Download 3301 Lecture 30

Sociology 3301: Sociology of Religion
Lecture 30: Religion Outside the (God) Box II
Moving on with our look at unrecognized religious aspects of society, now that
we have looked at media religion, we turn to consider religion and sport, among other
things.
Religion and Sport:
Religion features prominently in sport. Famous athletes wear religious jewelry,
utilize religious gestures, pray together, and, when interviewed, often express thanks to
God. However, sociologists look at the vast amount of religious activity in and around
sport today and consider that it may serve to obscure a longer term trend toward the
secularization of sport (e.g. “Sport owns Sunday now, and religion is content to lease a
few minutes before the big games). Indeed, this is one thing that separates modern sport
from ancient athletics. Originally athletic competitions were fundamentally religious
enterprises meant to please the gods (e.g. the Olympics, the ball games of the Mayans and
Aztecs, relay races among the Apaches).
In the West, athletics began to be approached more secularly by the Romans, with
the principle purpose being entertainment (e.g. gladiatorial combat being half of the
“bread and circuses” that distracted the masses). While less extreme, modern sports have
adopted the Roman importance on winning and entertaining, and the secularization of
sport parallels the general societal pattern of secularization – one where religion has lost
effective control over vast areas of cultural life once conducted under its watchful eye.
Now, like many other things today, sport operates under its own rules and pursues its
own ends.
This societal secularization changes the overall relationship between sport and
religion, diminishing the religious significance of sport. However, institutional
differentiation of religion from other institutions enables the development of a religious
free market. This is fertile soil in which organizations can compete for attention and
adherents. U.S. evangelicals, for example, have become adept at using sports
organizations to advance their purposes.
Muscular Christianity and the YMCA:
The idea of “Muscular Christianity” – a Christian commitment to health and
manliness – may be found in the New Testament, but this term was not coined until the
mid 1800s. Indeed, before that time many Puritans were suspicious of sport for moral
reasons. Yet they and other Protestant sects eventually came to embrace sport through
this ideology. Religious leaders who supported linking sport and religion professed the
idea of the body as a temple. This provided a framework where a sound mind in a sound
body became essential in worship. The term “Muscular Christianity” was coined by the
press, as well as in adventure novels replete with high principles and manly Christian
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heroes – which sparked an interest in the social benefits of athleticism. While the main
focus originally was to address the concerns of boys so that they could apply religion to
their lives. While it took some time to catch on, over time this has become one of the
most notable tools employed in evangelical outreach ministries.
The YMCA was started in England with strict religious ideals. Appalled at city
lifestyles, George Williams created it as a place where men could fellowship together. Its
central activities originally were Bible studies, Christian readings, and prayer – with all
amusements prohibited. It was designed to educate and promote Christian responsibilities
in a world of temptation and self-indulgence. In 1851, the first American YMCA was
founded in Boston, modeled on its English counterparts. By 1856 there were over 50
YMCA’s in the U.S. As time went on, they began recruiting young men from all walks of
life and employing a more secular approach. Cards, secular novels, and athletic
competitions began to bring young people in – and then leaders could preach the word to
them. Whereas English YMCAs acted as safe havens for Christian young men, American
ones used popular activities to recruit and convert non Christians. Then, in 1860, the
annual convention decided that gyms should be built, and by 1890 more than half of the
YMCAs in the U.S. had them, soon followed by bowling alleys, boxing rings, and pools.
Through use of these facilities, along with camping trips and baseball leagues, the
YMCA used sport and teamwork to expose young men to Muscular Christianity and
“lead men to Christ.”
It is hard to underestimate their contribution. For example, bodybuilding,
volleyball, and basketball were all invented by clergy or religious individuals associated
with the YMCA.
Sport remains integral to YMCA programming today, yet the prevalence of these
secular activities marks a dramatic change in the approach today. While the ostensible
mission of the YMCA remains “to put Christian principles into practice through
programs that build healthy spirit, mind and body for all,” there is little organized effort
at the Y to proselytize today as the group has become secularized.
Evangelical Protestant Sports Ministries:
As the YMCA became secularized, other organizations arose to fill the gap.
Professional athletes began openly sharing their testimonies, a practice that opened the
door for prominent religious leaders to use them in their efforts to attract young people to
meetings. As well, evangelical sports organizations arose (e.g. Sports Ambassadors),
which accelerated the use of athletes as spokespersons for Christ, organizing exhibition
games in order to draw large crowds and then sharing testimonies during halftime.
As college sports became more popular, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes
(FCA) was organized as a student athlete Christian ministry, growing into an
organization of summer camps and retreats designed to promote Christian ideals among
high school and college athletes. Athletes in Action, another group, have a presence on
more than 100 U.S. campuses and 35 professional sports teams. It fields summer teams in
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many sports to promote the Christian message and personal testimonies of Christian
athletes.
Hence, an entirely new genre of religious organizational forms was created, with
sport occupying an essential presence. Unlike the formative years of the YMCA, which
used religion to legitimize sport, these modern groups use sport to legitimize religion.
This suggests the increasing social significance of sport and relatively decreasing social
significance of religion.
Religion and Spirituality at the Individual Level:
In a secular society people can choose whether to be religious and, if so, how they
are religious. They can choose to make religion part of their identity as an athlete, or to
make athletics part of their religious identity – or not. Many do visibly choose to connect
religion and sport, but, unfortunately, efforts to measure this sports/faith relationship have
lagged behind media visibility.
Some small-scale studies suggest a link. Storch et.al. (2004) found that athletes
had higher levels of conventional religious faith – and the two realms do share many
values (e.g. fair play). Overman (1997) highlighted the link between sport and the
Protestant ethic of self-discipline, delayed gratification, hard work, and success.
How generalizable are such findings? Yamane and Blake (2008), using
representative data from UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, and controlling
for several other variables, actually found the reverse: college athletes are actually less
religious than college students in general. It is possible that there may be a value conflict
between sport and religion (competitive aggression vs. cooperation and compassion), that
could lead to lower levels of religious commitment. However, the authors believe that
sport today is better understood as a secular competitor to religion. On this view, they are
both part of a zero-sum game where only one can win – since both require investments of
limited time and energy. Indeed, the most visible manifestations of religion in sport
(wearing jewelry or making religious gestures) may require no real effort. Yet, when
push comes to shove, for college athletes sport wins out over religion.
Of course, today it is important to distinguish between religion and spirituality.
Whereas the former is often associated with inherited tradition and dogmatic beliefs, the
latter is viewed as and individual quality, particularly as it relates to experience.
Spirituality is often seen as a more primary and pure relationship to the divine, raising the
possibility that college athletes are perhaps spiritual but not religious. If so, this might be
accounted for in two ways. First, one can easily be spiritual on one’s own terms, which
would make it easier for athletes to accommodate spirituality in their busy lives. Second,
for some, athletics itself can be a form of spiritual practice – with peak experiences
during performance sensitizing them to a spiritual dimension of life in general.
However, Yamane and Blake (2008) find no general support for this position.
Their findings suggest that college athletes are actually less spiritual too. Why? Perhaps
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because modern sport is the antithesis of play: highly structured, work-like, and extrinsic
as opposed to free and playful. Thus, it is precisely outside of organized sporting activity
that transcendence is to be found. As well, the modern ethic of work in sport trumps the
ethic of play – which is probably closer to spirituality now.
While college athletes appear generally to be less religious and spiritual than their
fellow students, one important exception did emerge in the above analysis. Evangelical
Protestant athletes are more religious and spiritual than college students in general. This
is not surprising given the history of “Muscular Christianity,” as well as the activities of
evangelical sports organizations on campuses. This theology enables evangelical
Protestants to sacralize sporting events and provides a framework for negotiating
conflicts between belief and sport. It is activated by such organizations’ ministers and
groups providing strong systems of social support for belief and practice (a.k.a.
“plausibility structures”), which are key to sustaining such religiosity.
Of course, more systematic studies on general populations are needed to flesh
such findings out further. But, for now, we can say provisionally that religion and sport
are largely separate spheres in people’s lives, but these do connect at some times and for
certain people. Yet, as we would expect from secularization, there appears to be no
inherent connection between them today. Thus, to say that there is now a fusion between
the two would be to overstate things. At certain times and places, religion and sport do
have a close relationship, but these are largely a thing of the past. The secularization of
sport as a social institution is a reality. It is also a reality that sport instills values into
young people that can have a pervasive and life long impact – rather like religion.
Invisible Religions:
This leads us to the issue of invisible religions. Several scholars have stressed
how individualization of religion enables each person in modern society to construct his
or her own meaning system by drawing from several religious and secular philosophies.
Thomas Luckmann (1967), in perhaps the most notable work, used an extraordinarily
broad definition of religion, referring to it as “the symbolic universe of meaning” that
infuses all of life with a sense of transcendent purpose. He emphasized worldview as an
elementary and universal manifestation of religion. In this respect, his ideas are similar to
other functional definitions. Yet, rather than limiting religion to macrosystems of
meaning that address death, suffering, and injustice, Luckmann sought to understand
worldview at all levels of generality and specificity. He insisted that “no single
interpretive scheme performs the religious function. It is rather the worldview as a whole,
as a unitary matrix of meaning” that defines one’s identity and serves as one’s religious
orientation. In essence, he pointed to personal identity as a form of religiosity. One’s
sense of identity – values, attitudes, dispositions, and sense of self-worth – are part of
his/her religiosity because all of these are related to feelings about what makes life worth
living. These are “invisible” forms of religion because they do not have the social
manifestations one ordinarily associates with it.
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This is very a broad definition. Some have objected that it makes everything
religious – or makes nothing at all specifically religious. Nevertheless, Luckmann defined
religiosity in a way quite compatible with that of a number of 20th century theologians.
Richard Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and others have strongly resisted the idea that one’s faith
or religiosity is expressed primarily through cognitive beliefs. Rather, one’s faith is most
fully found in everyday assumptions, actions, and one’s personality structure. They seek
to discover one’s “real” centre of worth by exploring the issue of what one ultimately
trusts. As some of the most widely esteemed theologians have defined religiosity in a
manner similar to Luckmann, we cannot simply dismiss him.
Luckmann believed that as society has become increasingly complex, and as
institutions have specialized their spheres of influence, traditional religions influence a
decreasing range of human behavior and thinking. As well, traditional religions tend to
freeze their systems of belief so as to make them seem more eternal, absolute, and
unchanging. Meanwhile, technological, political, and economic changes go on – at ever
accelerating rates. Luckmann felt that this has caused traditional forms of religion to
become irrelevant to the everyday experiences of the common person. He denied that this
represents a decline in religiosity. The common person is as religious as ever, but the
religiosity of the laity has taken on new forms. He insisted that claims of religious decline
are due to sociologists focusing on and traditional forms and measures, while ignoring the
rest.
In today’s world, people derive their sense of meaning by drawing upon a wide
range of religious and secular philosophies. Each competes for loyalty. Citizens, in turn,
are basically consumers in a marketplace of ideas. Each worldview posits its own center
of worth, system of values, and what makes life worth living. Popular religious tracts,
magazines, psychological theories, TV shows, political theories and social ideologies,
and websites, among other things, can all affect a person’s sense of both the meaning of
life and one’s personal “philosophy of life.”
Other organizations, social movements, or businesses also compete in the
philosophy of life marketplace. Libertarianism, primarily formulated by Ayn Rand,
politically exalts the rights of the individual to seek his or her self interests without
interference. It stresses individual initiative and the survival of the fittest – casting
selfishness as a virtue and altruism as a vice. Marxism, feminism, and various “social
justice” movements, in contrast, offer a coherent outlook on life and a constellation of
values that promise to bring a better life in the future through collective consciousness
and social action. Each such social movement offers a philosophy of life and set of values
that compete with traditional religions in defining the meaning and purpose of life.
Even business enterprises like Amway seek to motivate by stressing the primacy
of financial independence, the ultimate value of free enterprise, and the rewards of close
friendship with other distributors. In fact, the regular Amway weekend rallies can be seen
as plausibility structures that reinforce the believability of the values and outlook
presented by the corporation. This is all possible because of the privatization of religion.
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Talcott Parsons and Robert Bellah viewed the privatization process as healthy,
while Peter Berger saw it as evidence of decline – not so much of religion, but as
unhealthy for society. When people must construct their own meaning systems, these
may seem less eternal and compelling. The individual may thus experience anomie.
Further, individually constructed meaning systems may be so privatized that they offer
meaning only to the individual – ignoring the wider social structure. Because many exalt
the autonomy of the individual (self-realization, self-actualization, rights to individual,
social, and geographic mobility, etc), the locus of meaning is squarely on the individual
biography. With this locus of meaning, people are unlikely to make sacrifices on behalf
of the larger society. If this orientation continues indefinitely, the needs of society itself
will go unmet. For this reason, the privatization of religiosity could be unhealthy in the
long run for our society (i.e. akin to an autoimmune disease like AIDS).
Hence, Luckmann insisted that religiosity is not declining, but undergoing a great
transformation. An alternative form of religiosity has been developing – one that doesn’t
look like religion to many because it lacks the traditional institutional structures,
trappings, and dogmas that define religion in many people’s eyes.
Luckmann’s thesis has garnered much attention – and it should. Attempts have
since been made to measure the relative importance of traditional religious views and
other “popular” meaning systems in personal philosophies of life. The results are mixed –
some finding evidence of invisible religions and others not. Regardless, most social
scientists would grant that the meaning systems of most people today seem to be
somewhat eclectic, mixing traditional systems, civil religions, and other values in a
multiplicity of combinations. At present, we are not certain that such eclecticism is an
entirely modern phenomenon, or whether it is just more obvious and acceptable now.
People should reflect on the extent to which this is true of themselves, of the
meaning systems, values, and those of others around them that inform their lives today.
Quasi-Religious Movements:
Loosely integrated societies, where the intensity of commitment to cultural
traditions is low, are much more likely than integrated ones to generate cults and other
non-traditional religious movements. It is thus not surprising that the U.S. has many new
religious and quasi-religious movements. Some hold rather esoteric beliefs, others are
based around concepts from pop psychology. None attract a large following, and most
don’t even attempt to articulate a comprehensive worldview. Still, they have significantly
impacted a segment of the population. Some such movements have elaborated their
ideologies further, developed theodicies, and, though some people may only dabble in
them, for others have evolved into full blown NRMs (e.g. astrology, Transcendental
Meditation, Scientology, the Silva Method). While some might view these as essentially
business enterprises, some are explicit in their claim to being religious movements that
synthesize western and eastern spiritualities and modern science.
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Some have attempted to formulate an eclectic philosophy that synthesizes these
diverse orientations into a unitary – but very diverse – movement called the New Age.
Some proponents argue that a compelling new religion is emerging out of this – but what
it will amount to is largely in the eye of the beholder.
Still another form of quasi-religious movement has emerged out of science
fiction, particularly Star Trek, and fan clubs, conventions, etc. have many aspects that
resemble religious gatherings. Focusing on a positive future and rational decision
making, it expresses an American and modernist worldview. Like many religious groups,
the most profoundly committed fans cope with stigmatization, yet such hard core fans
suggest that Star Trek provides models and myths that influence them profoundly in day
to day life.
Such examples are only a few of the myriad of modern quasi-religious
movements that, in different ways, offer inner peace, fulfillment, spiritual expansion or
insights into human existence. Whether these are actually new religions is debatable, but
they do offer a form of spirituality for some that might influence traditional religiosity or
serve as an alternative mode of religion. Some may draw on these things here and there,
others may take things deeply to heart in organizing their lives. Again, any empirical
study of religiosity that attempts to explain current trends and likely patterns for the
future must consider that religiosity is not declining but changing in both form and
substance.
The nature of religiosity in North America seems to be in transition. Worldviews,
including those of the traditionally religious, appear to be somewhat more this-worldly
(or secular). There is less willingness to assent to traditional doctrines, privatization of
religiosity, and syncretistic worldviews assembled from diverse sources. At present, there
is little comparative data for firm generalizations, but the media undoubtedly enable
smaller groups to have more influence on people who are constructing their worldviews
than in the past.
Whether this is a trend that will have unfortunate consequences for society as a
whole remains to be seen. It may be hard on traditional religious communities, yet may
bestow other offsetting benefits unforeseen at present.
Ultimately, if defined broadly, religion is not on a declining phase. Systems of
meaning that offer to explain human events through a worldview, an ethos, and a system
of symbols are unlikely to disappear. However, certain traditional views and certain
established religious institutions may well decline in influence. Whether this is seen as a
decline in religion depends largely on how one defines religion in the first place.
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