Sports and religion are great forces in America.
For example, in the 1960s, Muhammad Ali used his fame as a boxer to speak about his faith, civil rights, and his refusal to enlist in the Army during the Vietnam War.
“Either I have to obey the laws of the land or I have to obey the laws of Allah,” said Ali, a member of the Nation of Islam. “I have nothing to lose by standing up for what I believe in. “We’ve been in prison for four hundred years. “
In “The Politics of Games and Protest: Religion and Sports in America,” University of Washington students use religion and sports to examine American life, including social protests like Ali’s.
“Sports is where a lot of conversations about our values as a society come to the fore,” said Cody Musselman, founder of the course and a postdoctoral fellow at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. .” “This is an opportunity for us to discuss larger social issues through the connection between religion and sport.”
Sports and religion have many similarities in America today. “They all have rituals,” Musselman said. “They all have institutions that they follow. They all have fans or crowds and followers. “There are holy places there and people make pilgrimages. “
However, Americans don’t always respect sports. Musselman said that in early American history, sports were viewed as deviant activities that drew people away from concerns about productivity and godly living.
This belief developed in the 19th century as frontier battlefields disappeared and the Industrial Revolution expanded leisure time. Musselman said religious leaders are beginning to see sports as a way to develop healthy citizens, both physically and mentally. Musselman pointed to football as an example.
“Football is seen as a way to strengthen the country,” she said. “The idea was that you could help shape the new American man through the game of football. This new, powerful form of robust Christianity reflected ideas about national identity formation and settler colonialism.”
To illustrate this point, Musselman introduced his students to the football team at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a Pennsylvania boarding school for Native Americans founded in 1879. In the early 1900s, the school’s teams were composed of below-average players, creating new, innovative football teams. Playing tricks, defeating Ivy League schools such as Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania.
“But in doing so, they upended the narrative of civilizational progress,” Musselman said. “Their success on the field gave rise to new rules that favored white American football players. Sports were (and still are) used to justify and Demonstrating racial and class hierarchies, white Protestant men represented the pinnacle of civilization.”
Marginalized groups have long been assimilated through sports, she said, citing the example of Catholics at the University of Notre Dame embracing football, or, in a lesser-known example, Jews playing baseball and managing the baseball team.
“We can think of sports as a place where people—athletes and fans—negotiate national belonging as a way of demonstrating Americanness,” Musselman said.
This quest for belonging spans race and gender.
“The example of Serena Williams (who grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness) highlights the difficulties of being a black female athlete—even when you are undoubtedly the greatest to ever play the sport one of the athletes. She is still struggling for recognition and a sense of belonging given her marginalized social status,” Musselman said. “We also use Colin Kaepernick’s protests (the NFL’s kneeling), the success of transgender athlete Leah Thomas, and Tim Tebow’s evangelism in our classes as examples to evaluate how athletes are using their platforms Mediation of commercial, political and religious interests.”
Additionally, the course explores unexpected topics such as cross-fitness, reality television, sports marketing, pre-Columbian indigenous sports, and more.
“My goal is for students to understand how relevant religion is to their daily lives,” Musselman said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that they believe in their own personal religion, it’s just the fact that religious influence is everywhere.”