"Lord, I don't ask that I should win, but please, please don't let me finish behind Akabusi."
Sport and Religion in the Twenty-first century
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Brad Schulz and Mary Lou Sheffer, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2016. ISBN9781498514415
The book consists of 12 chapters by different authors, who are academics, journalists or broadcasters. There is no structure to the book and little common ground between the chapters other than a reference to sport and religion in each. The comment by Alan Goldenbach that some people “who utilize the medium of live television to fuse sport and religion have grown to understand the complex relationship, in which the three entities coexist” illustrates the Communication Studies slant of some of the writers for whom the way the media deal with issues of sport and religion are as important as the issues themselves.
The book is more about how sport mirrors religion or indeed has become a religion than about how Christianity (or religion) helps us to understand sport. One chapter is about a book on the sports career of Bill Bradley and another about the imprisonment of NFL player Michael Vick for cruelty to dogs, and how the story was reported – neither is quite mainstream sport and religion studies!
One writer refers to the “body of scholarship that has begun to recognize and take seriously the intersection of sports and religion. Another argues that “one of the most popular directions in modern scholarship has been an examination of the correlation between religion and sport and the similarities between the two” – an assertion which may be a bit overstated. However, the extensive bibliographies at the end of each chapter make few references to what would be seen as the core literature of Christianity and sport.
The approach is more to seek similarities between religion and sport such as common language: “Consider the vocabulary associated with both: faith, devotion worship, ritual, dedication, sacrifice, commitment, spirit, prayer, suffering, festival and celebration”.
References to Christianity in relation to sport are often shallow, for example: “instead of not being conformed to the world as Paul warned in his book of Romans, religion is conforming to sport, if not giving itself over wholeheartedly”…. “The ideas that the ‘last shall be first’ (Matthew 20:16) and ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’ (Matthew 5:5) have given way to a Gospel of win-at-all-costs competition”… “Team chaplains, prayers after the game, and groups like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes give the impression that religion still influences sports, when the reality is often just the opposite”.
There are two chapters which look at fans, one of which analyses two massacres of football fans in Egypt in 2012 and 2013, interpreting the incidents in religious terms. The fans who died are seen as sanctified martyrs after their ultimate sacrifice for their club transforms them “from a sports fan club to a religious and political movement”.
Eric Bain-Selbo and Terry Shoemaker in Southern Reconstructing Sport and the Future of Religion in the American South argue that because sport functions like religion and both sport and religion represent important conceptualizations of identity, they are inevitably in competition. The authors see sport – particularly college football and stock car racing – becoming more important as church and Christianity lose influence, “even in the Bible-belt of the American South”.
InExercising the Spiritual Muscle : Holistic Care Service Provision in Intercollegiate Athletics Landon T. Huffman, Robin Hardin, and Steven N. Waller argue the case for spiritual development as a critical element of individuals’ optimal holistic wellness and for significant practical benefits of spiritual development.
Patrick J. Sutherland looks how sports programs at small church-affiliated colleges and universities are perceived and positioned and whether that is significantly different from those at non-religious colleges.
The final chapter Our Hope Is Built on Nothing Less” Why Religion/Spirituality Matters in the lives of Black Male College Athletes by Steven N. Waller looks at interactions of sport and faith, suggesting that “athletes seize religion for a multiplicity of reasons which include a means of addressing and coping with their fears in the face of competition”. The chapter also discusses athletes seeking to use their sporting talent to glorify God and seeing their sport as part of God’s plan for their lives.
The strength of the book is the range of topics covered, which means that everyone should find something of interest. The weakness – at least from my perspective – is the lack of theological reflection.