Chapter 15: Sports and Play: Sports and Religions

Dan Cox, the research director at PRRI explains that, "If you are an enthusiastic fan, why would God be absent from the [field of play]?" In the case of religious athletes, he noted:

"If people believe in a personal relationship with God, it is not such a big step for them to say God rewards people who are faithful. For athletes, the rewards would be good health and success."

The social influence of religion and religious beliefs varies widely, and it can produce the following consequences:

-Power forms of group unity and social integration, or devastating forms of group conflict and violent warfare. -A spirit of love and acceptance or forms of moral rejection and condemnation -Humble conformity with prevailing social norms or righteous rejection of prevailing norms -A commitment to social equity or commitment to policies and practices that produce inequities (between men and women, racial and ethnic groups, social classes, homosexuals and heterosexuals, and people with and without certain physical or intellectual impairments.

Religions have?

-churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples -commitment to perfection through disciplined study of holy books and quest for moral purity -prophets, popes/patriarchs/presidents, pastors, and priests. -annual holy days that celebrate moral commitment, community, and redemption. -baptisms, opening hymns, regular sermons, the joining of hands, and ceremonial processions. -heroes are granted sainthood, and their stories are told by religious writers, leaders, and believers. -theologians and believers are inspired to contemplate the meaning of existence. -Focus on salvation and a relationship with a deity and the supernatural realm.

Similarities between sports and religion

-special sites for events and communal gatherings -disciplined quests for perfection in mind, body, and spirit -structured organizations and a clear hierarchy of authority -events to celebrate and reaffirm shared values -rituals before, during, and after major events -heroes and stories about their accomplishments -occasions that inspire emotions and existential thoughts -A focus that distracts attention from here-and-now social, political, and economic issues.

Sports have?

-stadiums, arenas, gyms, and park -commitment to perfection through disciplined training and competitive performances -commissioners, owners/athletic directors, managers, and coaches -scheduled contests that celebrate competition, hard work, and achievement. -Initiations, national anthems, pep talks, fist bumping, and marching bands -Heroes are elected to halls of fame, and their stories are told by sports journalists, coaches, and fans. -Players and fans are inspired to contemplate the physical potential of human beings. -Focus on athlete-celebrities, scores, win-loss records, records of achievement, and championships.

Athletes, coaches, and teams use religion, religious beliefs, prayers, and rituals in many ways. Research on this topic is scarce, but there is much anecdotal information suggesting that religion is used for one or more of the following purposes:

1. To cope with uncertainty 2. To stay out of trouble 3. To give meaning to sports participation 4. To put sports participation into a balanced perspective 5. To establish team solidarity and unity 6. To reaffirm motivation and social control on teams 7. To achieve personal and competitive success

Not all religious athletes use prayer and religious rituals in this manner, but many call on their religion to help them face challenges and uncertainty. Therefore, many athletes who pray before or during games seldom pray before or during practices when uncertainty isn't an issue. For example, Catholic athletes who make the sign of the cross when they enter or are taken out of a soccer match, come up to bat in a baseball game, or shoot a free throw during a basketball game don't do the same thing when they walk on the field, bat, or shoot free throws during practices. It is the actual competition that produces the uncertainty and then evokes the prayer or religious ritual.

A national survey done in the United States by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that when sports are important to people with a religious affiliation, they assume that sports also are important to their God. Consistent with this, nearly 40 percent of the Protestants and Catholics believed that God has a hand in the outcomes of competitive events (Jones & Cox, 2017).

Through history, people have used prayers and rituals based on religion, magic, and/or superstition to cope with uncertainties in their lives (Cherrington, 2012, 2014; Weber, 1922b/1993). Because sport competition involves uncertainty, it is not surprising that many athletes use rituals, some based in religion, to help them feel as if they have some control over what happens to them on the playing field.

A study of Olympic-level wrestlers in Europe found that some of them found reassurance through their prayers before matches. Saying silent meditative prayers, they explained, helped them relax their minds and gain control before stepping onto the mat (Kristiansen and Roberts, 2007). This strategy has been described by a German sport scientist as "Glaubensdoping," or "faith doping" (Güldenpfennig, 2001). This term would not be used in the United States, where prayers and religious rituals are commonly used prior to competition.

A sociological discussion of religion often creates controversy because people tend to use their own religious beliefs and practices as their point of reference.

Additionally, tensions are inevitable whenever people are asked to think critically and analytically about the beliefs they use to make sense of their experiences and the world around them.

Church-affiliated colleges and universities in the United States have also used sports as recruiting and public relations tools.

Administrators from these schools know that seventeen-year-olds today are likely to listen to recruiting advertisements that use terminology, images, and spokespeople from sports. Plus, a winning sports program can provide exposure and publicity for particular religious beliefs (Michaelis, 2011;

Religious beliefs about developing and strengthening the body were not applied to girls or women during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For most people, "a female muscular Christian was a contradiction in terms [and] ... Muscular Christianity represented a reaction against the 'femininization' of American middle-class culture" (Baker, 2007, pp. 44-45). In fact, when activist women opened the first YWCA in Boston in 1866 their focus was on "prayer, Bible study, and Christian witness" devoted to helping women find decent housing and obtain job training so they could work and support themselves; playing sports was not part of the program (Baker, 2007, p. 62).

Although mainline Protestants endorsed sports for boys and men through the end of the nineteenth century, some of them came to wonder about the religious relevance of the highly competitive sports that emerged during the first half of the twentieth century. Scandals, violence, and other problems in sports caused evangelicals, in particular, to question their value. Protestant leaders were also wary of women playing sports because it contradicted their belief that God created men and women to be different and that female athletes would subvert God's plan (Jonas, 2005).

The issue of prayer related to public school teams continues to be contentious. In 2014, a high school coach in North Carolina was ordered to stop baptizing his players and leading his team in prayers (Stuart, 2014). A similar order was given in 2015 to a high school coach in Georgia when some of his players were baptized before practice. In front of a local news camera, the coach declared, "We did this right before practice! Take a look and see how God is STILL in our schools!" (Estep, 2015).

Although most of these incidents do not lead to lawsuits, local authorities have confirmed again and again that they violate the US Constitution—a conclusion reaffirmed whenever cases have gone to court.

Blazer's research identified the struggles that some female Christian athletes experience as they make sense of their sports participation combined with traditional evangelical beliefs about what it means to be a Christian woman today.

Although this gender-focused form of self-reflection seldom occurs among male athletes who combine witnessing and male-identified sports participation, their interaction with female peers in the sports ministry may cause them to raise similar issues—but research is needed to determine if, when, and how this might occur.

Historically, Native Americans have often included physical games and running races in religious rituals (Nabokov, 1981). However, the purpose of doing this is to reaffirm social connections within specific native cultural groups and gain skills needed for group survival. Outside these rituals, sport participation has had no specific religious meaning. Making general statements about religious beliefs and sports participation among Native Americans is difficult because beliefs vary from one native culture to another. However, many native cultures maintain animistic religious beliefs emphasizing the spiritual integration of material elements, such as the earth, wind, sun, moon, plants, and animals. Many native games contain features that imply this integration, and, when Native Americans play sports constructed by people from European or other backgrounds, they often use their religious beliefs to give their participation a meaning that reaffirms their ways of viewing the world and their connection with the sacred.

Anthropologist Peter Nabokov has studied running among Native Americans and notes that prior to their contact with Europeans they ran for practical purposes such as hunting, communicating, and fighting; but they also ran to reenact myths and legends and to reaffirm their connection with the forces of nature and the universe. More recently, Native American athletes whose identities are grounded in native cultures often define sports participation in terms of their specific tribal cultural traditions and beliefs. However, little is known about how they incorporate specific religious beliefs and traditions, which vary across cultures, into participation that occurs outside of their cultures or how young Native Americans who play sports connect their participation to religious beliefs. Again, research is needed.

Overman's theory helps to explain some of the ways that people in predominantly Protestant regions around the world view the body and sports. For example, most Protestants have emphasized that the body is a divine tool to be used in establishing mastery over the physical world (Genesis 1:28; I Corinthians 9:24-27; Philippians 4:13). The perfect body, therefore, was a mark of a righteous soul (Hutchinson, 2008; Overman, 2011). However, traditional Catholic beliefs emphasize that the body is a divine vessel—a "temple of the Holy Spirit" (I Corinthians 6:19).

As a result, Catholics living in the nineteenth and early twentieth century were taught to keep the body pure through sexual abstinence and restraint, not through playing sports. Protestant beliefs have also supported the idea that individual competitive success demonstrates a person's moral worth. Organized competitive sports, because they emphasize work and achievement, are logical sites for the application of Protestant beliefs. Unlike free and expressive play, sports often are worklike and demand sacrifice and the endurance of pain. Therefore, Protestant/Christian athletes can define sports participation as their calling (from God) and make the claim that God wants them to be the best they can be in sports, even if sports sometimes require the physical domination of others. Furthermore, Christian athletes can define sports participation as a valuable form of religious witness and link their efforts in sports to moral worth and personal salvation.

Even a half century ago, when the famous preacher Oral Roberts founded his university in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he highlighted the importance of its sports program in this way:

Athletics is part of our Christian witness. ... Nearly every man in America reads the sports pages, and a Christian school cannot ignore these people. ... Sports are becoming the No. 1 interest of people in America. For us to be relevant, we had to gain the attention of millions of people in a way that they could understand (in Boyle, 1970, p. 64).

Discussions about sports and religions often are confusing. Some people view sport as a form of religion, or at least "religion-like," whereas others assume that the "true and essential nature" of religion is essentially different from the "true and essential nature" of sport. Still others view sports and religions as two distinct sets of cultural practices, which may be similar or different depending on how people create, define, and use them. The purpose of this section is to explain and clarify each of these three positions.

Attending an NFL game or a World Cup soccer match and being a part of 75,000 or more people yelling, chanting, and moving in unison reminds some people of a religious experience. A few even say that sport is religion because it involves passion, dedication, identities, and ritualistic actions and it is played with bodies made in the image of God (Bain-Selbo, 2008, 2009; Bauer, 2011; Thoennes, 2008). Others stop short of this position and say that sports are sometimes religion-like because they share characteristics and produce similar consequences (Baker, 2007; Forney, 2007; Serazio, 2013; Sing, 2013). In both cases, the proponents of the sport as religion and sport as religion-like positions

Although ideologies are linked with the secular world and religions are linked with a supernatural realm, they often overlap, making it difficult to clearly differentiate them. For example, if people have a religious belief that God created male and female as two distinct human forms, they could use it to develop and support a gender ideology organized around male-female sex differences and the assumption that it is neither moral nor natural to blur or make light of those differences. When this occurs, secular ideologies take on moral significance and ideologically based actions become moral actions. This is why Islamic jihadist ideology is a powerful force in the world today—it establishes a connection between selected Islamist beliefs and a here-and-now quest for political control. As a result, the actions of jihadists are given moral urgency and legitimacy in their view of the world.

Because religion informs widespread views of the world and influences social relationships and the organization of social life, it also informs ideas and beliefs about the body, movement, physical activities, and sports. However, as we examine the relationship between religions and sports, it's useful to know that religions are linked with the supernatural and sacred—that is, with things that inspire awe, mystery, and reverence. For example, Christians define churches as sacred places by connecting them with their God. Therefore, the meaning of a church to Christians can be understood only in terms of its perceived link with the supernatural. On the other hand, sport stadiums are seen by most Christians secular places having no connection with the sacred or supernatural.They may be important to people, but they are understandable in terms of everyday, secular meanings and experiences.

Some religious organizations are developed around sports to attract people to Christian beliefs and provide support for athletes who hold Christian beliefs. Examples include Sports Ambassadors, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA), Athletes in Action (AIA), Pro Athletes Outreach (PAO), Global Sports Outreach, Baseball Chapel, and dozens of smaller groups associated with particular sports. These organizations have a strong evangelical emphasis, and members are usually eager to share their beliefs in the hope that others will embrace Christianity as they do.

Christian organizations and groups also use sports as sites for evangelizing. For example, in 1996 the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism (ABWE) organized and supported hundreds of evangelical Christians as they were bused 260 miles from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Atlanta and back each day during the Atlanta Olympic Games (Hartman, 2016). They distributed over 500,000 booklets prepared for the spectators at the games and recorded over 600 professions of faith by the people they talked with during the two weeks. News of this success spread and inspired other evangelical organizations to send "missionaries" to every Olympic city to spread their beliefs. Most recently, highly organized teams of Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Mormons joined the United Christian Churches of Korea to engage in an Olympic outreach to spectators and athletes (Mulkey, 2018). The Jehovah's Witnesses alone sent 1000 missionaries to Gangneung and Pyeongchang, the host cities for the 2018 Winter Games. A key strategy used by missionaries was a to trade lapel pins, one of which was a "More Than Gold" pin that enabled them to redirect conversations to religious beliefs. They were so successful and there were so many of them that Olympic park officials banned them and began to confiscate religious materials that had been handed out and left in the park.

Although a few Christian athletes have expressed concerns about social justice in sports, most have used Christian religious beliefs to transform winning, obedience to coaches, and a commitment to excellence in sports into moral virtues. Therefore, Christian beliefs generally reproduce sports as they currently exist. At this point, the only exception to this appears to be recreational sports where athletes have agreed upfront to use Christian beliefs to guide their actions during play.

Daniel Grano (2017), a communication studies scholar, has questioned the conclusion that sports never change in connection with religious beliefs. After identifying how media images expose myths and contradictions that exist in elite, commercial sports, he suggests that a critical theological approach may provide "a framework for imagining a 'wholly other' alternative to the political, economic, and social conditions of the present" in sports (p. 195). Grano's analysis leads him to conclude that this is a critical point in time because it is no longer possible to hold on to idealized versions of sport's past and present or to maintain narratives about the purity and goodness of sports. However, it remains to be seen whether theology or any major religious belief system will inspire demands to recreate sports so they match what many people believe them to be.

There have been recent studies of the influence of Islamic beliefs on the sport participation of Muslim women (Toffoletti, 2012 & Palmer, 2017; Walseth, 2016). For those who study sports and gender, it is helpful to understand that religious beliefs often define, in moral terms, expectations related to gender. This makes religion important to include in their analyses because these expectations regulate bodies and influence sports participation patterns in different cultures. Islam has received more attention than other religions in this regard, because it has very specific beliefs about the clothing that must be worn by women, especially when they might be seen by men.

Despite the relative shortage of information about sports and religions other than Christianity, issues related to this topic are discussed in the section, "Sports and World Religions" later in this chapter. But first, we focus on why certain forms of Christianity have become closely associated with organized competitive sports.

A 1962 US Supreme Court decision banned organized prayers in public schools when they are said publicly and collectively at sports events sponsored by state organizations, such as public schools. This ruling caused controversy in Texas in 1992, when two families near Houston filed a lawsuit requesting a ban on prayers in public schools. They appealed to the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." The federal district judge in the case ruled that public prayers are permitted as long as they are nonsectarian and general in content, initiated by students, and not said in connection with attempts to convert anyone to a particular religion. But this decision was qualified during an appeal when the appellate judges ruled that sports events are not serious enough occasions to require the solemnity of public prayer; therefore, the prayers are unconstitutional.

Despite this decision and a long list of similar court rulings between the early 1990s and today in the United States, people in many US towns have continued to say public prayers before public school sport events. These prayers often are "local traditions," and people object when federal government judges tell them that they are unconstitutional. They argue that it violates their constitutional right to "freedom of speech."

Do these differences present a moral dilemma fore Christian athletes? For example, do Christian boxers and Mixed Martial Arts fighters wonder if pummeling another human being into senseless submission and risking the infliction of a fatal injury is an appropriate spiritual offering?

Do Christian football players see problems associated with using intimidation and "taking out" opponents with potentially injurious hits and then saying that such behaviors are "acts of worship"? Do athletes believe that they can use physically injurious actions as expressions of religious commitment simply by saying that they are motivated by Christian love?

It wasn't until the late 1940s that evangelical Christians again made a direct connection between sports and their religious beliefs (Ladd and Mathisen, 1999)—and they were not alone in embracing sports in the years following World War II. Protestant churches and congregations, Catholic dioceses and parishes, Mormon wards, the B'nai B'rith, and some Jewish synagogues also embraced sports as worthwhile activities for young men. These organizations sponsored sports and sports programs because their members and leaders believed that sports participation developed moral character and prepared young men for the military.

During the 1960s and 1970s, athletic-minded evangelical Christians began to focus on sport as a realm in which they could bring their religious beliefs to (male) athletes and then use the visibility and popularity of athletes to spread those beliefs to sports fans and the general public (Krattenmaker, 2010). The widespread acceptance of the great sport myth (see Chapter 1, p. 11) contributed to their success. People already believed that the essential purity and goodness of sports would be internalized by athletes willing to learn what sports would teach them. When athletes accepted and gave witness to Bible-based values, people saw the connection between sports participation and Christianity as logical and credible.

The exclusion of women from the doyhō was hotly contested in 2018 when a wrestler had a stroke in the ring and the only medical person close to the ring was a female nurse who was restrained from entering the ring to help the man

Feminists and progressive scholars protested and said that the exclusion of women was discriminatory and must be eliminated. Sumo and other male officials in Japan disagreed and the policy continues to exist although it is on shaky cultural grounds.

At the risk of creating some discomfort, this chapter focuses on the many ways that sports and religion intersect in society. The major questions we'll discuss in this chapter are these:

How is religion defined, and how is it connected with society and culture? What are the similarities and differences between sports and religions? Why have people combined sports and religious beliefs, and why are Christians more vocal about this combination than are Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, and others? What are the issues and controversies associated with combining religious beliefs and sports participation? When discussing the last question, special attention is given to the prospect of using religion as a platform for eliminating racism, sexism, deviance, violence, and other problems in sports and sports organizations.

The wrestlers take great care to preserve the purity of the dohyō. Prior to their bouts, they ritualistically throw salt into the ring to symbolize their respect for its sacredness and purity; they even wipe sweat off their bodies and rinse their mouths with water presented to them by fellow wrestlers. If a wrestler sheds blood during a bout, the stains are cleaned and purified before the bouts continue. Shinto motifs are included in the architecture and decorations on and around the dohyo. However, wrestlers do not personally express their commitment to Shinto, nor do Shinto organizations sponsor or promote sumo or other sports.

In recent years, the popularity of sumo has declined at the same time that the sport has attracted participants from other parts of the world. Not being raised to know or respect Shinto and the traditional sacred rituals associated with the sport, these new wrestlers bring a secular orientation to the ring. This, combined with championships being won by non-Japanese wrestlers and recent match-fixing scandals, has eroded the religious foundations of the sport (McCurry, 2011; Sanchanta, 2011).

Using sports to promote particular religious beliefs was a key strategy of Christian missionaries who accompanied European and North Americans who colonized traditional cultures. Since the mid-1800s, this strategy was used to attract and recruit boys and men to churches and religious organizations, especially in England and the United States (Putney, 2003). This practice became so common in the United States after World War II that sociologist Charles Page referred to it as "the basketballization of American religion" (in Demerath and Hammond, 1969, p. 182).

In the early 1990s, for example, Bill McCartney, the former football coach at the University of Colorado, used sport images and metaphors as he founded a religious organization, The Promise Keepers, and recruited men to join. McCartney and others in the evangelical men's organization preached that a "manly man is a Godly man." Similarly, other Christian fundamentalist organizations have used images of tough athletes to represent ideal "Christian men." This strategy of presenting a "masculinized Christianity" was designed to attract men into churches so they could reclaim their status as moral leaders, honor their commitment to their wives and families, and present a masculinized version of biblical values (Beal, 1997; Randels and Beal, 2002). This approach continued in 2013 with a six-city Promise Keepers men's conference titled "Awakening the Warrior."

The link between Judaism and sports is weak, but the link between Jews and sports participation is strong. This apparent contradiction is understandable when we remember that Jews constitute an ethnic population as well as a religion, and that Jews have faced discrimination in nearly every society in which they've lived, except Israel. The following two contradictory statements help us understand the confusion about sports participation among Jews:

Jews are not sportsmen. Whether this is due to their physical lethargy, their dislike of unnecessary physical action or their serious cast of mind—it is nevertheless a fact. ... —Henry Ford, 1921 (based on his anti-semitic stereotype of Jews) Sport valorized Gentile masculine values like aggression, strength, speed, and combativeness. ... I loved it. Nothing my [Jewish] father could do or say stopped me from embracing baseball, basketball, or football over religion. —Alan Klein, 2008 (German-born Jew, anthropologist who studies sports and culture)

The first statement was made in 1921 by Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company and one of the most influential men in the United States at that time. The second statement was made by Klein (2008), who came to the United States just after the gas chambers had been shut down following World War II.

Klein played sports, earned a Ph.D., and became an anthropologist noted for his excellent research on sports and human rights.

Fundamentalist movements in all religions arise when people perceive moral threats to a past way of life that was, according to their beliefs, firmly based on moral principles. Therefore, fundamentalists emphasize the "moral decline of society" and the need to return to a time when religious truth was the foundation for culture and social organization. This belief is so deeply held by some believers that it creates a social and political split between fundamentalists and the rest of society.

Ladd and Mathisen (1999) explain that most fundamentalist Christians in the United States have used sports, in part, to reduce their separation and gain acceptance from people in the rest of society. The ways that sports have been used by Christian fundamentalist movements in other predominantly Protestant societies suggest that this is seen to be an effective strategy although there are important variations between countries (Butterworth and Senkbeil, 2017).

Sumo, or traditional Japanese wrestling, is a combination of a sacred religious ritual and a fight to the death between two larger than life combatants. The wrestlers dress the part by wearing a mawashi or loincloth. They respect the priest-like referee and the history and cultural meaning of the sport. These coordinated presentations of self give spectators the feel of drama along with sport. Sumo has strong historical ties to Shinto, a traditional Japanese religion (Light and Kinnaird, 2002). Shinto means "the way of the gods," and it consists of a system of rituals and ceremonies designed to worship nature rather than reaffirm an established theology.

Modern sumo is a nonreligious activity, although it remains steeped in Shinto ritual and ceremony. The dohyō (sumo ring) in which the bouts take place are defined as sacred sites. Religious symbols are integrated into their design and construction, and the rings are consecrated through purification ceremonies, during which referees, dressed in priestly garb, ask the gods to bless the scheduled bouts. Only the wrestlers and recognized sumo officials are allowed in the dohyō. Shoes must not be worn, and women are never allowed to stand on or near an officially designated ring.

To complicate matters, some Islamic feminists accused Boulmerka of allowing herself to be used by a sport system based on men's values and sponsored by corporations that promote a soulless, consumer culture. To participate in such a system, they said, was to endorse global forces that oppress humankind.

More recently, eighteen-year-old tennis phenomenon Sania Mirza from India was given heavy police security at a tournament in Calcutta, India, after receiving alleged threats from Muslim men saying that she violated Sharia Law stating that any woman in public must cover her entire body except for her hands and face. Mirza's shorts and sleeveless shirts were called "indecent" and "corrupting," and in 2008, the disputes over her tennis clothes led her to consider quitting her tennis career. Instead, she decided to boycott tournaments in her home country. At the same time, Indian corporations sought Mirza to endorse their products, knowing that many young Indian women looked up to her.

Evidence supports this aspect of Overman's theory in that athletes from Protestant nations disproportionately outnumber athletes from nations where people are primarily Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist (Lüschen, 1967; Overman, 2011). Even the international success of athletes from non-Protestant nations is often traceable to the influence of cultures where Protestant beliefs are dominant. However, the recent and rapid global diffusion of work-related achievement values has decreased the influence of religious beliefs on athletic success. As a result, many athletes from non-Protestant nations excel in sports and win international competitions today. China and Japan are classic examples.

Most of what we in North America know about sports and religions focuses on various forms of Christianity, especially evangelical fundamentalism. Little is written about sports and Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Shinto, Taoism, or the many variations of these and other religions. The beliefs and meanings associated with each of these religions influence how people perceive their bodies, define and give meaning to physical activities, and relate to each other through human movement. However, few people other than evangelical fundamentalist Christians use sports to publicly proclaim their religious beliefs, or use their religious beliefs to give spiritual meaning to sport participation.

The popularity of sports among men in Islamic countries is often tied to expressions of political and cultural nationalism rather than religious beliefs. Similarly, when Muslims migrate from Islamic countries to Europe or North America, they sometimes play sports, but their participation is tied more to learning about life and gaining acceptance in their new cultures than expressing Muslim beliefs through sports

Muslim girls and women in non-Islamic countries have low participation rates and Muslim organizations don't often sponsor sports for their members.

Studying Islam and sports is a challenge because Muslims, like many Buddhists and Hindus, make few distinctions between the secular and the sacred. Religion is the foundation for personal identity for most Muslims and their every action is done to please Allah (God). This means that every part of their lives is an expression of worship. Religious beliefs and cultural norms are merged into a single theology/ideology, with an emphasis on peace through submission to Allah's will.

Muslims have long participated in physical activities and sports, but participation is regulated by their beliefs about what pleases Allah, and this varies among believers. The connection between sports and the mandate to submit to Allah's will has not been studied until recently (Dagkasa et al., 2011; Farooq and Parker, 2009; Jobey, 2012; Samie, 2013; Samie and Sehlikoglu, 2015; Toffoletti, 2012; Walseth, 2016). There are noteworthy past and present examples of African American Muslims who excel in sports. However, the traditions of sports participation and the quest for excellence in sports are not as strong in Muslim countries as they are in secularized, Christian-Protestant countries, partly because low per capita income makes full-time training nearly impossible for many Muslims in rural and less materially developed regions of the world.

As a 30-year-old Canadian student at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, James Naismith invented basketball in 1891. He did it to fulfill a requirement in a psychology of play graduate course he was taking at the same time that he needed an engaging activity that would keep football players physically active during their off-season. Naismith also wrote the first official rule book for basketball, founded the basketball program at the University of Kansas, became the first coach the university ever hired, and was an unordained Presbyterian minister who left his religious studies to work in the newly developing field of athletics.

Naismith's story is interesting because he did all these things at a time when many Christians in North America saw competitive sports as a tool of the devil—an activity that glorified the flesh rather than the spirit and focused the attention of young men on competition and winning when they should be using their body to honor God through work, reverence, and humility. Naismith knew these things but he was influenced by Muscular Christianity, a social movement started by Christian men who believed that religion had become so feminized that it ignored the connection between masculinity and living a Christian life.

This use of religion can backfire when athletes object to being expected to pray using Christian prayers. This occurred at New Mexico State University when four Muslim football players filed a lawsuit accusing their coach of religious discrimination because he labeled them "troublemakers" after they objected to reciting the Lord's Prayer in a team huddle after each practice and before each game. The university settled the case out of court, suggesting that they agreed that a football coach doesn't have the right to turn his team into a Christian brotherhood (Fleming, 2007).

Objections to pregame prayers in public schools have led some US students and their parents to file lawsuits to ban religious expression in connection with sport events. However, coaches and athletes continue to insist that prayers bring team members together in positive ways and serve a spiritual purpose in players' lives. This controversial issue is discussed in the Reflect on Sports box "Public Prayers at Sport Events."

Some Christian athletes believe that God intervenes in sports. For example, Colorado Rockies chairman and CEO Charlie Monfort assembled a Major League Baseball team that in 2007 had many Christians in management, coaching, and on the roster. When the team experienced success, Monfort said, "I think character-wise we're stronger than anyone in baseball. Christians ... are some of the strongest people in baseball. I believe God sends signs, and we're seeing those." Dan O'Dowd, the team's general manager concurred with his boss, saying, "You look at some of the games we're winning. Those aren't just a coincidence. God has definitely had a hand in this."

Of course, athletes and others connected with sports list many different reasons for praying when they play sports (Hopsicker, 2009). But it is unlikely that nearly every major professional sport team in the United States would have a chaplain unless owners and managers thought it would improve performance. This also may be why 193 national teams at the 2012 Olympics brought chaplains with them to London. Reid Priddy, who led the US volleyball team to a gold medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, explained his success on the court in this way: "Right before the ... Olympic Games I really felt the freedom from God to be a fierce competitor—not just a really nice and supportive teammate" (FCA, 2012).

In societies where Christianity is dominant, there usually are reasonably clear distinctions between the secular and sacred. In societies where Buddhism is dominant, it is very difficult to make this distinction because the secular and sacred are almost seamlessly merged in daily life. These boxers in Thailand make Buddhist prayers to their Master (teacher) before their competitions.

Of course, none of these consequences is inevitable. Each occurs only in connection with the ways that people interpret religious beliefs and incorporate them into their lives. But it is important to study the conditions under which specific consequences occur.

These four scenarios illustrate that the bodies of Muslim women are "contested terrain." Today, they remain at the center of deep political, cultural, and religious struggles about what is important, what is right and wrong, and how social life should be organized. Muslim women in sports embody and personify these struggles. On the one hand, these athletes are active subjects asserting new ideas about what it means to be a Muslim woman. On the other hand, they're passive objects used in debates about morality and social change in the world.

Of course, there are significant variations in the rights and autonomy of women in different countries where Islam is the dominant religion. But in general, struggles over issues of religion and gender will continue for Muslim women participating publicly in sports. At the same time, Muslim women living in predominantly Christian countries sometimes use sports played in private as a refuge and an opportunity to spend time with peers who share their beliefs. But coming to terms with "Allah's will" continues to be a challenge for many Muslim women. Their sports participation often depends on the support of people working in sports organizations. For those in sports management it raises an important question: What strategies are most effective in promoting inclusion and accommodating religious diversity in programs and facilities?

Traditional Hindu practices in India are heavily gendered and call for women to be secluded and veiled—that is, confined to private, family-based spaces and covered with robes and scarves. For example, when Hindu girls were interviewed in a study about sports participation their responses indicated that "mothers and grandmothers still struggle with allowing girls to be physically active. One of the reasons could be the clothing they wear" (Araki et al., 2013). These traditions and practices were originally linked with a caste system in which religion was used to justify and maintain social inequalities. The caste system consisted of complex norms and beliefs that regulated activities and relationships throughout Indian society. Individuals were born into a particular caste, and their caste position marked their social status in society as a whole.

Officially, the caste system is illegal today, but its cultural legacy continues. This explains why women with a heritage traced back to middle and upper castes have considerable freedom, but women and many men from lower-caste heritage live with persistent poverty, unemployment, and illiteracy. Current patterns of sports participation are influenced by these factors, even though people may embrace "modernized" Hindu beliefs that accommodate increasing secularization in Indian society. Although the caste system was never grounded exclusively in Hindu religious beliefs, Hinduism was organized by upper caste people so that it reproduced the social importance of castes and caste membership. This topic has yet to be studied in terms of its connection with sports and other physical activities. Additionally, there is a need for research on how Hindus in India and other countries combine religious beliefs with an intense passion for cricket.

Sports participation emphasizes personal achievement and self-promotion, and it involves playing games that produce no essential goods or services, even though people create important social occasions around sport events. This makes sports participation a self-centered, self-indulgent activity. Although training often involves personal sacrifices and pain, it focuses on the development and use of personal physical skills, often to the exclusion of other activities and relationships. Realizing this can create a crisis of meaning for athletes who have dedicated their lives to personal achievements in sports.

One way to deal with this crisis of meaning is to define sport participation as an act of worship, a platform for giving witness, or a manifestation of God's plan for one's life (Hoffman, 2010; Krattenmaker, 2010). For example, US track-and-field athlete Jesse Williams put it this way at the 2012 London Olympics: "Jesus Christ is the reason why I am able to perform at this level, and I know He has a plan for me. That puts things into perspective before, during and after competition. I know God has put me in this place to represent Him." Many Christian athletes and coaches like to quote Colossians 3:23 in the Bible: "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, working for the Lord, not for men." This enables them to define their sports participation as a sacred rather than a secular activity. As a result, their doubts about the worthiness of what they do are eliminated because playing sports is sanctified as a calling from God. Additionally, it is comforting to know that your sport career is part of God's plan.

Then, in his opening prayer, Falwell declared, "Father, we don't want to be mediocre, we don't want to fail. We want to honor You by winning" (in Capouya, 1986, p. 72). More recently, university chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. proudly stated that he was carrying out his father's vision (Pennington, 2012).

Other church-affiliated colleges and universities have used sports in similar but less overt ways to attract students. Catholic schools—including the University of Notre Dame, Gonzaga, Georgetown, and Boston College—have used football and/or basketball programs to build their prestige as church-affiliated institutions. Brigham Young University, affiliated with the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), has also done this. Smaller Christian colleges around the United States formed the National Christian Collegiate Athletic Association (NCCAA) in the mid-1960s and today they continue to sponsor championships and recruit Christian student-athletes to their schools.

Religions also can sanctify norms and rules by connecting them with divinities. In this way, some Christians connect the moral worth of athletes with the quality of their play and their conformity to team rules and the commands of coaches. This combination of Christianity and sport is very powerful, and coaches have been known to use it as a means of motivating and controlling athletes. Coaches see obedience to their rules as necessary for team success, and religious beliefs can sometimes be used to promote obedience by converting it into a divine mandate.

People often debate whether it is appropriate to pray for victories or other forms of athletic success. Some argue that using prayer this way trivializes religion by turning it into a training strategy. Others say that if prayers bring a sense of harmony and feelings of self-worth to an athlete, praying could enhance performance (Briggs, 2011; Krattenmaker, 2012).

Buddhism and philosophical Hinduism emphasize physical and spiritual discipline, but they do not inspire believers to strive for Olympic medals or physically outperform or dominate other human beings in organized competitive sports. Instead, most of the current expressions of Buddhism and Hinduism focus on transcending the self and the material world. Beliefs emphasize that physical reality is transient and the human condition is inherently fragile—neither of which is consistent with training to be an elite athlete, signing endorsement contracts, or being inducted into a sport hall of fame. For example, 80 percent of the 1.3 billion people in India identify themselves as Hindu, and athletes from India have won fewer than 30 medals in Olympic history, compared with nearly 3000 won by US athletes. This is due to many factors, and religion is one of them. China, where Buddhism is practiced by about 300 million people, sent teams to the Olympics only four times prior to 1984 and until recently was not very successful in the competitions. But during the past three decades, political interests have trumped religious interests and athletes from China are winning more medals in international competitions.

People revise religious beliefs as changes occur in their cultures and as belief systems travel from one culture to another. This is true for Buddhism and Hinduism as well as other world religions. Of course, there are many variations of Buddhist beliefs and practices, and most of them reflect the orientations of particular teachers or Masters. The island of Taiwan, off the southeast coast of China, is home to a form of "humanistic Buddhism" in which sports have been used to promote health and teach Buddhist principles (Yu, 2011). Competitive success is important, but more important is focusing on good everyday thoughts, words, and deeds.

Although Muslim nations in many parts of Central and Southeast Asia have no religious restrictions on girls and women playing sports, Islamic beliefs in other parts of the world legitimize patriarchal structures and maintain definitions of male and female bodies that discourage girls and women from playing sports and restrict their everyday access to sports participation opportunities.3

Physical activities in many Muslim nations are sex segregated. Men are not allowed to look at women in public settings, and women must cover their bodies with robes and head scarves, even when they exercise. These norms are especially strong among fundamentalist Muslims, which is why national Olympic teams from some Muslim nations have few female athletes. The nations with the tightest restrictions include Iran, Afghanistan, Oman, Kuwait, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Sudan. However, an increasing number of women from Islamic countries have participated in recent Asian Games, and some countries now allow women to be spectators at men's soccer matches and other men's sport events (Alaei, 2019; Dorsey, 2018). The connection between gender, sport, and Islam is discussed further in the Reflect on Sports box "Allah's Will."

Organized competitive sports and religions are cultural practices with different histories, traditions, and goals. Each has been socially constructed in different ways, around different issues, and through different types of relationships. This means that combining religious beliefs with sports participation requires adjustments—either in a person's religious beliefs or in the way a person plays sports.

Physical educator Shirl Hoffman (2010) has made the case that there are built-in conflicts between some Christian religious beliefs and the actions required in many power and performance sports. Christianity, he explains, is based on an ethos emphasizing the importance of means over ends, process over product, quality over quantity, and caring for others over caring for self. But power and performance sports emphasize winning, final scores, season records, personal performance statistics, and self-display.

A similar strategy has been adopted by top Catholic officials. In 2004, Pope John Paul II established a new Vatican office dedicated to "Church and Sport." Although its primary stated goal is to reform the culture of sport, it is also concerned with making Catholicism relevant in the lives of people, especially men, who are no longer involved in their parishes or using Catholic beliefs to guide their lives. Today, the office sponsors a talk radio sport program to attract Italian men who no longer see the Catholic Church as relevant to them; soccer is a central focus of the program on Vatican radio. It has also published books summarizing presentations on sports from a Catholic perspective and serves a guide for Catholics associated with sports (Pontifical Council for the Laity, 2006, 2008, 2011).

Pope Francis has supported the connection between Catholicism and sport through many of his addresses on the topic. However, the emphasis among Catholic officials is less on evangelizing and more on preventing men from leaving Catholicism and urging athletes to use Catholic dogma to inform their involvement in sports.

Prayers before sport events are common in the United States. They're said silently by individuals, aloud by small groups of players or entire teams in pregame huddles, and occasionally over public address systems by students or local residents.

Public prayers are allowed at private events, and all people in the United States have the right to say silent, private prayers for any purpose at any time—and this allows one or more students to kneel and say a private prayer before or after a game. As long as an event is not connected with a public, tax supported organization and as long as people pray privately, prayers are legal in connection with sports (Byrd, 2017; Green, 2016).

Religions change over time and differ from one culture to the next due to the influence of prophets and theologians and decisions made by religious leaders. They are held together over time by believers who share beliefs about values and truths that transcend here and now reality. Related to these values and truths are the norms that believers use to assess the morality of individual actions, and identify good and evil in the world. In this sense, religions support the "moral and ethical backbone" of societies (Dorsey, 2019). As such, they can bring people together around shared values or they can drive people apart when values clash and create irreconcilable differences.

Religions are powerful because people use them as sense-making perspectives and guides for action. For this reason, they share certain characteristics with ideologies. Both are parts of culture organized around beliefs accepted on faith or taken for granted; both are used to to guide choices and actions and explain the meanings of objects, events, and experiences. However, ideologies focus mostly on secular, here-and-now, material world issues, and they're neither automatically nor inevitably linked with a supernatural realm or a divinity. Religions, on the other hand, always bring a divinity or the supernatural into the sense-making process and connect meaning and understanding to a sacred realm that transcends the here-and-now material world.

Some team owners also see "born-again athletes" as good long-term investments because they "are less likely to get arrested" (Nightengale, 2006).

Religious beliefs also may keep athletes out of trouble by encouraging them to become involved in church-related and community-based service programs. This involvement also separates them from risky off-the-field lifestyles.

It's easy to lose perspective in sports, to let it define you and foreclose other parts of your life. In the face of this threat, some athletes feel that religious beliefs enable them to transcend sports and bring balance to their lives. Domonique Foxworth, a former NFL player, explains that "there is no better way to calm an eager rookie before a big game than to put the game in perspective by reminding him of his spiritual beliefs" (Foxworth, 2005, 2D). This makes playing sports part of God's plan, and it becomes easier for athletes to face challenges and deal with the inevitable disappointments experienced in sports. In the process, they keep sports in perspective.

Religious beliefs and rituals can be powerful tools in creating bonds between people. When they're combined with sports participation, they can link athletes together as spiritual teammates, building team solidarity and unity in the process. Many coaches know this, and some have used Christian beliefs as rallying points for their teams.

When they study religion and sport, they argue that the fundamental character of each is essentially different in the following ways:

Religious beliefs, meanings, rituals, and events are fundamentally mystical and sacred, whereas sport beliefs, meanings, rituals, and events are fundamentally clear-cut and secular. The purpose of religion is to transcend the circumstances and conditions of the material world in the pursuit of eternal life, whereas the purpose of sport is to embrace material reality and seek victories through physical performance. Religion involves faith in the primacy of its beliefs and rituals, whereas sport involves competition to establish objective superiority. Religion emphasizes humility and love, whereas sport emphasizes personal achievement and conquest. Religious services highlight a collective process of acknowledging the sacred and supernatural, whereas sport events highlight a collective commitment to a here-and-now outcome with secular significance.

Most of the religious groups and organizations previously mentioned, excluding Catholics, promote a specific form of Christianity—one based on a loosely articulated conservative ideology and a fundamentalist orientation toward life.

Religious fundamentalism is based on the belief that the secular foundation of modern societies is inherently corrupt and can be redeemed only if people reorganize their personal lives and the entire social order to manifest the absolute and unchanging Truth contained in a sacred text. Fundamentalists in all religions emphasize that this reorganization requires people to be personally committed to the supernatural or transcendent source of truth (God, Allah, Christ, Mohammed, "the universe," the spirit world), which provides answers to all questions. These answers are revealed through sacred writings, the verbal teachings of divinely inspired leaders and prophets, and personal revelations.

For most of the twentieth century these questions were not asked, because it was assumed that sports, especially violent sports, were pagan rather than Christian activities. Athletes were not seen as representatives of Christian ideals. But acceptance of the great sport myth and the belief that sports participation imparts purity and goodness made it possible to claim that being a tough, aggressive athlete was consistent with Christian values.

Research suggests that Christian athletes combine their religious beliefs with sports participation in diverse ways (Baker, 2007; Butterworth & Senkbeil, 2017). However, in elite power and performance sports most self-described Christian athletes don't think about possible conflicts between their religious beliefs and their actions in sports (Oppenheimer, 2013; Sinden, 2013). At the same time, a few athletes do struggle with the conflict between the moral ethos of sports and the moral ethos of their Christian faith. To be selfless, a primary goal in most religious belief systems, including Christianity, is contrary to what is required to excel in sports. This has recently become an issue among some Christians who wonder if brain damage caused by head hits in football and MMA fights interferes with using those sports as a form of witness (Blakely, 2014; Watson and Brock, 2014; Krattenmaker, 2012).

Religions and sports change as people's values and interests change and as power shifts in society, but it appears that sports change little, if at all, when combined with religion. Instead, it seems that religious beliefs and rituals are called into the service of sports, or modified to fit the ways that dominant sports are defined, organized, and played in society (Oppenheimer, 2013).

Robert Higgs makes this point in his book God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America (1995). He explains that the combination of sports and Christian beliefs has led religion to become "muscularized" so that it emphasizes a gospel of discipline, duty, and self-righteousness rather than a gospel of stewardship, social responsibility, and humility. Muscularized religion gives priority to the image of the knight with a sword over the image of the shepherd with a staff. This approach, emphasizing a Christian's role as "the Lord's warrior," fits with the power and performance sports that are popular today.

The issues facing Mirza were avoided by Bahrain-born sprinter Ruqaya Al Ghasara. Since 2004 she has been winning medals and setting records while wearing her trademark white headscarf and red bodysuit. When Al Ghasara won the 100-meters at the West Asian Games in 2007, she told reporters, "I have no problems with the hijab. I have a great desire to show that there are no problems with wearing these clothes. Wearing a veil proves that Muslim women face no obstacles and encourages them to compete in sport" (Algazeera, 2006). When pressed further, she said, "It's not just a matter of wearing a piece of cloth. There is something very special about wearing the hijab. It gives me strength. I feel lots of support from society because I am wearing the Islamic hijab. There is a relationship between the hijab and the heart" (IAAF, 2007).

Sadaf Khadem, a boxer from Iran pushed normative boundaries related to clothing in 2019 when she was the first Iranian woman to box in an official match in France against a French opponent (Pretot, 2019; Smith, 2019). She wore traditional boxing shorts and a tank top as other female boxers do, and this led Iranian authorities to issue a warrant for her arrest in her home country. To avoid jail, she canceled her trip home and stayed in Europe.

Most sociologists who study religions and sports see them as cultural practices that are created by people as they live with each other and give meaning to their experiences and the world around them. This is a social constructionist approach, and it is based on evidence showing that religions and sports have diverse forms and meanings that are understandable only in connection with the social and cultural conditions under which people create and maintain them. Furthermore, these forms and meanings change over time as social and cultural conditions change.

Social constructionists generally use cultural and interactionist theories to guide their work. That is, they study social relations, power relations, and the meanings given to the body by people who have h religious beliefs. They also examine the ways that religious beliefs influence movement, physical activity, sports participation, and the organization of sports. They ask why sports and religions are male-dominated spheres of life and then study gender ideology in relation to religion, the body, and sports. They also investigate the ways that people combine religious beliefs with sports participation and the social consequences of those combinations in specific social worlds.

Essentialists argue that there are fundamental differences between Super Bowl Sunday and Easter Sunday, even though both are important days for many people. Similarly, they see fundamental differences between a hockey team's initiation ceremony and a baptism, a seventh-inning stretch and an evening prayer, a cathedral and a stadium.

Some essentialists are religious people who believe that religion and sport are fundamentally different because religion is divinely inspired and sport is not. They often claim that the essentially sacred character of religion is corrupted when combined with the essentially secular character of sport (Hoffman, 2010; White, 2008). Nonreligious essentialists don't believe in divine inspiration, but they also conclude that the cultural meanings and social consequences of religion and sport are fundamentally different.

These similarities are striking, but most scholars also note that there are important differences between sports and religions. Some say that these differences are grounded in the unique essential natures of sport and of religion, and others say that they are inevitable differences grounded in the social and political histories of each. These positions are explained in the following two sections.

Some people argue that religion and sport each have a unique, separate truth, or essence. The essence of religion, they believe, is grounded in divine inspiration, whereas the essence of sport is grounded in human nature.2 They argue that religion and sport reveal basic truths that transcend time and space, and people "live out" these truths every day, but the truths offered by religion are clearly different from the truths offered by sport.

Cox also explained that 1 in 5 religious fans believe that if God is involved in sports, there will be times when their teams and athletes will be cursed and suffer negative consequences.

Sometimes it's difficult to separate the use of religion from the use of magic and superstition among athletes.

Evangelical Christian organizations also faced pushback in China after they had been banned by the Chinese government, but they took their evangelizing underground and spoke with uncounted Chinese people and spectators at the 2008 Olympic and Paralympic Games (4 Winds Christian Athletics, 2008; Associated Press, 2008). This led organizations to plan ahead for the strategies they would use at London 2012 and Rio de Janeiro 2016 where they experienced record success for passing out materials and encouraging professions of faith (Blazer, 2015; Cobb, 2016). This approach to sports evangelizing has also been used at the men's FIFA World Cup, the Pan American Games, and Super Bowls, among other sport mega-events.

Such efforts to evangelize are not new, but today they are highly organized and coordinated in connection with major events, such as the Super Bowl, FIFA World Cups, the Pan American Games, and other sports mega-events.

Anthropologist Susan Brownell (1995, 2008) has studied physical culture and forms of Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist ideas and practices in her comprehensive studies of the body and sport in China. She notes that each of these life philosophies is actually a general theory of the nature and principles of the universe. As with Islam, this makes it difficult to separate "religious beliefs" from cultural ideology as a whole. Each of these life philosophies emphasizes the notion that all human beings should strive to live in accord with the energy and forces of nature. The body and physical exercise are seen as important parts of nature, but the goal of movement is to seek harmony with nature rather than to overcome or dominate nature or other human beings.

Tai chi is a form of exercise based on this cultural approach to life and living. Some versions of the martial arts are practiced in this spirit, but others, including practices outside China, are grounded in secular traditions of self-defense and military training. China's success in recent international competitions, raises other questions about the possible connections between religious beliefs and sports participation. Therefore, research is needed to investigate the implications of Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism as they have been integrated into the lives of various segments of the vast and diverse Chinese population.

The connection between Christian values and the perceived purity and goodness of sports was clearly highlighted in 1971 by Billy Graham, the best-known and most highly respected evangelist of the later twentieth century. A long-time outspoken promoter of sports as a builder of moral character, Graham summarized the spirit in which many religious organizations have viewed sports over the last century:

The Bible says leisure and lying around are morally dangerous for us. Sports keep us busy; athletes, you notice, don't take drugs. There are probably more committed Christians in sports, both collegiate and professional, than in any other occupation in America (in Newsweek, 1971, p. 51).

The importance of distinguishing between the sacred and secular is illustrated by answers to the following questions. First, do you think that people in your town would object to a sport stadium having Pepsi, Budweiser, and McDonald's logos on scoreboards and signs placed around the venue? Second, do you think those people would accept the same logos placed on the pulpit and incorporated into its stained-glass windows in their church, temple, synagogue, or mosque? My guess is that having logos in the stadium is a non-issue, but putting them in a place of religious worship is certain to cause controversy, with people saying that they degrade the sacred meaning given to their (God's) house of worship and the sacred objects in it.

The diversity of religions and religious beliefs around the world is extensive. Human beings have dealt with inescapable problems of human existence and ultimate questions about life and death in many ways. In the process of creating answers and explanations, they've developed rich and widely varied religions. When sociologists study religions, they examine the ways that people use religious beliefs as they give meaning to themselves, their experiences, and the world around them. They also focus on the ways that religious beliefs inform people's feelings, thoughts, and actions. When religious beliefs set some people apart from others and connect power, authority, and wisdom in the secular world with a divinity or supernatural forces, religion has even deeper and more socially significant consequences.

Christian athletes often say that religion helps keep them "on track" and avoid the risky lifestyles that often exist in the social worlds that develop around certain sports. For example, an NFL player said, "Before I found the Lord, I drank! I whoremongered! I cussed! I cheated! I manipulated! I deceived!" (in Corsello, 1999, p. 435).

The fact that religious beliefs may separate athletes from risky off-the-field lifestyles and keep them focused on training in their sports has not been lost on some coaches who are attracted to the possibility that religion may help athletes control their actions and avoid trouble that could disrupt team focus. This is why many professional teams—in the United States more than other countries—include Christian chaplains on their teams.

Despite important differences between the organization and stated goals of sports and religions, people have combined these two spheres of life in mutually supportive ways. In some cases, people with certain religious beliefs have used sports for religious purposes, and in other cases, people in sports have used religion to define and give meaning to their sport participation.

The frequency with which people combine Christian beliefs and sports raises interesting questions. Why have Christian organizations and beliefs, in particular, been linked to and combined directly and explicitly with sports? Why haven't other religions been linked with sports and sports participation to the same extent? How have Christian organizations used sports, and how have athletes and sports organizations used Christianity and Christian beliefs? What are the dynamics and social significance of these connections? These issues are discussed in the following sections.

During the mid-1800s, influential Christian men, described as "muscular Christians" in England and New England, argued that Christianity at that time had become feminized and promoted the idea that the physical condition of a man's body had religious significance. They believed that the male body was an instrument of good works and that meeting the physical demands of godly behavior required good health and physical conditioning. Although most Christians didn't agree with this approach, the idea that there might be a connection between the physical and spiritual dimensions of human beings grew increasingly popular (Baker, 2007; Guttmann, 1978, 1988; Watson et al., 2013).

The idea that the body had moral significance and that moral character could be strengthened with physical conditioning encouraged many religious organizations to use sports in their efforts to recruit boys and men. For example, the YMCA grew rapidly between 1880 and 1920 as the organization built athletic facilities in many communities and sponsored sport teams. Canadian James Naismith invented basketball in 1891 while he was a student at the Springfield, Massachusetts, YMCA. William Morgan, the physical activities director at a YMCA in Holyoke, Massachusetts, invented volleyball in 1895.

Social constructionists realize that the meanings and practices that constitute sports and religions vary by time and place. Religious beliefs and rituals change with new revelations and visions, new prophets and prophecies, new interpretations of sacred writings, and new teachers and teachings. These changes often reproduce the cultural contexts in which they occur, but there are times when they inspire transformations in social relations and social life. Sports are viewed in similar terms—as socially constructed and varying cultural practices that usually reproduce existing meanings and social organization but have the potential to challenge and transform them.

The question of whether sports and religions are essentially the same or different does not inspire critical sociological analysis. More important to sociologists are the ways that people participate in the formation and transformation of social and cultural life and how sports and religions are involved in those processes. Unfortunately, research on sports and religions is scarce. Scholars who study religions are seldom interested in studying sports, and scholars who study sports are seldom interested in studying religions. The studies that do exist focus primarily on Christian belief systems, particularly in North America. Therefore, we know little about sports and major world religions, even though it would be useful to understand how various religious beliefs are related to conceptions of the body, expressions of human movement, the integration of physical activity into everyday life, and participation in sports. Such knowledge could be used to create more culturally inclusive sports programs.

The record of Christian organizations indicates that they give primary emphasis to building faith one person at a time. Consequently, they do not devote many resources to eliminating problems in sports other than occasional condemnations of overcommercialization and drug use. Noted sports historian William Baker points out that evangelical Christians generally assume that reform occurs only when individual athletes accept Christ into their lives, so their emphasis is on evangelizing over social action and social justice.

Their approach is based on the "primacy of faith"—the idea that faith rather than good works alone is the basis for spiritual salvation. Critics of this approach argue that faith without good works is meaningless, and that people who do good works can be saved even if they haven't given their lives to Christ. But this is a matter of faith rather than the sociology of sport.

Unlike other religions, Christianity has inspired believers to use sports for many purposes.

These include (a) promoting spiritual growth; (b) recruiting new members and promoting religious beliefs and organizations; and (c) promoting fundamentalist beliefs and evangelical orientations.

Although there is little research on this topic, Christian athletes in power and performance sports could use one or more of three strategies to solve moral dilemmas about the value of what they do in sports.

They could focus on the ascetic aspects of sports and see themselves as enduring pain for God's sake (Blazer, 2019). They could strive to be the best they can be as athletes so they can more effectively use sports as a platform for evangelizing or doing good works off the field. They could drop out of power and performance sports, and seek other sports and activities that fit more closely with their religious beliefs. Figure 15.2 illustrates the two factors most likely to create conflict and doubts experienced by athletes and the strategies used to reduce them. On the basis of statements made by athletes on the FCA and AIA websites, it appears that Strategy B, options 1 and 2, would be most commonly used.

We need more information about the connections between various world religions, ideas about the body, and participation in physical activities and sports.

This information would help us understand the lives of billions of people who participate in various forms of physical activities and sports but do not connect them directly with religious organizations or use them as sites for religious witness. This is different from the tendency of some Christians to attach their religion to institutionalized, competitive sports that already exist for nonreligious purposes.

Apart from major events, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes publishes Sharing the Victory (STV), a widely circulated magazine that uses a biblically informed perspective to report on sports and athletes. Articles highlight Christian athletes and their religious testimony. Most athlete profiles emphasize that life "without a commitment to Christ" is superficial and meaningless, even if one wins in sports.

This method of using athletes to evangelize is now a key strategy. As the founder of the FCA asked over a half century ago, "If athletes can sell razor blades and soft drinks, why can't they sell the Gospel?" This approach corresponds with the fact that some high-profile media evangelists pair up with celebrity athletes whose statements about their fundamentalist Christian beliefs serve to promote the ministry of the evangelist.

Graham's statement about drugs sounds naive today, but he accurately noted that many Christians see sports as activities that symbolize and promote moral development.

This perception, despite evidence to the contrary, remains strong in North America.

The Christian athlete movement worldwide has been male-dominated from its inception, especially in the United States. But female Christian athletes in the United States have embraced the movement to such an extent that they now constitute the majority of participants in the American sports ministry. As these athletes became immersed in sports, some of them learned things about gender, their bodies, and sexuality that caused them to rethink the meaning of specific evangelical beliefs that they had internalized during their childhood and adolescence.

This process of dealing with moral dilemmas created among young women who used sports as a form of Christian witness was studied by religious studies scholar and anthropologist Blazer (2015, 2019). Data collected through the use of ethnographic research methods enabled Blazer to investigate the ways that the sport experiences of young conservative Christian women pushed them to expand their ideas about gender and marriage, sexuality and same-sex attraction, and the impact of femininity and heteronormativity in their lives. Their embodied experiences as athletes prompted them to seriously reflect on the meaning of evangelical expectations in light of the realities they experienced in sports. In the process, they pushed the boundaries of their religious beliefs.

Overman theorizes that these seven virtues are closely matched with the orientation and spirit that informs the meaning, purpose, and organization of modern sports, especially power and performance sports in societies that have been predominantly Christian for the past two centuries.

This theory is only partially supported by evidence because these virtues have been integrated into people's lives in many different ways, depending on historical and cultural factors. Furthermore, some of these virtues are not exclusive to Protestantism—they also exist in forms of Catholicism, Islam, and other religions, although no religion other than mainstream Protestantism is organized around a set of virtues the same as these seven.

Imagine facing death threats whenever you play sports. Imagine winning an Olympic gold medal, receiving death threats from people in your country who brand you as an immoral and corrupt woman, and then being forced to live in exile. At the same time, imagine that you are a heroine to many young women, who see you as inspirational in their quest for equal rights and opportunities to play sports.

This was the situation faced by Hassiba Boulmerka, the gold medalist in the 1500 meters at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, Spain. As an Algerian Muslim woman, she believed that being an international athlete did not require her to abandon her faith or her commitment to Islam. But those who condemned Boulmerka said that although it is permissible for women to participate in sports, it was not permissible to do so in shorts or T-shirts, or while men are watching, or when men and women train together, or when facilities do not permit total privacy, or, if you are married, unless your husband gives his permission.

Jerry Falwell, noted television evangelist, introduced intercollegiate athletics at his Liberty University in the 1970s with a similar explanation:

To me, athletics are a way of making a statement. And I believe you have a better Christian witness to the youth of the world when you competitively, head-to-head, prove yourself their equal on the playing field (in Capouya, 1986, p. 75).

Like many Jews, Klein was attracted to sports as a reaction to anti-Semitism (Brenner and Reuveni, 2006). He played typical American sports to assimilate, to fit in at a time when being like everyone else kept him from feeling different in his school and community. Excelling in sports disrupted the anti-semitic stereotype that Jews were "thinkers instead of doers"—smart people with frail bodies. Similar dynamics led Jews to dominate professional basketball in the United States from 1920 through the late 1940s, and boxing from 1910 to 1940 (Klein, 2008).

Today Jews sponsor the quadrennial Maccabiah Games in the year following the Olympics. These games are cultural rather than religious in origin and purpose. They were founded to foster Jewish identity and traditions and to showcase highly skilled Jewish athletes. The 2017 Maccabiah Games, often described as "the Jewish Olympics," involved more than 10,000 athletes from 85 countries in 45 sports. In addition to sports competitions, there are cultural and educational programs, all designed to create strong ties with Judaism, Israel, and the global Jewish community (Chabin, 2013). In recent year the Maccabiah Games have added three new divisions for Juniors, Masters, and Paralympic athletes.

It appears that no religion has an equivalent of the self-proclaimed "Christian athlete," which is a visible character in competitive sports in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Western Europe. This may be due in part to the Christian notion of individual salvation and how certain believers have applied it to everyday life. Additionally, some world religions focus on the transcendence of self, which means that believers seek to merge the self with spiritual forces rather than distinguishing the self by using sports participation to achieve personal growth and spiritual salvation. In fact, the idea of physically competing against others to publicly distinguish the self violates the core beliefs of many religions.

Unfortunately, our knowledge of these issues is limited. We know more about the ways that some North American athletes and coaches convert Zen Buddhist beliefs into strategies for improving golf scores, marathon times, and basketball teamwork than we do about the ways that Buddhism is related to sports and sports participation among the world's 500 million Buddhists. This is because much of our knowledge is grounded in Eurocentric science and limited personal experiences.

Historical evidence helps explain links between modern sports and contemporary Christian beliefs. In the late nineteenth century, German sociologist-economist Max Weber did a classic study titled The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904/1958). His research focused on the connection between the ideas embodied in the Protestant Reformation and the values underlying the growth of capitalist economic systems. He concluded that Protestant religious beliefs, especially those promoted by the reformer John Calvin, helped create a social and cultural environment in which capitalism could develop and grow. Weber explained that Protestantism promoted a "code of ethics" and a general value system that created in people deep moral suspicions about erotic pleasure, physical desire, and all forms of idleness. "Idle hands are the devil's workshop" was a popular Protestant slogan.

Weber also used historical data to show that this "Protestant ethic," as he referred to it, emphasized a rationally controlled lifestyle in which emotions and feelings were suppressed in a dual quest for worldly success and eternal salvation. This orientation, developed further in Calvin's notion of predestination, led people to define their occupation as a "calling" from God and to view work as an activity through which one's spiritual worth could be proven and displayed for others to see. This was socially significant because it linked the economy and material success with moral worth: Being rich was a sign of "being saved"—as long as you didn't spend the money on yourself.

These are the reasons that judges have consistently ruled that public prayers are not allowed at sport events sponsored by state organizations such as public schools. This continues to create management challenges for officials in schools and sport programs, especially as local populations become increasingly diverse in terms of religious beliefs.

What would you do if you were a coach and half of your team members wanted to read out loud from the Koran/Qur'an in the lockerroom before games?

Those who have filed lawsuits argue that the prayers affirm Christian beliefs and create informal pressures to give priority to those beliefs over others. They also say that those who don't join in and pray are subject to ridicule, social rejection, or efforts to convert them to Christianity. The people who support public prayers say they don't pressure anyone and that Christianity is the dominant religion in their towns and in the United States. However, they also assume that the public prayers will not be Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Baha'i, or Sikh prayers and that they will not contradict their Christian beliefs.

When judges rule on these cases they consider what would occur if prayers at public school sports events represented beliefs that contradicted Christian beliefs. Would Christians object if public prayers praised Allah, the Goddess, or multiple deities? What would happen if Muslim students said their daily prayers over the public address system in conjunction with a basketball game, if teams were asked to pray to Allah or the Prophet Muhammad, or if all football games were rescheduled to accommodate Muslim customs during their three- to four-week observance of Ramadan in October? These are important questions because over four billion people in the world do not hold Christian beliefs and about 1 in 4 Americans have beliefs that are not Christian.

People who think this way are essentialists

because they assume that the universe is governed by unchanging laws and that meaning and truth are inherent in nature.

Superstitions

consist of regularized, ritualistic actions performed to give a person or group a sense of control and predictability in the face of challenges. Thus, when athletes pray, it may be a form of religion or a form of magic and superstition, but for the person doing it, the purpose is usually to deal with the uncertainty in competitive sports.

Magic

consists of recipe-like rituals designed to produce immediate and practical results in the material world.

In sociological terms, religions are

religions are socially shared belief systems comprised of the words, symbols, metaphors, myths, and rituals that people use to think about their relationship with the supernatural realm and communicate their thoughts to others. Religious beliefs and rituals usually link the supernatural realm with a divinity, including God or gods.

The Protestant work ethic has been integrated into different cultures in different ways over the past 500 years. However, it emphasized values consistent with the spirit that underlies organized competitive sports as they've been developed in Europe and North America over the past 200 years. Sociologist Steven Overman explains this in his book, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Sport: How Calvinism and Capitalism Shaped American Games (2011). Overman shows that the Protestant ethic has emphasized a combination of the following seven key virtues: 4. Individualism

salvation is a matter of individual responsibility, initiative, and choice, and people control their spiritual destiny by accepting a personal relationship with God/Christ.

The Protestant work ethic has been integrated into different cultures in different ways over the past 500 years. However, it emphasized values consistent with the spirit that underlies organized competitive sports as they've been developed in Europe and North America over the past 200 years. Sociologist Steven Overman explains this in his book, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Sport: How Calvinism and Capitalism Shaped American Games (2011). Overman shows that the Protestant ethic has emphasized a combination of the following seven key virtues: 3. Goal directedness

spiritual salvation and the moral worth of human action depend on achievement and success.

The Protestant work ethic has been integrated into different cultures in different ways over the past 500 years. However, it emphasized values consistent with the spirit that underlies organized competitive sports as they've been developed in Europe and North America over the past 200 years. Sociologist Steven Overman explains this in his book, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Sport: How Calvinism and Capitalism Shaped American Games (2011). Overman shows that the Protestant ethic has emphasized a combination of the following seven key virtues: 1. Worldly asceticism

suffering and the endurance of pain has a spiritual purpose, godliness is linked with self-denial and a disdain for self-indulgence, and spiritual redemption is achieved only through self-control and self-discipline.

The Protestant work ethic has been integrated into different cultures in different ways over the past 500 years. However, it emphasized values consistent with the spirit that underlies organized competitive sports as they've been developed in Europe and North America over the past 200 years. Sociologist Steven Overman explains this in his book, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Sport: How Calvinism and Capitalism Shaped American Games (2011). Overman shows that the Protestant ethic has emphasized a combination of the following seven key virtues: 7. The time ethic

time has a moral quality and wasting time is sinful and a sign of weak moral character.

The Protestant work ethic has been integrated into different cultures in different ways over the past 500 years. However, it emphasized values consistent with the spirit that underlies organized competitive sports as they've been developed in Europe and North America over the past 200 years. Sociologist Steven Overman explains this in his book, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Sport: How Calvinism and Capitalism Shaped American Games (2011). Overman shows that the Protestant ethic has emphasized a combination of the following seven key virtues: 2. Rationalization

truth is discovered through human reason, and virtue is expressed through efficiency and measurable achievements.

The Protestant work ethic has been integrated into different cultures in different ways over the past 500 years. However, it emphasized values consistent with the spirit that underlies organized competitive sports as they've been developed in Europe and North America over the past 200 years. Sociologist Steven Overman explains this in his book, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Sport: How Calvinism and Capitalism Shaped American Games (2011). Overman shows that the Protestant ethic has emphasized a combination of the following seven key virtues: 6. The work ethic

work is a calling from God and people honor God by working hard and developing their "God-given potential" in whatever they do.

The Protestant work ethic has been integrated into different cultures in different ways over the past 500 years. However, it emphasized values consistent with the spirit that underlies organized competitive sports as they've been developed in Europe and North America over the past 200 years. Sociologist Steven Overman explains this in his book, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Sport: How Calvinism and Capitalism Shaped American Games (2011). Overman shows that the Protestant ethic has emphasized a combination of the following seven key virtues: 5. Achieved status

worldly success is associated with goodness and salvation, whereas failure is associated with sin and damnation.