Eric Bain-Selbo
Department Head, Philosophy and
Religion, Western Kentucky
University
Abstract
Beginning with the assumption that college football in the
American South at least looks religious, this essay explores the possibility that it functions religiously to the extent that it provides opportunities
for fans to have religious experiences. The essay draws upon fan descriptions
and survey data, classic accounts of the nature and import of religious
experience, and the contemporary philosophy of religion of Wayne Proudfoot. The
conclusion is that a reasonable case can be made that the experience of the
Southern college football fan is similar to the kinds of experiences of religious
adherents.
Introduction
[1] The fundamental assumption of this paper is that if we
think of religion in terms of myths and legends, heroes and saints, rituals and
sacrifice, sacred sites and community, then we can come more and more to see
sports in the modern world as religious.[1] Writers and scholars like Michael
Novak, Joseph Price, and William Dean have effectively made this argument, even
if in importantly different ways.[2] There are innumerable sporting examples
that can be used to make the case. The beliefs and practices of Boston Red Sox
baseball fans, of Duke University basketball fans, of Oakland Raider football
fans, could all be used to illustrate the ways in which the beliefs and
practices of sports fans can function religiously. College football in the
American South, however, may provide a particularly exceptional example with
its game day rituals, legendary or mythological figures and games, sacred
spaces, and much more. But while Southern college football may “look” like
religion or have the “trappings” of religion, do fans really experience it religiously? In other
words, do Southern college football fans have religious experiences?
[2] Renowned college football analyst Tony Barnhart writes
that Southerners have formed an “emotional bond with college football that I
have not seen in any other part of the country or with any other sport”
(Barnhart, xiii). But what are these emotions? Are they similar to those of a
religious experience? How is the experience of the fan comparable to the
experience of the religious adherent? In this essay I will defend the claim
that there are good reasons to believe that the experience of the Southern
college football fan is similar to many experiences that people generally would
describe as religious.
Sports and Spirituality
[3] Michael Novak claims that “sports are at their heart a
spiritual activity, a natural religion, a tribute to grace, beauty, and
excellence” (Novak, 346). Football, for example, can “touch you deeply, and to
probe further and further in the depths of your psyche, you will find that it
can go far more deeply than you ever had imagined” (Novak, 87). But what do
Novak and others mean when they say that sports are “spiritual activities”?
What are these emotions to which Barnhart and others refer? In my survey of
college football fans in the South, conducted during the 2005 and 2006 seasons,
I asked participants to provide me with words that described the game day
experience for them. Some of the words provided may or may not have religious
connotations. For example, participants described the experience as fun, great,
entertaining, drunk, utter chaos, and better than sex. Whether or not these
make any sense in a religious context probably depends on what kind of religion
you practice. But other terms were provided that easily could be
used—and, in fact, stereotypically have
been used—to describe religious experience. Friendship, fellowship,
and community were used 40 times (out of a total of 220 surveys completed).
These certainly are positive terms used to describe the experience of religious
organizations, rituals, or institutions. Excitement or exciting (46 times),
tradition (17 times), awe-inspiring or awesome (15 times), passion or intensity
(11 times) also were used frequently. Even terms like spirit (three times),
love (four times), hope (once), godliness (once), heaven (once), and energy
(twice) were used. Interestingly, the concept of ineffability was expressed on
eight surveys. In other words, some fans found that no words could adequately
describe the experience they have on game days. Ineffability is a common
(non-)descriptor of mystical religious experiences. Indeed, ineffability is
considered by some to be constitutive of a genuine religious experience.[3] If
you are able to describe a religious experience then what you are describing is
not it. “The Way [Dao] that can be spoken of is not the constant Way;/The name
that can be named is not the constant name” says the Daoist sage Laozi (De
Bary, 79). The religious experience according to this characteristic is
necessarily of a transcendent content—beyond what our senses can tell us,
beyond our cognition, beyond anything we can imagine and thus describe.
[4] More than half of the respondents used at least one
religious or possibly religious descriptor to explain the game day experience.
While the use of these descriptors may be simply a matter of their ready
availability, their use seems particularly significant given the deeply
religious context of the fans. No region of the United States is more religious
than the South. The South often is equated with the “Bible Belt.” Any number of
surveys and polls indicate that Southerners are more likely to attend church on
a regular basis than other Americans. While church attendance data is renowned
for its inaccuracies (people tend to say they go to church more than they
really do), the regional differences still are significant. In the South, it is
more often the case that church attendance is simply assumed—and learning
what church a person goes to is part of learning about him or her. “Belonging
to a church, and being more or less active in it, is a taken-for-granted part
of middle-class life in the South, in a way that it’s not in many other parts
of the country,” John Shelton Reed notes. “Nearly everybody, rich or poor,
urban or rural or suburban, black or white, has a church to go to. Even those
Southerners who don’t go to church at least know which one they’re not going
to” (Reed, 141). Most likely a Southerner will identify a Protestant church as
his or her own, and among Protestant churches Baptists are number one, followed
by Methodists (Reed, 36). David Goldfield reports another survey that
highlights the regional differences:
Nearly one-half of southern
respondents read the Bible at home during the week, compared with less than
one-third of non-southerners. Nearly one-third of southerners admitted that
their ministers offered advice and guidance on political matters, compared with
18 percent of non-southerners. Almost two-thirds of the southern respondents
agreed that some people are possessed by the Devil; 44 percent of
non-southerners expressed that belief. Nearly one-half of southerners claimed
that prayer had cured an illness in their lives, compared with 28 percent of non-southerners
(Goldfield, 11).
In short, religious beliefs and church activities are a more
significant part of the worldviews of Southerners and a greater part of their
daily (or at least weekly) lives. Given that context, it is reasonable to
imagine that many Southerners would be hesitant to use any potentially
religious expressions to describe the game day experience. To do so would be
blasphemy. Indeed, in numerous interviews with fans I would see this hesitancy.
After explaining the hypothesis driving my research (that college football
functions religiously for many people in the South), fans expressed their
agreement with the hypothesis “in theory,” but refused to really embrace it.
They seemed to understand the argument, but psychologically could not assent to
it.
[5] In sum, Southern fans identified their game day
experience as emotionally positive and powerful. They often used religious or
possibly religious descriptors to express how they experienced college
football. When asked to rank a number of aspects of their lives (family,
friends, church, work, hobbies, etc.), fans ranked football just behind church
as the place where they have “the deepest and most positive emotional
experiences.” Given the importance of religion in the lives of many Southerners,
the survey information at a minimum is suggestive of the power and importance
of college football in the lives of these fans.
[6] Certainly religion is more than just emotional
experiences, and even all religious experiences are not “deep” or “positive.”
But many religious emotions are, and to make the case that college football in
the South or any sport functions religiously, one would need to show that the
emotions of the fans are the same as or at least akin to what stereotypically
are considered to be religious emotions. Such emotions (for example, joy,
fellowship, passion, and intensity) are those that arise typically in religious
contexts and that differ from everyday emotional experiences.
[7] Fuller descriptions of the game day experience confirm
that the emotional experiences associated with being a college football fan in
the South are not like everyday experiences. In fact, one might even say that
they are qualitatively greater. For instance, one University of Alabama fan
writes: “Put simply, Alabama football has not, is not, and never will be just a
game. It’s much, much more. It’s a way of life. You are born with it, you die
with it, and your happiness during those moments in between greatly depends on
it” (Lovette, 81). Another Alabama fan observes: “I guess it’s similar to
church—sometimes you don’t really choose who to be for—you just
are. For me, there was no moment of conversion. I was born into an Alabama
family, and for that I’m thankful to this day” (Lovette, 121). For this fan, being
an Alabama fan became intricately bound with his other religious beliefs (for
example, in God) and practices (specifically, prayer). In the weeks leading up
to the national championship game (between Alabama and the University of Miami)
at the conclusion of the 1992 season, he began to pray each night for five
Alabama players. Each night it was a different group of five players, and by
the day of the game, he had been able to pray for all the players. Alabama won
the national championship. The fan concludes: “After the game, I thanked God
for allowing us to beat Miami. I was overjoyed when we brought the national championship back to Alabama. In some way, I felt
like I had helped. I felt like I was a part of the Alabama family, and felt like God had smiled upon us” (Lovette, 123; my
emphasis). What fan comments like these suggest is that some fans understand
college football as central in the broad context of their lives and even in
theological context.
[8] Of course, seasons do not always end in championships.
Sometimes entire seasons can be great disappointments to fans. The 2005 season
was particularly disastrous for the University of Tennessee. Not only did the
team finish the season with a losing record (including a shocking home loss to
Vanderbilt, a perennial doormat in the Southeastern Conference), it also was
the first time since 1989 that the team failed to make it to a bowl game. One
Tennessee fan writes:
During last season . . . it
literally put me in a mild state of depression for the entire fall—and I wasn’t totally aware of it until my wife
brought it up. I realized at that point that I probably take it a little
seriously. However, given the fact I have such a deep connection to Knoxville
and the VOLS, there really is no other way, and I’d gladly trade the occasional anguish I feel for the good times.
Moreover, the really good times are euphoric to say the least.[4]; my emphasis]
[9] This sense of euphoria is central to my effort to show
how the emotional intensity associated with college football in the South can
be compared to a religious experience. Warren St. John, in his wonderful
account of Alabama fans (particularly those who travel to games—home and
away—and tailgate in their RVs), describes well this euphoria. After a game-winning
touchdown, he writes that “joy engulfs us like a wave. That chamber of the
psyche that houses our ancient tribal instincts is torn open, compelling
thousands of strangers to embrace in a frenetic tumble. The glee is pure and
uncomplicated” (St. John, 230). He writes of the power and “mystery” of the
experience. The euphoria and the way it brings people together in a common
ecstatic state is described well in this passage about the hours after Alabama
won a conference championship:
Outside the stadium, I’m swept
into a crowd of revelers, and we sing our way to a bar called Jocks &
Jills; the name, like every thing we encounter, is also hilarious, but so is
that stop sign, so is that drunk person, so is that nondescript office building
over there. There’s nothing that’s not utterly wickedly wackily funny. A
hip-hop mix throbs. The patio is now a dance floor. And we dance—hundreds
of us, all with beer bottles in our hands, swaying and commingling like the
tentacles of anemone in a brisk current. The air is cool and clean, a beautiful
late-autumn night in the South so perfect as to seem custom ordered from
heaven. The women, all their pretty Southern pretense having left them sometime
in the middle of the third quarter, twirl and shout. Wild tangles of hair brush
unexpectedly against my face (St. John, 263).
St. John’s account indicates the centrality of community in
the experience of the Southern college football fan, and reminds us of the
importance of community in many religious experiences. In the survey data that
I collected in a variety of locales, Southern college football fans ranked
their game day experience as one where they experienced a significant sense of
community. College football ranked behind family and friends in regard to where
those surveyed experienced the greatest sense of community. It ranked ahead of church (as well as job or
career). Forty-eight percent of the respondents ranked college football ahead of church in regard to where they
experience the greatest sense of community. If a central function of the
religious experience is the construction of community and a sense of
belongingness to a community, it would appear that college football in the
South might be religious in the same way in which church is.
[10] My point is not that the survey data proves that Southern college football
fans have religious experiences. My point also is not that they describe the
experience as religious (they frequently do not) and thus it is religious. My
point is that the survey data and the way they describe the experience are such
that one might assume that they are having religious experiences as a
consequence of their participation in Southern college football rituals. Still,
when St. John describes a certain euphoric moment as an Alabama fan as a
“near-religious experience” (St. John, 185), we must ask: Is it a “near”
religious experience or is it really a religious experience?
Defining Religious Experience
[11] Determining whether or not participation in sports
(whether as an athlete or fan) can be a religious experience necessitates first
defining what a religious experience is. This is much easier said than done.
Defining what religion is can be tough enough. Religion certainly is not just a
kind of emotional experience. Religion involves institutions, doctrines,
material culture, actions (e.g., rituals) and much more. Religious experience
is but one aspect of religion. But how can we define the subjective
characteristics of this experience? Is it an impossible task? It may be. But
human beings do have experiences that they identify as religious or spiritual,
and though the task is daunting we should not be deterred from giving up on
theorizing about these experiences.
[12] In the 19th century, theologians and
scholars of religion started to identify feeling or emotion as that which was most characteristic of religion. Wayne
Proudfoot, a leading scholar on this topic, argues that this occurred primarily
for two reasons. First, it was thought that feelings or emotions are more
grounded in the lived experience of adherents than is doctrine. Feelings or
emotions are more powerful than dogma. Second, the move to feeling or emotion
helped to avoid a rationalist critique of religion. At least since the
Enlightenment, religious doctrine had been subject to powerful philosophical
criticism. Indeed, in the 19th century and continuing into the 20th century, many intellectuals predicted and still predict the demise of religion
as individuals and whole societies become more rational. Religious doctrines
will be seen as erroneous and/or superstitious, and no reasonable person will
continue to affirm them. But reason often reaches a certain limitation (so it
is thought) when confronted with feeling or emotion. At the very least, feeling
or emotion do not seem subject to the same level of rational critique as does
doctrine (Proudfoot, 75-78). A person’s beliefs may be susceptible to being
proven wrong, but we cannot say a person’s feelings or emotions are wrong (at
least not in the same sense).
[13] Christian theologians like Friedrich Schleiermacher and
Rudolf Otto, whose interests included the more general study of religion as
well, were instrumental in moving the study of religion in this theoretical
direction. Schleiermacher (late 18th and early 19th centuries) urges his educated readers to avoid the troubles found in
conflicting doctrines and dogmas and instead “direct your attention solely
toward the inner stirrings, moods, and dispositions to which the utterances of
divinely inspired men and their deeds attest” (Schleiermacher, 58). He argues:
The contemplation of pious men is
only the immediate consciousness of
the universal being of all finite
things in and through the infinite,
of all temporal things in and through the eternal.
To seek and to find this infinite and eternal factor in all that lives and
moves, in all growth and change, in all action and passion, and to have to know
life itself only in immediate feeling—that is religion
(Schleiermacher, 79; my emphasis).
Otto (first half of the 20th century) likewise
highlights feelings or emotions. He is critical of the “bias of
rationalization” not only in theology but comparative religion as well (Otto,
3). He describes religious feelings or emotions with concepts like awe, energy,
and mystery (among others) as constitutive of religious experience. These terms
already have come up in our review of Southerners’ descriptions of their
experience of college football. In the religious context, Otto argues that
these feelings or emotions are “immediate” or arise “spontaneously” when the
person encounters the divine (however that may be conceived) (Otto, 10, 11).
[14] William James, the early 20th-century
philosopher and psychologist, also emphasizes the subjective experience of
religious phenomena as central to the study of religion. His Varieties of Religious Experience is a
seminal work in the typology of religious experience. He describes religion not
in terms of doctrines or institutions, but as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude,
so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may
consider the divine” (James, 42). The prioritizing of “feelings” and
“experiences” as well as “solitude” again moves our focus from rational
conceptions of religion to more non-rational and emotional conceptions of
religion. Likewise, in works like The
Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, the 20th-century
historian of religion Mircea Eliade very much draws our attention to subjective
experience. In his phenomenology of religion, he argues for the qualitatively
greater experience associated with the sacred as opposed to what is associated
with the profane.
[15] Proudfoot offers a compelling critique of this
historical and theoretical development in the study of religion. He finds that
many of the approaches to understanding religious experience simply protect
that experience against rational investigation and criticism. They are
“protective strategies” rather than coherent accounts of religious experience.
Consequently, these approaches fail philosophically. Take, for example,
Proudfoot’s critique of Schleiermacher—one that can be (and is) extended
to other theorists.
[16] Schleiermacher describes religious experience as an
immediate apprehension of the divine or religious object or being—the
“universal being,” “infinite,” or “eternal.” By making the religious experience
immediate, Schleiermacher preserves it against the argument that it is the
“idea” or “thought” of the divine that causes the experience. If this experience
is “immediate,” that means that it is not “mediated” by concepts or ideas—by cognition. We then cannot say that the
divine is merely an “idea” or
“thought” and thus has no external reality (or, at least, following Kant, that
we cannot know that reality). Religious consciousness, according to Proudfoot’s
reading of Schleiermacher, “is both intentional, in that it is directed toward
the infinite as its object, and immediate. It is not dependent on concepts or
beliefs, yet it can be specified only by reference to the concept of the whole
or the infinite” (Proudfoot, 11). This, however, is impossible. “If the feeling
is intentional,” Proudfoot writes, “it cannot be specified apart from reference
to its object and thus it cannot be independent of thought” (Proudfoot, 11). In
other words, Schleiermacher “defends the incoherent thesis that the religious
consciousness is both independent of thought and can only be identified by
reference to concepts and beliefs” (Proudfoot, 18). He cannot have it both
ways. Either religious experience is truly immediate (i.e., not mediated by
thought), in which case it becomes hard to identify it vis-à-vis an intentional
object, or it is mediated by thought, in which case it is not immediate and
thus open to philosophical scrutiny.
[17] There are at least two key points that come out of
Proudfoot’s critique of Schleiermacher—again, points that can be extended
to subsequent theorists who attempt (either explicitly or implicitly) to
protect religious experience from critical inquiry. First, Proudfoot makes the
point that religious language is both expressive and formative of experience.
Religious language may describe an experience but the words and ideas that we
associate with religious language also cause or at least shape the experience
itself. Thus, Proudfoot argues that religious language “is not only the
expressive, receptive medium Schleiermacher takes it to be. It also plays a
very active and formative role in religious experience” (Proudfoot, 40). The
second (related) point is that it is illegitimate to separate religious feeling
or emotion (in short, religious experience) from thought. Proudfoot admits that
Schleiermacher “is correct to view primary religious language as the expression
of a deeply entrenched moment of consciousness,” but he is “incorrect to
portray that moment as independent of thought and belief. Schleiermacher has
mistaken a felt sense of immediacy for a guarantee that piety is not formed or
shaped by thought or inference” (Proudfoot, 36).
[18] The point here is that religious experience gives rise
to certain emotions and that these emotions are experienced as religious in
part because those who experience them interpret them that way. Those who
experience these religious emotions also interpret and understand the situation
in such a way that one reasonably would ascribe religious content or character
to the emotions being experienced. Thus, there may not be some magical
religious experience that is unconnected to thought and context. People have at
least some if not all religious experiences because they are in situations
where they expect to have them and/or they interpret and understand their
emotional state through religious concepts and systems.
[19] Proudfoot’s turn to the psychological research of
Stanley Schachter may further clarify the line of argument. Schachter’s
experiments confirm that physiological changes alone are not clear indicators
of particular emotions or feelings. In other words, the same physiological
changes may be interpreted in different ways depending on the person who is
experiencing them and the context in which they occur. But what is the
relevance of Schachter’s work for Proudfoot’s interest in religious experience
and for our own concerns here? “Given the results of Schachter’s experiments,”
Proudfoot concludes, “it seems quite plausible that at least some religious
experiences are due to physiological changes for which the subject adopts a
religious explanation” (Proudfoot, 102). Thus, if understood in the same way
that we should understand other emotions or feelings, the physiological changes
(the felt experience) of the religious experience are in fact religious (at
least in part) to the extent that they are interpreted and explained
religiously.
[20] This understanding of what constitutes an experience is
critical to Proudfoot’s distinction between descriptive and explanatory
reduction in the study of religious experience. Descriptive reduction is “the
failure to identify an emotion, practice, or experience under the description
by which the subject identifies it. This is indeed unacceptable” (Proudfoot,
196). Proudfoot uses the example of a hiker seeing a bear in the woods, thus
leading to an experience of fear in the hiker. As it turns out, it really was
not a bear but a tree stump instead. It would be a case of descriptive
reduction, however, to claim that the hiker was in fear of a tree stump. The
tree stump indeed was the object he saw, but he thought it was a bear. To say
that he was afraid of a tree stump would be to fail to make sense of the story.
Still, it would not be wrong to say that the cause of his fear was a tree stump
that looked to him (perhaps at a distance, through some fog or mist, etc.) like
a bear. This would be explanatory reduction, “offering an explanation of an
experience in terms that are not those of the subject and that might not meet
with his approval. This is perfectly justifiable and is, in fact, normal
procedure” (Proudfoot, 197). It might be the hiker refuses to believe that
there was no bear; that what he really saw was a tree stump. I certainly am not
obligated simply to accept his account of the experience, especially if I have
strong evidence supporting the claim that what he saw really was a tree stump.
In other words, I have to take him seriously when he says that he saw a bear
and that this is what made him afraid, but I need not accept that as the final
explanation of the event. Proudfoot concludes:
Where it is the subject’s
experience which is the object of study, that experience must be identified
under a description that can plausibly be attributed to him. . . . The
explanation the analyst offers of that same experience is another matter
altogether. It need not be couched in terms familiar or acceptable to the
subject. It must be an explanation of the experience as identified under the
subject’s description, but the subject’s approval of the explanation is not
required (Proudfoot, 195).
[21] All of this can be applied to religious experience in
the following way. If a religious adherent claims to have had a religious
experience of God’s love, then any investigation of this experience must begin
with the adherent’s description. But a full explanation of the experience may
entail an account of the full context in which the experience occurred in order
to more accurately identify the factors or causes that gave rise to the
experience. For example, perhaps it was an emotionally taxing period in the
adherent’s life. Maybe she was part of a prayer group that emphasized the
experience of God’s love during its communal activity. Maybe she was on
medication that fostered such loving emotions. Naturally, she might reject
these latter explanations. But while we must begin with her description, we
need not end up there. As Proudfoot argues, “To require that any explanation of
a religious experience be one that would be endorsed by the subject is to block
inquiry into the character of that experience” (Proudfoot, 200). In other
words, if all I can do is accept her description of the experience, then there
is no room for any other explanation nor even for an investigation of her
experience in the first place.
[22] There seems to be two possible directions to go from
here. First, we could say that the experiences of the religious and sports
fanatics could be very much the same, but they only differ in the explanations
or interpretations. Or, second, because the pre-existing explanations or
interpretations for potential experiences are different (between religious and
sports) then the actual experiences come to be qualitatively different. In
other words, if we interpret and understand an experience by looking through a
theological or religious prism then (surprise!) we probably will not only think
the experience is religious but experience
it that way.
[23] Proudfoot concludes that the “distinguishing mark of a
religious experience is not the subject matter but the kind of explanation the
subject believes is appropriate” (Proudfoot, 231). Another way of putting this
is that it is not the content (increased heart rate, feelings of elation, forms
of ecstasy, etc.) of the experience that defines it, but the explanation we
give to that content. Many people who have used psychedelic or hallucinogenic
drugs have claimed they have had religious experiences as a consequence of that
drug use. Others have used the same drugs, yet do not describe the experiences
as religious. Are the experiences religious or not? In the case of experiences
surrounding the participation (either as an athlete or spectator) in sporting
events, it very well could be the case that the participants have similar
physiological and psychological experiences as religious practitioners
have—but the former are not having “religious” experiences because they
simply do not label them that way as do the latter. If, for example, the
participants in the sporting event had a different understanding of what
religion is or what a religious experience is, perhaps they more likely would
use the term “religious” to describe their experiences and, thus, those
experiences legitimately could be considered religious.
[24] The approach Proudfoot provides certainly opens up the
experience of the sporting event to a deeper and more thorough investigation.
There are other theorists whose work supports or is supported by such an
approach. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi champions the psychological concept of
“flow.” Flow involves the immersion of the individual psyche in an activity
that is productive, creative, and personally valuable. Flow is “the state in
which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter;
the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great
cost, for the sheer sake of doing it” (Csikszentmihalyi, 4). Flow experiences
can occur in all sorts of activities, ranging from painting a picture to
dancing to making a cabinet. They can occur in religious settings. They also
can occur in sports. “Play, art, pageantry, ritual, and sports are some
examples [of flow],” Csikszentmihalyi writes. “Because of the way they are
constructed, they help participants and spectators achieve an ordered state of
mind that is highly enjoyable” (Csikszentmihalyi, 72). He adds that in the
sporting event “players and spectators cease to act in terms of common sense,
and concentrate instead on the peculiar reality of the game” (Csikszentmihalyi,
72). Thus, the flow experience is common or universal whether it occurs in the
art studio, the church, or the stadium—it is just that the contexts will
shape how we label the flow experience. From this perspective, the argument
would be that the experience of the religious adherent and the experience of
the Southern college football fan are essentially the same flow experiences,
they simply are labeled differently.
[25] Howard Slusher argues, “Something of faith, something
of peace, a touch of power, a feeling of right, a sense of the
precarious—all of these and more is what real spirit of sport is”
(Slusher, 191). He acknowledges the mystical dimension of sport and religion,
concluding that both “open man towards the acceptance and actualization of
being” (Slusher, 191). Sociologist Harry Edwards and anthropologist Victor
Turner remind us that while the religious experience (be it in a church or
stadium or arena) happens to individuals, it often takes place in a communal
context. For Edwards, sports provide us with a sense of belonging and an
opportunity to foster and express powerful emotions (Edwards, 242). The sense
of belonging, of face-to-face encounter with others in a community, is what Turner
calls communitas. It is an experience
of the sacred or holy (Turner, 128). This religious experience of communitas
can happen in a variety of locales, from the church pew to the bleacher seat.
The experience of communitas is universal, it is the same in both cases (the
pew or the bleacher), it simply is labeled differently.
[26] If then the content of the experience is similar
(ecstasy, “flow,” belongingness or communitas,
etc.) but we simply label it differently, then it should not surprise us when people
decide that it is appropriate and perhaps necessary to use religious language
more accurately to describe the experience of the sporting event. Such was the
case with many of the Southern college football fans I surveyed. Perhaps they
have come to believe that the content of the experience is similar to if not
identical with those experiences described by religious practitioners (for
example, mystics).
[27] It is important to remember, however, that Proudfoot
makes a convincing case that our labels of experiences do not merely describe
them but help to constitute them. Religious language is formative of
experiences as well as expressive of them. There still might be something
different about the religious experience—because it in part is constituted
by religious concepts and ideas—that separates it from the often equally
powerful experiences at the sporting event. But here we are pushed to our
reflective limits, and the recognition that we now are probing psychological
and existential areas where we cannot have anything close to definitive
answers. We also are left with a most intriguing question: If we came to
conclude that the content of the religious and sporting experience are similar
(the same physiological occurrences, emotional affects, etc.); and if we
started to adopt the language of the former to describe the latter; would the
latter soon be indistinguishable from the former—since both the content and interpretation of the experiences
would be the same?
Conclusion
[29] If nothing else, this investigation has indicated how
difficult it is to define religious experience. Such is the case with
subjective experiences. If the religious experience can be measured
physiologically, by increased heart rate, blood pressure, or other bodily
change, then we certainly could see such experiences in a variety of
settings—stereotypically religious or not. While such physiologically
changes are part of the experiences, there also is a cognitive experience as
well. Is the cognitive aspect of religious experiences found in other
experiences? It might seem not. If I say that I have had an experience of God,
it is hard to imagine my saying the same thing while at the stadium (though,
according to my survey responses, that might not be as farfetched as it
sounds). But this begs the question: What does “God” mean? Emile Durkheim, for
example, argues that God simply is a symbol for society itself—society’s
projection of itself into the heavens. If there are any merits to this, then
the object of the religious experience and the object of the experience at the
stadium may be very similar if not identical—and, thus, the experiences
may be very similar if not identical.
[30] In sum, we are left with good reason to expand our
understanding of what we mean by religious experience or, at the very least, be
suspicious of definitions too narrowly circumscribed. Recognizing the role of
interpretation in the constitution of experience opens up some epistemological
space that allows for broader and more flexible understandings or definitions
of religious experience. We may not have proven that sports provide
opportunities for religious experiences, but at least we can see that a
reasonable case could be made for such a conclusion. And perhaps we have good
reason to take more seriously claims by observers and fans that game day at
universities throughout the South are occasions for religious experiences.
Notes
1.
For a full discussion, see my forthcoming Game
Day and God: Football, Faith, and Politics in the American South (Macon, GA.:
Mercer University Press, 2008).
2. See Dean (2003), Novak (1994), and Price (2001) as just a
few examples of works that examine the religious dimensions of sports.
3. For example, James identifies ineffability as one of the
four marks of the mystical experience—the mystical experience being the
“root and centre” of “personal religious experience” (James, 299).
4. E-mail correspondence received August 30, 2006.
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