Being Religious
I go to church with my kids on Sundays, and we even go to the holy days of obligation. We do devotionals at home, including Advent wreaths, Lent, and the holiday seasons. We are quite intentional with our kids. In a different age I would have likely been considered a fairly dutiful, fairly ordinary Christian. Nothing more.
Now, I am a bit of a freak. I am a freak because I am religious.
There were times that I would joke with my wife that our neighbors were more devoted to their children’s youth sports than we were to our churchy faith. And they are quite devout: they go to multiple weekday visits to the fields and rinks and gyms, followed by all-weekend tournaments, overnight trips to play in round-robins, and they pay big bucks for it all, including camps and showcases throughout the summer. They have loads of team swag, with stickers on their full-sized SUV and Thule roof top carriers. They make sure their kids practice stick skills in the driveway, and they even watch film. They were all in.
In comparison, I felt like a dilettante to the thing I purport to believe is the most important thing. Is God as important to me as lacrosse is to my neighbor?
Alas.
I have played the joke out in my head from time to time, but do not think too much of it. My categories have remained straightforward and conventional: religious people do church, or synagogue, or mosque. Not an ice rink, or gym, or fieldhouse, or pitch.
Besides, though my neighbors are secular folks, they were quite friendly, kind, generous, upstanding. But most certainly not religious. I should have pressed harder on my intuitions because I think it reveals a deep insight into what makes us tick, and how we are currently behaving.
Religious energy once so animated cultures that massive wars were fought over interpretations of holy writ. Where did this energy go? I might get annoyed with excesses of other faiths, but I’m mostly in the “you do you” camp. Perhaps the energy has been sublimated into other areas, other arenas of focused attention. Its apparent dissipation must be accounted for.
This energy has found a home in sports and politics
These are the arenas in which we wage holy war. The war has jumped out of the arena and entered the stands. We are caught in our symbols, our totems, our liturgies. Can these energies be tamed and contained?
Trump the Accelerant
Who else to expose these secret sublimated fault lines and untapped energies better than Donald J Trump, number 45 himself?
Like most people, I was totally shocked by his victory, called officially at 2:30 in the morning. I assumed that the prognosticators handicapping the race at 85% chance for a Hillary victory were both serious and legitimate. They were very wrong. Immediately, people were freaking out in my circles. I knew a slew of folks who made the pilgrimage to DC for the Pussy Hat Protest. What a strange thing to do, I thought. I was struck by their devotion and their piety, regardless of what I thought of the vulgarity of the totemic hat, or the petulance of their reactions. I was no enthusiast for Orange Man, but this seemed to be a bit much.
Being upset that Orange Man won is one thing, but these strange public rituals of protest over an election? It struck me. The passion they were displaying was metaphysical. It was a violation of their sacred, even though they would not use such language. He was literally offensive to their sensibilities. He was unclean and had to be purged. The language itself was religious. What Trump unleashed was more of a spirit than anything “of the flesh.” People were symbolically mad, metaphysically mad. And there was no instant-replay to reverse a bad election. Those months were a mess, and DC has yet to recover.
Kaepernick Kneels
During the frenetic days leading up to that election, something else was afoot in the NFL. While Trump was busy campaigning in the states Hilary ignored, a once-promising, now reserve quarterback started sitting out the pre-game ritual of standing for the National Anthem. Colin Kaepernick then started kneeling as a protest against police brutality. It caught on. Though it was ignored at first, it quickly became widespread, not only in the NFL but in other leagues as well, and soon was even pro-forma, like genuflecting upon entering the pew at a Catholic church. Ah. There it is.
Like so many things, the public ritual of kneeling during the anthem became a proxy war. Trump, the most intuitive politician of the age, saw it as an attack on “real America.” He sensed that Deplorable America was outraged by Kaepernick’s political statements. In the world of MAGA, Kaepernick was desecrating the sacred by kneeling in protest. The progressive sports media saw it as a proxy with which they could become relevant, not just talking X’s and O’s, trade rumors, and locker room kerfuffle's, but real-deal, morally important social issues. Like CNN and the rest of the powerful media platforms, ESPN went all in. They were preparing the way for something, anything by using their platforms to go after Orange Man.
Then the Summer of George Floyd happened. The dormant religious energies found the conduit they had been searching for. The energies and spirits found form. The deep human need for liturgy returned in a flood of public displays of witness, of devotion, of penance, of sacrifice, of praise.
This is the fundamental religious impulse. We cannot escape it. It is what we do when we feel the need to act out and incarnate our deepest ideals, our deepest sorrows, our deepest aspirations, our deepest needs. We act as physical markers of spiritual realities.
But to what spirits do we attend?
Watching politicians and police chiefs “do the work” publicly was a revelation to me. Kneeling ritualistically, with Kente cloths and mantra’s of “I can’t breathe” were mouthed and played and performed.
I do not doubt the outrage itself. What happened to Floyd was horrific and nightmarish, if not complicated. But the media class, the politicians, the academics, the entertainers, the athletes had found the right moment. That Floyd died in the midst of pandemic lockdowns added to the felt need to “do something.” Suspension of the lockdown for the “real pandemic” of racism gave people license. The media was awash with copy. The streets were awash with protest.
Politics and Sports as Theology
Undergirding all of these discussions, and rants, and think-pieces was thinly veiled theology. We were having religious fights in drag. Instead of talking ecclesiology, or eschatology, or Christology, we were talking about reparations, white supremacy, black lives matter, intersectionality, and the great stain of racism, including the “original sin” of race-based slavery. This was not sports; this was culture war fueled by theology. It was “Church without Christ” level discourse. Instead of reporting on who was playing in the slot on Monday night, we were treated to sermons. We stopped seeing the game for what it was in itself, and saw through it. It was proxy for something else. We forgot what “it” was.
But, as an old English teacher always reminded us back in high school: the play is the thing.
We like sports and theatre because it is proxy for human excellence and human tragedy. We watch ourselves, or rather, we watch our best and worst selves. The rehearsed, choreographed, produced and performed event is the thing. It is the point. If the game is no longer “just a game” then it becomes something totemic, and even dangerous. The tribalism it evokes is troubling. Rather than being a group ritual ordered towards a catharsis, it becomes a proxy war for the deeply religious. Religious war dressed up as athletic competition.
Sports fans are religious. Politicos are religious. There is no way out. We church everything and everything becomes scripted and pre-ordained.
Professional sports have always been inter-mixed with liturgical practices: the coin-flip, national anthem, team colors, queued situational music, choreographed movements, familiar and relevant repetitions. It is a thing we do together, focusing our attention on something we gather to mark as important. Politics, too, partakes in the deep patterns of liturgical and religious significance. Perhaps the loss of “true” religion—you know, the churchy variety—heralds dangerous times. Politics was once war sublimated. But perhaps war will become politics sublimated.
Super fans on Sundays rock team colors, jerseys, even face paint. Politics, always a step removed from “real” theatre, is creeping into this arena. Both groups are enacting religious impulses.
Perhaps I am a freak because I go to church on Sundays. But it would do us all well to pay attention to where we really go for “church,” for we all go. We need to pay attention to what we actually worship. When we go to an arena or a political rally, what are we really doing? Both service not merely the devout, but the fan. These spirits we enact are not us, exactly. They are real and they are other.
As Katherine Dee quips, we are now a nation of fandoms. Fandoms are worshippers.
It is religion by another name.
Sports, Politics, Religion
Why everything became politicized is a conundrum. Sports especially, as it was traditionally an area of neutrality for different groups to come together, at least for a short time. Even within families, relatives who usually did not see eye to eye on other issues, could have discussions on the aspects of their favorite player or team. Sometime in the 21st century a switch was flipped, and now everything is viewed from a lens of political ideology. Its as if the culture war and political realm fused into an ongoing political kabuki theater production.
Yet, this new phenomenon where the religious are being ‘othered’ is unsettling. As the country trends towards being more secular, the level of tolerance for religious beliefs has gone down. There is some irony in this, as the standard line is that a society based on rationality and science should be a logical one. As we cannot determine what a woman is anymore, or even find purpose in this life beyond mindless entertainment and distractions, being centered religiously becomes more important.