Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America by Randall Balmer (review)

Reviewed by: Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America by Randall Balmer Isaiah Ellis Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America. By Randall Balmer. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. xii, 177. $25.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-7006-5.) I grew up Jewish in a small Texas town, surrounded by church steeples and multimillion-dollar high school football stadiums. A middling, but persistent, athlete, I spent a good part of my youth on the field of play. I also spent a good deal of time immersed in the Christian God-talk that permeated these environments. Though the many pre-game prayers I sat through silently did not speak to or for me, it seemed I was to play “in Jesus’ name” whether I liked it or not. With these memories ready at hand, I eagerly picked up Randall Balmer’s Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America. It proved worthwhile and, at times, perplexing. One of America’s preeminent historians of evangelical Christianity, Balmer seeks deeper connections between religion and sport than the well-known stories of “bivocational” figures, whose careers and callings spanned [End Page 750] preaching and athletics (p. 9). These deeper structures include origin myths, ritual behaviors, festival calendars, credos, hymns and chants, systems of authority, narratives of sacrifice and redemption, communal ecstasy, and even language (for example, football’s “Hail Mary” pass and hockey’s penalty box, also known as the “sin bin”). Above all, sport has represented a search for order amid changing times. Balmer devotes one broad, synthetic chapter each to North America’s “four major team sports,” baseball, football, hockey (plus lacrosse), and basketball (p. 3). Mexico and soccer are left out without much explanation, and so hockey supplies the “North American” frame. Football brings the U.S. South into the narrative, and Balmer interweaves a discussion of segregation, civil rights, racial violence, and militarism into the story of the game’s development. The football chapter will prove more useful to southern historians than the others, but the book’s overall approach recommends it to a broader audience. The connective structure Balmer lays out deserves more playing time in historical scholarship and teaching on religion. Thinking structurally also enables Balmer to link multiple sports in a relatively unified narrative—something sport historians do not often do. He thus sheds light on the larger cultural landscape of American sport in ways that could enliven undergraduate curricula in history and in any classroom setting that calls for structural approaches to religion. The history classroom is in need of this approach. Balmer does not shy away from the dark side of sport history, focusing extensively on race, violence, and, to a lesser extent, class, gender, and empire in the development of the four sports under discussion. Yet Balmer’s panoramic account offers perplexingly generous views of sport’s role in society overall. At times, he seems to want to serve as sport’s critic and its caretaker, an attitude that reflects another feature sport and religion share: the fraught position of the insider. By his own admission in the introduction, Balmer’s reason for writing the book in the first place is that he is a sports fan, ultimately trusting—believing, he might say—in the enterprise of sport. This perspective allows him to engage with the baked-in violences and hegemonies he recounts in hopes of encouraging progressive change. Yet more incisive questions about the societal cost of admission to this progress—the relentless corporatization of amateur athletics; the corruption, exclusions, and exploitations inherent in the big business of sport; and the continuing militarization of major sporting events—are left largely undisturbed. It will be important for scholars and citizens to seriously consider whether the game has gotten out of hand. Yet, on a smaller scale, Passion Plays can help religiously different athletes put a face to the sometimes subtle alienations of participating in the thoroughly Christian world of American sport. Isaiah Ellis University of Toronto Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

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