religion tended to focus on women and female piety. Women were generally seen as the “angels in the house” who would domesticate their men — and make them better Christians.
In other words, traditional masculinity was in decline, and men who wanted a traditionally “masculine” way of expressing their religious identity had little to go on. Meanwhile, much of the identity of members of the British Empire was defined by, well, empire — by colonial power overseas — an identity that, by the late 19th century, was in jeopardy.
“Muscular Christianity” as a movement came out of the writings of Christian men who sought to address that need. In novels and manifestos alike, they envisioned a new kind of role model for (white, British) men: the macho, heroic, strapping young adventurer who was physically and mentally fit, and who used that fitness in the service of Christianity. That Christianity, of course, also included colonizing and converting the “natives” wherever they went.
Writers like Thomas Hughes, of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and Rudyard Kipling created the image of, to quote Hughes, “the old chivalrous and Christian belief, that a man’s body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men.” Physical fitness and sports were a huge part of this ideology, from the playing fields of boarding schools like Eton or Harrow, where boys were frequently toughened up through extreme hazing, to the development of rule-driven sports like “gentleman’s boxing."
British colonial culture became American sports culture
The “muscular Christian" mentality spread to the United States in the aftermath of the Civil War, as it developed to meet similar social needs across the Atlantic. America, too, was becoming more industrialized, and the aftermath of war meant that “cowboy” and “soldier” were no longer contemporary models of masculinity. Rather, Americans sought examples of masculinity in a virtuous, Christian way.
In 19th century America, being “macho” and being a good Christian went hand in hand. Indeed, the American version of muscular Christianity was even more extreme than its English counterpart, treating effeminacy or effeteness as a spiritual and moral weakness.
As one pastor, Moses Coit Tyler, put it in his 1869 collection of essays on physical culture, The Brawnville Papers (pun intended), “since every part of our nature is the sacred gift of God, he who neglects his body, who calumniates his body, who misuses it, who allows it to grow up puny, frail, sickly, misshapen, homely, commits a sin against the Giver of the body. Ordinarily, therefore, disease is a sin. Round shoulders and narrow chests are states of criminality. The dyspepsia is heresy. The headache is infidelity. It is as truly a man’s moral duty to have a good digestion, and sweet breath, and strong arms, and stalwart legs, and an erect bearing, as it is to read his Bible, or say his prayers, or love his neighbor as himself.”
This mentality gave rise to organizations like the Young Men’s Christian Association (or YMCA). Originally founded in London to provide wholesome, physically challenging entertainment to factory workers, who might otherwise turn to alcohol, brothels, or other vices, the YMCA in America became a powerhouse of muscular-Christian values, and a defining step in the development of how sports culture functions today.
In fact, many of America’s most famous team sports were developed by educators at the YMCA precisely to keep young Christian men active between football and baseball seasons, including basketball and volleyball. For James Naismith, the YMCA physical educator credited with inventing basketball in 1891, it — like all his work — was a chance "to win men for the Master through the gym.”
Sports, in other words, weren’t just a chance to show off physical prowess or to develop interpersonal skills. Rather, they were the primary way that English and American men of the 19th and 20th centuries could define themselves and their values. These values in turn were rooted in their idea of what it meant to be “masculine” (and, often implicitly, to be white and masculine).
Football — and American sports more generally — thus represents the culmination of varied strands of American ideology about what it means to be a “man” and to express certain masculine and moral values. And, just as in the Victorian era, it offers a structured and straightforward environment to answer these questions; a temporary escape from a world in which the unquestioned role of men (and, particularly, white Christian men) is less certain.
Balmer makes this point explicitly in his Sojourners article:
…stadiums provide an alternative universe, a kind of safe haven or subculture, a place of refuge from the outside world. For the white American, middle-class male (the primary patron of sporting events), the contest itself offers a welcome contrast to the larger world because here, inside the arena, the rules are clear and impartially enforced. Everyone also knows his or her place, so...the unsavory corollary is that women are relegated to the sidelines and the only acceptable place of self-expression for men of color is within the well-regulated universe of the playing field.

Football is the New Religion in America by Tanya Jones (2018)
Football has become a religion. Religion is defined as “a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices,” “scrupulous conformity,” or “the service and worship of God or the supernatural; commitment or devotion to religious faith or observation." Unlike traditional religions, football allows for, and encourages, “idleness, drunkenness, gambling, and fancy dress;” that is part of the appeal. Whether they attended the games in person, at a bar, or sat at home and watched the games on television, millions of Americans chose to do the same thing every Sunday for seventeen weeks. Fans of the sport wore their team jerseys, purchased their favorite food and beverages, and shouted at referees simultaneously. Those who participated in this shared revelry conformity played into the institutionalization of football.
I did not become a “full-time fan until I met my fiancé, and we began to watch the sport religiously on Sundays. I use the term religiously because, like for many Americans that is what American football for us. This past football season 14.9 million Americans joined our religious sport traditions. My football rituals every Sunday this past season consisted of waking up early, cleaning, going to the store and buying “game food” and coming home to watch eight hours of football on the NFL RedZone channel. Naysayers may decry these rituals as mere spectacles, but as I will demonstrate, the spirituality of football runs deep.
The Church used this need for masculinity to promote its own agenda and regain a prominent place in men’s souls through muscular Christianity. According to Peter McIntosh, author of Fair Play: Ethics in Sport and Education, muscular Christianity is “the ideal of manliness and the association of physical prowess with moral virtue.”[17] Though the need for manliness and masculinity is still ever present in football, the need for moral virtue is not as prevalent. The focus of sport (football in particular) has shifted from moral virtue to secular fun.

IS GOD A RAMS FAN?
by Randall Balmer (2001)
But what about the parishioner? It would not be difficult to argue that the sports stadium has replaced the church sanctuary as the dominant arena of piety at the turn of the 21st century, especially for American men. At least as far back as the late 17th century, women have far outnumbered men in the churches. Religious leaders have periodically sought to redress this imbalance, to lure men back to the faith through all sorts of schemes, most of which can be grouped beneath the rubric "muscular Christianity." The Businessman's Awakening of 1857-58 in New York and other North American cities was one such effort, as was the Men and Religion Forward Movement of the 1910s.
More important, however, stadiums provide an alternative universe, a kind of safe haven or subculture, a place of refuge from the outside world.

Interview with Randall Balmer
One of your primary observations in the book is that competitive sports seem to have become America's new "religion." What led you to this idea?
It seems to me this is where real passion has migrated, this is where the real devotion is directed. It's not to organized religion. It's sports.
I try to argue that the appeal is really for certain white males. Part of the reason that some white males gravitate to sports is because of their perception that the larger world is unfair or stacked against them in some way. I want to emphasize that this is a perception, not necessarily reality. The appeal of professional sports teams or team sports generally is that they offer this proverbial level playing field. Now, because of economic privilege and factors like race, sex, and gender identity, some people have better access to that level playing field than others. But I think sports is probably the closest thing we have to a meritocracy in American society.
It's also an enchanted world where the rules are clear and impartially enforced. For example, something is either fair or foul. It's either in or out of bounds—and not subject to appeal. One of the reasons white males gravitate to sports is that it's an orderly universe, unlike the one many perceive in broader society. That's one of the appeals of religion, too. I think more and more people are finding that same assurance in the world of sports.
There is a church out in Washington state that typically had Sunday morning services at 10. That is fairly standard for churches. Well, when the Seattle Seahawks are playing the New York Giants, for example, the game time is 10 a.m. in Seattle. So what did that church do? They changed the time for their Sunday services from 10 in the morning to five in the afternoon, because it was clear that the Seahawks were going to win the attention of their congregants. They simply adapted. And that story has been replicated hundreds of times.

WATCHING FOOTBALL ON TV by Howard Nemerov (1975)

It used to be only Sunday afternoons,
But people have got more devoted now
And maybe three four times a week retire
To their gloomy living room to sit before
The polished box alive with silver light
And moving shadows, that incessantly
Gives voice, even when pausing for this message.
The colored shadows made of moving light,
The voice that ritually recites the sense
Of what they do, enter a myriad minds.
Down on the field, massed bands perform the anthem
Sung by a soprano invisible elsewhere;
Sometimes a somewhat neutral public prayer.
For in the locker rooms already both
Sides have prayed to God to give them victory

Are Dangerous Sports Like Football and Wrestling Kosher? by Yehuda Shurpin
Contact Sports
Rabbi Moshe Feinstein writes that he was asked whether it is permissible to play professional ball despite the danger of getting hurt. Based on the Talmud we quoted earlier, he writes:
It is permitted to engage in a livelihood even if it involves a slight risk. Also, it should be permitted when there is a remote danger of killing others, for what is the difference between the prohibition against killing others and the prohibition against killing oneself? Killing oneself is also prohibited as murder, but it is permissible to take the risk for the sake of livelihood when the chances are minimal. Seeing as such is the case, it is also permitted when the minimal risk involved concerns injuring someone else. If this would not be so, how would it be permitted for the owner of a tree to hire a worker to climb it? Yet, this reasoning is only true if the other person takes the risk willingly. Otherwise, it would not be permitted to put others in even the slightest risk if they are unaware of it or if it is against their will.
How Much Danger
It is thus clear that one can play professional sports to earn a livelihood even when there is a slight risk of bodily harm. But where do we draw the line?
In the responsum from Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, it is not clear which type of “ball” playing he is referring to. It can be argued that he was only talking about sports like baseball where there is only a minimal chance of injury. Indeed, there are some who explain that halachah permits activities where there is only a very slight risk of danger. This would seem to preclude participating in more dangerous activities like football or wrestling.
But there is another factor as well.
Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach writes that, in general, we look to the habits of the public to help determine whether something is deemed too dangerous. He determined that anything that the public “runs away from” out of fear of it being dangerous is, in fact, considered dangerous according to halachah, while anything that most people aren’t scared of is not.
In other words, to determine whether it would be permissible, one would need to determine what the general public feels about it.
Since contact sports are generally not something people avoid, one could argue that neither should halachah view them as dangerous.

The Terrifying Collapse of Damar Hamlin and the Everyday Violence of Football by Louisa Thomas (2023)
It was a normal tackle, a normal hit, a normal moment in a big football game—one of the biggest of the season, a nationally televised Monday-night matchup between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Buffalo Bills, two of the N.F.L.’s best teams. Then Damar Hamlin, a Bills safety, twenty-four years old, stood up and fell backward, legs limp and feet splayed, his heart stopped. The team surrounded him as medical professionals performed CPR and used a defibrillator to get his heart beating again. Players cried and knelt and held hands and prayed. Finally, roughly sixteen minutes after he collapsed, Hamlin was taken by ambulance to a hospital, where he remains in critical condition. The coaches met, gathered their players, and headed to the locker room.
The ethos of football is to play on. A player breaks his leg, hobbles off, and the game goes on. A player is concussed, stumbles off, and the game goes on. A player breaks his neck, is carted off, and the game goes on. Football is violent. The violence is intrinsic to the sport—a feature of it. It is part of the stakes, the thrill, the intensity, the draw. And yet there is a line, one that is almost inconceivable, even to the men who accept the risks and the fans who celebrate them for it. On Monday night, the line was crossed. It was clear from the faces of the players and the coaches: there was little thought of the game’s going on. “Immediately, my player hat went on,” Troy Vincent, the N.F.L.’s executive vice-president of football operations and a former cornerback, said to reporters after the game. “How do you resume play after you’ve seen such a traumatic event occur in front of you in real time?”
That question, of course, invites another: How do you ever resume play after you’ve seen such a traumatic event?

In Defense of the Super Bowl by Adam Gopnik (8 Feb 2016)
"The epidemic of concussions—or, rather, the recent discoveries about the normal incidence of concussions, and their catastrophic consequences in the lives of aging players—has made every Super Bowl, as it has every boxing match, a moral dilemma. Against one’s own pleasure and connection to one’s own past—and to friends, here and gone—through the game, it now requires a thick head not to grasp that we are being entertained by gladiators who are shortening their lives and pleasures in exchange for our attention, and so our money."

Settlement Leaves Fans at a Moral Crossroads by William Rhoden (2013)
The settlement has left critics of football stranded on a moral island, though I suspect a large number have not lost much sleep over the moral and ethical costs of America’s brutal pastime.
“I think the fans have read about it, they think about it for about a week and they don’t think about it anymore because the product is still there,” said Roman Oben, a 12-year N.F.L. veteran now working as an analyst for MSG Network.
For at least a decade, fans have been exposed to dreary statistics about debilitating injuries, and they have seen a parade of retired players who continue to pay a physical and emotional price for their lives in the game.
“A lot of fans say: ‘I can’t save the world. I can’t stop poverty and bring about world peace. It’s out there, but I can’t do anything about it except go to work, save my paycheck, pay for my DirecTV package and keep it moving.’ ”
The settlement has put all of us who watch pro football on a moral hot seat. Former players have taken the money, leaving the fans three ways to rationalize their addictive zeal for these weekly spectacles.
■ You love the product and don’t really care about its costs.
■ You are troubled by football but will continue to watch.
■ You will walk away.
I will continue to cover football as one who appreciates the opportunities the game has provided and as a cultural critic who thinks that football is merely evidence of erosion in the American soul. But the moral pendulum has swung from the owners, the executives and the players who produce football’s violence to the millions who consume it.
The league wins again, and fans are left to find their way out of a deepening moral and ethical quandary.

Is it OK to Watch Football? by Ian Crouch (2013)
A common argument from contented, unworried football fans is that players in the N.F.L. are not conscripted into a violent game, but instead eagerly strive for it all their young lives and are richly rewarded with money and attention. Jackson takes it one step further, arguing that for players, the real rewards of football are in its violence: “I want to get hit. I mean really hit. I want to hit the ground hard and get up shaking myself off because I think I’m dead.” In some of the book’s most captivating prose, Jackson writes about the thrills of what he calls “the ritual sacrifice” of kickoffs. They are among the game’s most dangerous plays, but still, he concludes, “There is no feeling that will ever replace that moment in my life. I know that now.”

Football as American Civic Religion by John Kitch (2018)
While these questions are important, they do not address the fundamental question of what is at stake for American culture as football’s future hangs in the balance. Football has become a key ritual in the nation’s civic religion and both the best and worst aspects of its impact on the country’s cultural landscape flow from this point.
Before delving into the benefits and costs of America’s football obsession it is first important to establish that the relationship is, indeed, deeper than a mere interest in sport or entertainment. One of the most obvious ways we can see how football functions in American society is to physically look around the country. One can drive on highways named after Tom Landry in Dallas and Walter Peyton in the Chicago suburbs. Many college campuses have opulent football stadiums that literally dwarf the surrounding campus. It is customary for college programs to create literal bronze statues of Heisman winners. The Pittsburgh airport has a full color statue depicting Franco Harris’ “Immaculate Reception.” The newest NFL stadiums cost over a billion dollars each and many were paid for by taxpayers, after successful bond campaigns. In short, Americans adore football and have given it a place of high honor in their lives.
There are some great benefits to this arrangement. The most pressing, in 2018 America, is that football often provides a desperately-needed forum for apolitical community engagement. This is straightforward, but the point is of fundamental importance. Go to an SEC game, for instance, and you may find a crowd of several hundred thousand, counting those who tailgate but do not go into the stadium. The atmosphere will be that of a carnival and the only partisan lines will be the ones based on the team one supports. It’s a forum where James Carville and the most ardent Trump voter can find substantive common ground for a few months of the year. That football is so important to so many people means that this common ground is not trivial, rather it opens a window into the common humanity of someone who would otherwise merely be “other” racially, politically, and socioeconomically.
Football also provides occasion for national celebrations to commemorate time with friends and family members. Think about the Super Bowl. Many Americans attend Super Bowl parties, even if they do not care about football. These parties often serve as opportunities to forge new social bonds with neighbors or co-workers and sometimes serve as a chance to renew friendship with older friends. That the Super Bowl is maximally commercialized may color the way that these parties often unfold, but it does not interfere with the quality time people spend with each other while watching. In fact, the commercial element demonstrates just how American a festival the Super Bowl is—millions of people watch only for the new ads!
In times of disaster or tragedy football often serves as a healing balm for a community. The Saints first game (and, five years later a Super Bowl win) after Katrina allowed New Orleans to mark the beginning of a new era on an inspiring note. College teams often adopt terminally ill young fans for a season or more, providing an irreplaceable grace for one family and a reminder of priorities for all fans. High school teams are often focal points for small, rural communities to rally around after natural disaster or economic calamity. In short, football helps keep Americans tied together at a time when extreme atomization is a primary threat to the nation’s cultural well-being.
Rates of long-term brain damage among former high level players are high and seem to be growing higher as more data becomes available. Even players who are spared from some of the worst of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy’s (always referred to as “CTE”) symptoms (early onset dementia, suicidal thoughts, and a loss of memory seem to be commonly associated with CTE) will often have to deal with bones, muscles, and joints that will never be healthy again once the player retires. It is hard to escape the sense that, especially at the highest levels, football has a gladiatorial side to it. And, as such, it is difficult to fully exonerate those of us who follow the game closely from the damage that is done to the minds and bodies of those who play.
At the NFL level, football is also clearly objectifying to women. The league will now suspend players accused of domestic violence, but the most talented athletes always get another chance. Most teams field squads of cheerleaders who are required to dress and perform in such a way that the only conclusion one can draw is that their purpose, in the team’s eyes, is to be visually enjoyed by the largely male audience.
Most fundamentally problematic is the obsession so many Americans have with the sport. This is not a commentary on football itself, but rather on the dark side of human nature. Moses’ anger at the golden calf was not at the statue, but at the people. Football is America’s golden calf. Back to the statues of Heisman winners: My alma mater, Baylor University, built an opulent, $266 million stadium, complete with a nine-and-a-half-foot tall statue of Robert Griffin III. How did this stadium and statue come about? They both happened because the team became a winner with Griffin as quarterback and Art Briles as coach in an older stadium. This allowed the university to raise the funds needed to build the new palatial home for the team. The ritual importance of the new stadium could be seen at the stadium’s opening game, for which I was in attendance. Current and former governors of Texas, local celebrities, and even former president George W. Bush were on hand as formal dignitaries.
The moral failings surrounding football in today’s American culture are both intrinsic to the game’s violent nature and to the amount of time, money, and emotional energy American’s invest in it. As with other prominent cultural figures (such as pop artists, Hollywood stars, some politicians, etc.) popular football players and powerful football figures, such as NFL owners and successful college head coaches are worshipped and enriched, even if they set a poor moral example.
America’s relationship to football is difficult to easily diagnose as mostly good or mostly bad. Like many things in life, its best aspects and its worst aspects are separate only by a thin wall of often subconscious motivation for following it. America would be at a great cultural loss if the sport were to die away, yet we should be sure to count the costs as we go.

Quitting Football --- by Ian Crouch (2014)
"Any other year, Steve Almond would have seen the play. But, after forty years of fandom, he’s quit the N.F.L. In his new book, “Against Football,” Almond is plain about what he considers the various moral hazards of the game: “I happen to believe that our allegiance to football legitimizes and even fosters within us a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia.” That list of grievances might be enough to put football fans off right from the start, but before you dismiss him as an angry skeptic or a naïve reformer, it’s worth noting the exuberance with which he writes about his once favorite sport. Football, he writes, “awakens within us deep recesses of emotion, occasions for reflection, reasons to believe.”
"There is less debate, however, about the fundamental risk that it poses to players’ brains. In short, he writes, “The moral decision in this situation isn’t very complicated: you stop playing the game until you learn more.” And, because professional players aren’t going to do that (the money is too good, the sport’s cultural cachet is too alluring, the joy of playing itself is too thrilling) and the league’s owners and executives aren’t going to make them (the money, in their case, is really too good), then it falls to fans. On the most basic level, Almond says, it means that we have to stop watching.
Almond’s rejection of football goes beyond the current concussion crisis. Even if football were safe for the brains of the players, he argues, it would still be bad for the soul. “We still have that American itch: the only way to truly regenerate our batteries and our spirit is through violence, through the consumption of violence—and mostly violence carried out by young men, consumed by old men, whether it’s football, or war,” he said.
“Football somehow hits that Doritos bliss point,” he told me. “It’s got the intellectual allure of all these contingencies and all this strategy, but at the same time it is so powerfully connecting us to the intuitive joys of childhood, that elemental stuff: Can you make a miracle? Can you see the stuff that nobody else sees? And most of us can’t, but we love to see it. And I don’t blame people for wanting to see it. I love it, and I’m going to miss it.”

FANDOM TRANSFIGURED: Fantasy Football as Neoliberal Religion by Jeremy Sabella
For tens of millions of Americans, fantasy football is an obsession. Over the course of the NFL season, the fantasy faithful immerse themselves in the roles of team owners and managers, drafting and trading players as they vie for league championships. The tangible reward for their efforts typically takes the form of a nominal cash prize or a league trophy. But what keeps people coming back year in and year out are the intangibles: the competition and camaraderie, bragging rights over friends and colleagues, sustained engagement with the game one loves and those that play it. Indeed, fantasy football becomes so engrossing that it can function as a surrogate for organized religion. As Rodney Ruxin, a character from FX’s fantasy football-themed sitcom The League (2009–2015) declares, “Fantasy football is my religion … Sunday is my Sabbath. And Mondays, and Thursdays, and Saturdays in December, baby!”
ENCHANTMENT
Anyone who has experienced a close contest in a packed stadium knows the excitement that sports can generate. The ecstasy of watching one’s team pull off a stunning victory is routinely described in terms befitting a dramatic religious experience. But, in conventional fan experience, such moments are often the culmination of a series of mundane, even tedious events: the long slog of the regular season, the games where one team mounts such a commanding lead that the outcome is all but assured, the seemingly interminable stretches where no one scores, the long pauses in the action for time-outs and huddles. But what if every play, no matter how inconsequential it might seem, is potentially charged with significance? Where every game, from opening day to end-of-season contests between teams with losing records, commands our attention? What if we could follow a sport such that there were no inconsequential moments left? This is precisely what fantasy football offers: the opportunity to view the game through an enchanted lens in which every moment matters. The term “enchantment” conjures images from fairy-tales: castles where inanimate objects talk and forests are inhabited by spirits. Here, however, I use it to describe the experience where the formerly nondescript becomes charged with deeper meaning. The explosive appeal of fantasy football is rooted in its capacity to enchant the spectator experience. Although fantasy football has morphed dramatically since its early days as a niche hobby for sports nerds, it has consistently expanded on and refined a simple core insight: virtually every data point that athletes generate on the gridiron can become significant above and beyond the outcome of the game itself.
Fantasy football enchants our most popular spectator sport. Under its spell, the NFL season becomes charged with significance from beginning to end. Experiencing the game in this transfigured mode converts legions of fans into superfans that binge on NFL content all season long.

This is Water by David Foster Wallace
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it [Hashem :)] or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.