"Lord, I don't ask that I should win, but please, please don't let me finish behind Akabusi."
Game Day and God, (Football, Faith, and Politics in the American South)
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Eric Bain-Selbo, Mercer University Press Macon, Georgia, 2009; ISBN-13:978-0-88146-l55-8
In the opening chapter the author looks at the meaning of “sacred” and suggests that “sacred is the power or source or motivating element of religious behavior and the ultimate object of religious thought” and that “in the most basic sense, the sacred is that which is not profane”. The big question for him is then “Can sport be sacred?” The book, we are told, arises “both from intellectual curiosity as a scholar and personal passion as a fan”. Both come across.The basic premise of the book is that sport for many is a religion or at least a religious experience. Chapter 4, for example, is based on a questionnaire survey of fans “Is college football a religious experience?” There is a discussion of whether sport (college football in particular) can “provide people with the social and psychological ‘goods’ of traditional religion?” He quotes Flynt: “If religion is defined as the object of a person’s ultimate concern, a case could be for Auburn or Alabama football as the state religion.”
There is an interesting discussion of the aggression and violence in sport and why people enjoy watching it. The author suggests that “People have to actively seek out thrills and vicarious risk-taking through, for example, watching sports” and “we can see that violence and aggression have been expressed through human cultures, beginning perhaps with religion and continuing through today in a cultural form like sport, for millennia”.
Chapter 5 is an interpretation of the Civil War defeat of South in religious terms and the creation of a civil religion response with college football as an important part as religion and college football are integral to southern culture.
He concludes with two sides of the argument: “So far, it seems like there is a compelling case to conclude that college football in the South is a form and expression of religious life. .. That said, the reader no doubt may still think that college football in the South or really any sport anywhere cannot constitute religion, and that they are fundamentally two separate things”.
The case is well presented but the reviewer is in the camp which believes that sport and religion are quite separate. The argument also looks a little dated with loads of references to Novak (1976) but not to Shirl Hoffman.