Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America

by Randall Balmer

Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn't help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. Houses of worship once railed against Sabbath-busting sports events, but today most willingly accommodate Super Bowl Sunday. On the other hand, basketball's inventor, James Naismith, was an ardent follower of Muscular Christianity and believed the game would help develop religious character. But today those religious roots are largely forgotten.

Here one of our most insightful writers on American religion trains his focus on that other great passion—team sports—to reveal their surprising connections. From baseball to basketball and football to ice hockey, Balmer explores the origins and histories of big-time sports from the late nineteenth century to the present, with entertaining anecdotes and fresh insights into their ties to religious life. Referring to Notre Dame football, the Catholic Sun called its fandom "a kind of sacramental." Legions of sports fans reading Passion Plays will recognize exactly what that means.

Genres: Sports, Nonfiction, Hockey

192 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2022

About the author

Randall Herbert Balmer, Ph.D. (Princeton University, 1985), is an ordained Episcopal Priest and historian of American religion, and holds the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth College. He also has taught at Barnard College; Columbia, Rutgers, Princeton, Drew, Emory, Yale and Northwestern universities; and at Union Theological Seminary. Balmer was nominated for an Emmy Award for the PBS documentary "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory," based on his book of the same title.

Reviews

[Lance · Rating 4 out of 5]

Starting with the shortening of the word “fanatics” to “fans”, there are many parallels between the world of sports and the world of religion. Historian Randal Balmer illustrates those commonalities in the four major team sports in North America in this short and enjoyable book.

Balmer describes of how social changes of various themes are related to the origins of the four sports and in many cases, how some of them are still applicable to this day. He likens the origins of baseball to the Industrial Revolution, war proliferation starting with the Civil War to the creation of American football, Canadian nationalism for ice hockey and urbanization for basketball as there was a lack of sporting opportunity between football and baseball seasons. The origins of the four sports are all well documented here. Even those readers who have researched those origins in one or more of the sports will pick up on something new.

Just about any religious connection with the sports that readers may have heard from watching games, reading about the games in the media or listening to sports talk will be found here. It was sports talk radio that gave Balmer the inspiration for this book. One of the cleverer descriptions of these connections is the nickname given to long-time sports talk host Mike Francesa in New York City – who is known as the “pope” of sports talk radio. Another example is how many sports venues are considered shrines, temples, churches, or similar places of worship. Among those listed by Balmer are Fenway Park (baseball), Lambeau Field (football) and the Montreal Forum (hockey). For the latter, the march from the Forum to the new Molson Centre (now Bell Centre) for the Montreal Canadiens by players and fans down St. Catherine Street felt like a pilgrimage.

That is the image that Balmer seems to want to bring to the reader – how team sports in North America will make followers have the same feelings as one who is devout in their religion, no matter what faith they may be. It should be noted that these comparisons are limited to those of Christian symbols – many different faiths are mentioned in the book. Also, for each sport, Balmer includes the struggle by non-white players for equality on the playing field and in other aspects.
No matter which sports a reader follows of those four, they will find something they will enjoy in this book. It is a quick enjoyable read that will shed some different light on one’s fandom for their favorite games or teams.

I wish to thank University of North Carolina Press for providing a copy of the book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

https://sportsbookguy.blogspot.com/20...

[Zak Schmoll · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a hard book to review because it is really interesting and compellingly written. It provides an overview of history of the four major sports in America, baseball, basketball, football, and hockey, and it shows how different cultural forces perhaps point towards the appeal of these sports. For example, the appeal of untimed baseball might be in reaction to industrialization and our lives always being on the clock. Football might appeal to our desire to fight wars like our fathers did but in a culturally acceptable way.

However, the subtitle of this book promises connections to religion, and those are very distant, at best. Is the rulebook of basketball Scripture? It is sports talk radio comparable to confession? Like I said, these connections are tough at best.

I enjoyed this book and read it very quickly. The thoughts about religion are kind of intriguing, but I don't think they really hold the weight of the argument. If this was a book about how American culture shaped the sports it embraces, then I think it would create a much better case. In regards to how religion shaped sports, I think it is a little bit wanting. Still, it is an interesting book for the academic sports fan.

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really sure what the idea is here. The book does not in any way live up to its subtitle, aside from a general observation that Muscular Christianity was in some way part of the formative DNA for all of the sports he mentions (in order, baseball, football, hockey, basketball), and the occasional notion that, say, the penalty box is like a confessional. Balmer has done his research, and there are a couple of articles from the footnotes I didn't know, but the overall point more or less restates cliches about each sport--we hear about baseball and the frontier (and to pile on the cliches, he cites both Bart Giamatti and James Earl Jones's character in Field of Dreams orating sonorously about baseball and time and the fall, etc.), and of course TR and a bunch of turn-of-the-century militarists their chests about how football nourishes the manly fighting spirit. The chapter about hockey, a sport about which I've read less than nothing (though every sports-book list includes Ken Dryden's autobiography as a must-read), was most interesting, in that it emphasized the ideological Canadian-ness of hockey to Canadians, the degree to which they consciously adopted and continue to celebrate it as a mark of distinction from overcivilized and effete Brits (is there an Australian-rules football equivalent?), though much less so vs US citizens, which I found a little surprising, though maybe Americans just register as less emotionally important--wonder if/how the three-decade lack of Canadian Stanley-Cup winners has challenged that? I don't read Canadian media, but maybe there's anguish along the lines of the British trauma Jonathan Wilson explores in Anatomy of England every time the national team flames out at Euros or the World Cup.

Also, at a fundamental level, I just don't buy the arguments here about how and where and why these sports evolved. For me, Michael Mandelbaum's connection of each sport's fundamental structure to workplace organization (football, with its specialization of skills, as a mirror of the factory floor; basketball as relevant to the more fluid post-industrial workspace) seems more to the point and less mired in the sonority of what's been said so many times before.

[Marvin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a great deal of respect for Randall Balmer, but this book, interesting and provocative as it is, is not among his best or most insightful work. It promises to look at the relationship between sport and religion. But in fact the four chapters that make up the bulk of the book offer brief and pretty standard histories of the four most popular American sports: baseball, football, hockey, and basketball. There are occasional interesting asides relating the individual sports to religion, but they’re not integral to the histories he relates. He gives more attention to other sociocultural developments: industrialization (baseball), war (football), nationalism (hockey), and urbanization (basketball). He also makes appropriate comments about the holy trinity of contemporary historical scholarship: race, class, and gender. A concluding 16-page chapter is more intentional about the relationship between sport and religion, but I don’t find it particularly convincing. The main point is that sport, like religion, evokes passionate devotion. But so do lots of other things. He points out a number of other things they have in common, but the same can be said of most of them. Also, he does not argue, as the title has it, that religion shaped sports but that sport has, in many ways, displaced religion. I admit that I have been known to make a sport-religion analogy of my own. When people advocate dumbing down Christian worship to make it more appealing to more people, I point out that baseball and football are complicated practices, but when we take a novice to a game we don’t expect the participants to simplify the game to make it more understandable; instead, we expect the novice to come back again and again, in the company of others who do understand and can explain the complexities, until it becomes something that is compelling for them, too. One final point: Balmer did find quite a few entertaining and engaging quotes, but sport (like religion?) seems to evoke such statements. And, despite my quibbles, I'm glad it read the book.

[Pumpkin+Bear · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is actually a quite readable--and short!--social history of four US/Canadian sports, and if that had been what it was supposed to be about, I'd be giving it a higher rating. However, the book is *supposed* to be about how religion shaped sports in North America, and that's why I wanted to read it! But not only does the book never even mention Mexico (not even with baseball?!?), much less the other non-majority white countries that make up North America, it also doesn't do more than throw in a couple of paragraphs about religion per sport. And most of those mentions are obligatory references to Muscular Christianity, which applies to ALL sports played during the times when it was popular.

It is SUCH a bummer, because you could do so much with the question of how religion has shaped sports in North America! There's Catholicism and baseball (which I know about solely through "Piazza, New York Catcher" and this article about the Mexican League's religious tourism: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/sp...). I'm pretty sure football and Trumper fascist Christian conservatism have something going on there that I'd love to have teased out for me. And why just mention a couple of times how church attendance has gone down while sportsball worship remains popular? Tell me more! Like... tell me a WHOLE BOOK MORE! As an atheist who's also a hockey fan, I am super interested in hearing more about that!

[Jodi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm glad I didn't let the critical reviews reflecting that this book doesn't really live up to its subtitle stop me from delving in. Although I agree that it's not so much "how religion shaped sports," it is a solid look into North American sports from a sociological perspective and I learned a lot. I was especially drawn into the football chapter, as a lifelong Minnesota Vikings fan as well as a displaced Midwesterner living in the college football worshipping South. I apparently somehow never learned before that the venerated "Bear" Bryant was so racist and slow to integrate his supposedly superior team. The way that sports were brought to the South from other regions was also fascinating.

I always love listening to authors narrate their own works, but I couldn't help but feel slightly disappointed that Dr. Balmer mispronounced both Kawhi Leonard and Stephen Curry's names.

Overall, I found this a very worthy read and shared a lot of what I learned with my fellow sports fans in my family, my husband and sons. We enjoyed talking about the new things we learned and it gave me a larger perspective on the sports I've enjoyed for so much of my known existence.

[Adam Metz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Provides nice and concise histories of the origins of the big four major sports in the US (baseball, football, basketball, and hockey), but I'm not sure how well he comes through on exploring his subtitle - how religion shaped sports in North America. Instead he follows a few religious themes in NA sports and provides anecdotal relationships between sports and religion - particularly in the final chapter, but overall I found evidence to support his "how" lacking. Still an enjoyable and quick read that anyone interested in the topics would find value, it just doesn't really put forth anything that hasn't already been explored at greater length and in greater detail elsewhere.

[Chris Gager · Rating 3 out of 5]

I THINK I got this from my brother recently. It has a lot of neat history on the development of Baseball. Football, Hockey and Basketball in North America. So... that's nice if you're a sports fan(I am). So far not so much connection to religion. Will that be coming along. I assume it will be along the lines of big time team sports fandom being a kind of secular religion.

After giving us a concise history of the big four(Football, Baseball, Basketball and Hockey) the author finishes up with exploring the religious angle. Seems pretty valid to me.

- 3.50* rounds down to 3* - I wonder if my brother knows this guy? He(my brother) may have taught him at Princeton.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book even though I'm not much of a major sports fan. Describes how each sport developed in relationship to societal changes: baseball (immigration), football (war), hockey (nationalism), and basketball (urbanization). Also reflects on how sports and religion serve the same role in sometimes similar ways (the Montreal Canadiens procession from the Forum to the Molson Centre).