Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America

Randall Balmer began his academic career as an early Americanist with a focus on Dutch religion in the middle colonies. Then in 1989, he published a book exploring the contemporary evangelical movement, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, that received widespread attention, launching Balmer into prominence as a commentator on religious trends in American life.For the past three decades, Balmer has continued to write, research, and teach on American religion, first at Columbia University and then Dartmouth College. His latest book, Passion Plays, fits within his broader body of work while offering a new angle: the subject of sports. Focusing on baseball, football, basketball, and hockey, Balmer has two aims: to examine “how the history of religion across North America connects in fascinating ways to the emergence of modern team sports” and to make the case that these religious roots and intersections help to explain “why sports inspires such passionate intensity” today (2).Balmer sets up his book with five chapters (plus an introduction), one for each of the four team sports, and a final chapter titled “Shut up and Dribble” that examines the social, political, and religious significance of sports in recent years. The chapters are short—the entire text, from the introduction to the end of the final chapter, clocks in at 132 pages. This is not a book aiming to make a major academic intervention; instead, this is a work of synthesis and interpretation intended for a thoughtful readership within and beyond the academy.As Balmer traces the origins and development of the four sports, he spends much of his time in the nineteenth century, highlighting the historical and cultural trends that shaped each sport's rise. But he also moves into more recent decades to consider the ways that “devotion to sports has eclipsed allegiance to traditional expressions of religion” (2). Indeed, for Balmer, there is something like an essence or spirit possessed by each sport, deposited in its foundational years, that continues to exert influence today.Take baseball, for example. Balmer suggests that the sport is defined by its paradoxes: a game with urban roots and pastoral imagery, shaped by the Industrial Revolution and yet rejecting (until recently) the regulation of the clock; supposedly birthed in the United States and yet it “replicates the experience of immigrants and outsiders” (23).Balmer seeks out similar interpretive frames for understanding the other three sports. He identifies football primarily with militarism and war. He views hockey as an expression of Canadian nationalism. Basketball, meanwhile, is presented as “the quintessential urban game” (102). This urban appeal was by design: white Protestant advocates of muscular Christianity, Balmer argues, hoped that it would help provide order and structure to the supposedly chaotic city.In style and approach, Balmer displays some similarity with Michael Novak's 1976 book, The Joy of Sports. Like Novak, Balmer tries to articulate distinctive meanings associated with specific team sports, offering historical analysis and theoretical reflections. Yet, while Novak's book was written, at least in part, as a conservative response to the work of sport scholars and activists like Harry Edwards and Jack Scott, Balmer has a more critical eye. He is not interested in defending sport as a cultural institution but instead in attempting to understand its enduring appeal.Balmer's book is also grounded in his expertise as a historian. In that sense, it carries some similarities with William Baker's Playing with God: Religion and Modern Sport (2007). Baker's book still stands as the most comprehensive historical treatment of religion and sports in the United States. Yet Balmer offers important updates and insights with a greater focus on questions of race and gender in particular.If there is a weakness to Balmer's book, it is simply that he is sometimes more interested in observations about the parallels between religious practice and sports participation than in analyzing the ways specific religious communities have interacted with and shaped the development of sports. In the football chapter, for example, Balmer spends several paragraphs explaining the ways that “sports radio can be understood in religious terms, with the host playing the role of cleric” (56). These passages are likely to play well in a religious studies classroom but might strike sport historians as too suggestive and speculative.Still, Passion Plays succeeds in synthesizing and repackaging material that will be familiar to sport historians, offering a compelling narrative with intriguing insights drawn from Balmer's perspective as a scholar of religion. It is an excellent contribution to the growing body of work on religion and sports. It would also be a helpful text in classes on American sport history—not just for the answers that it delivers but also for the questions that it asks and invites the reader to consider.

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