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 Jeremy Sabella Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America. By Randall Balmer. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. x + 177. $25. This lucid survey examines how religious leaders, institutions, and ideas shaped the four major North American spectator sports of baseball, [End Page 81] football, basketball, and hockey. Over the course of 140 crisply-written pages, Balmer synthesizes American religious history and sports scholarship to offer a concise and engaging narrative that traces how religion and sports interweave in North America. Balmer opens by describing the sheer—one might say religious—intensity and focus with which sports fans dissect the minutiae of a given game over talk radio. This reflects how "the real locus of popular devotion in North America has shifted from the sanctuary to the stadium" (3). Tracing this shift reveals how the four major sports have come to function as both mirror and catalyst: they reveal entrenched problems in North American society even as they help spur change. Chapter one examines the game historically most closely associated with America: baseball. As with organized religion, its origins are murkier than popular belief suggests. Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball in 1839, although organized baseball did emerge in the 1840s (22). By the turn of the century, the sport had become entrenched in American culture and lore. It proved especially popular in industrial areas, where the outfield grass brought rural green to dingy urban outposts and gave factory workers respite from the tyranny of the clock (23–24). This provides historical context for the argument of David Chidester and others that in American culture, it is baseball that creates sacred space and marks sacred time. Furthermore, minoritized groups such as Native Americans, Blacks, Jews, Italians, and Latin Americans used baseball to contest their place in the American experiment, in part because a game where even the most sublimely gifted players only get a hit a third of the time captured the experience of claiming space in a hostile social context (28–29). Where baseball dramatizes the immigrant experience, football dramatizes war. Chapter two examines how early variants of the game spread during the Civil War as Union soldiers taught it to Confederates. When Alabama beat the Washington Huskies in the 1926 Rose Bowl, an Atlanta paper described it as the "greatest victory for the South since the first battle of Bull Run" (54). Football also became a proxy for religious conflict: immigrant communities that contended with anti-Catholicism took pride in Notre Dame football beating Protestants at their own game (55–56). The game's tactical evolution parallels the battlefield. The run-heavy style of play that predominated in the early twentieth century mimicked trench warfare in World War I. The passing element to the game developed alongside [End Page 82] the aerial attacks of World War II. As warfare became more highly specialized and strategically complex in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, so did football (69). Although the game's boosters argued that it inculcates Muscular Christian virtues such as perseverance, teamwork, and trust, it also reveals America's unsettling fixation with violence. Serious injury and even death were disturbingly common in the game's early days (67). Balmer also recounts lethal examples of racism. For instance, Greg Page, who desegregated the Southeastern Conference when he took the practice field for Kentucky in 1967, died from injuries sustained from white teammates piling on him during a drill (60). Over time football has helped Americans work through conflicts based in region, religion, and race (49). But at what brutal cost? As legendary NFL quarterback Troy Aikman notes, "the violence of the sport attracts us to the game" (68). "If there is any town east of, say, Ontario that does not claim to be the birthplace of ice hockey," Balmer quips in chapter three, "I should like to know about it" (77). Hockey grew out of First Nations game of lacrosse, taking organized form in the 1870s (78). The game helps cultivate the grit, toughness and resilience that surviving the long, harsh Canadian winter requires: hence...

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