Growing up in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, I could tell you about the “Ice Bowl” well before I could read the words “ice” or “bowl” off a page.
For the uninitiated reader, the “Ice Bowl” contributes an essential – perhaps the essential – narrative strand in the mythology of the Green Bay Packers and all things Wisconsin. My grandfather was at the infamous 1967 National Football League (NFL) Championship game played between the Dallas Cowboys and Green Bay Packers on the storied “frozen tundra” of Lambeau Field. Game-time temps hovered around -15 F (around -40 with wind chill). In pre-game festivities, the brass section of the marching band found their instruments frozen to their lips, and the field-heating system failed such that the ground became dangerously hard and slick. The game ended with Packers quarterback Bart Starr following Jerry Kramer’s block into the end zone to give the Packers a 20-17 lead. Had the play failed, time would have run out and the Packers would have missed a chance for a chip-shot field goal to tie the score.
Handed down by the elders, the story of the Ice Bowl and the other past glories of the 1960s Packers took on mythical dimensions for me. It told me who I was and how I am located in the world and to whom I belong. I am a person who can overcome the fierce winters of the upper Midwest, for whom no weather conditions are too extreme. I am a person from the industrial heartland, from the gritty ice-fishing houses of “flyover country.” I belong to a global community of enlightened people who bleed Green and Gold. I am someone incapable of quitting on the Packers, even though they were lovable losers for the first decades of my life.
It is not a stretch to say that Packers football inspired religious zeal. And, although I haven’t lived in Wisconsin for 32 years, I find this religion hard to quit between Labor Day and the second week of February every year.
I offer the above confession in full confidence that I am not alone.
After leaving Sheboygan, I’ve lived in Northern Iowa, Minneapolis, Vancouver, and Pittsburgh. I know that churches in Pittsburgh cannot stretch past noon on gameday, that a Canucks appearance in the Stanley Cup playoffs can upend social stability in a preternaturally cool city like Vancouver, that any mention of Hayden Fry in Iowa can inspire a devotional pause in the conversation, that youth sports in Minneapolis invites parents (and grandparents) to sell all they have and give to the AAU basketball team or AAA hockey. Show up at any soccer pitch in any city in the U.S. on a Sunday morning to watch parents shouting at six-year-old players content to pick dandelions, or wander down the street to a tailgate for the Big Game starting around the same time, barbeques lit, drinks in hand, folks dressed up in game-day best, and one can safely conclude that sports occupy a significant part of the American social imaginary. We root for our team and cheer on our kids with what can only be called a religious zeal. This, of course, at a time when all we can talk about is how Americans are no longer interested in religion.
In his book The Uses of Idolatry, William Cavanaugh describes the “misenchanted” dimensions of modern American life. Against popular accounts of secularism, which understand contemporary life as largely “disenchanted” when compared to late medieval belief in magic or hauntings or spirits, Cavanaugh suggests that religious devotion has not disappeared, but rather migrated into other spheres of modern life. We may not believe that some days are holier than others or that particular spirits cause sickness, but we do believe that an inanimate object like money can multiply itself and that a piece of fabric with a cluster of stars and alternating red and white stripes must be handled with the utmost care and respect. For Cavanaugh, the language of “disenchanted” serves a rhetorical purpose more than a descriptive one. We use the enchanted/disenchanted binary to distinguish the West from other parts of the world and to describe the discontinuity we feel with previous generations. But we still devote ourselves to things like the nation or consumeristic accumulation with a type of religious fervor. Echoing earlier work by James K. A. Smith in Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, Cavanaugh shows how the human propensity toward worship has not diminished in the modern era, it has just found new objects in things like nationalism and capitalism.
…the human propensity toward worship has not diminished in the modern era, it has just found new objects in things like nationalism and capitalism.
While Cavanaugh does not consider the role sports play in our society, professional (and college and youth) sports could certainly be added to the pantheon of American gods. A cult, the advertising guru Douglas Atkins has said, is characterized by commitment that defies reason. A religion, according to sociologist Emile Durkheim, bonds members of a society together into a shared project and identity. A professional sports team functions as both a cult and religion in these two framings. I cannot explain why I care about the Packers, but I do and such commitment connects me to an invisible international community. Or, consider the annual debates in cities across the country with regard to stadium funding. Whenever cities are held hostage by their beloved sports franchise for a new stadium deal, politicians and representatives from the franchise trot out manufactured statistics to show how a taxpayer-funded stadium will benefit the economic bottom line of the taxpayer. But we all know such statistics are not factual economic data. They are ontological speculations we take on faith because losing the team is as unimaginable as the “death of God” would have been to a medieval peasant. Can one envision Pittsburgh without the Steelers? Or Boston without the Red Sox?
This could be because professional sports draw their power from both nationalism and capitalism — the two modern objects of worship centered in Cavanaugh’s account. Every major sports league in the United States begins the contest with a whole set of rituals around the national anthem. Military brigades, flags unfurled, 70,000 people standing at attention, hats duffed, hands over their hearts, lustily singing the “and the rocket’s red glare” while the players nervously stare straight ahead. Such displays of patriotism are manufactured to project strength and elicit strong emotions — pride, gratitude, love for one’s country. They are not designed to prompt reflection on either the meaning of patriotism or why such rituals are necessary for a sporting event in the first place. They are certainly not designed to tease out distinctions between, say, patriotism and nationalism, or perhaps how one might be both a proud American and critical of the militarization of our society. When the F-18 jets roar overhead and the color guard stands at attention, one can only roar with approval. If a player (or fan!) deviates from the liturgy, the condemnation is swift and often irrationally severe, as Colin Kaepernick can attest.
The rituals around the national anthem are policed, in part, because professional sports are a multi-billion-dollar-a-year business, and stirring images of patriotic athletes and devoted fans make for good TV. Nuanced discussions about police violence or racial inequities do not drive up ad revenue or market share. Professional sports, in the end, are an entertainment product and so accountable to the vicissitudes of the market. Anyone who has attended an NFL or NBA or MLB game has experienced the jarring disconnect between the live game and the televised product. In the stadium, it is a group of people playing a game, who take (in the case of football) frequent commercial breaks for the televised audience. Without the televised commentary, product placements, and close-up shots of an anguished quarterback or jubilant manager, the actual game is detached – just a little – from the curated product that CBS or Fox Sports wants us to see. It is, in the end, just a game. And yet, one that still seems to carry existential importance for those gathered. Just ask the greased light poles in Philadelphia after the Eagles’ last Super Bowl victory or the burned cars in Vancouver after the Canucks’ game seven loss in the Stanley Cup Finals.
The way in which professional sports facilitate deep emotional connections in the guise of a frivolous consumer product makes it an easy target for critics. The linguist Noam Chomsky famously describes sporting events as a form of mass control, in which certain elites keep the masses both disciplined and focused on the inconsequential. Sports such as football, which emphasize the team over the individual and valorize sacrificial obedience to the team’s objectives, he suggests, discipline young men for the military. For the rest of us, the spectacle of the sporting event distracts the masses from things that matter. Depending on the framing, rooting for one’s local team can either be as innocuous as choosing a pair of socks and thus not worthy of our attention or a mass manipulation that threatens our well-being and is worth confronting at every turn.
The way in which professional sports facilitate deep emotional connections in the guise of a frivolous consumer product makes it an easy target for critics.
And yet, professional sports – the stories it generates and the rituals it provides – have become one of the ways in which we make meaning and tell our own stories. Ross Gay’s book-length poem “Be Holding” is an extended meditation on one particular moment in the 1980 NBA Finals when Julius “Dr. J” Erving of the L.A. Lakers beat three Philadelphia 76ers defenders on the baseline with a shot that was equal parts genius and transcendent. Of course, the poem is not about Dr. J, but about Gay and the relationships that have held and formed him, including his affection for basketball. So also, Hanif Abdurraqib’s memoir, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, explores his own life growing up in Columbus in tandem with the career of LeBron James — Abdurraqib’s basketball hero and fellow Ohioan. For Abdurraqib, the life, struggles, and achievements of James are not only a commercial product developed for mass consumption by the NBA but a lens through which his own life within the complexities of the American landscape can be understood. I can attest to this in my own life as well. The Packers have provided a way to connect with my family and my hometown. I even felt a deep connection with my deceased grandparents the last time the Packers won the Super Bowl in 2011.
The prevalence and moral ambiguity of professional sports raise an interesting challenge for those of us interested in the public witness of the church. As any pastor in Green Bay or Pittsburgh can attest, churches pit themselves against Sunday football at their own risk. Our congregants may not want to choose between the altar of Steelers football and the Eucharistic table, but they will not waver if given the choice. And, whatever hesitations we harbor about concussion risks and militarism and crass consumerism, these teams have become stitched into the fabric of our collective lives in ways that are difficult to disentangle because the liturgies of consumer capitalism and American nationalism prepare the ground for our unreasonable commitment to our hometown team. And this team connects us to one another and even offers fleeting moments of transcendence. We are, in the words of Cavanaugh, “misenchanted.”
Of course, nothing I’ve said should surprise someone familiar with Reformed theology. Augustine spends a good portion of the Confessions describing the restlessness of his own heart apart from God. John Calvin observed that the human heart is an idol-making factory. As our society becomes more secular, it should not be a surprise that the human propensity for worship – our longing for transcendence, meaning, and participation in something bigger than us – has found other avenues for expression. Cavanaugh – and the rest of the biblical tradition – calls this propensity to worship what we have created idolatry. And the great moral hazard of idolatry is that we begin to take on the features of that which we worship. As the prophet Isaiah warns, those who worship blind and deaf gods made by human hands will themselves become blind and deaf to that which is real: the Living, True God and the community of creatures God created and loves. Idolatry, that is to say, promises transcendence but actually turns us in on ourselves, into our own self-made prison.
And this is perhaps where both Ross Gay and Noam Chomsky can help us discern the nature of Christian community and practice within a society so “misenchanted” by the ubiquitous siren song of professional sports. We are, undoubtedly, enchanted by Sunday Night Football and the World Series, to say nothing of college football and basketball (which at this point we can just include in the category of “professional sport”). And this enchantment is dangerous to our faith and witness. It can certainly distract us from what is important in life. It can certainly discipline us as consumers and unreflective nationalists. It certainly bears all the basic ingredients of idolatry. But because it runs the risk of idolatry, it is a space within which our humanity can be shared, expressed, and made visible. We are, after all, worshiping and meaning-making creatures. In a society characterized by loneliness, displacement, and polarization, the local sports team remains one of the few liturgical practices that draw us into a larger community and shared project rooted in the particularities of place. Cheering for the local team becomes one of the ways we understand our lives and join our community. Like it or not, sports constitute the basic religious material with which we have to work in our secular age.
…the local sports team remains one of the few liturgical practices that draw us into a larger community and shared project rooted in the particularities of place.
In Acts 17, the apostle Paul walks the streets of Athens before his speech to the philosophers at the Areopagus, finding an idol constructed “to an unknown God.” Later that day, standing up in the crowd, Paul references this idol to affirm the religiosity of his Greek audience. He then tells the story of Jesus as God’s response to this yearning. What they have called unknown, God has made known. His approach is deft and nuanced. Paul wants to redirect this longing, from general religious sentiment to the person of Jesus. He isn’t cutting down the prophets of Baal or asking the Athenians for a complete separation from Greek society. He seems to recognize that a Greek form of faith might look different from his own, a view reflected in his approach to meat that has been sacrificed to idols. The enchanted world of the Athenians is not something to be cast aside, but perhaps redirected.
I suspect that we are now in a similar situation in the post-modern West. This is not the “Twilight of the Idols” that Friedrich Nietzsche anticipated, but rather the birth of new ones, and they come with all the ambivalence and complexity as the enchanted universe of earlier eras. And so the Packers or Steelers or Red Sox become some of the religious material that we will need to draw from, redirect, and at times subvert as we seek to cultivate Christian communities that can witness to the good news of the Gospel in this time. Of course, most of us do not have something like the Areopagus or the rhetorical moxie of the Apostle Paul, and so our redirection of such impulses may not be in the form of a public presentation standing atop a table in the local sports bar. Instead, I think we need to recognize that learning to love the place where God has called us to ministry means trying to understand the histories and mythologies related to the local sports teams that have given meaning and identity to our neighbors. We don’t need to bleed “black and yellow” in Pittsburgh, but if we are going to love our neighbor we need to recognize why and how our neighbors do bleed such colors, and to recognize the ways that love for a team can offer preparatory sentiments and virtues for the love we proclaim in the gospel. For the good news of the new creation in Jesus Christ calls us to a place and a people, invites us to participate in a body greater than our individual concerns, and connects us with one another. The enchanted stadiums and arenas across the United States offer a pale reflection of these things, and perhaps reflect a real yearning for the kind of community and participation in transcendence that the Triune God opens to us in Jesus Christ. I guess what I’m trying to say is: let’s maybe not throw away the Terrible Towel or Cheesehead just yet.
