Religion and Sport in North America: Critical Essays for the Twenty-First Century 9780367857240, 9780367857257, 9781003014621

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Introduction
PART I: Evangelicalism and Sport
1. “There Is Talk of Black Power”: Christian Athletes and the Revolt of the Black Athlete
2. “The Greatest Christian Movie of All Time”: 300 and Spartan Masculinity as Cultural Repertoire in Christian Mixed Martial Arts and Beyond
3. Forgiving Freeze: Jerry Falwell Jr., Donald Trump, and the Making of Liberty University Football
PART II: Sport as a Religio-cultural Vehicle
4. Structuring Sports, Structuring Community: The Islamic Society of Chester County Debates a Basketball Court
5. Desiring “Deep Community”: Formations of Soccer and Evangelical Christianity in the British Columbia Christian Soccer League
6. Sport, Religion, and Absence: The Subfield of Religion and Sport as an Explanatory Tool for the Moment
PART III: Religion, Sport, and the Market
7. Foucault for Heisman: College Football and the Liturgies of Power
8. “Be More Human”: CrossFit, Reebok, and Sporting Consumerism
9. Fandom Transfigured: Fantasy Football as Neoliberal Religion
PART IV: Religion and Sport through a Racial Frame
10. Ted Corbitt: The Once-forgotten and Now-remembered Pioneer of American Distance Running
11. Savage Symbols: Native American Mascots in the USA
12. Race, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, and Religious Realism
13. ¿Dios Bendiga Whose América? Resisting the Ritual Theologizing of Nation
Postscript: White Hauntings, Black Hoops: The Ghosts of Kyrie Irving
Index

Citation preview

RELIGION AND SPORT IN NORTH AMERICA

From athletes praising God to pastors using sport metaphors in the pulpit, the association between sport and religion in North America is often considered incidental. Yet religion and sport have been tightly intertwined for millennia and continue to inform, shape, and critique one another. Moreover, sport, rather than being a solely secular activity, is one of the most important sites for debates over gender, race, capitalism, the media, and civil religion. Traditionally, scholarly writings on religion and sport have focused on the question of whether sport is a religion, using historical, philosophical, theological, and sociological insights to argue this matter. While these efforts sought to answer an important question, contemporary issues related to sports were neglected, such as globalization, commercialization, feminism, masculinity, critical race theory, and the ethics of doping. This volume contains lively, up-to-date essays from leading figures in the field to fill this scholarly gap. It treats religion as an indispensable prism through which to view sports, and vice versa. This book is ideal for students approaching the topic of religion and sport. It will also be of interest to scholars studying sociology of religion, sociology of sport, religion and race, religion and gender, religion and politics, and sport in general. Jeffrey Scholes is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Religious Diversity and Public Life at the Uni­ versity of Colorado, Colorado Springs, USA. Randall Balmer is John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth College, USA.

RELIGION AND SPORT IN NORTH AMERICA Critical Essays for the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Jeffrey Scholes and Randall Balmer

Cover image: Getty 607547426, © Streeter Lecka First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Jeffrey Scholes and Randall Balmer; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Jeffrey Scholes and Randall Balmer to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-85724-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-85725-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-01462-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003014621 Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

CONTENTS

List of Contributors Introduction Randall Balmer and Jeffrey Scholes

vii 1

PART I

Evangelicalism and Sport 1 “There Is Talk of Black Power”: Christian Athletes and the Revolt of the Black Athlete Paul Emory Putz 2 “The Greatest Christian Movie of All Time”: 300 and Spartan Masculinity as Cultural Repertoire in Christian Mixed Martial Arts and Beyond Zachary T. Smith 3 Forgiving Freeze: Jerry Falwell Jr., Donald Trump, and the Making of Liberty University Football Daniel A. Grano

11 13

35

53

PART II

Sport as a Religio-cultural Vehicle 4 Structuring Sports, Structuring Community: The Islamic Society of Chester County Debates a Basketball Court Megan Eaton Robb and Max Dugan

79 81

vi Contents

5 Desiring “Deep Community”: Formations of Soccer and Evangelical Christianity in the British Columbia Christian Soccer League Nicholas William Howe Bukowski 6 Sport, Religion, and Absence: The Subfield of Religion and Sport as an Explanatory Tool for the Moment Terry Shoemaker

103

121

PART III

Religion, Sport, and the Market 7 Foucault for Heisman: College Football and the Liturgies of Power Jason M. Smith 8 “Be More Human”: CrossFit, Reebok, and Sporting Consumerism Cody Musselman 9 Fandom Transfigured: Fantasy Football as Neoliberal Religion Jeremy Sabella

135 137

162 182

PART IV

Religion and Sport through a Racial Frame

199

10 Ted Corbitt: The Once-forgotten and Now-remembered Pioneer of American Distance Running Arthur Remillard

201

11 Savage Symbols: Native American Mascots in the USA Annie Blazer

216

12 Race, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, and Religious Realism Lori Latrice Martin

235

13 ¿Dios Bendiga Whose América? Resisting the Ritual Theologizing of Nation Carmen M. Nanko-Fernández Postscript: White Hauntings, Black Hoops: The Ghosts of Kyrie Irving Onaje X. O. Woodbine Index

246

276

281

CONTRIBUTORS

Randall Balmer is the John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America. His commentaries about religion in American life appear in newspapers across the country, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Santa Fe New Mexican. Annie Blazer is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. She is an anthropologist of religion that focuses on religion and sports in the USA. Her first book, Playing for God: Evangelical Women and the Unintended Consequences of Sports Ministry (2015) is an ethnographic exploration of the religious experiences of Christian athletes. Blazer is currently writing a second book on religion and sports, American Culture through Religion and Sports, that offers an overview of the multiple intersections of religions, sports, and social issues in the USA. Nicholas William Howe Bukowski is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. He has an M.A. in anthropology from the University of British Columbia. His work revolves around the relationship between sport and Christianity in British Columbia, Canada. Max Dugan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in Islam. His research focuses on Islamic materiality in the twenty-first century, especially in North America. Max’s dissertation project examines Islamic tattooing and halal consumption using a combination of ethnographic methods and digital humanities to understand how class, gender, ethnicity, and communal authority shape Islamic tradition.

viii List of Contributors

Daniel A. Grano is Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His work focuses on intersections between sport and politics, with particular emphasis on religion, race, health, the body, and public memory. Lori Latrice Martin is Associate Dean in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at Louisiana State University. She has written books and articles about race and sports, racial wealth inequality, and the practice of leadership. Cody Musselman is a scholar of contemporary American religion with degrees in religious studies from Yale University, Harvard Divinity School, and Kalamazoo College. Her work focuses on the theories and embodiment of religion in every­ day life. Her current research uses the fitness franchises CrossFit and SoulCycle as case studies for theorizing religion in popular culture. Carmen M. Nanko-Fernández is Professor of Hispanic Theology and Ministry at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, Illinois, USA. A Latin@́ theologian, her publications include books, chapters, and articles on Latin@́ theologies, lo popular, sport and theology—with particular attention to béisbol/baseball. The founding co-editor of the multivolume series Disruptive Cartographers: Doing Theology Lati­ namente (2021), she is completing her book ¿El Santo? Baseball and the Canonization of Roberto Clemente. Paul Emory Putz is Assistant Director of the Faith and Sports Institute at Baylor’s Truett Seminary. He holds a Ph.D. in history, and his writing and research focuses on the cultural and intellectual history of sports and Christianity in the USA. Arthur Remillard is Professor of Religious Studies and Associate Director of the Honors Program at Saint Francis University. His writing on religion and sports has been featured both in scholarly and popular outlets such as the Washington Post and the Christian Century. A lifelong runner, he still enjoys racing distances from a mile to a marathon. Megan Eaton Robb is the Julie and Martin Franklin Assistant Professor in Reli­ gious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a historian of Islam in South Asia, and she researches issues that illuminate the religious identity of Muslims with links to South Asia in the twentieth century. Her first book, Print and the Urdu Public, was published in 2021. In addition to her work on print publics in and beyond South Asia, she teaches about, and researches, the subjects of gender, sport, and Islam. Jeremy Sabella is a lecturer in religion at Dartmouth College. Sabella served as lead consultant to the award-winning PBS documentary, An American Conscience:

List of Contributors ix

The Reinhold Niebuhr Story, and authored the companion book by the same name (2017). His current research interrogates the theological foundations of American politics and culture in the Cold War era. Jeffrey Scholes is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department and the Director of the Center for Religious Diversity and Public Life at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. He has written books and articles on American political theology and on the relationship between religion and the sporting world in the USA. Terry Shoemaker is a lecturer in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. His research focuses on deconversion from evangelicalism in the USA and the role of sport within the American society. Jason M. Smith is a Mellon Partners for Humanities Education Postdoctoral Fellow at Tougaloo College. His writes on the relationship between liturgy and ethics as well as the theology and philosophy of sport. His work has appeared in the Anglican Theological Review, the Heythrop Journal, Religions, Liturgy, Theology, and the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport. Zachary T. Smith is an assistant teaching professor in the School of Behavioral Sciences and Education at Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg, where he teaches courses on historical and sociocultural perspectives on sport and the body. His current research focuses on the embodied politics and affective economies of Christian mixed martial arts in the USA. Onaje X. O. Woodbine is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion at American University in Washington, DC, where his research explores the varieties of Black religious experience, especially as they are lived on the margins of estab­ lished institutional authority. His book, Black Gods of the Asphalt: Religion, Hip-Hop, and Street Basketball (2016), garnered national praise and has been adapted into a stage play, which was performed at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival in South Africa.

INTRODUCTION Randall Balmer and Jeffrey Scholes

At the time of this writing, Americans are dealing with a pandemic, continued racial unrest, and extreme political polarization that contributed to the besieging of the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. This combination of events has forced many to rethink and reorder priorities, both personal and political. These conditions have pressed many into calculating the relative value of work and family as it relates to safety, compensation, age, one’s bank account, geography, demographics, and career aspirations. Hence, a book coming out now about sport may seem particularly inopportune or severely out of touch. Yes, sport is an edifice that looks shiny, owing its appearance to the vast amounts of money paid by its consumers who are willing to shell out for tickets, merchandise, and the products that teams hawk. Also contributing to its shine are television networks that, in some cases, pay billions of dollars per year to certain leagues for the rights to broadcast and package games in a glossy, hyper-commercialized way. Yet, when we strip the edifice of sport down to its studs, games are played by human beings for a temporary goal that has no real or lasting bearing on lives nor on the body politic against which these lives challenge, negotiate, and perhaps settle on, so the cynic might argue. Against this, sports have also been trusted to serve as a national bellwether that alerts the wider culture as to when it is appropriate to return to normalcy after a severe crisis.1 For instance, the New York Mets’ and Yankees’ first game after 9/11 did not precede David Letterman’s resumption of his show, but baseball’s resumption more forcefully announced to the nation that “we are starting to get back to normal” far more than a talk-show host could possibly do. Similarly, that professional sports disrupted the collective standstill of the current pandemic by starting the NBA and NHL seasons back up in late July 2020 speaks to its significance in North America. That significance is felt even when sport falters in its timing. In the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, then NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle DOI: 10.4324/9781003014621-1

2 Randall Balmer and Jeffrey Scholes

decided to have games played the following Sunday while the other league, the AFL, and most colleges decided to cancel their games. Rozelle’s decision was met by the public with discomfort at best, anger at worst. The message sent to the NFL was that playing football while the nation was still in a state of shock was improper. And, accordingly, Rozelle later stated that he regretted the decision. Point being: sport acted as a barometer and a thermostat for the country’s status and was scolded loudly for acting before the curtain lifted or applauded when performing at the time that we needed an act. What are we to make of the enlarged space that sport takes up in the collective imagination that helps explain its power? That the simple restoration of baseball games after 9/11 signals to Americans that now life can begin to normalize in the face of terrorism speaks much to this power that sport wields, whether one is copacetic with its power or not. Different in the 2020 version of the early reboot is the nature of the enemy. An invisible virus that debilitates the body (and mind in some cases) may be the kind of enemy that could cripple the healthiest of us. Hence, the resumption of major professional sports in the USA on July 30 was in part a show of health despite the climbing deaths around the country and in part a show of a league’s power to stave off the virus through insulated bubbles, frequent testing, and punishments for those who violate protocols.2 What is it about sport in North America that draws our col­ lective eyes toward it as a sign that we would be OK? After all, sports may draw a ridiculous amount of attention during peaceful times that simply seem distracting from more important matters, not representing nor solving them. Sport proves itself to be the muscle that powers itself beyond the field or the court. It does so in both clandestine and open ways. The coverage of the recent Department of Justice prosecutions of parents paying off college coaches to get their kids into elite schools through sports programs and not on their intellectual merit (dubbed “Operation Varsity Blues”) directs our attention to the “evil” par­ ents and coaches who would enter to such an arrangement. But omitted from these depictions is the fact that sports, at elite and non-elite universities alike, are the soft underbelly of these institutions. Monied parents who want their kids to attend university X but have Y level credentials look to sports, specifically lowerprofile sports such as crew and fencing, as a way to smuggle their child through the gates via secret payoffs to these programs. Fairly assumed in their calculation is that sport is a hard driver at the administrative level where enrollment and national prestige holds sway in ways that academic renown could never accomplish. In other words, they know not only of the receptivity of college coaches to take a payout but also of the power of such coaches to be able to flout admission proto­ cols. This example may, in a twisted way, convey that sport has clout outside of its well-known functions: the acceleration of brand-name recognition and potential salary generation at the professional level. And that power can be used not in exploitative ways but in empowering ways. As Prentice Gautt, the first African American football player at the University of Oklahoma, said, “[t]he long-range problems will take a long time to solve. But if they can’t be solved in sports, where can they be solved?”3

Introduction 3

Yet, why is it that we seek to intersect religion with sport in this volume? Likelier candidates that could replace the former are economics, politics, feminist thought, race, and sociology—all of which have weighed in on sport for decades. By way of definition, loosely constructed, religion is that which orients its participants to the sacred and transcendent so that mundane and immanent lives can be lodged in a meaningful context—one that infuses such lives with purpose, a moral compass, and answers to ultimate questions. Conversely, sport tends to move in the opposite direc­ tion. Competitive athletic activity is concrete, material, temporary, and undoubtedly of this world. Yet, participation in and presentation of sport has spawned a kind of transcendence of its raw materiality since the games of Ancient Greece. The recent hyper-commercialization of sport did not transform its nature but merely enhanced and therefore amplified its transcendence over mere play on the field. The power of modern sport to capture our imagination and pull on our purse strings has obliged a certain, though small, sector of scholars to take notice and comment. The relative inattention paid to sport by scholars of religion likely betrays either a dismissal of sport as a serious object of study (based on its supposed triviality) or on the assumption that religion is experienced and expressed only in traditional, sacred settings. Sport, then, may have its religious players or coaches, but their religiosity, as understood through the sport they play, is not worthy of scholarly consideration. Alternatively, this volume sees religion as one of the primary ways to understand modern sport. Then sport can act as one of the wide windows through which we may grasp contemporary religious expression. Few would contest the point that religion is a driving force in the lives of most Americans. The same goes for sport. The question is how these two cultural forces are connected, if at all. We assert that they are connected in deeply meaningful ways. In addition, we are asking the reader to think of religion, as it relates to sport but not at all limited to it, in a different way. That religiosity, both expressed in the sporting world and/or religion utilized as a lens through which sport is viewed, can expose fault lines in our body politic that otherwise would go unnoticed or ignored. So why this book now? Our justification for this volume is twofold. One, many working scholars have determined that sport is a driver of culture. If we can admit of the power of sport (think of the effect that a mere LeBron James tweet possesses to mobilize thousands to take certain political issues more ser­ iously), then we should ask ourselves, what or who granted this power as such? Certainly, neoliberal capitalism combined with the rapid increase in the mon­ etized power that athletes have built aids in the explanation of the acquisition of new-found power that elite athletes now possess. The power of sport to dictate the news cycle as well as modify the psyche of the garden-variety fan should bid all scholars to take notice. Two, by our estimation, we have entered a third period of religion and sport scholarship in which scholars are increasingly asking about the role that race, gender, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, pluralism, and neoliberal capitalism play in shaping both religion and sport. Hence the relationship between religion and

4 Randall Balmer and Jeffrey Scholes

sport is being reimagined in light of these considerations. Journal articles and monographs demonstrate this trend, but an edited volume, particularly one that highlights religion and sport in North America, has heretofore not been published.

Religion and Sport Scholarship: A Brief History We see three periods in the scholarship involving religion and sport. These periods are not wholly discrete by any measure but are informative; the boundaries that guard these episodes are admittedly porous and more heuristic than definitive. Older ways of thinking about the relationship between religion and sport rear their heads today, and newer, more progressive approaches demonstrate a reliance on the foundations. The spirit and content of this volume should not represent a hand slap (or to use a sports culture expression, a “Heisman”) to the scholarship of the past. Instead, the essays in this volume draw heavily on the ideas that came before and perhaps are simply refinements attuned to the current culture. Still, there are general contours of these time periods that help us identify past patterns of thinking that, in turn, locate the essays in this volume. The first period of religion and sport scholarship, starting in the mid-1970s, was surely inspired by the sudden and exponential rise of the attention paid to sports. As such, what naturally followed was the question of whether sport possessed reli­ gious qualities or was even a religion itself. The rise of modern, commercialized sport in Western culture at this time prompted these inquiries and produced some penetrating answers. Michael Novak’s, The Joy of Sports (1976), Frank Deford’s long piece, “Religion and Sport” in Sports Illustrated (1976), and Allen Guttmann’s groundbreaking book, From Ritual to Record (1978) signal the beginning of this period. Novak argues that sport is “somehow, a religion”;4 Deford contends that sport has replaced religion, and Christians are not handling it well;5 and Guttmann similarly argues that modern, rationalized sport had “sidelined” religion without offering any value judgment as to whether this was the right thing to do.6 All three, to varying degrees, begin with working definitions of religion and sport that then encourage a way of talking about how they might relate. The literature that followed invited expansions on this theme as sport was likened to a kind of folk religion7 and a civil religion.8 Admittedly, religion and sport scholarship largely lay dormant throughout the 1980s. One explanation for this is that this first period did not successfully establish an actual field of study. Novak’s lifework involved the locating the religious roots of the free-market system; The Joy of Sports was an outlier and a book that he conceded writing merely because he was a die-hard sports fan. Deford was a sports journalist, not a scholar. A resurgence in publications beginning in the 1990s and subsiding in the 2000s heralds the second period. Here we find a tendency of scholars to emphasize the potential of sport to act as a vehicle for transmitting religious values yet lament the failure of current-day commercialized sport to actualize them. Largely gone is the strict siloing of religion and sport—a prerequisite for arguments written during the first period. Instead, we see a broadening out of the relationship, historically

Introduction 5

speaking, between religion and sport. A renewed interest in “muscular Christianity,” the mid- to late-nineteenth-century movement in England and the USA that attempted to fuse athleticism and strength with the Christian faith so that Victorian age boys would beef up, drew attention to historical developments and their bearing on the present. The legacy of muscular Christianity, both beneficial and deleterious, helped explain the ambivalence expressed in this second period thought. Shirl Hoff­ man’s edited volume, Sport and Religion (1992),9 and his later Good Game (2010),10 Robert J. Higgs’s God in the Stadium (1995),11 and Joseph L. Price’s From Season to Season (2001),12 stand as prominent examples of this period. Clifford Putney’s history of muscular Christianity, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (2001),13 and Tony Ladd and James A. Mathisen’s Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of American Sport (1999),14 expose muscular Christian residues in evangelical sports organizations and sports ministry overall. Historicizing the conceptualization of the relationship between religion and sport largely prevented the making of assertions that sport is a religion. The chameleon character of both religion and sport defies durable, timeless categorization. Yet this historicizing also opened the door to a critique of the relationship between religion and sport. If modern, hyper-capitalized sport is no longer able to convey values such as humility, fairness, and honesty, as it was putatively able to do in it past, then Christian history must be leveraged as a call to Christians to view their allegiance to sport askance. A kind of moral reckoning was often called for, not unlike that declared by Billy Sunday a century prior. Or Deford’s screed holds up minus the rigid ontologies of religion and sport. The third period, in which we argue that this volume finds itself, certainly relies upon previous scholarship to make its case. But this period, beginning around a decade ago, expands those previously constructed boundaries even further. This expansion is enlarged through a heightened awareness of the ways in which the politics of race, gender, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, pluralism, and the neoliberal capitalism under which all are of these categories are entangled, have been and are still intertwined with sport. Tabled are questions of whether sport is a religion or whether religious values are accurately displayed in sport. Such questions, while timely in earlier scholarship, often betray metaphysical assumptions that are baked into the questions and answers. A presumed ontological stability of “religion” and “sport” served many scholars in the first period, and this is often replaced with historically based critiques of both religion and sport that have a confessional quality to them in the second period. The condemnation, restoration, disregard, or even abandonment of modern sport is then galvanized by theology, orthodoxy, moral absolutism, and/or religious essentialism. This third period, alternatively, is marked by a refusal to use ontological or theological metaphysics as first principles that guide research and production. Instead, the reality of the divine and the sincerity of faith, as expressed by athletes, coaches, and fans, is taken seriously in a functional sense, while the substance backing their religiosity is bracketed off. Here, one’s beliefs and practices as an evangelical or Muslim athlete, for example, can be seen as shaped by and as a

6 Randall Balmer and Jeffrey Scholes

shaper of race, gender, ethics, and economics. In other words, theological concepts and the significance of religiously driven actions are not rejected out of hand. Rather, the religiosity of the people involved with chosen topics is repurposed from serving as a foundation to acting as a guide. And the guidance being sought is not that which leads to a “theory of everything” that reveals the “real” relationship between religion and sport. Nor is it that which “guides” some scholars to reprove fellow Christians for their sporting allegiance because sport is so infected with illegality and profit. Instead, it is reiterated that religion is an indispensable prism through which sport should be refracted and then observed. Rebecca Alpert’s Out of Left Field (2011),15 Annie Blazer’s Playing for God (2015),16 Daniel A. Grano’s The Eternal Present of Sport (2018),17 and God, Games, and Globalization, edited by Alpert and Arthur Remillard (2019),18 are several prominent representatives of this third period. There are two main reasons for the ushering in of this third period. Before the mid-2000s, theoretical frameworks such as critical race theory and intersectionality as well as identity-based disciplines, such as queer, Latinx, and disability studies (to name a few) had not been adopted into the mainstream academy. Two, sport, in particular professional sport, went through an apolitical phase from the mid-1980s into the 2000s. Led by Michael Jordan and later continued by Tiger Woods and others, this phase saw elite athletes more preoccupied with landing lucrative cor­ porate sponsorships, and corporations were listening. Apolitical stances by athletes were taken so as to avoid alienating groups of consumers. Consequently, much religion and sport scholarship during this era focused on history and ethics (though little concerning greed) which lacked a hook, at least from the athletes’ perspective, that could bring race, class, or gender into arguments. If athletes are not talking about politics, why should we? Recently the wider public has been made painfully aware of extant racism as seen in uneven policing, education, incarceration, Oscar nominations, college admission, and job hires. The public murder of George Floyd has blown the lid off a simmering pot in a country that naively assumed that racism had been put to bed a long time ago. Race, and its similarity, yet substantive dissimilarity, to gender, ethnicity, disability, and class has invited new ways to frame the relationship between religion and sport. That religion is a thing, that sport is a thing, and that our job is to make sense of how these two things interact independently is over. Religion and sport each have been forged in the cauldron of societal stew. Therefore, their contact is less of a meeting between two strangers and more that of an inbred marriage. Much to the chagrin of many theologians and religion scholars who believe that the only ones to be writing about sports are journalists, scholars writing in this third period instead recognize the value of the religion and sport connection to make a point about something else altogether. In other words, the value of the religion and sport relationship has become largely instrumental rather than substantive, material instead of metaphysical. We view this as a positive development in the field. By decentering a stand-alone relationship between religion and sport, race, gender, and other considerations become central as agents that mold both.

Introduction 7

The essays that follow assert that sport is, yes, a site at which societal issues are expressed and wrestled with, not just a display of overpaid athletes doing their thing. Moreover, these authors largely presume that religion cannot be ignored in any discussion about sport. Or the way we think about sport is automatically caught up in the ways we think about religion. Yet the religion discussed in these chapters is broadly construed rather than traditional and institutional, and function is favored over substance. Part I: “Evangelicalism and Sport,” contains essays that strive to scramble the signal historically given to us about current-day American evangelicalism. The historical line inscribed on American soil first by the Puritans and then threads itself through towering Victorian-era pastors and then modernized through the ministries of Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell is challenged here. Paul Emory Putz asks whether the demonstrably louder and more demanding voices of white, male evangelicals in the late 1960s and 1970s had anything to do with the equally demonstrable “revolt of the Black athlete” that occurred simultaneously. In another essay, Zachary Smith further troubles the water that tends to keep evangelicalism and sport afloat, at least as far as the wider public is concerned, by questioning the assumed association between Christian mixed martial arts (MMA) and white evangelical masculinity. Finally, Daniel Grano sees in the case of former disgraced Liberty University head football coach Hugh Freeze an instrumentalization of forgiveness to protect white, male evangelicalism in the Trump era vis-à-vis college football. The essays in Part II, “Sport as a Religio-cultural Vehicle,” argue that sport is a powerful medium that can do much of the work of religion by clarifying what it means to exist in a diverse community, to exist as an individual in a complex world, and to exist in a world plagued by extreme difficulty and hardship. Megan Eaton Robb and Max Dugan challenge the common idea that sport, when engaged in American Islamic communities, serves as a tool for Western assimilation alone. Rather, armed with evidence gathered from their study of an Islamic com­ munity in Pennsylvania, they contend that sport raises as many worries for those concerned with cultural and religious assimilation as those pushing for assimilation. In another essay, Nicholas William Howe Bukowski argues that the formation of a church soccer team by an evangelical church in British Columbia proves essential in moving participants past an individualist religious life to a more productive, collectivist one. Terry Shoemaker mines the significance of sports through its absence as experienced during the early months of the pandemic in 2020. It is the relationship between religion and sport that illuminates a deep human desire for sports seasons and competitive activity—a desire that is religious and one that is uniquely expressed in times of lack. The essays in Part III, “Religion, Sport, and the Market,” lay out the relation­ ship between religion and sport through the all-encompassing logic and power of neoliberal capitalism. The featured authors brook no interpretation of religion or sport that omits the influence of profit-seeking, marketing, the impetus to grow capital, and the pervasiveness of “the market” to help justify all of these endeavors. Jason M. Smith finds family resemblances between religion and college football

8 Randall Balmer and Jeffrey Scholes

that owe themselves less to appearance and more to how each wield power, specifi­ cally through the strict management of student athletes regarding their finances. Cody Musselman investigates Reebok’s “Be More Human” campaign, which is targeted at CrossFitters, and discovers that spirituality is being sold to consumers as much as gear is. Lastly, Jeremy Sabella argues that the relatively recent obsession with fantasy football draws on certain religious sensibilities to transform the way that the sport is consumed. Hence the conversion of play on the field to data (which is then organized and dis­ sected for maximum output) by run-of-the-mill fantasy-team owners should be understood as a ritual within a form of neoliberal religion. “Religion and Sport through a Racial Frame,” Part IV of this volume, contains essays that position race and ethnicity at the heart of selected events involving religion and sport. Against the widely held assumption that sport is a “colorblind meritocracy,” these authors make clear that race and ethnicity have structured sport in North America and continue to do so—primarily in ways that maintain white supremacy. These essays ask how does religion elucidate, challenge, and possibly reverse the damage done by racism and ethnocentrism in sport? Arthur Remillard inquires into the discrepancy between the idyllic, sacred narrative of long-distance running in the USA versus the reality that African Americans have been historically excluded from the sport both in formal competition and in its origin story. Remillard explores the complicated legacy of Black running pioneer Ted Corbitt in order to expose the tension between now lifting him up as a mythical figure and the fact that Black men are still being murdered for merely jogging in their own neighborhood. In Chapter 12, Annie Blazer supplements the story of Native American sports mascots existing as reminder of colonization, degradation, and caricature with a religion story. Blazer avers that European Christianity established white superiority that was carted across the ocean and therefore must be seriously considered in the ongoing reckoning with team names that perpetuate destructive stereotypes. Former NBA star and Muslim Mah­ moud Abdul Rauf is the subject of Lori Latrice Martin’s chapter. Martin finds that scholarly treatment of the public criticism of Abdul Rauf’s refusal to stand for the national anthem has a blind spot—a “religion of whiteness” more accurately explains the fervor behind removing Abdul Rauf from the league in the mid-1990s. Carmen M. Nanko-Fernández’s essay rounds out this final section. Nanko-Fernández classifies certain activistic stances taken by athletes outside the play on the field but within the confines of a stadium to be disruptions of our “national liturgy.” Hence, protests that take place within the “sacred space” of a sports arena can be considered heretical. Religion and sport respectively have changed quite a bit over the past fifty years in North America and elsewhere. This volume attempts to engage these changes and meet them head-on with new and compelling ways of thinking about both religion and sport separately and in conjunction. The subordination of rigid definitions of religion or sport to broader, more fluid descriptions of both allow the inclusion of long neglected yet salient issues into the discourse as well as the inclusion of marginal sports such as CrossFit and MMA into the fold. If the reader nominally agrees that, indeed, religion and sport scholarship is in its third stage, then much ground has cleared for innovative ideas to continue to break the surface and take root.

Introduction 9

Notes 1 We use “sport” to refer to the general institution of sport. “Sports” refers to collection of more than one sport, such as basketball, lacrosse, and swimming. 2 We add “major professional sports” here because an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fight was held on May 9, 2020, in Florida. UFC is quickly gaining fans and cultural power, but it has yet to break into what we would describe as “major.” 3 Paul Putz, “Black Christians Play a Crucial Role in Athlete Activism,” Christianity Today, August 31, 2020. 4 Michael Novak, The Joy of Sports: End Zones, Bases, Baskets, Balls, and the Consecration of the American Spirit (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1994). 5 Frank DeFord, “Religion in Sport,” Sports Illustrated, April 19, 1976. 6 Allen Guttmann, From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). 7 James A. Mathisen, “From Civil Religion to Folk Religion: The Case of American Sport,” in Sport and Religion, ed. Shirl J. Hoffman (Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics Books, 1992). 8 Craig A. Forney, The Holy Trinity of American Sports: Civil Religion in Football, Baseball, and Basketball (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2010). 9 Shirl J. Hoffman (ed.), Sport and Religion (Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics Books, 1992). 10 Hoffman, Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2010). 11 Robert J. Higgs, God in the Stadium (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1995). 12 Joseph L. Price, From Season to Season Sports as American Religion (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2005). 13 Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). 14 Tony Ladd and James A. Mathisen, Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of American Sport (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 1999) 15 Rebecca T. Alpert, Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 16 Annie Blazer, Playing for God: Evangelical Women and the Unintended Consequences of Sports Ministry (New York: New York University Press, 2015). 17 Daniel A. Grano, The Eternal Present of Sport: Rethinking Sport and Religion (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 2018). 18 Arthur Remillard, Gods, Games, and Globalization: New Perspectives on Religion and Sports (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2019).

PART I

Evangelicalism and Sport

1 “THERE IS TALK OF BLACK POWER” Christian Athletes and the Revolt of the Black Athlete Paul Emory Putz

Introduction In late November 1967, a group of Black athletes met at Second Baptist Church in Los Angeles to discuss a potential boycott of the 1968 Olympics. Organized by Harry Edwards as part of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, the meeting represented a shift in the way Black athletes were engaging with sports. Prior to the 1960s, Black athletes often saw participation in predominantly white sporting spaces as a way to “advance the race” and gradually move toward racial justice and equality. But during the 1960s many grew disillusioned with that tactic. With Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell, and Jim Brown (among others) leading the way, a growing number of Black athletes began to believe that mere inclusion in predominantly white sporting contexts was not enough, and that far from being an engine of racial advancement sports actually per­ petuated racism in American society. The gathering at Second Baptist was an attempt to build an organized coalition that could use sports as a platform to challenge the persistence of racism in American society; it was a key moment in what Edwards would call “the revolt of the Black athlete.”1 Although a unified boycott of the 1968 Olympics did not occur, the “revolt” did inspire protests and change in other ways, including the now-iconic moment on the medal stand in Mexico City when sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists skyward. It also reached numerous college campuses, inspiring Black athletes to speak out and demand greater support and consideration for the difficulties they faced at predominantly white schools. So pervasive was the athletic activism that it received attention from Sports Illustrated, the “Bible of sports,” which published a five-part series in 1968 on racism in sports titled “The Black Athlete: A Shameful Story.”2 This flurry of activity in the late 1960s and early 1970s is well-traveled material, receiving substantial scholarly attention and multiple book-length treatments.3 And DOI: 10.4324/9781003014621-3

14 Paul Emory Putz

yet there is at least one element of the story that has not yet been analyzed: the interaction between the Black athlete “revolt” and evangelical sports ministries.4 Beginning in the 1950s, organizations like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) and Athletes in Action (AIA) built a Christian athlete movement that gained momentum during the very years that the Black athlete revolt captured national attention. Like the revolt, the Christian athlete movement was built around the use of athletes—particularly male athletes—to promote a social agenda. Yet its members generally avoided protests and demonstrations, choosing instead to affirm the basic structures of American society. If we revisit the scene at Second Baptist in 1967, we can see this contrast in plain sight. Consider how Harry Edwards described the actions of “Deacon” Dan Towler, an ex-athlete Black minister and a leading figure in the Christian athlete movement: [Towler] pointed out how much sports had done for Negroes and how great a privilege it was for a Negro to compete for America. A chorus of boos greeted his words. Undeterred, he continued, this time attacking the athletes who had previously spoken as being unintelligent and gullible. Finally, as his remarks began to draw threats from the audience, he was shouted down. Other Negroes who had obviously come to try to dissuade the athletes form supporting the movement left the meeting after witnessing the fate of the “Deacon.”5 In his account, Edwards did not probe the religious motivations behind Towler’s words and actions, depicting him instead as representative of a generic “traditional” Black approach to sports held by some in the older generation. But if we want to understand the ways that race and religion have been intertwined in American sports history, we should take a fresh look at Towler and his fellow leaders—white and Black—in the Christian athlete movement. What did they think of the Black athlete revolt? How did they respond when Black Power came to sports? Exam­ ining their responses can help to reveal the ways in which ideas about race and American identity were central to the religious formulations of evangelical sports ministries and influential in setting long-standing boundaries about who gets to be considered a “Christian athlete” and what ideas are welcome in the movement.

Sports Ministry Origins The original catalyst for the Christian athlete movement—as well as the most developed sports ministry in the late 1960s—was the FCA. Founded in 1954 during the Cold War, the FCA was part of a broader “muscular Christianity” ideology and movement that had its origins in the nineteenth century. Like its nineteenth-century predecessors, the FCA linked sports with American nationalism, seeking to identify the USA with religious values associated especially with white Protestant men. As FCA founder Don McClanen explained in 1955, the FCA’s goal was to mobilize “devoted athletes who wish to share their Christ-centered convictions with others at a time when Communistic teachings threaten our way of life.”6 The FCA took this

The Revolt of the Black Athlete 15

impulse to defend the “American way” and turned it into a full-fledged movement. While there were plenty of Christians in sports before the FCA, they did not think of themselves as a distinct “Christian athlete” group with shared interests and goals. “I’ve been in major college athletic activities for more than a quarter-century,” early FCA leader and University of Denver athletic director Tad Wieman explained in 1956. “It was only through the fellowship movement that I found out that some of the men with whom I had been dealing for years have deep Christian values.”7 By the 1960s, the FCA had developed a number of institutional and cultural spaces to build on its early success. There were summer camps for high-school athletes, breakfasts at national coaching conventions, city-wide evangelistic rallies, a magazine titled The Christian Athlete, and the grassroots development of team prayers and Bible studies led by FCA members. Famous athletes and coaches like Bobby Richardson, Bill Glass, Paul Dietzel, and Tom Landry advocated for the organization, while lesserknown sports leaders carried on its work at local and regional levels. So successful was the FCA at building the Christian athlete movement that it soon had compe­ titors. In 1966, AIA was formed as the sports-specific arm of Campus Crusade for Christ, while in 1967 maverick evangelist Ira Lee “Doc” Eshleman created his own sports chaplaincy organization. Both AIA and Eshleman were key players in the launch of another sports ministry, Pro Athletes Outreach (PAO), in 1971. While there were differences in method and emphases in all of these organizations, they grew out of the soil of white Protestantism and shared similar evangelical sensi­ bilities. Writing in 1976, Sports Illustrated’s Frank Deford lumped them all together with the term “Sportianity.”8 The Christian athlete movement may have been led by white Protestant men, but it was open to racial inclusion. This, too, was due in part to the Cold War context out of which the FCA was formed. The reality of race-based segregation clashed with America’s self-perception as a land of freedom and equality under God. Thus, sports became a popular venue for promoting the image of a pluralistic and inclusive USA. The US government projected this image by sponsoring global tours featuring prominent Black athletes, and the FCA followed this model of image-conscious inclusion.9 Black Methodist minister and former NFL player Dan Towler (whom we have already met) and University of California, LA (UCLA) track star Rafer Johnson were both involved early on, as was Branch Rickey, the man who signed Jackie Robinson. Moreover, the FCA’s promotional pamphlets often featured at least one African American, and FCA speakers frequently emphasized the importance of interracial cooperation. “There is no fatherhood of God without a brotherhood of man,” Presbyterian minister Louis Evans Sr. told FCA campers in 1961. “You get out and call everybody in this world brother or somebody’s gonna get there ahead of you and call every man comrade and then we’re gonna have one heck of a mess.”10 Support for racial inclusion among sports ministry leaders was compatible with what historian Steven Miller has described as “a postwar elite evangelical consensus on race.” This consensus held that racism was a sin but framed it as a matter of personal conscience and internal belief rather than of cultural and structural

16 Paul Emory Putz

inequalities that needed to be remedied by the state. Following the lead of figures like Billy Graham, elite evangelicals in the 1960s aimed for the goal of “color blindness” that placed them to the left of segregationists but also made them suspicious of race-conscious movements and policies. Since racism was viewed as an individualsin problem, it was an issue that could only be solved on a person-by-person basis, either through education and relationships or through a new birth in Christ.11 The FCA preached its message of color-blind racial inclusion even as it expanded its reach into the South in the 1950s and early 1960s, a tricky proposition in the era of massive resistance from white segregationists. In 1961, FCA leaders introduced a new alphabetical system for housing assignments at its summer camps in an attempt to prevent white Southerners from implementing their own segregated housing arrangements.12 In 1963, when FCA leaders were discussing two potential sites for their first summer conference in the South, they stipulated that “any camp must include all races” and rejected one possible location because no information “relative to the inclusion of other races at this camp” was forthcoming.13 When the FCA finally launched its first summer camp in the South in 1964, holding it at Black Mountain, North Carolina, the camp featured three notable Black leaders, including legendary Black basketball coach John McLendon. Through actions like these, the FCA felt it was capitalizing on the “great opportunity to be a creative influence with the general racial problem today.”14 Entries in both Courage to Conquer and Sports Alive!, two 1966 collections of Christian athlete profiles, provided the FCA’s preferred approach to being a “creative influence” for change. The entries discussed the friendship between NFL teammates and FCA members Jerry Stovall (a white Southern Baptist) and Prentice Gautt (a Black Presbyterian who had been the first Black athlete at the University of Oklahoma), using it to show how such relationships could help bridge racial divides. “He helped me, a Southerner, to see that a soul has no color,” Stovall wrote.15 “There are no barriers between us,” Gautt explained. Because we’re following the same Lord, we understand and trust one another. That’s one value of the FCA. It’s ecumenical and interracial. When Christian athletes—and other people for that matter—play and live together in close fellowship, they come to know and understand one another.16 While the FCA did not encourage athletes and coaches to support the civilrights movement or to endorse the passage of laws that would end segregation, by using sports to encourage interracial cooperation FCA leaders believed they were advancing American progress in a safe and orderly way.

Reactionary Responses to the Revolt In the first half of the 1960s, the FCA could make a legitimate claim to be somewhat progressive when it came to race, particularly in the South. But the coming of the Black athlete revolt in the late 1960s challenged the organization’s self-perception as a

The Revolt of the Black Athlete 17

place of inclusion. The FCA tended toward a slow and gradual approach with predominantly white leaders operating as gatekeepers; the Black athlete revolt demanded immediate change. The FCA was a Christian, integrationist, and mostly white sports-boosting organization, while most prominent leaders of the Black athlete movement criticized the sports establishment, were skeptical of prioritizing integration at the expense of Black institutions and either rejected Christianity as a “white” religion (particularly those who sympathized with the Nation of Islam) or de-emphasized Christianity as a core aspect of their identity. “We don’t catch hell because we’re Christians,” Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) told a reporter in 1967. “We catch hell because we’re black.”17 An early sign of the new state of affairs came from emblems of the old: Jerry Stovall and Prentice Gautt. In 1967, Gautt joined his fellow Black teammates on the St. Louis Cardinals in signing a letter that aired grievances over racist treatment at the hands of white Cardinals players and coaches. Those concerns were ampli­ fied in 1968 when the Cardinals’ racial turmoil was profiled by Jack Olsen in his “Black Athlete” series for Sports Illustrated. The publicized frustration of the Black players caused great embarrassment for Stovall, whom they described as a racist “who poses as a good Christian boy.”18 While it is unclear if Gautt shared these specific criticisms, it was nevertheless a blow to Stovall’s view of himself as an open-minded white Southerner. According to one of his white teammates, Stovall responded with exasperation: “Why, I even took Prentice Gautt into my parish church in Monroe, Louisiana.”19 The charges levied against Stovall by his teammates pointed to a new reality emerging as segregation ended and as the Black athlete revolt challenged the depth of racism within supposedly racially integrated spaces. With desegregation and sym­ bolic inclusion no longer enough to stake a legitimate claim to the mantle of racial progressiveness, evangelical sports ministries were forced to consider the claims and actions of Black activists. While the Christian athlete movement never adopted a single unified approach, it nevertheless played the role of guardian, limiting the range of possibilities that it validated as legitimate responses to racism for Christians. One response that garnered substantial support was to reject the demands of Black activists and to rally around a defense of “traditional” values and discipline. Within this group there were some white men who had a strong track record of racial inclusion in the past. Clarence “Biggie” Munn, ex-football coach and athletic director at Michigan State, is a good example. The Spartan football team had a history of racial integration dating back to Munn’s time as coach in the 1950s and continuing with Munn’s successor, Duffy Daugherty, in the 1960s. By 1966, when Michigan State matched up with Notre Dame in the so-called “game of the cen­ tury,” over half of the starters on the Spartan team were Black—Notre Dame, meanwhile, had only one Black starter.20 Munn wore his reputation for both Christianity and racial inclusion proudly. He liked to claim (incorrectly) that his teams were the first to pray after games, and he served as president of the FCA’s advisory board in its formative years, playing a key role in securing the FCA’s place within the college football community.21 In 1961,

18 Paul Emory Putz

meanwhile, he criticized segregated Southern teams for their refusal to play inte­ grated teams, arguing that such teams should not be ranked number one in the polls. A flood of virulently racist hate mail ensued from white Southerners.22 But when Michigan State’s Black football players joined the revolt in 1968, demanding better treatment and more Black coaches, Munn responded with defiance. “I will resign my position as Director of Athletics when I am told who I have to hire and who my coaches must play by the athletes themselves,” he declared. “In Athletics I have always been for fair play and equal rights no matter what color or creed.”23 Munn’s resistance to ceding authority and submitting to the demands of young Black athletes extended to events beyond Michigan State. In 1969, Detroit-based sportswriter Roger Stanton penned an article titled “Blacks Are Ill-advised” in which he denounced Black athletes as prima donnas. “The greatest tragedy of the 1969 football season is the revolt of certain black football players,” Stanton wrote. “They are hurting themselves, their schools, and the entire Negro race.” Munn wrote to tell Stanton that the article was “fantastic.”24 In 1970, when Stanford announced that it would no longer schedule athletic contests with Brigham Young University because of the Mormon church’s policy of prohibiting Blacks from the priesthood, Munn sent letters to confidants decrying Stanford for “making a great mistake.” “If there is one place where they have been fair to all it is in sports, no matter the color, creed or anything,” Munn wrote, before making a reference to his own situation. “I hope I can keep it going here without too much in the way of people demanding and wanting without doing the job.”25 Another college football coach prominently involved with the FCA, Paul Dietzel, echoed Munn’s concerns with Black athlete activism—although without Munn’s strong track record for racial inclusion. Dietzel had coached segregated teams at Louisiana State University (LSU) from 1955 to 1961, winning a national champion­ ship with an undefeated season in 1958. That same year, Dietzel had also become more involved with the FCA. In interviews, he credited the FCA’s summer camp, which he attended with a few of his players, for providing the spark that his team needed for their title-winning season.26 Dietzel moved from LSU to Army in 1961, and then to South Carolina in 1966, where he served as football coach and athletic director until 1974. At both Army (1965) and South Carolina (1969), Dietzel recruited the school’s first Black football players. Yet in both cases Dietzel was a follower rather than a leader, lagging behind peer institutions.27 While Dietzel supported and worked for desegregation—albeit on his own terms—he had an entirely different view of the Black athlete revolt. In a 1969 interview with the South Carolina student newspaper the Gamecock, Dietzel depicted the growth of athlete activism as a nefarious plot. “Athletic departments throughout the country have been finding that they are being lampooned by dif­ ferent militant groups,” he stated, further explaining that “these problems are carefully planned.” Dietzel cited reports from friends in the coaching profession who had Black players on their teams. Those players, Dietzel claimed, regularly received phone calls “from highly militant groups” across the country who urged the Black athletes to take actions “of a disruptive nature.”28

The Revolt of the Black Athlete 19

For Dietzel, Munn, and others in the reactionary camp, the problem with the Black athlete revolt was its apparent attack on authority. They lumped it in with the broader protest movements associated with college students in the 1960s, seeing their opposition to the revolt not as a result of entrenched racism but rather as a defense of traditional values. By framing the Black athlete revolt in this way, Christian coaches mirrored the growing support among white evangelicals for the “law and order” rhetoric embraced by Richard Nixon.29 As president of the American Football Coaches Association (AFCA) in 1969, Dietzel took this approach when he wrote to rally his fellow coaches to “hold your ground” and maintain discipline. Dietzel never specifically mentioned race, but the recent demands by Black athletes were clearly among the targets Dietzel had in mind. “For anyone to imply that we as coaches have no right to enforce training rules is completely absurd,” Dietzel declared. “Where in the entire world can you get along with people in society without accepting the standards laid down by your superiors. We will always have superiors.” Dietzel went on to blame “militants” who “seek out our problems to exploit them” and called on the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to provide a remedy to restore coaches’ authority: eliminating the guaranteed four-year scholarship and replacing it with a one-year scholarship renewed at the behest of the coach.30 As leaders in the Christian athlete movement, Dietzel and Munn saw their faith as central to their stand against the subversion of authority. In his 1969 letter to coaches, Dietzel cited a New Testament passage about athletes training (1 Corinthians 9:24–27) as evidence of the need for discipline. Speaking to the annual AFCA convention the following year, Dietzel told his fellow coaches about attending FCA summer camps with his son, where the athletes in attendance modeled the sort of disciplined approach that Dietzel desired. FCA athletes, Dietzel claimed, were “the kind of man that I am very happy my son has picked as his hero.”31 Munn, too, saw Christianity as the answer. After evangelical leader Billy Graham was selected grand marshal of the 1971 Rose Bowl parade, Munn praised the decision. “[B]ringing the facts of Christianity to the public and to our country is so greatly needed in order to save our civilization,” Munn wrote.32 These reactionary sentiments were not confined to white Christian coaches. Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University’s (A&M’s) Jake Gaither—described by Sports Illustrated as “most famous black coach in America”—spoke out against the proposed Black boycott of the Olympics in 1968 and also banned long hair and facial hair on his football team. “I hope we never let down our rules and regula­ tions,” he told a group of coaches at an AFCA gathering in 1970. “It is the last bastion in our educational institutions for discipline.”33 At the time, Gaither was not as connected to the FCA as Munn and Dietzel, both of whom served in formal leadership positions. But Gaither had long viewed his coaching role as something akin to the task of a minister. He was, as historian Derrick White has written, a “profoundly religious southerner” with a “deeply held social conservatism.”34 He led his team in pregame prayers, expected players to attend church, and sought to instill moral values in his athletes. By the late 1960s, he found an increasingly

20 Paul Emory Putz

welcome home in the FCA, speaking at rallies and conferences—at one such event he described the FCA “one of the greatest organizations in the world”—and by the early 1970s he was serving on the FCA’s board of trustees.35 The overlap in opposition to the Black athlete revolt among Black Christian coaches like Gaither and white Christian coaches like Munn and Dietzel suggests that racism should not be viewed as the sole motivating force for reactionaries. Football, after all, is a sport with a high demand for conformity and respect for authority, regardless of who is coaching. Harry Edwards recognized this, too. Writing in 1973 about the way coaches reacted to the revolt, Edwards considered the disparate responses to Gaither’s views compared to similar views expressed by white coaches. For Edwards, context was key: Gaither operated in a Black insti­ tutional context where all students, including athletes, knew they were respected and valued for their racial identities. At predominantly white colleges there were few Black students and even fewer support structures affirming their realities and experiences as Black men. The issue, then, was less about whether or not white Christian coaches consciously acted out of racist intentions than in the way their opposition to Black athlete activism reflected the taken-for-granted racialized structures and values embedded within American society and sports—and the sense that Christianity supported rather than challenged the white-led status quo.36

Lending a Listening Ear While there was a strong contingent of reactionary responses within the Christian athlete movement, a far more common approach, at least in public, was to take the posture of a responsible listener. This approach was defined by a willingness to demonstrate flexibility and openness to the concerns expressed by Black athletes. While it did not necessarily lead to action or change, it did provide space for the perspectives of Black athletes to be heard. Yet, even if it was different in style with the reactionary group, it remained tethered to a color-blind ideal that functioned to ensure that established authorities maintained their control. San Jose State football coach Dewey King serves as one example of this approach. His school was an incubator of the Black athlete revolt—Harry Edwards, an alum, taught sociology classes and organized protests there in the late 1960s, and both Tommie Smith and John Carlos were graduates. By the time King arrived in 1970, Edwards had moved on to a position as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, but his imprint on the San Jose State athletic program remained. Writing in the Christian Athlete in 1972, King recalled his first team meeting: he entered a room with seventy-five athletes, “half of them blacks, some of them militants.”37 King’s strategy in this environment was to attempt to reach and connect with his players as individuals. He grounded it in the Christian doctrine of the imago dei, telling his players: “God created each of you. He created you in his image and as such you are unique.” This, he claimed, “struck a bell with our black athletes faster than anything.” Whether or not his players felt the same way, it did free King to

The Revolt of the Black Athlete 21

worry less about policing and enforcing rules as a way to maintain his authority and more about relating to players as human beings. He cited The Awesome Power of the Listening Ear—written by John Drakeford, a Baptist seminary professor—as an espe­ cially helpful book, and he also referenced advice he heard from UCLA basketball coach John Wooden at an FCA camp. “Athletes come from different backgrounds, have different temperaments and will therefore respond differently,” Wooden has said. “Find out how to best approach each of your players.”38 Wooden himself was heavily involved with both the FCA and AIA, and he coached a team in the late 1960s led by outspoken Black athlete-activist Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then Lew Alcindor). Wooden’s relationship with Abdul-Jabbar did not truly blossom until years later, but even during Abdul-Jabbar’s time at UCLA, Wooden demonstrated a willingness to learn from the perspective and experiences of his Black players.39 Numerous other white Christian athletes and coaches expressed similar sentiments. Doug Dickey, football coach for Florida, wrote for the Christian Athlete in 1970 to encourage fellow coaches to adapt to changing times.40 Dean Smith, basketball coach for North Carolina and a key FCA leader, made it a point to discuss current issues with his players and even offered support behind the scenes for Black players such as Charlie Scott who were interested in racial activism.41 Bill Glass, recently retired from an eleven-year NFL career in which he played a key role in expanding the Christian athlete movement, acknowledged the continued problem of racism in sports, too. “Black athletes have legitimate gripes. There is no doubt about that,” he wrote in a 1972 book. “And I don’t blame them for their protests and efforts to get things improved.”42 At an institutional level, evangelical sports ministries generally promoted listening and learning as well. It was no accident that advocates for the flexible and openminded approach were often published in the Christian Athlete, the FCA’s official publication. Editor Gary Warner showed an affinity for more progressive ideas, and he encouraged Christian athletes and coaches to be “reconcilers with the proper dosage of revolutionary seasoning,” taking on the difficult social issues of the day and working to bring harmony to their teams and communities.43 Beyond the magazine, the FCA inaugurated a summer “Coaches Conference” in 1969, providing an intimate venue for coaches to debate and discuss issues and problems related to their profession. The 1969 conference featured small-group conversations on “the lack of the father image in the home, haircuts, lack of discipline, racial problems, outside influences and lack of athletic commitment on the part of today’s youth, the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] on the college campus and coach/player relationships.”44 The new upstart sports ministry organizations followed a similar path when it came to race. In 1971, when AIA leaders and Doc Eshleman converged to hold the inau­ gural conference for what would become PAO, they included a session focused on Black involvement. It was led by Clint Hooper, a Black basketball player from Seattle Pacific who competed for the AIA’s traveling squad. The following year, Black evangelist Tom Skinner spoke at the PAO conference. Skinner was a controversial figure in some evangelical circles for his willingness to speak forcefully against racism, including pointing out the hypocrisy and double standards of “law and order”

22 Paul Emory Putz

rhetoric. Even so, over the next decade he remained connected with PAO while also serving as the most prominent Black chaplain in professional sports.45

Black Christians in Sports Ministry The involvement of Hooper and Skinner with PAO pointed to another element to the listening and learning approach: the need for Black Christian voices to be involved in evangelical sports ministries. While these organizations had been racially integrated since the FCA’s founding, until the 1960s Black involvement was limited to a handful of standout athletes or ex-athletes from predominantly white teams. Until the late 1960s, too, the only Black person with a significant voice in decision-making and strategy was Dan Towler, who served on the FCA’s board of directors. Recognizing the need for greater diversity, the FCA declared in 1969 that they “would like more blacks on the FCA team” and brought in John Westbrook, who had been the first Black football player at Baylor University, as the FCA’s first full-time Black staff member.46 By the early 1970s, too, as we have already seen, the FCA placed additional Black leaders like Jake Gaither on its board of trustees. Gaither’s public opposition to the Black athlete revolt and his emphasis on discipline overlapped with the more reactionary wing of the Christian athlete movement. But most of the Black Christian leaders aligned more with the flexible listening approach—indeed, a key source of their tenuous authority and influence within evangelical sports ministry spaces was their willingness to provide a Black voice and perspective for white Christians to interact with. They were expected to serve as the bridge between white and Black athletes, coaches, and ministers, helping to mediate tensions as predominantly white evangelical sports ministries increasingly sought out more Black members. Although this strategy heightened in importance in the late 1960s, it predated the revolt. When the civil-rights movement was gaining momentum earlier in the decade, Towler often provided commentary and perspective for the white audience of the Christian Athlete. In 1964, soon after the March on Washington, Towler wrote an article titled “A March for Freedom.” He struck a conciliatory tone, writing that “God’s judgment is on the Negro and Caucasian alike” and that the answer to the country’s racial problems could be found in open and honest communication between people of different races. If churches could become sites for interracial interaction, cooperation, and communication, then they could create “the March that lasts … the one that sets us free to love one another.”47 The following year, Towler expanded on this theme with an interview in The Christian Athlete titled “Love, Not Laws, Will End Race Difficulties.” Towler again highlighted the need for Blacks and whites to get to know and interact with each other. “You can legislate all the integration you want,” Towler declared, “but it’s going to take real love of man toward man to solve our race problem.”48 Towler did not ignore the problem of racism or the need for protests and leg­ islation. In 1963, he helped lead a march in support of civil-rights laws in Los

The Revolt of the Black Athlete 23

Angeles, and he also spoke out about discriminatory housing policies, explaining to a Los Angeles Times reporter in 1964 that segregated housing and limits on eco­ nomic opportunities for Black people were like “the football coach telling his fullback to drive off tackle, but the guards won’t block for him or open up a hole.”49 But he believed that the best strategy was to encourage gradual progress built around shared interests and relationships, and this did not change for him with the coming of the Black athlete revolt. Focusing on shared Christian commitments brought people together; focusing on racial differences, in Towler’s view, could drive them apart. “Race is one of the real great problems in our society,” he told a reporter in 1970. “But it becomes a more difficult problem to deal with the more we hang up on it.”50 Years later, he provided additional insight into his perspective when he was interviewed about the lack of Black head coaches in professional football. “In this business if you’re aggressive, it destroys you. You’ve got to let somebody open the door and give you a chance,” he said. “If you try to break it in, it will close tighter.”51 Other Black Christians within the Christian athlete movement made similar strategic assessments about the long-term benefits of operating within pre­ dominantly white spaces. Famed Olympic decathlete Rafer Johnson, second only to Towler in terms of Black involvement in the early years of evangelical sports ministry, faced a moment of spiritual crisis while he was a student at UCLA in the 1950s. After experiencing racist behavior at his white church, Bel Air Presbyterian, he considered leaving and attending a Black church. Only after talking with the pastor and receiving support did he decide to remain—for Johnson, it was another racial barrier that he could break down. “I thought about men like Jackie [Robinson] and Jesse Owens and Ralph Bunche, and all the hearts and minds they had changed just by being themselves,” Johnson later wrote. “Maybe, in my own way, I could do the same by simply worshiping where I wanted to.”52 Along with attending Bel Air, Johnson frequently spoke at FCA events and rallies.53 For Towler and Johnson, integrating religious spaces was part of the broader goal of gradually breaking down racial barriers in American society. But for Harry Edwards and many leaders of the Black revolt, the assimilationist tactics of Johnson and Towler were ineffective. While the two might have successfully entered into white-dominated spaces, it did not follow that their individual achieve­ ments and access would translate to substantial improvement in the lives of Black people. “The only reason why Rafer Johnson has not been attacked,” Edwards claimed, “is that he has taken no stand in support of liberation for black people.”54 While not all Black leaders in the revolt were as direct as Edwards in their criticism of Johnson, the movement nevertheless carved out a different path by taking outspoken Black athletes like Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell, and Jim Brown as the preferred models for race leadership.55 Asked to play a mediating role between a white-led movement claiming to speak for Christian athletes and a Black-led movement focused on galvanizing Black athletes for social change, Black Christian athletes and coaches had to care­ fully navigate competing interests and concerns. In 1968, while he was still enrolled

24 Paul Emory Putz

at Baylor, John Westbrook was interviewed by the Christian Athlete and asked to provide an answer to America’s racial crisis. “I don’t know the answer—riot, push harder, wait, negotiate, march. It may take all of these things,” Westbrook stated.56 Two years later, while on staff with the FCA, Westbrook offered a glimpse into the difficulties faced by Black people at white institutions, publishing an article in Guideposts about his experience at Baylor. Titled “I Was the Man Nobody Saw,” Westbrook discussed the racism and loneliness he experienced, even revealing that he attempted suicide—revelations that caused at least one Baylor graduate to complain that Westbrook was negatively affecting the school’s image.57 If Westbrook was asked to speak for Black Christian athletes, in 1969 Prentice Gautt was asked to speak for coaches, penning an article for the Christian Athlete on “The Coach and the Black Athlete.” Recently retired from his NFL career and serving at Missouri as one of the first Black assistant coaches for a white school, Gautt addressed many of the issues that athletes engaged in the revolt were raising. He warned against insensitive racial jokes and “stacking” Black players into the same positions. He urged coaches not to crack down on expressions of identity, like hairstyles and celebrations after a great play. He sought to explain, too, the way that white supremacy (a term he used) shaped the lives of many Black athletes: “A coach has to be perceptive to the fact that an athlete sees, interprets, and responds to things said and done based upon attitudes which have been instilled and internalized since birth.” And while Gautt encouraged the hiring of more Black coaches, he also warned against “token integration,” explaining that a Black coach should not be expected to speak for all Black people.58 It was a theme he would continue to hit on over the next few years. “Don’t hire a black coach just as a buffer between you and the black athlete,” he told white coaches at a clinic in 1971. “Don’t ask him to orchestrate to the black athlete while you conduct the music.”59 In their public statements for white audiences, Gautt and Westbrook spoke clearly about the reality and presence of racism in sports. Yet the two refrained from advocating for protest and disruption, seeking instead to find common ground through shared athletic identities and Christian commitments. In the same 1968 interview in which Westbrook acknowledged that riots might be needed to bring change, he also pointed to a solution with which white evangelical readers would have agreed: “If people are spiritually reborn we don’t look at people as janitors or teachers or black or white, we look at them as children of God.”60 In 1968, when he was interviewed by Sports Illustrated about racism within the Cardinals, Gautt went on the record about his experiences. Yet he framed it more as a call for the sports establishment to realize its potential for good rather than as damning evidence of its corruption. “Racial prejudice is almost a tradition in sports,” he told Jack Olsen. “The long-range problems will take a long time to solve. But if they can’t be solved in sports, where can they be solved? Sports has been following when it’s supposed to lead.”61 The following year at an FCA summer camp, Gautt reiterated his belief in the potential of sports for positive change. “So many doors have been open to Negro athletes because of sports in America,” he stated. “I am convinced that a Negro athlete, or a white athlete, has a great opportunity to help the race situation today, especially if he is a dedicated Christian.”62

The Revolt of the Black Athlete 25

The eagerness with which evangelical sports ministries sought out the voices of Black leaders like Prentice Gautt, Tom Skinner, and John Westbrook—as well as the flexible approach adopted by white Christian coaches like John Wooden, Dean Smith, and Dewey King—showed that many in the Christian athlete movement desired to be sensitive to the concerns raised by Black athlete protesters. Even so, theirs was ultimately a vision with clear limits. It could include individual Black athletes and even attempt to listen to their perspectives, but it could not adopt race-conscious remedies that deviated from the individualistic, color-blind ideology of evangelicalism. When an FCA-affiliated coach told a reporter in 1969, “Today there is talk of Black Power and so many other powers. It is time somebody talked about God Power,” he was stating what most leaders in the Christian athlete movement implicitly understood: God Power and Black Power were mutually exclusive domains.63

Paths Not Taken This becomes more apparent when we consider the paths not taken, the ways in which evangelical sports ministries limited the range of possibilities for acceptable Christian responses to racial protests. Because white-led sports ministries were embedded within the sports establishment—with access, resources, and cultural influence—they were strategically positioned to speak for Christian athletes and to filter the views of their members through a white evangelical perspective. As such, they were able to subtly shape what counted as legitimate and accepted expressions of Christian activism. It is not that the FCA, AIA, and other organizations cracked down on Black activists—in fact it was more common to adopt a posture of empathy. But while reactionaries like Biggie Munn were not necessarily the dominant viewpoint, they were nevertheless fully accepted as a legitimate approach alongside their more open-minded peers. In contrast, Christians who openly participated in or supported the Black athlete revolt generally found themselves criticized or left on the margins. Consider the case of Calvin Jones, a defensive back for the University of Washington and Denver Broncos. The son of a Black Baptist preacher, he had rededicated his life to Christ soon after enrolling at Washington in 1969. The next year he was embroiled in racial controversy when he and three Black teammates quit the team, citing racist behavior from head coach (and FCA member) Jim Owens. Jones returned a year later after Washington made changes, but he could not forget the harsh response from fellow Christians. “I guess the thing that bothered me most—and still bothers me,” Jones recalled a few years later, “is that many people who profess to be Christians came down hardest on me. They said I wasn’t being a Christian. But down deep inside me, I actually felt God was leading me to make that move.” After college, Jones spent four years with the Denver Broncos, where he was involved with PAO. He was a popular speaker with white church groups during that time, but when it came to talking about race, Jones felt he had to tread carefully. “I still have to check myself out when I’m speaking to white congregations about the

26 Paul Emory Putz

racial problems,” he said at the time, “to make sure I’m together in my thinking.”64 Jones eventually left white Christian spaces behind, following the footsteps of his father in the Black Baptist tradition. Two white Christian athletes heavily involved in the FCA in the 1960s also distanced themselves from the movement because of its approach to race. Bill Bradley, basketball standout for Princeton and later the New York Knicks, was the darling of the FCA through much of the 1960s. He spoke frequently at camps, appeared on promotional videos, and published articles for FCA publications. By the end of the 1960s, however, he withdrew from evangelicalism, in part because of resistance to the civil-rights movement that he witnessed from people involved with the FCA. “I could not fathom how those who professed such faith in Jesus Christ could so adamantly refuse to see that prejudice and discrimination against black people were affronts to Christian values,” he later wrote.65 NFL player Bill Curry, a Georgia Institute of Technology graduate, stepped back for similar reasons. A white Southerner, it was through the FCA that Curry’s ideas on race first began to evolve. At a 1962 FCA summer camp, Curry roomed with a Black camper, the first time he ever encountered a Black person as a peer. After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, however, Curry felt convicted by his lack of involvement in social change. He was willing to accept Black people as friends and teammates, but what was he doing to help Black communities? An Atlanta native, Curry felt compelled to march in King’s funeral, and he later spoke to a reporter about his frustrations and laments. “I had talked a good game but I never got in the game,” Curry said. “I want to get involved. But I am confused where to go.”66 Feeling that there was little support within the Christian athlete movement for a faith that advocated for social justice, Curry distanced himself from evangelical sports ministries over the next decade. He also took note of the persistence of racism among fellow evangelicals. Talking to George Plimpton about his time in a Texas town in the early 1970s, Curry described a contrast between the very religious atmosphere in the community, with a lot of emphasis on God, country, and all the things that go along with the Bible Belt ethic, and on the other hand, a racial bigotry much more blatant that it was in Atlanta when I was a kid.67 While Jones, Curry, and Bradley stepped away from involvement with the Christian athlete movement in part because of its limited acceptance of racial activism, equally telling are those Christians who never joined in the first place. There is no better example than Jackie Robinson. Despite his strong Christian commitments and his friendship with FCA leader Branch Rickey, Robinson did not collaborate with the FCA or any of its offshoots.68 And despite his image, too, as the icon of gradual racial integration through sports—the model that athletes like Rafer Johnson, Dan Towler, and Prentice Gautt followed—Robinson came to see that desegregation in sports was not enough to advance the cause of racial equality. Soon after hearing about the proposed Olympic boycott in 1968—and after an initial response of

The Revolt of the Black Athlete 27

“mixed emotions”—he threw his full support behind the movement, including publicly praising Smith and Carlos for their Black Power gesture.69 In a 1969 com­ mencement address delivered at Franklin Pierce University, Robinson framed his support with reference to his faith, turning to the biblical figure of Job. “I translate [Job’s] story into the story of the black man in America today,” Robinson declared. Like Job we were subtly bereft of our wealth, our civilization, our land, our health … Like Job, we have advisors telling us if we are so mistreated it must be our own fault … But like Job we answer, “I am a man and therefore worthy. Though you slay me I will … maintain my own ways before you.”70 For Robinson, the revolt of the Black athlete was at heart an articulation of Black dignity in a society still dominated by whiteness. Looking back at his own career, he saw that success on the desegregated playing field had not led to lasting change for Black communities, in part because the process of integration meant that Black people were expected to conform to white expectations. He came to see, as he put it in the preface of his 1972 autobiography, that he remained a “Black man in a white world,” and was “only a principal actor” in “Mr. Rickey’s drama.”71 While Robinson remained committed to the principle of interracial cooperation, he saw in the revolt an opportunity for Black athletes to take the lead in setting their own terms, in taking authorship of their own drama. Like Martin Luther King Jr., who also supported the revolt, Robinson believed it was not only compatible with Christian faith but sanctioned by it as well.72

Conclusion By 1972, when Robinson passed away, the Black athlete revolt was on its last legs. With television money flooding into big-time sports, both white and Black players had ever-growing economic incentives to set aside divisive protests and political positions that might cost them sponsorships and money. Standout Black athletes like O. J. Simpson and Michael Jordan instead cultivated a corporate-friendly, apolitical public persona. So, too, according to historian Simon Henderson, leaders of the predominantly white sports establishment were able to maintain authority and stifle dissent in the 1970s with a combination of “strategic concessions” to the concerns of Black activists and a reassertion of the mythology that sports were an engine of racial progress.73 Leaders of the Christian athlete movement, meanwhile, remained focused on the goal of color-blind inclusion in which Black athletes and coaches were invited into a space led primarily by white people—a space where disruption and protests were frowned upon and person-by-person change was the goal. A memo near the end of 1975 from FCA president John Erickson showed that hiring African Americans was a top priority: he listed “placing [minorities] in responsible and decisionmaking staff positions” as one of the FCA’s goals for 1976.74 In the 1970s, too, a journalist writing about AIA noted that the organization “aggressively recruited”

28 Paul Emory Putz

Black players, with African Americans composing nearly half of its signature basketball team. And at a PAO conference in 1977, a speaker claimed that “Jesus is color blind,” and then gushed about how “skin color is not remotely important here.”75 While this approach encouraged sports ministry organizations to recruit Black members, it also limited the extent to which they could speak on social issues. And it raised questions of motivation. Was the increase in racial diversity in sports ministry a matter of Christian principle, or a matter of self-preservation, a recog­ nition of the growing cultural prominence of Black athletes after the 1960s? An ethnographic study by Jonathan Jacob Brower on the lives and experiences of Black football players for an unidentified NFL team in 1970 provides a Rorschach test of sorts for how one might answer that question. Among Brower’s observa­ tions, he noticed that white and Black players usually sat at separate tables during shared meals. There was one exception. Whites who did venture over to Black tables, he found, “usually … belonged to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.”76 For Brower, this was not an action to praise but rather a cause for suspicion. He viewed it as an example of a white organization attempting to tokenize and use Black people. Others more sympathetic to the FCA, however, undoubtedly would have viewed it is as an example of Christians who were seeking to break down racial barriers as they cultivated a shared faith-based identity. The appeal of this spiritual connection for both white and Black athletes should not be ignored. Beginning with Dan Towler and Rafer Johnson and extending to Prentice Gautt, Jake Gaither, Tom Skinner, John Westbrook, and others, many Black Christians in sports found friendship, meaning, and spiritual growth through their involvement with evangelical sports ministry organizations. And yet, the fact that the Christian athlete movement remained centered on and led by white evangelicals should not be ignored either. Black Christian athletes who might have followed Jackie Robinson’s path in advocating for a prophetic perspective that demanded racial justice found little support for such efforts within predominantly white evangelical organizations that preferred to affirm the status quo and to support socially con­ servative causes associated with the religious right and the Republican Party.77 When considering the response of evangelical sports ministries to the Black athlete revolt, then, we can see that one of its lasting legacies is the way that it limited the imaginative possibilities of what it might mean to be a Christian athlete or coach. Black and white Christians who shared the conservative moral sensibility and the desire for gradual, carefully guarded racial progress were likely to feel welcome—in fact, within the world of white evangelicalism, sports ministries could even seem racially progressive. It was no accident that Promise Keepers, one of the most promi­ nent evangelical organizations calling for the moderate aims of white repentance and racial reconciliation in the 1990s, was led by FCA member and college football coach Bill McCartney. Yet even if McCartney championed the cause of racial reconciliation, the rank and file of the movement tended to downplay that aspect of the ministry.78 Similarly, white and Black Christians who believed their faith called them to confront racial injustices in a way that went beyond changing individual hearts were not likely to find much support within evangelical sports ministries.

The Revolt of the Black Athlete 29

The coming of a new era of Black-led athlete activism in the 2010s—an era with its own iconic symbol of protest in Colin Kaepernick—has the potential to challenge this pattern. Numerous Black Christian athletes, including Maya Moore, Eric Reid, and Stephen Curry, have joined the Black Lives Matter movement in calling for an end to racialized policing practices and other forms of discrimination. Most of these athletes, too, have been involved with evangelical sports ministries, and they have often linked their support for racial justice activism with their Christian faith.79 Yet evangelical sports ministries remain connected to a white evangelical audience and donor base that looks with suspicion at most attempts to speak about racism as a social and structural problem. While there is plenty of support for listening and conversation, it remains to be seen if the efforts of Black Christian athletes will translate into organizational and institutional changes within evangelical sports ministries, expanding the imaginative possibilities of what it means to be a Christian athlete.

Notes 1 Harry Edwards, The Revolt of the Black Athlete, 50th anniversary edition (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2017). 2 Jack Olsen, “The Black Athlete: A Shameful Story,” Sports Illustrated, July 1, 1968, 12–27. 3 This scholarship began with Edwards, The Revolt of the Black Athlete. For two important book-length treatments, see Amy Bass, Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Douglas Hartmann, Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and Their Aftermath (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 2004). Books with chapters or sections devoted to the subject are too numerous to include here, but a few important selections include David Wiggins, Glory Bound: Black Athletes in a White America (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1997); Aram Goudsouzian, King of the Court: Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2010); Michael E. Lomax (ed.), Sports and the Racial Divide: African American and Latino Experience in an Era of Change (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2011); Damion L. Thomas, Globetrotting: African American Athletes and Cold War Politics (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Simon Henderson, Sidelined: How American Sports Challenged the Black Freedom Struggle (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2013); John Matthew Smith, The Sons of Westwood: John Wooden, UCLA, and the Dynasty that Changed College Basketball (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Louis Moore, We Will Win the Day: The Civil Rights Movement, the Black Athlete, and the Quest for Equality (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2017). 4 Historians who trace the history of evangelical sports ministries pay little attention to race. For examples of this neglect, see Tony Ladd and James A. Mathisen, Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of American Sports (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 1999); William J. Baker, Playing with God: Religion and Modern Sport (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007); Shirl Hoffman, Good Game: Chris­ tianity and the Culture of Sports (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2010); Annie Blazer, Playing for God: Evangelical Women and the Unintended Consequences of Sports Min­ istry (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 5 Edwards, The Revolt of the Black Athlete, 49. 6 Don McClanen to Robert E. Willison, July 13, 1955, Box 57, Folder 8, Branch Rickey Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter Rickey Papers). On nineteenth-century muscular Christianity, see Clifford Putney, Muscular

30 Paul Emory Putz

7

8

9 10

11

12

13

14

15 16 17

Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). Wieman’s quote is from “Aid to Christianity,” a Denver Post article covering the FCA’s Estes Park conference held between August 19 and August 23, 1956. The clipping was part of a page of reprinted Denver Post articles located in the Amos Alonzo Stagg Papers, Box 108, Folder 10, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library (hereafter Stagg Papers). On the FCA’s Cold War origins, see also Baker, Playing with God, 193–201. Frank Deford, “Religion in Sport,” Sports Illustrated, April 19, 1976, 88–102. On the development of “Sportianity,” see Ladd and Mathisen, Muscular Christianity, 123–160; Paul Putz, The Spirit of the Game: American Protestants, Big-Time Sports, and the Contest for National Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Thomas, Globetrotting; Cat M. Ariail, Passing the Baton: Black Women Track Stars and American Identity (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2020). Louis Evans’ words quoted from an excerpt of a 1961 summer conference talk that was included in Under the Master Coach, Word Records, 1962, LP. For additional examples, see “Famous Athlete Hurls Challenge to State Youths,” February 21, 1955, newspaper clipping in Rickey Papers, Box 57, Folder 8; Robin Roberts Talk to Houston Youth, n.d. (likely 1956), Stagg Papers, Box 108, Folder 10. Steven P. Miller, “The Persistence of Antiliberalism: Evangelicals and the Race Pro­ blem,” in American Evangelicals and the 1960s, ed. Axel R. Schafer (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 81–96; Steven P. Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 87– 123. On the prevalence of color-blind racial ideology among white evangelicals, see also Curtis J. Evans, “White Evangelical Responses to the Civil Rights Movement,” The Harvard Theological Review, 102 (2) (2009): 245–273; Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); J. Russell Hawkins and Philip Luke Sinitiere (eds), Christians and the Color Line: Race and Religion after Divided by Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Grant Wacker, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 120–136; Curtis Evans, “A Politics of Conversion: Billy Graham’s Political and Social Vision,” in Billy Graham: American Pilgrim, ed. Andrew Finstuen, Anne Blue Wills, and Grant Wacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 143–160. Minutes of a Meeting of the National Conference Committee of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, October 12 and 13, 1961, Box 1, Folder 13, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Duke University Chapter Records, Duke University Archives, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University (hereafter Duke Uni­ versity FCA). Minutes of a Special Meeting of the Board of Directors of the FCA, September 16, 1963, Box 507, Folder 58, Clarence L. Munn Papers, Michigan State University Archives and Historical Collections, East Lansing, Michigan (hereafter Munn Papers); Minutes of the Conference Committee of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, October 28, 1963, Duke University FCA, Box 1, Folder 13. Minutes of the FCA’s Board of Directors Meeting, May 24–25, 1965, Munn Papers, Box 769, Folder 34. For details on the first Southern conference, see The Blue Ridge Athlete, June 10–12, 1964, Munn Papers, Box 520, Folder 44; “Mountain-Top Experi­ ence,” Christian Athlete (August/September 1964): 4–5; Wayne Atcheson, “A Report on the First National Fellowship of Christian Athletes Conference Held at the Blue Ridge YMCA Assembly at Black Mountain, North Carolina on June 7–12, 1964” (1994). Jerry Stovall, “A Changed Life,” in Courage to Conquer, ed. Leroy King (Westwood, N. J.: Fleming H. Revell, 1966), 64. James C. Hefley, Sports Alive! (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1966), 55. Quoted in Jonathan Rodgers, “A Step to an Olympics Boycott,” Sports Illustrated, December 4, 1967. While only a handful of Black athletes embraced the Nation of

The Revolt of the Black Athlete 31

18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Islam, the organization was able to extend its influence among athletes in the 1960s through the efforts of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. See David Wiggins, “Victory for Allah: Muhammad Ali, the Nation of Islam, and American Society,” in Muhammad Ali, The People’s Champ, ed. Elliott J. Gorn (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 88–116; Maureen Smith, “Muhammad Speaks and Muhammad Ali: Intersections of the Nation of Islam and Sport in the 1960s,” in With God on Their Side: Sport in the Service of Religion, ed. Tara Magdalinski and Timothy J. L. Chandler (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 177–196; Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith, Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X (New York: Basic Books, 2016). Jack Olsen, “The Anguish of a Team Divided,” Sports Illustrated, July 29, 1968, 22. Dave Meggyesy, Out of Their League (Berkeley, Calif.: Ramparts Press, 1970), 219. John Matthew Smith, “‘Breaking the Plane’: Integration and Black Protest in Michigan State University Football during the 1960s,” Michigan Historical Review, 33 (2) (2007): 101–129. Munn was responsible for initiating the FCA’s annual breakfast at the AFCA in the 1950s. See Putz, The Spirit of the Game, for more on his influence within the FCA. Bob Voges, “Munn Answers Complaint from Mississippi,” November 3, 1961, clipping file in Munn Papers, Box 504, Folder 44. Copies of the letters Munn received from white Southerners are included in this folder as well. Quotation from Untitled Memorandum (likely April 1968), Munn Papers, Box 790, Folder 50. See also Don Edwin Coleman, “The Status of the Black Student Aide Pro­ gram and the Black Student Movement at Michigan State University,” Ph.D. disserta­ tion, Michigan State University, 1971, 31–35. Biggie Munn to Roger Stanton, November 24, 1969, Munn Papers, Box 797, Folder 58. A copy of Stanton’s article, which was published in Football News, is located in the folder as well. Biggie Munn to Howard Stoddard, February 3, 1970, Munn Papers, Box 797, Folder 58. “Christian Athletes Group an Inspiration for LSU,” Associated Press story excerpted in “News from the Fellowship of Christian Athletes,” January 1, 1959, Stagg Papers, Box 108, Folder 4. See also Don McClanen to Biggie Munn, January 2, 1959, Munn Papers, Box 413, Folder 14. Charles H. Martin, Benching Jim Crow: The Rise and Fall of the Color Line in Southern College Sports, 1890–1980 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 139–143. “Dietzel Gives His Opinion on Problems Concerning Recruiting of Black Athletes,” Gamecock, April 25, 1969, 6. On this overlap, see Gary Wills, “‘Born Again’ Politics,” New York Times, August 1, 1976; Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 69–104. Paul Dietzel, “Open Letter to American Football Coaches,” June 10, 1969, American Football Coaches Association Summer Manual 1969 (1969), 2–3. “Address by President Dietzel,” Proceedings of the Forty-seventh Annual Meeting of the American Football Coaches Association (1970), 7. Biggie Munn to Louis Shinger, January 11, 1971, Munn Papers, Box 801, Folder 6. Proceedings of the Forty-seventh Annual Meeting of the American Football Coaches Association (1970), 71–72; John Underwood, “Concessions—And Lies,” Sports Illustrated, September 8, 1969. Derrick E. White, Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither: Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 210. “Jake Gaither Addresses FCA Meeting,” Atlanta Daily World, June 28, 1970, 7. Harry Edwards, Sociology of Sport (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1973), 148–152. See also White, Blood, Sweat, and Tears, 180–184, for an analysis of Gaither’s complex rela­ tionship with Black Power ideas. Dewey King, “‘Man, I Dig You’!” Christian Athlete (December 1972): 3. King, “Man, I Dig You,” 2–5; John Drakeford, The Awesome Power of the Listening Ear (Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1967).

32 Paul Emory Putz

39 John Matthew Smith, The Sons of Westwood, 131–132. See also Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Coach Wooden and Me: Our 50-Year Friendship On and Off the Court (New York: Hach­ ette, 2017). 40 Doug Dickey, “Why I Believe in My Profession,” Christian Athlete (September 1970): 6–7. 41 Art Chansky, Game Changers: Dean Smith, Charlie Scott, and the Era that Transformed a Southern College Town (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 135–148; Dean Smith with John Kilgo and Sally Jenkins, A Coach’s Life: My Forty Years in College Basketball (New York: Random House, 1999), 111–114. 42 Bill Glass, Don’t Blame the Game: An Answer to Super Star Swingers and a Look at What’s Right with Sports (Waco, Tex.: Word, 1972), 44. 43 Gary Warner, “The Three Rs of the Soaring 70s,” Christian Athlete (January 1970): 23. 44 “The 36th Chair,” Christian Athlete (September 1969): 18–20. 45 “Kick-Off for Christ,” Green Bay Press-Gazette, July 10, 1971, A-5; Zola Levitt, Some­ body Called “Doc” (Carol Stream, Ill.: Creation House, 1972), 143; Arlis Priest with Al Janssen, Love Unlocks Every Door (San Bernardino, Calif.: Here’s Life Publishers, 1982), 127–130. On Skinner’s work as a Redskins chaplain, see “Super Bowl Rivals Emphasize Spiritual Values,” New York Times, January 6, 1973. On Skinner’s ambivalent place within the white world of evangelicalism, see Soong-Chan Rah, “In Whose Image: The Emergence, Development, and Challenge of African-American Evangelicalism,” Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 2016, 205–230. 46 “Christian Athletes Flex Muscles,” Christianity Today, August 22, 1969, 37–38; “Joins FCA National Staff,” Christian Athlete (September 1969): 9. Westbrook remained on staff for a short time before moving on to work for the Southern Baptist Convention and then with Florida State University before settling into a role as a pastor. 47 Dan Towler, “A March for Freedom,” Christian Athlete (January 1964): 4. 48 “Love, Not Laws, Will End Race Difficulties,” Christian Athlete (October 1965): 2. 49 “Demonstrators Will March on LA City Hall,” Los Angeles Times, August 27, 1963, 2; Jerry Doernberg, “Former Grid Great Faces Rougher Battle,” Los Angeles Times, November 2, 1964; Dan L. Thrapp, “Deacon Dan Finds Home, Fading Bias,” Los Angeles Times, November 6, 1966, H-11. 50 Bob Myers, “Ex-Ram Deacon Dan Towler Has Devoted Life to Youth,” Clarion-Ledger, July 12, 1970. I would like to thank James Vaughn for bringing this source to my attention. 51 Hal Bock, “NFL Blacks Call Signals, but Not Plays,” Associated Press, November 29, 1987. 52 Rafer Johnson with Philip Goldberg, The Best that I Can Be: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 84. 53 On Johnson’s support for the FCA, see “Rafer Johnson Visits K.C.,” Christian Athlete (December 1960), 5; Minutes of the Annual Meeting of the Board of Directors (1961), Munn Papers, Box 445, Folder 61. 54 Edwards, The Revolt of the Black Athlete, 61–62. 55 Moore, We Will Win the Day, 151–188. 56 “A New Face in the League,” Christian Athlete (October 1968): 2–4. 57 John Westbrook, “I Was the Man Nobody Saw,” Guideposts (November 1970), 12–15. John Hill Westbrook with Thomas Lee Charlton and Rufus B. Spain, Oral Memoirs of John Hill Westbrook (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Institute for Oral History, 1972), 74–75. 58 Prentice Gautt, “The Coach and the Black Athlete,” Christian Athlete (October 1969): 12–13. 59 “Orange Bowl Reversal,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 21, 1971. I would like to thank James Vaughn for bringing this source to my attention. 60 “A New Face in the League,” 4. 61 Olsen, “The Anguish of a Team Divided,” 35. 62 “Sports Helps to Open Doors,” The Daily Ardmoreite, August 22, 1969, 7. 63 The FCA-affiliated coach was John Lotz, an assistant basketball coach for North Car­ olina—a team led by Dean Smith, who was on the more progressive end of the FCA

The Revolt of the Black Athlete 33

64

65

66 67

68 69

70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77

when it came to racial issues. Lotz was quoted in Gary Warner, “Sand Box Logic,” Christian Athlete (November 1969), 23. David L. Diles, Twelfth Man in the Huddle (Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1976), 109–118. For background on Jones’s involvement in the revolt, see Gary Rausch, “All ‘Quiet’ on the Washington Front,” Independent Press-Telegram (Long Beach, Calif.), August 18, 1971; Carver Gayton, “Carver Gayton Reflects on the Jim Owens Statue at Husky Stadium, University of Washington,” History Link, September 19, 2004; Greg Bishop, “At Long Last, Peace for Three UW Players,” Seattle Times, November 6, 2006. Bill Bradley, Time Present, Time Past: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1996), 421. For contemporaneous references to Bradley’s estrangement from the FCA, see George Vecsey, “The Fellowship of Christian Athletes: A Love Cult that Continues to Grow,” New York Times, August 22, 1971; Gary Warner, Competition (Elgin, Ill.: David C. Cook, 1979), 150. As late as 1968, Bradley remained connected to FCA work, granting an interview with the Christian Athlete that year in which he made reference to the importance of rejecting “a faith that separates.” See “New Pro in Gotham,” the Christian Athlete (March 1968): 3–4. Murray Olderman, “Curry Found Self in Funeral March,” The Morning News (Wilmington, Del.), May 3, 1968, 35. George Plimpton and Bill Curry, One More July (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 69. Gary Warner also mentioned Curry as an athlete estranged from the FCA in Competition, 150, although Curry would eventually move back into the FCA fold in the 1980s when he became a college football coach. On Robinson’s faith, the best treatment is Michael G. Long and Chris Lamb, Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017). Jackie Robinson, “Mixed Emotions over Boycott of Olympics,” New York Amsterdam News, December 16, 1967, 17; Jackie Robinson, “Some Resolutions for the New Year,” New York Amsterdam News, January 6, 1968, 13; Jackie Robinson, “Victory Won in Olympic Boycott,” New York Amsterdam News, May 11, 1968, 1; “Robinson in State,” Greenville (SC) News, October 22, 1968, 2. Jackie Robinson, Untitled Acceptance Speech, 1969, available via the Franklin Pierce University library online at “How a Baseball Great Made Franklin Pierce’s ’69 Com­ mencement Legendary,” Sentinel Source, May 4, 2019. Jackie Robinson, I Never Had It Made: An Autobiography of Jackie Robinson (New York: Putnam, 1972), xxiv. The title of Robinson’s book is a reference to this very theme: the idea that despite his success in sports he could not claim to “have it made” until Black Americans everywhere had access to equal opportunity. For more on the ways Rickey crafted a narrative to center himself, see Rebecca Alpert, “Who Is the Prophet? Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey, and the Integration of Baseball,” in The Prophetic Dimension of Sport, ed. Terry Shoemaker (Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2019), 15–24. On King’s support for the 1968 Olympic boycott, see Not the Struggle but the Triumph, 138. On the way Robinson applied his faith to the civil-rights movement, see Long and Lamb, Jackie Robinson, 127–178. Henderson, Sidelined, 121–148. On the decline of the revolt, see also Hartmann, Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete, 207–270; Bass, Not the Triumph but the Struggle, 291–325. John Erickson to Herbert J. Taylor, December 12, 1975, Collection 20, Box 26, Folder 41, Herbert J. Taylor Papers, Billy Graham Center Archives, Wheaton College, Whea­ ton, Illinois. Richard Quebedeuax, I Found It! The Story of Bill Bright and Campus Crusade (San Francisco, Calif.: Harper & Row, 1979), 144; Watson Spoelstra, “Training for Pros,” Christianity Today, March 18, 1977, 53. Jonathan Jacob Brower, “The Black Side of Football: The Salience of Race,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California Santa Barbara, 1972, 280. On the links between sports ministry organizations and Christian right politics, see Tom Krattenmaker, Onward Christian Athletes: Turning Ballparks into Pulpits and Players into

34 Paul Emory Putz

Preachers (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 127–166; Ladd and Mathisen, Muscular Christianity, 161–163. On the rise of the Christian right and its links with the Republican Party and social conservativism, see Seth Dowland, Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 78 Dowland, Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right, 215–223. 79 Paul Putz, “The Role of Sports Ministries in the NFL Protests,” Religion and Politics, October 17, 2017; Paul Putz, “Black Christians Play a Crucial Role in Athlete Acti­ vism,” Christianity Today, August 31, 2020.

2 “THE GREATEST CHRISTIAN MOVIE OF ALL TIME” 300 and Spartan Masculinity as Cultural Repertoire in Christian Mixed Martial Arts and Beyond Zachary T. Smith

Introduction “I think 300 was one of the greatest Christian movies ever made.” As I read the interview transcript, this line by Jude Roberts—a former Christian mixed martial arts (CMMA) practitioner, and pastor of a “fight church”—seized my attention. It was not the first reference I’d heard in my research on CMMA to the 2007 film about the last stand of Leonidas and the Spartan army against an advancing Persian horde. In fact, references to the film were commonplace. What arrested my attention was the description of the film as “one of the greatest Christian movies ever made.” This statement, an almost throwaway clause in the context of the longer inter­ view, speaks to the place of 300 in the canon of contemporary white evangelical Christendom in the USA.1 Interpreting this GOAT (Greatest Of All Time) state­ ment as an act of canonization,2 this essay takes up Newton’s provocation to “theorize about the politics of [300] in light of … the genealogy of privileged cultural texts”3 and to offer an account of Spartan masculinity as a “cultural repertoire” in CMMA.4 As a cultural repertoire, constructions of Spartan warrior masculinity provide a set of “knowledge, skills, and symbols which provide mate­ rials from which” white evangelical men such as Jude Roberts can forge individual and group identities.5 Processes of identity construction such as this are important to analyze in order to unmask cultural strategies through which white male supremacy is fabricated and secured. Attention to these processes helps to trouble what appears as a common­ sense equivocation between CMMA and white evangelical hegemonic masculi­ nity.6 Refusing to accept CMMA as naturally or essentially associated with white evangelical hegemonic masculinity parochializes whiteness, making it possible to observe a range of contingent strategic identifications at the intersection of religion, race, and gender.7 DOI: 10.4324/9781003014621-4

36 Zachary T. Smith

I argue that Spartan masculinity is one repertoire through which these identifications are martialed together, such that manliness is constructed “as simultaneously cultural and racial.”8 Under the logic of racial liberalism, generic language of culture becomes a primary means of signaling difference in such a way as to obscure the historical violence through which racial orders are imposed.9 As an account of white evangelical masculinity in CMMA, this essay examines one strategy by which masculinity, whiteness, and Christianity provide cover and context for each other illuminating the associations created when Spartan mascu­ linity is invoked by figures like Jude Roberts, evangelical pastors like Mark Driscoll, politicians like Ted Cruz, or the January 6 Capitol insurrectionists.10

Methodology The primary data that this essay is based on was produced in 2012 as an “elite interview” with “Jude Roberts”—at the time one of the most visible figures of what was being labeled by the media as “Christian mixed martial arts.”11 The polished transcripts were published in 2017 in the article “Fist, Feet and Faith Collide” by Steven Waller.12 In what follows, I reconsider three themes of Waller’s original analysis related to US Christian values, masculinity, and violence to show the operational acts of identification at work in the valorization of the film 300 by CMMA practitioners.13

Elite Interviews The purpose of “elite interviews” is to elicit the perspective of “people who occupy, by heritage, merit or circumstance, a key place in power networks.”14 While elite interviews have been a marginal method in the qualitative research methods literature,15 and in sport studies,16 Waller contends that it is a good source for research with athletes at elite levels of sport.17 Though “elite interviews” are not heralded as a method in the religious studies literature, this is likely a result of the lesser attention paid to social-science methodology in the discipline.18 In fact, scholars have criticized research in religious studies for focusing too heavily on religious leaders (elites) while ignoring the perspectives of lay practitioners.19 Despite the warrant of these critiques, it is still useful to examine the position and perspectives of religious leaders as key influencers in a social network, especially when these influencers are practitioners in a community and producers of content that is widely distributed and consumed.20 Teresa Odendahl and Aileen Shaw suggest that researchers using the elite inter­ viewer should prioritize the interviewee’s account of a phenomenon, allowing them to dictate subject relevance (as opposed to the researcher).21 Thus, the result of the interview is what can be termed “the interviewee’s definition of the situation.”22 With a focus on the subject position of Jude Roberts as a former professional MMA fighter, a former pastor of a “fight church,” and a de-facto figurehead for CMMA in the early 2000s,23 Waller employed a semi-structured interview design.24 I position my readings

300 and Spartan Masculinity 37

of this interview as a critical reanalysis of Jude Robert’s definition of CMMA, arranged alongside of a selection of other cultural texts,25 and crystallized through a year of fieldwork with CMMA practitioners.26

The Spartan Mythography Ancient Greece has figured prominently as a model of white US society and citizenship, offering a pattern for organizing everything from art and archi­ tecture to education and sport.27 However, as W. E. B. DuBois showed, this “heritage” was not available to everyone and generally excluded people not legible as white.28 In fact, the study and promotion of ancient Greece was often conducted as the study of a white racial heritage, with whitewashed his­ tories of Greece commonly combined with scientific racism. White-supremacist movements, including Nazi Germany and early twentieth-century eugenics in the USA, interpreted ancient Greeks as both genetic and ideological pre­ decessors of a superior white race. Such notions were far from limited to a racist fringe.29 Early twentieth-century white journalists lionized white boxer Jim Jeffries as “The Great White Hope” to defeat African American Jack Johnson because Jeffries’ white racial heritage supposedly included great military achievements such as the Spartan stand at Thermopylae. As Gail Bederman pointed out in a discussion on the Jeffries v. Johnson bout, “male dominance and white supremacy have a strong historical connection.”30 The racialized image of ancient Sparta relies on the supposed physical and martial supremacy of the masculine Spartan soldier, itself a complex mythography. Reaching back centuries, the myth of Spartan warrior masculinity incorporates a range of texts, including writings by Xenophon (fourth and fifth century BCE), Herodotus (fifth century BCE), Plutarch (first and second centuries CE) and Dracontius (fifth century CE).31 Figures such as David Hume commented on the seeming uniqueness of Spar­ tan society, while Jean-Jacques Rousseau frequently referred to Spartan exception­ ality.32 In similar fashion, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an early advocate of muscular Christianity in the USA, referenced Spartan physicality and bravery in his Outdoor Papers.33 300 continues this long lionization of the Spartan soldier as the ideal man and citizen as it dramatizes Frank Miller’s 1998 graphic novel—an adaption of the 1962 film The 300 Spartans. Darlene Juschka notes that despite the vast amount of time that elapsed between these constructions of Spartan masculinity there is a remarkable coherence to the ways in which ideal and proper Spartan masculinity, and Spartan society as an extension, is represented.34 Both Plutarch and Xenophon link heroic masculinity to a proper polis, a connection that later mythographers have employed to connect the Spartan mission at Thermopylae to the preservation of democracy. The widespread acceptance of the notion that the Spartan 300 “saved” Western democracy is illustrated by articles such as those featured on HistoryNet with titles such as “The Significance of Thermopylae: Why We Ought to Thank the Spartans for the Constitution, Chick-fil-a, and Capitalism.”35

38 Zachary T. Smith

Despite the long association with democratic modes of governance, Thomas More in the sixteenth century used Sparta as the model society for his Christian-socialist vision described in Utopia,36 while the John Birch Society would later invoke Sparta as an icon of “communist fascism.”37 What holds these seemingly disparate visions together is the extent to which “exceptional” Spartan masculinity qua society provides a model for the organization of social order, a model premised on the management of difference.38 Observed in this light, More’s Christian-socialist appeal and popular democratic claims to Spartan social order both elide the social and corporeal violence underpinning Spartan supremacy. These Spartan mythographies “create a story that in its formation of masculinity, specifically Spartan masculinity, erases the negative implications of the construction and maintenance of a warrior masculinity”—notably the brutalization of youth undergoing the agoge, the enslavement of non-Spartitae “helots,” the use of physical and sexual violence to terrorize and control populations, and the eugenicist practice of infanticide.39 Framed as acts of canonization, white Eurocentric narratives about the superior masculinity of Spartan soldiers anchor proper masculinity and democratic citizen­ ship in an idealized and mythologized past. As a historicization, Spartan manhood is also presented as the peak of an uncorrupted and “natural” manliness. Like many origin stories, Spartan mythography establishes the Spartan warrior as an idealized figure of primordial masculinity, one that is available for appropriation both as a heritage past and as an image of a possible future. To speak clearly and analytically about Spartan mythography, then, is to speak about the canonization of white masculinity as a historical identification granted the power to determine hierarchies of value, and to enforce such orders through violence.40

Spartan Masculinity as Christian Democratic Masculinity Jude Roberts’ articulation of an ideal Christian masculinity as soldierly and Spartan maps on to a longer history of idealizing militant masculinities within white US evangelical and muscular Christianities,41 even as it reconfigures a centuries-old script about the loss of (white) American masculinity.42 And yet Roberts’ invocation of 300—akin to the evangelical homage to Braveheart and Fight Club43—is an act of identification that reveals how constructions of (American) masculinity are inseparable from constructions of violence, race, Christianity, and US citizenship.44 These concurrent identifications can be observed in a series of Internet com­ ments on the Christian film-review website Cinemagogue. One Christian film reviewer summed up 300 writing, “this will be the new defining man-movie for years to come, trumping even the tough Gibson films Braveheart and Apocalypto.”45 Internet poster “Brammer” found 300 not only a commentary on modern mas­ culinity but also a referendum on Christianity qua democracy: I find it no coincidence that this battle was one of the defining moments in the rise of democracy which would allow the gospel to spread farther than

300 and Spartan Masculinity 39

Xerxes or Greek armies would ever reach. Looks like the true God-King had this plan all along.46 With the connection between democracy and Christianity established, another poster on the same site, “Pastor James Harleman,” added: to quote Tyler Durden: “our war is a spiritual war.” This is why being pre­ pared for the Christian experience is compared to “armoring up” in Ephesians 6. Hooah. Brammer, your point about democracy is right on the money, and many theologians have seen the political landscape being painted in those pivotal years before Jesus as providential … as a good God setting things in motion even before Christ’s incarnation.47 “Gary” draws these threads together using the melodramatic language of demoni­ zation, echoing Florence Nightingale’s century-old vision of Thermopylae as a cosmic battle. “What illustrations we can draw from this film, and what an encouragement to wage war against the flesh, world & Satan with all the strength we have!”48 “Christ, our Leonidas, this world our Thermopylae, we the brave swords which keep the pass between heaven and hell.”49 These comments partially illustrate the chain of identifications through which the Spartan repertoire is configured as US Christian white masculinity, and they reflect the dominant interpretations of 300 and of CMMA. Tae Young Kwak has analyzed the “obfuscation of race, culture, and history” in 300 to theorize how Orientalism foments melodramatic fears of a “clash of civilizations,” interpreted as a cosmic battle between good and evil.50 Kaveh Farrokh describes this binary as “the democratic, good, rational [Spartan] ‘Us’ versus the tyrannical, evil and irrational, ‘other’ of the ever-nebulous (if not exotic) ‘Persia’.”51 As an Orientalist trope, the Spartan army appears as white and noble with unadorned chiseled physiques while the Persians are presented as non-white, corrupt, and effeminately accessorized.52 The depictions of Leonidas and Xerxes, as representative figureheads, further bring these differences into stark relief.53 Whereas Leonidas appears at the vanguard of a volunteer army of white super-soldiers, the monstrously large Xerxes is black and hairless, decorated with jewels, and perched on a platform carried by enslaved porters. By “enwhitening the Spartan warriors in 300” and demonizing (partially through a simultaneous “enblackening”) the Persian army, Kwak concludes that 300 “has achieved the effect of more facile identification with the Spartans by American audiences.”54 That the film entered production in October 2005 during Saddam Hussein’s trial and as the US military death toll crested 2,000 casualties only served to compress the distance required for such imaginings. Similarly, scholars critically analyzing CMMA have tended to situate it “as a means by which US evangelical communities, typically but not exclusively middleclass and conservative, negotiate masculine Christian identity, and through which they counteract the perceived emasculation of Protestant Christianity.”55 Scott Strednak Singer has linked evangelical gender anxieties to a national experience of

40 Zachary T. Smith

post-9/11 vulnerability, referring to the men’s ministry Core 300, named “in reference to a gory 2006 action film featuring a mostly naked and supremely buff collection of white soldiers who fight to the last man to defend their homeland from an overwhelming, brown-skinned Persian army.”56 Kwak’s and Singer’s interpretations confirm the co-constitution of masculinity, race, and culture and reflect the sociocultural dynamics that animate historical dis­ courses about white muscular Christianity and contemporary CMMA. For while CMMA is a relatively recent historical phenomena, its articulation as “Spartan” draws on a centuries-old script about the proper ordering, training, and containment of bodies. More than signposting a unique twenty-first-century, Christian, white mas­ culinity, the CMMA appeal to Spartan masculinity rearticulates and recreates the same old webs of association as when Jim Jeffries was placed in the Spartan bloodline or when Thomas Wentworth Higginson contrasted Spartan bravery, martial intelligence, and physical prowess with a portrait of nineteenth-century dyspeptic manliness. Understood as a cultural repertoire, Spartan masculinity is one of many scripts that have been used to transpose orders of racialized and gendered difference into more generic discourses of civilization and culture.57

Violence, Militance, and Christianhood The hard masculinity of an embattled band of 300 Spartans offers individuals like Roberts a conveniently packaged popular narrative about a valiant manhood lost to history. US Protestant sport culture has long drawn on nostalgic images of bygone warrior-men, idolizing Christianized heroes ranging from Arthurian knights and Christian crusaders to William Wallace, John Wayne, and Chuck Norris.58 Roberts’ own self-portrait depicts him as an Oakleys-sporting modern-day crusa­ der, an image that sits next to the Spartan shield hanging above his desk.59 It should come as no surprise, then, that since the advent of MMA in the mid 1990s, Christians have situated the sport in the lineage of practices for producing warrior masculinity.60 Singer points out that MMA achieved this status due to its popular perception as an arena for “no holds barred” violence and partly due to the initial development of the Ultimate Fighting Cham­ pionship (UFC) as a professional sport for men.61 UFC marketed the octagon as a crucible for determining the efficacy of hand-to-hand combative styles, a test easily and often coded as a site of authentic masculinity. In the early 2000s, Pastor Mark Driscoll, by now well known for his popular version of militant Christian misogyny,62 challenged the views of prominent individuals such as Senator John McCain who vocally opposed the legalization, commercialization, and popularization of MMA. Driscoll unequivocally celebrated the octagon as confirmation of men’s combative nature: I don’t think there is anything purer than two guys in a cage … as a pastor, and as a Bible teacher, I think that God made men masculine … Men are made for combat, men are made for conflict, men are made for dominion.63

300 and Spartan Masculinity 41

The message is clear. God made men violent, and true manhood can only be measured through combat. Roberts is similarly unequivocal about Christianity, manhood, and violence. One of Roberts’ favorite catchphrases, and one that has had broad appeal in the MMA world thanks to Roberts’ entrepreneurial savvy, appears on a popular T-shirt featur­ ing an “angel mounted on top of a demon beating him” with the caption “Beating the Hell Out of Them.” Offering an interpretation of the phrase, Roberts explained that, “violent men take the kingdom of God by force,” though he quickly added, “it is not talking about walking down the street and beat some guy up and force him to convert.” Despite this qualification, and the additional qualification that “the only way that we obtain victory in Christianity is to submit ourselves to the cross and to Jesus Christ,” Roberts continued his explanation with another military metaphor. “What it [the phrase] means to me is literally beating the hell out of the enemy. We are taking ground not losing ground.” The centrality of militant violence also appears in his personal mantra-turned­ manifesto, “Peaceful, in a Violent Sort of Way.” Roberts believes that this mantra expresses a core truth of Christianity, that, as he puts it, “violence is central to Christianhood”—a term he coined that suggestively links religious and gender identities, while echoing Christian identity language of a “Christian race.”64 Referencing an online exchange with pacifist theologian Greg Boyd, Roberts appeals to the authority of New Testament scripture to establish the relationship between masculinity, violence, and Christianity: If you go through the New Testament analogies, the number one and number two analogies are that of a father and that of a husband. Three and four are closely tied are that of military and that of wrestling. Those are the euphe­ misms that the Bible uses the most to describe our walk in Christ. Further challenging Christian pacifist readings of the New Testament, Roberts cites the concept of Christus victor, which he says was used by early Christians as “church militant” because “He [Christ] is militarily victorious because he overcame evil.” Another CMMA practitioner I met through fieldwork adopted the Latin phrase Si vis pacem para bellum (If you want peace, prepare for war) along with a Spartan helmet as a kind of personal badge and motto. Military-style violence animates Roberts’ Christian imagination and doubtlessly reflects his experience both in the military and as an MMA fighter. That he inter­ prets this military experience as universally central to Christian identity—an iden­ tity he constructs as essentially white, masculine, and American—testifies to the salience of what Newton terms the “US Christian-White Imaginary.”65 As Newton demonstrates, the US Christian white imaginary operates as a religio-racial conceptual horizon that naturalizes and justifies white-supremacist violence in the name of Christian virtue. For Roberts and others, the Spartan repertoire provides historical and cultural cover for sanctioning violence as a legitimate means for neutralizing perceived counterinsurgent threats.66

42 Zachary T. Smith

Roberts’ vision coalesces in a chapter of his self-published manifesto, titled “Jesus the Crucified Messiah or the Warrior King?” which is juxtaposed with a photo of a US Apache helicopter gunship. Beyond Roberts, these same identifications are a widespread part of the CMMA cultural mélange. For example, the now defunct Christian apparel brand “Jesus Didn’t Tap,” founded by Jason “Fearless” David Frank, an actor known for his role in Power Rangers and who featured briefly on the pro-am MMA circuit in Texas, featured numerous items with explicit military appeal. One T-shirt is emblematic: the silhouette of gun-toting GIs is depicted surrounding a cross and flanked by two American flags, underscored with the phrase “Jesus Didn’t Tap, and Neither Do Our Troops.” Another T-shirt featuring similar imagery sported the phrase “Jesus Didn’t Tap, and Neither Does This Country.” Less stylized, the two leaders of the CMMA group that I trained with frequently wore US Army T-shirts, despite neither having served. The Spartan repertoire provides a military history of America that extends back to the battle at Thermopylae. Just as 300 elided the Spartan reality of “chronic abject terror of arbitrary violence, including annually state-sanctioned murder of random slaves,”67 Roberts’ genealogy of militant American Christian masculinity masks the realities of US settler colonialism, state-sponsored torture, and violence against women both within the military as well as civilians in regions where the US has deployed troops.68 His self-styling as a modern-day crusader is revealing.69 Asked to comment on the crusader shield in his office, Roberts responded: [T]he crusades were ultimately fought over 400 years of Muslim invasion, occupation, rape and pillaging of Europeans all across Europe … the stuff that we did in those wars is obviously a lot like Jihad. So those things are inap­ propriate. So what is appropriate about it is they saw Muslim persecution and occupation and evil intent and they took a stand against those things and that is what the crusade shield really means to me is men that has enough cajones to stand up against evil and say this is going no further. Though Roberts acknowledges an at least partial “inappropriateness” of the Crusades, he constructs the overall mission as one of righteousness, and part of a clash of civilizations. Note the “we” invoked by Roberts, collapsing time, space, and geographic distance to create an imagined community that encompasses both (white) medieval and modern crusaders. The implication is clear: even if violence done on one side mirrors the violence of the other, there are still right and wrong sides to be on. Historicized cultural repertoires such as crusader or Spartan masculinity offer resources to both “frame and claim” the right side.70

Militant Mythopoeia For Roberts, concerns about Christians being too passive are fundamentally related to concerns about the effeminization of men in the USA, which he believes is at the heart of a national societal decline. Such concerns are not new. White

300 and Spartan Masculinity 43

American men have cyclically sounded the alarm of civilizational collapse, blaming a loss of manly verve and prescribing variations on the doctrines of muscular Christianity and strenuous manhood as the antidote.71 Employing this centuriesold melodramatic trope, Roberts says: The vast majority of problems we’re having in our culture today are because we don’t have a warrior ethos. We have a bunch of cowards. A warrior ethos, if properly developed, will do nothing but help our society … If we raise our boys to be men of honor and integrity and strength who will stand up to evil, and wickedness, and unrighteousness—these kinds of problems will go away. Elsewhere, Roberts is more explicit about the gendered threats facing Christian men in the USA. Chapter titles in his manifesto include “On Every Front: War against Men,” and “10 Signs Your Church is Officially Effeminate.” For Roberts, the military masculinity on display in 300 models a strategy for recovering what has been lost. Recognizing that masculinity is made, Roberts rhet­ orically asks, “So in America what determines you are a male, just because you have a penis? I mean what makes you a man?”72 Roberts answers his own question with a typically mythopoetic Jungian insight by appealing to the supposed manhood of ancient Sparta: “In America, we have no rights of initiation. We have no rites of pas­ sage for young men to become men” but “within 300, you have the agoge and then they have to graduate from the agoge and when they do, they are a man.” Roberts’ emphasis on rites of passage mimics the mythopoetic script of manli­ ness. Illustrated by Robert Bly’s best-selling book Iron John, the mythopoetic men’s movement of the early 1990s was positioned as a therapeutic response to the pro­ blem of lost or corrupted masculinity.73 As David Bell and Ruth Holliday put it, [T]he movement’s key concerns lie in rediscovering and celebrating “deep” masculinity as a response to the softening effects of feminism, white-collar alienation and post-modern urban living; tapping historically and transcultu­ rally into sources of masculine strength; reaffirming via naturalization the duality of the sexes; and … locating a space for rituals of deep masculinity.74 What distinguishes Roberts’ response from the more typical mythopoetic masculi­ nity on offer in the 1990s and early 2000s is his location of initiation rituals adja­ cent to the physical violence of military training—for example, as it is played out in the early scenes of 300.75 Juschka argues that the pain represented by initiation rituals such as the Spartan agoge operates as the primary signifier through which proper masculinity is constructed. Pain—and the exceptional ability to both give and receive it—marks the status of Spartan warriors as true men, the ultimate protectors of democratic freedom, in possession of an uncorrupted primordial masculinity “lost to the depths of time.”76 Roberts depicts the practice of MMA as akin to the training of the Spartan agoge, an association that further extends the signifying work being performed by pain.

44 Zachary T. Smith

Talal Asad contends that the significance of pain is “not [in] the traditional symbolism attributed to ascetic pain … but the place occupied by bodily pain in an economy of truth.”77 In the “economy of truth” that is CMMA, pain is contextualized as something to be endured and struggled through while also materially signifying (and made worthwhile by) the practitioner’s status as manly and Christ-like.78 As Roberts makes clear, the objectification of truth through pain is key to the construction of CMMA as a space for training in both Christian and manly virtues: I think there are a ton of values in MMA that relate to Christianity … One of the characteristics that Jesus brings up is suffering. In the Christian faith, you have to persevere to the end through the hardships and suffering … Guess what, when you’re getting punched in the face, when the guy is on top of you, you’ve got to persevere through those things … Jesus never gave up. All the way to the cross at Calvary, he stayed with it. In our sport, we work hard at never tapping. In MMA, to “tap” is to quit or give up. The CMMA mes­ sage [is]: “Jesus Didn’t Tap!” after going through unimaginable suffering and pain when he was crucified on the cross. Roberts’ declaration about 300 as the “one of the greatest Christian films of all time” is scripturalizing, as it appeals to the mythography of Spartan warrior mas­ culinity as a story of origins for Christian white American manhood. As a cultural repertoire, the Spartitae also provides a strategy for recovering lost masculinity. As a site where pain is experienced and meted out, MMA is the twenty-first-century heir of the Spartan agoge, providing a place for men to experience the Godordained violent rituals of authentic proper manhood and in so doing restore proper order to US society.

On the Spartan Mirage and Uncivil Religion Newton contends that formal advances in racial equity such as civil rights have induced a “lullaby of a sanctified liberal idealism that conceals unacknowledged racism” in the USA.79 One strategy of concealment he documents is the labeling of violence as properly Christian, a strategy primarily employed by white people to mask anti-Black violence and eschew labels of white supremacy or racism. While this strategy has long historical application in the USA,80 contemporary versions are often situated within a racial liberal formation in which race has been redefined as culture, where culture “has been saturated with connotations of ‘national culture’ as a moral and spiritual (anticommunist) ideal.”81 That we commonly refer to contemporary “culture wars” and not “race,” “civilizational,” or “gender” wars is suggestive for the way that “culture” has assumed chameleon-like status for mark­ ing difference in contemporary neoliberal multiculturalism. Where gender, race and class were once subsumed by the discourse of civilization,82 today language of generic “cultural difference” is used.83

300 and Spartan Masculinity 45

In this context, ancient Sparta is a repertoire that accommodates this language of culture and difference, especially in popular representations like 300, which pre­ sents a racialized “clash of civilizations.” Here, it is ancient Greek culture which is said to be the progenitor of American democracy, the protector of the future of global Christianity, and the model of white Christian masculinity. Likewise, this explanation of “culture” also helps to explain how Roberts simultaneously invokes the Spartan repertoire alongside of mythopoetic celebrations of (imagined) African initiation rituals and condemnations of the violence against people indigenous to what is now North America. Positioning white masculine formation as a matter of “cultural” heritage makes it available for appropriation and consumption while also making white supremacy a matter of personal preference fit for consumption among the great “American feast of difference.”84 The transposition of race into culture situates resources as properly multicultural, exoticizing difference while also minimizing it. Contextual flexibility, including the unevenness with which such techniques are applied, is a key component of the contemporary racial formation that Jodi Melamed calls “neoliberal-multicultural racialization” and one that enables liberal and multicultural idealisms to “racialize [and gender] without seeming racist [or sexist].”85 Contemporary discourses about lost or failed masculinity may refer less overtly to eugenicist concerns about “race suicide” than did those of a century ago, but they traffic in similar logics connecting masculinity to justified violence and racial formation.86 The case of John Turano—known among the alt-right as “Base Spartan” as well as the moniker “The Berserker of Berkeley” for his role as a counter-antifa protestor—offers a final example. Turano gained notoriety for his Spartan-themed costume featuring a Corinthian-style helmet and a cuirass displaying pronounced pectoral and abdominal muscles with the script “Soldier of Christ” emblazoned on the back, paired with US-flag-themed shorts and knee-high socks.87 Since the Berkley clash in 2017, Turano gained additional notoriety for challenging Juan Cadavid (also known as “Johnny Benitez” by the alt-right), former commander of the Orange County chapter of the white-supremacist organization Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, to a street fight (and later an MMA bout in a follow-up video) as part of a rant denouncing the alt-right.88 Yet even as Turano admits that he “made a horrible mistake” and that the alt-right “loved me because they thought I was violent and I looked threatening,” he sports a “White Pride” tattoo because “everyone should be proud of who they are.”89 As Melamed poetically concludes, discourses of multiculturalism both “represent and destroy.”90 Turano as “Base Spartan” (who accepted Cadavid’s counterchallenge to an MMA bout) shows how the Spartan repertoire has been configured as a historicizing identity for white supremacists, even as it is also reconfigured to historicize muscular liberalism.91 A web of historical associations and identifications, the Spartan repertory in CMMA and beyond is one example of what Michael Altman and Jerome Copulsky call “uncivil religion” in the USA, a compendium of “persistent and pervasive” sym­ bols, rituals, and beliefs at the center of the American political imagination often put toward “petty interests and ugly passions.”92

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Conclusion Roberts’ invocation of the Spartan mythography and celebration of MMA is easily interpreted as a response to gendered and racialized anxieties. There is little doubt that part of the appeal of Spartan masculinity for Roberts and other white evan­ gelical men is the same as what appealed to the men who donned Spartan helmets during the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, or at the Capitol Insurrection. Such interpretations, however, are limited if they don’t also make sense of the way that CMMA features misogynistic, xenophobic, and nativist dis­ course alongside egalitarian and multicultural discourses, or the extent to which Christianity itself is used discursively to appeal to multicultural ideals while rein­ forcing the dominant monoculturalism implicit in references to “Christianhood.” Revisiting 300-inspired CMMA discourse in the context of racial liberalism shows the contextual flexibility of cultural repertoires such as Spartan warrior masculinity “this side of modernity, where outright evocations of racial supremacy have lost their luster.”93 Counter-hegemonic readings of 300 (such as Kieron Gil­ len’s graphic novel Three, which features three enslaved helot protagonists who defeat 300 Spartan warriors in an uprising) draw attention to the power of the Spartan repertoire “as a signifying system that stigmatize[s] and depreciate[s] one form of humanity for the purposes of another’s health, development, safety, profit, or pleasure.”94 As a cultural repertoire, Spartan masculinity provides resources for ordering and upholding differential hierarchies of human value, carrying out the orthotaxic work of sustaining “social difference with authority and without critical accountability.”95 In drawing on the Spartan repertoire, CMMA practitioners such as Jude Roberts rearticulate the violent and extractive logics of white male supre­ macy and scientific racism for use in the twenty-first century as a “properly” Christian masculine comportment fit for liberal democratic society.96

Notes 1 Notwithstanding the problems involved with invoking “evangelical” as a stable or fixed referent. See Linford D. Fisher, “Evangelicals and Unevangelicals: The Contested History of a Word, 1500–1950,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, 26 (2016): 184– 226; and Michael Altman, “‘Religion, Religions, Religious’ in America: Toward a Smithian Account of Evangelicalism,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 31 (2019): 71–82I. I use the term here as what Cody Musselman calls a “generic” referent for a set of “behavioral dynamics, affects, temporalities, and webs of associations that shape distinctive types of com­ munity formation, recruitment strategies, proselytization techniques, architectures, languages, and bodily comportments.” Cody Musselman, “Training for the Unknown and Unknow­ able: CrossFit and Evangelical Temporality,” Religions, 10 (2019): 627. 2 Television and film, as media and genres, are especially effective cultural repertoires in the ways that they invite viewers to identify with characters on screen. Through film, viewing publics become “imagined communities.” Building on Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983), Melanie McAlister details the role of television in the Gulf War for establishing the USA as an imagined community. Melanie McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005), 244.

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3 Richard Newton, Identifying Roots: Alex Haley and the Anthropology of the Scriptures (Sheffield: Equinox, 2020), 9. I thank Richard for his comments and a conversation on an earlier draft of this chapter, which were important for helping me focus on Spartan masculinity as a “cultural repertoire.” 4 While also pointing the extent to which Spartan manhood, as a cultural repertoire, is broadly available for appropriation such as it was by some insurrectionists at the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. On cultural repertoire as a sociological concept, see Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review (1986), 273–286. See also Jean-François Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity, trans. Steven Rendall, Janet Roitman, Cynthia Schoch, and Jonathan Derrick (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2005). See Richard Newton, “Scared Sheetless: Negrophobia, the Fear of God, and Justified Violence in the US Christian-White Imaginary,” Journal of Religion and Violence (2020) for an application of the concept where Newton theorizes canons as “cultural repertoires.” While canons are often thought of as curated discourses, as cultural repertoires they include broad modes of communicative action such as music, film, or clothing. Newton, Identifying Roots, 9. 5 Swidler, Culture in Action, 280–284. 6 Bayart, in Illusion of Culture, refers to these kinds of essentialisms as “culturalism” (xii), which he describes as the “processes of forming cultural or political identities whose crystallization is often recent” (85). See Zachary T. Smith, “Wrestling with Repugnance in Christian Mixed Martial Arts,” in P. Persaud and S. Choudhury (eds), American Examples: New Con­ versations on Religion, vol. II (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 2022) for a cri­ tical review of the scholarly literature on CMMA in which I argue that the literature had ignored both women and practitioners of color to construct CMMA as a primarily white evangelical male phenomenon. Beyond issues of data and interpretation, I contended that the “repugnicization” of CMMA was also part of an operational act of identity for scholars of the liberal academy. Condemnations of the regressive politics of CMMA, while incisive, warranted, and necessary, exist within a longer history of liberal academic identity forma­ tion, a history and identity which, in the discipline of religious studies (and perhaps beyond, too) have often been secured through strategic acts of differentiation. See also Susan Hard­ ing, “Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant Cultural Other,” Social Research, 58 (1991): 373–393 and “Secular Trouble: Regulating Reality in Non-fic­ tion Literatures,” Christianity and Literature, 69 (1) (2020): 126–137; Christopher Driscoll and Monica Miller, Method as Identity: Manufacturing Distance in the Academic Study of Religion (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2019); Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1986); Benjamin Rolsky, “Producing the Christian Right: Conservative Evangelicalism, Representation, and the Recent Religious Past,” Religions, 12 (3) (2021): 171. The news media is also partially responsible for creating and sustaining this particular representation, as communication scholar Richard Wolff notes. Richard Wolff, Fight Sports and the Church: Boxing and Martial Arts Ministries in America (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2021), 142. Additionally, whereas I approach CMMA ethnographically, the literature is primarily based upon popular and news media representations (including the documentary film Fight Church). The two exceptions that I am aware of include Steven Waller, “‘Fist, Feet and Faith’: An ‘Elite’ Interview with ‘Fight Church’ Pastor Jude Roberts,” Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics, 20 (2017): 1241–1258; and Wolff, Fight Sports and the Church, which also used interviews, and which is primarily a constructive project of practical theology. 7 Newton, “Scared Sheetless.” For a concise historical overview of the project of white evangelical racism, see Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Ferris & Ferris, 2021). My thinking is also informed by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (London and New York: Routledge, 2014); and Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-coming: Black Reli­ gion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (New York: New York University Press, 2016); and “The House We Live In: Religio-racial Theories and the Study of Reli­ gion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 88 (2) (2020): 440–459.

48 Zachary T. Smith

8 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 29. 9 Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 10 For example, Mark Driscoll, “Jesus Our Warrior King,” https://subsplash.com/markdris collministries/lb/mi/+aefhh7v; and Abigail Rosenthal, “Sen. Ted Cruz Brought Back His ‘Come and Take It’ Mask for Biden’s Inauguration,” Chron.com, January 20, 2021. For a wide assortment of examples, see Myke Cole, “The Sparta Fetish Is a Cultural Cancer,” New Republic, August 1, 2019. 11 Jude Roberts is the pseudonym that is used in Waller, “Fist, Feet and Faith.” 12 See Waller, “Fist, Feet and Faith” for published transcripts. 13 Though this essay primarily focuses on CMMA in order to maintain a manageable scope, these acts of identification exist widely beyond CMMA, both historically, and contemporaneously. Additionally, these acts are not limited to those legible as white men. In my ongoing work I situate CMMA as a site in which race and gender are operationalized affectively for what McAlister calls the labor of “military multi­ culturalism.” McAlister, Epic Encounters, 235. 14 Trond A. Undheim, “Getting Connected: Sociologists Can Access the High Tech Elite,” in S. N. Hesse-Biber and P. Leavy (eds), Emergent Methods in Social Research (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2006), 14. 15 Samuel Coleman, “Obstacles and Opportunities in Access to Professional Work Orga­ nizations for Long-term Fieldwork: The Case Study of Japanese Laboratories,” Human Organization, 55 (3) (1996): 334–343; Rosanna Hertz and Jonathan B. Imber (eds), Studying Elites Using Qualitative Methods (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995); Susan A. Ostrander, “‘Surely You’re Not in This Just to Be Helpful’: Access, Rapport, and Interviews on Three Studies of Elites,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 22 (1) (1993): 7–27. 16 Trevor Slack, “An Interview with David Stubbs, Executive Director, Committed to Green Foundation,” International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship, 4 (4) (2003): 3–9. 17 Waller, “Fist, Feet and Faith,” 1247. 18 Michael Strausberg and Steven Engler, “Introduction: Research Methods in the Study of Religion/s,” in The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 25–42. 19 Which often disproportionately denigrates the perspectives of women and others his­ torically marginalized by a given community of practice. David Hall, “Introduction,” in David Hall (ed.), Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), vii–2. 20 Nancy Ammerman, “Lived Religion as an Emerging Field: An Assessment of Its Con­ tours and Frontiers,” Nordic Journal of Religion and Society, 29 (2) (2016): 83–99. 21 Teresa Odendahl and Aileen Shaw, “Interviewing Elites,” in Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein (eds), Handbook of Interview Research (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2001), 299–316. 22 Waller, “Fist, Feet and Faith,” 1247, quoting Robert K. Merton, Marjorie Fiske, and Patricia L. Kendall, The Focused Interview: A Manual of Problems and Procedures (New York: Free Press, 1956). 23 Roberts’ position in CMMA, though one of influence, is partial. He is no longer pri­ marily involved in CMMA and has transitioned into survival training and wilderness excursions. 24 See Waller, “Fist, Feet and Faith” for a complete description of the protocols used to produce the interview, as well as published transcripts. As a student of Steve’s, I was familiar with his article on “Jude Roberts” and CMMA. Eventually, I took up CMMA as the topic of my dissertation research, in which Jude lurked as a background character. Though I never interviewed or trained with Roberts for my study, his influence was palpable; one of my interlocutors “introduced” us via text message. Through the course of my research I spoke with individuals who had trained with him, either at his former

300 and Spartan Masculinity 49

25 26

27

28 29

30 31

32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

fight church, or at the Army’s fight school, where Roberts has often served as an instructor. And as I sought to articulate CMMA as a cultural project, Roberts appeared in the form of T-shirts, popular CMMA slogans, Department of Defense contracts, blog posts, Nightline interviews, and a self-published manifesto. Including Roberts’ public interviews and published writings. Where I quote these, I attribute them to Roberts but do not cite where they came from in order to mask Roberts’ identity. On crystallization, see Laura Ellingson, Engaging Crystallization in Qualitative Research: An Introduction (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2009). For an example of this approach used in interview reanalysis, see Brian T. Gearity, Leslee A. Fisher, Ashley Yandt, Allison Perugini, Susannah K. Knust, Matthew P. Bejar, Terilyn C. Shigeno, Leslie K. Larsen, and Jamie M. Fynes, “Deconstructing Caring in the Coach Athlete Relationship: A Gentler Form of Domination,” Sports Coaching Review (2021). Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. III: The Linguistic Evidence (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2020); Dani Bostick, “Not for All: Nostalgic Distortions as a Weapon of Segregation in Secondary Classics,” American Journal of Philology, 141 (2) (2020): 283–306; Aimee Hinds, “Hercules in White: Classical Reception, Art and Myth,” The Jugaad Project, 23 (2020); Denise E. McCoskey, “Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts: How Neo-Nazis and Ancient Greeks Met in Char­ lottesville,” Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, 11 (11) (2018). William Edward Burgardt DuBois, The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques (New York: New York University Press, 2001). As Kelly J. Baker shows, Christian white supremacy is historically centrist and banal, not fringe and extreme. See Kelly J. Baker, Goespel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930 (Topeka, Kans.: University of Press of Kansas, 2011). See also Newton, “Scared Sheetless”; and Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, The Movie (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1988). Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 239.

Darlene Juschka, Contours of the Flesh: The Semiotics of Pain (Sheffield: Equinox, 2021),

72. As Jeffrey Murray notes in “‘Christ, Our Leonidas’: Dracontius’ Reception of the Battle of Thermopylae,” Greece and Rome, 63 (1) (2016): 106–115, Dracontius is an aberration in the tradition by casting Leonidas as suicidal. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract Discourses (Darlington: J. M. Dent, 1761). See also Murray, “Christ, Our Leonidas” for extensive documentation of Spartan imagery in both historical and contemporary thought. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Outdoor Papers (Boston, Mass.: Ticknor & Fields, 1863), 40, 143. Juschka, Contours of the Flesh, 67. “Spartan Militarism Saved Athenian Democracy,” Queen’s Gazette, April 11, 2007, www.qgazette.com/articles/spartan-militarism-saved-athenian-democracy; and Rachel Basinger, “The Significance of Thermopylae: Why We Ought to Thank the Spartans for the Constitution, Chick-fil-a, and Capitalism,” HistoryNet, www.historynet.com/ the-significance-of-thermopylae.htm. See also Juschka, Contours of the Flesh, 78–79. And, as Murray, “Christ, Our Leonidas,” 107, notes, both Jewish and Roman society claimed the Spartans as their own as a means of asserting cultural sophistication. Thomas More, Utopia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2014). Robert Welch, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society (1961), accessed January 7, 2022, https://ia800207.us.archive.org/18/items/WelchRobertBlueBook/Welch%2C%20Robert %20-%20Blue%20Book.pdf, 49–50. See S. Jonathon O’Donnell, Passing Orders (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020) for a theorization of religion as “orthotaxy” or “proper ordering.” Juschka, Contours of the Flesh, 71. Channeling Newton, “Scared Sheetless,” 309 that “to speak analytically about whiteness is to highlight the identity claims that, if successful, give a person carte blanche to have one’s way in spite of another.”

50 Zachary T. Smith

41 Seth Dowland, “War, Sports, and the Construction of Masculinity in American Chris­ tianity,” Religion Compass, 5 (2011): 355–364; Kristen Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2020); Jonathan Ebel, GI Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015); Jon Pahl, Empire of Sacrifice (New York: New York University Press, 2010). 42 Bederman, Civilization and Manliness; Anne Braude, “American Religious History Is Women’s History,” in T. Tweed (ed.), Retelling US Religious History (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997), 87–107; Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 43 Kristen du Mez, “Braveheart’s Warped History Keeps Suckering Evangelicals,” The Daily Beast, June 21, 2021; and Kristen du Mez, “Braveheart: President Donald J. Trump,” Uncivil Religion, January 2, 2022. See also Rebecca Hays and Nicholas Werse, “Evangelicals and the Film Fight Club: A Cultural Comparison of Masculine Ideology,” The Projector, 17 (2) (2017): 16–32. 44 Scott Strednak Singer, “Redeeming Sports Violence: Mixed Martial Arts Ministries as a Remedy for Gender Anxieties in American Evangelicalism,” in R. Alpert and A. Remillard (eds), Gods, Games, and Globalization: New Perspectives on Religion and Sport (Macon, Ga.: University of Mercer Press, 2019), 146–174, looks specifically at the links between evangelical masculinity and Islamophobia post-September 11, 2001. 45 See the film review and comments on James Harleman, “Come and Get Them …” Cinemagogue, March 11, 2007. 46 Harleman, “Come and Get Them …” 47 Harleman, “Come and Get Them …” 48 Harleman, “Come and Get Them …” 49 Florence Nightingale, quoted in Murray, “Christ, Our Leonidas,” 115. 50 Tae Young Kwak, “The Clash of Civilizations: Obfuscating Race, History, and Cul­ ture,” in K. McDonald (ed.), Americanization of History: Conflation of Time and Culture in Film and Television (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 192. 51 Kaveh Farrokh, “The 300 Movie: Separating Fact from Fiction,” www.ghandchi.com/ iranscope/Anthology/KavehFarrokh/300, para. 9; see also Daniel O’Brien, “This Is Sparta!” in Classical Masculinity and the Spectacular Body on Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 168–172; and Lena Roos, “Religion, Sexuality and the Image of the Other in 300,” The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 22 (1) (2010). 52 Kwak, “The Clash of Civilizations,” 198. 53 Kwak, “The Clash of Civilizations,” 198. 54 Kwak, “The Clash of Civilizations,” 198. Emphasis in original. 55 Singer, “Redeeming Sports Violence,” 148. See also Justine Greve, “‘Jesus Didn’t Tap’: Masculinity, Theology, and Ideology in Christian Mixed Martial Arts,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, 24 (2014): 141–185. Though, as is pointed out in Smith, “Wrestling with Repugnance,” CMMA can hardly be described as only white, evangelical, or male. 56 Singer, “Redeeming Sports Violence,” 163–164. Kristen du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 188, also includes CMMA as one example of a larger post-9/11 white evangelical male backlash though her narrative situates 9/11 as more of an inciting incident within a longer historical tradition of militant white evangelical masculinity. 57 Bederman, Manliness and Civilization; Melamed, Represent and Destroy. 58 Dowland, War, Sports, and the Construction of Masculinity; Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne. 59 And one that, in 2012, was a premonition of the Donald Trump-as-crusader figure. 60 There have been various iterations, of course, including Christian strongmen such as the Power Team and Team Impact, and regional articulations, such as the Christian cowboys. 61 Singer, “Redeeming Sports Violence,” 154–155; See also Adam Park, “Muscular Christianity, Human Nature, and Fighting in America,” Ph.D. dissertation, Florida State University, 2017.

300 and Spartan Masculinity 51

62 Jessica Johnson, Biblical Porn: Affect, Labor, and Pastor Mark Driscoll’s Evangelical Empire (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018). 63 Mark Driscoll, as quoted in E. Vahey (dir.), Fighting Politics [motion picture] (Media Fly Films, 2009). 64 Douglas E. Cowan, “Theologizing Race,” Religion and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 112–123. 65 Newton, “Scared Sheetless.” 66 Newton, “Scared Sheetless.” On demonization and countersubversion in the USA, see also Rogin, Ronald Reagan, The Movie and O’Donnell, Passing Orders. As a military strategy, countersubversion is deployed as counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency has been a central strategy for US settler military operations since the colonizing of Turtle Island. As a military mode of operation, counterinsurgency expands the interpretation of just-war theory to authorize the use of force against potential threats while one’s status as a defender of Christianity authorizes the use of “extremist” tactics. See Andrew Bace­ vich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 123–124. 67 Kwak, “Clash of Civilizations,” 197. 68 Among myriad other related violent acts. 69 The “crusades” in CMMA discourse are another cultural repertoire worthy of investigation. 70 Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri, The Militant Middle Ages: Contemporary Politics between New Barbarians and Modern Crusaders (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 64. Newton suggests that mastery of these strategies is one means by which whiteness articulates itself through people “who can envelope their spheres of influence within mythologies that narrate their totalizing aspirations—all the while covering over the complexity of the hybrid pasts of which we are all products.” Newton, Identifying Roots, 6. 71 Gail Bederman, “‘The Women Have Had Charge of the Church Long Enough’: The Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911–1912 and the Masculinization of Middle-class Protestantism,” American Quarterly, 41 (1989): 432–465. Braude, Women’s History Is American Religious History; du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne; Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977); Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). 72 Emphasis mine. 73 Jordan Peterson would be a contemporary corollary. 74 David Bell and Ruth Holliday, “Naked as Nature Intended,” Body and Society, 6 (3–4) (2000): 135. 75 du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, tracks the development of a warrior trope in evangelic­ alism alongside of the mythopoetic movement in the 1990s. It was both inspired by it, to the extent that a hegemonic essentialized masculinity was lionized, and a reaction to it, to the extent that mythopoeia was at times read as “soft.” So, while distinctions can be drawn between what Melanie Heath calls soft-boiled masculinity and warrior masculi­ nity (Melanie Heath, “Soft-boiled Masculinity: Renegotiating Gender and Racial Ideologies in the Promise Keepers Movement,” Gender and Society 17 (2003): 423–444), it is also important to note the extent to which these gender formations were mutually reinforcing. See also John Bartowski, The Promise Keepers: Servants, Soldiers, and Godly Men (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004), who broke down the Christian mythopoetic men’s movement headlined by the Promise Keeper’s organization into the four ideal types of Rational Patriarch, Expressive Egalitarian, Tender Warrior, and Multicultural Man. See also Donna Minkowitz, “In the Name of the Father,” Ms, 6 (3) (1995): 64–71. 76 Juschka, Contours of the Flesh, 92. 77 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 110.

52 Zachary T. Smith

78 This is a common feature in white US evangelical athleticism. See Annie Blazer, Playing for God: Evangelical Women and the Unintended Consequences of Sports Ministry (New York: New York University Press, 2015); and Annie Blazer, “An Invitation to Suffer: Evange­ licals and Sports Ministry in the US,” Religions, 10 (2019): 638. 79 Newton, “Scared Sheetless,” 305. See also Melamed, Represent and Destroy, for a cultural history of racial formation and “official” antiracisms. 80 See Newton, “Scared Sheetless” and Kelly Baker, Gospel According to the Klan. 81 Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 58. 82 Bederman, Civilization and Manliness. 83 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “New Racism,” Color-blind Racism, and the Future of Whiteness in America (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 268–281. 84 Sharon P. Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 9. 85 Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 151. 86 Scholars of white masculinity have well documented the appropriation of indigenous practices and symbolism. See Mark Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989); and Abby Ferber, “Racial Warriors and Weekend Warriors: The Construction of Masculinity in Mythopoetic White Supremacist Discourse,” Men and Masculinities, 3 (1) (2000): 30–56. 87 Anna Williams, “Fascism on the Rise,” Portland State University Vanguard, July 24, 2017. 88 Gabriel San Román, “OC Weekly Offers $1,000 Prize to Winner of Proposed MMA Fight between Alt-Right Frenemies!” OC Weekly, August 30, 2017. 89 Williams, Fascism on the Rise. 90 Melamed, Represent and Destroy. 91 Jim Jose, “A Liberalism Gone Wrong? Muscular Liberalism and the Quest for Monocultural Difference,” Social Identities, 21 (2015): 444–458; Zachary T. Smith, “‘For God’s Sake, FIGHT!’ Carnal Ethnography, Christian Mixed Martial Arts, and a Military Defi­ nition of Reality,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Tennessee, 2020. 92 Michael Altman and Jerome Copulsky, “Introduction: A Religious, Yet Religiously Incoherent Event,” Uncivil Religion, January 1, 2022, para. 9. See Cody Musselman, “You Don’t Storm the Capitol Using the Stairs,” Uncivil Religion, December 30, 2021, for an example using functional fitness culture, and Kristen du Mez, “Braveheart: Pre­ sident Donald J. Trump,” for an example using historical nostalgia and popular film. 93 Newton, “Scared Sheetless,” 309. 94 Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 223. The original quote occurs specifically as a definition of race; I include gender, insofar as race and gender are intertwined elements of contemporary evangelical demonization, as O’Donnell shows in Passing Orders. 95 Newton, “Scared Sheetless,” 309. 96 McAlister, Epic Encounters, 259. According to McAlister, the process for forging an American multicultural identity was reminiscent of early twentieth-century efforts to imagine the USA as “white.” For a thoughtful and accessible application of this line of thinking to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, see Michael Altman and Jerome Copulsky, A Religious, Yet Religiously Incoherent Event, which features a set of interpretive essays linking religious (and secular) pluralism to the January 6 events.

3 FORGIVING FREEZE Jerry Falwell Jr., Donald Trump, and the Making of Liberty University Football Daniel A. Grano

Introduction University of Mississippi (UM) head football coach Hugh Freeze resigned from his position in July 2017 after school officials confronted him about a phone call he made to a female escort service during a 2016 recruiting trip. Officials cited the call as part of a “pattern of misconduct” that violated the “moral turpitude” clause in Freeze’s contract.1 Dating back to 2014, Freeze made at least twelve calls to escort services during recruiting trips using his university-issued cell phone.2 When Freeze resigned, the UM football program faced twenty-one National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) allegations related to academics, improper payments by boos­ ters, and recruiting violations, most of which occurred during Freeze’s 2011–2017 head coaching tenure.3 While Freeze was forced out specifically for the escort calls, the NCAA violations played a part: Freeze and university officials tried to pin the allegations on the preceding head coach, Houston Nutt. Nutt subsequently sued the university for smearing his name, and the 2016 escort call came to light through an investigation related to the lawsuit.4 Freeze’s resignation made national news not only because he had transformed the UM football program from an afterthought to a national power but also because he built his personal brand around his Christian evangelical faith. Sportswriters often regarded Freeze as a sanctimonious character—a man who wielded religion for pur­ poses of self-promotion and who defended himself against media scrutiny by implying he was a victim of anti-Christian bias. Journalists thus covered his downfall as comeuppance for a man who proved to be a “sanctimonious fraud.”5 In January 2018, six months after his ouster, Freeze delivered an address at Liberty University’s (LU) convocation, a twice-a-week campus gathering and speaker series. LU is a private evangelical Christian university founded by the late Jerry Falwell in 1971 in Lynchburg, Virginia. Falwell was the architect of the famed “Moral DOI: 10.4324/9781003014621-5

54 Daniel A. Grano

Majority,” a religious right political organization that shaped Republican politics throughout the 1980s and beyond. After he died in 2007, his son Jerry Falwell Jr. took over as president and oversaw a period of significant financial growth that made LU the largest nonprofit evangelical university in the USA.6 Falwell Jr. made his own mark in Republican politics by being one of the first major evangelical figures to endorse Donald Trump for the presidency. Falwell Jr.’s tenure as president—from 2007 until his resignation over a sexually suggestive photograph in August 2020—was a period of significant growth for LU in terms of online education profits, political influence, and athletic program development. The Falwell family’s influence has made LU a required pilgrimage site for Republican politicians dating back to Ronald Reagan. Convocation has become an especially important forum for Republican presidential hopefuls and prominent figures on the political and religious right (e.g., John McCain, Mitt Romney, Nikki Haley, Dinesh D’Souza, Ralph Reed). In 2016, Ted Cruz became the first presidential candidate to announce his run at the event, and Donald Trump spoke at the January 2016 convocation as part of his campaign.7 The LU convocation has also provided a space for sports figures to seek public forgiveness. Former New York Mets star Daryl Strawberry, who struggled with drug addiction during his playing career, confessed in 2015 to being a “heathen” before he was saved.8 Former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice, who was captured on a surveillance camera beating his fiancée unconscious, spoke in 2017 about the trappings of pride and his “journey” toward personal transformation.9 Five days after Freeze spoke, former NFL quarterback Michael Vick, who went to prison on charges related to a dog-fighting operation, testified to the importance of faith and grace.10 During his own appearance, Freeze confessed to a personal experience of “brokenness” and to the value of forgiveness within Christian communities. As Los Angeles Times reporter Brady McCollough writes, Freeze could not have known that he “had just completed a very public job interview.”11 LU officials stayed in touch after the address, and, when head football coach Turner Gill retired in 2018, the university hired Freeze as his replacement. Once again, Freeze came to represent the conceit of evangelical power, and LU football encapsulated Falwell Jr.’s impious pursuit of influence in politics and sport alike. After two years of perpetual scandal in the Trump administra­ tion, Falwell Jr. remained one of the president’s most vocal supporters. In 2016, LU hired Ian McCaw as its athletic director. Earlier that year, McCaw had resigned from the same position at Baylor University (a private Baptist institu­ tion) over his involvement in a systemic rape crisis involving the football pro­ gram. Sportswriters were exasperated, but unsurprised. Deadspin announced that LU had hired Freeze “because of course they would.”12 SBNation proclaimed “Hugh Freeze to Liberty lmao [laughing my ass off].”13 The Daily Beast pub­ lished an especially illustrative critique under the headline “Holy Hypocrisy,” with artwork that featured Freeze bracketed to the left by President Trump and to the right by Falwell Jr.14

Forgiving Freeze 55

Drawing associations among Falwell Jr., Trump, and Freeze reflected not only the frustrations of sport and news media but also Falwell Jr.’s own approach to defending LU. Where critics viewed Trump, Freeze, and football as associated signs of avarice, Falwell Jr. insisted that they represented instead the unique theological and cultural values of evangelical forgiveness. Accordingly, when Falwell Jr. was asked to defend the Freeze hire, he typically redirected to Trump. In response to a question about concerns over Freeze’s past, for example, Falwell Jr. told The Los Angeles Times: Evangelical Christianity is all about forgiveness … It’s all about redemption. That’s what makes it different from most mainline religions. And that’s why it was so easy for Evangelicals to accept Donald Trump, because that’s what Evangelicalism is all about.15 I will argue that this defense represents a conspicuously politicized construction of forgiveness vital to holding together agreements between evangelicalism and sport in the Trump era. More specifically, I demonstrate how forgiveness facilitates white, conservative evangelicals’ co-optations of sport as an instrument of the so-called “culture war.” Contrary to the images of shame or deceitfulness implied in charges of hypocrisy, figures like Falwell Jr. do not seek to reconcile the contradictions internal to politicized applications of forgiveness or to evangelical co-optations of sport. Rather, they capitalize on these contradictions as signifying a necessary align­ ment between Christian redemption and political influence that allows evangelicals to deploy sport without limits: to seize upon its full capitalist and proselytizing potential minus the religious inhibitions that have given the enemy the upper hand for too long. My analysis demonstrates how forgiveness and sport are placed on a culture war footing through characteristically white, conservative, masculine constructions of sin along private/public lines. Predominant evangelical understandings of theolo­ gical doctrine (especially penal substitutionary atonement) and of biblical narratives (in particular the story of King David) constitute a separation whereby evangelical leaders become forgivable under the auspices of private, church-controlled mercy, while cultural decline necessitates a retributive public mission. Forgiving figures like Freeze or Trump thus establishes the conditions for belonging within the ranks of a forgiven and forgivable community ready to mobilize against a hostile, exterior opposition—those liberals, secularists, and even fellow evangelical Christians who, as both Falwell Jr. and Freeze would argue, are marked by their refusal to forgive. I support my argument in four parts. First, I contextualize LU football within the Falwell family’s hopes to make the university an evangelical version of Notre Dame. Second, I explain the importance of forgiveness in sport culture, with a particular focus on evangelical beliefs that facilitate a privatization of mercy and a publicization of retribution. Third, I analyze Freeze’s convocation address and its political constructions of brokenness, attending in particular to how Freeze capita­ lizes upon private conceptions of sin that align forgiveness with broader white,

56 Daniel A. Grano

masculine, evangelical cultural oppositions. Finally, I assess the stability of the white, conservative coalition that LU calls forth through forgiveness, particularly in light of recent conflicts over race surrounding Falwell Jr., LU leadership, and the university’s athletic program. Before I proceed, I want to clarify how I am thinking about “evangelicals” in this chapter. Falwell Jr.’s constructions of forgiveness, his support for Trump, and his embrace of sport, all rest upon important fault lines in American evangelical culture. Perry Bacon Jr. and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux write that Trump’s presidency has exacerbated a broadening evangelical divide between “a more conservative, Trumpaligned bloc deeply worried about losing the so-called culture wars” and “a bloc that is more liberal on issues like immigration, conscious of the need to appeal to nonwhite Christians, and wary of the president.”16 I view LU’s messaging on forgiveness as addressed primarily to the Trump-aligned bloc. I also view it as a response against forces both outside of and within evangelical culture that threaten this bloc’s hegemony. Any attempt to identify evangelicals as a people is inescapably selective.17 I am choosing a political definition because, as Kristin Kobes Du Mez, argues, it accounts for the operations of power to which faith principles like forgiveness are often appropriated. This definition is particularly suited to the problems presented by the centering of white, masculine, conservative hegemony in American evan­ gelicalism and its success in advancing a patriarchal, xenophobic, militant, and Christian nationalist politics.18 A political definition also accounts for the provisional nature of hegemonic control. The number of non-Hispanic white evangelicals (the core of Trump’s support) is declining, while the population of people of color within evangelicalism is on the rise.19 Evangelicals of color—who have for decades pushed back against the influences of racism, gender panic, capitalism, and militarism associated with the religious right—point to the current embrace of Trump’s open racism and xenophobia as indicative of evangelicals’ long-standing affiliations with white supremacy.20 Younger white evangelicals—who are often less receptive to the narratives of cultural decline that mobilize their older peers and more opposed to racist and anti-immigration politics—have increasingly left evangelicalism and the Republican Party since Trump was elected.21 This applies to a subsection of LU students and alumni, who have organized protests and formed political groups to contest Falwell Jr.’s support of the president.22 These evangelicals are important because they potentially threaten the stability of the coalition that politicized for­ giveness calls forth, a concern that becomes apparent in LU’s admonitions against an unforgiving culture.

An Evangelical Notre Dame Falwell Sr. started a football program at LU in 1973, only two years after he founded the school. The team played against area junior colleges and preparatory schools,23 but from the outset Falwell dreamed of building football as a national power that could compete against elite programs and serve as a beacon for

Forgiving Freeze 57

evangelical identity. As Falwell Jr. put it, his father’s dream was “to create for evangelical Christians what Notre Dame is for Catholics and Brigham Young [University] is for Mormons.”24 This would include building athletic facilities, Division I sports programs, and academic programs that rivaled “any major secular university.”25 For most of its existence, LU has lacked the resources to pursue its dreams of football glory. Though, after years of financial instability,26 the university changed its fortunes by building an online education empire. LU’s physical campus is set on 7,000 acres framed by the Blue Ridge mountains and in recent years has housed a student population of around 15,000. This idyllic setting serves as Liberty’s cultural front stage, while a massive virtual education program called Liberty University Online (LUO) provides the funding. LUO operates from a large off-campus call center staffed by recruiters who work under a high-pressure system that incentivizes new student registrations.27 Falwell Jr. built the initial infrastructure for LUO in the early 2000s, gaining a competitive foot­ hold before most nonprofit universities had embraced online learning.28 By 2015, Liberty had the largest online program among nonprofit colleges in the country, with 65,000 students.29 In 2016, Liberty reported net assets of more than $1.6 billion.30 LUO now boasts enrollments of as many as 95,000 per year, and Liberty is, at the time of this writing, one of the most profitable nonprofit educational institutions in the USA. Unlike its aspirational peers (Notre Dame, Brigham Young University, Baylor), LU has failed to build a national academic reputation and ranks poorly in areas such as graduation and retention, social mobility, and faculty resources.31 Liberty only pro­ vides tenure to its law-school faculty (in order to meet accreditation requirements), so Falwell Jr. could disregard faculty concerns about instructional investment and quality, focusing instead on profit margins and recruitment.32 Falwell Jr. maintained through­ out his presidency what students, faculty, and aides referred to as a “culture of fear,” exercising restrictions on academic freedoms, censoring the student newspaper (in one case killing an editorial critical of Trump), shutting down progressive student organi­ zations, and aggressively suppressing public criticisms of his leadership.33 It was this same approach to administration that allowed LU officials to ignore student and faculty concerns over football program hires. So, the image of an “evangelical Notre Dame” relates mostly to accumulating power through college sport, and here LU has made significant progress. In 2013, the university announced a $400 million campus master plan that featured con­ struction of new academic, student, and athletic facilities (including a football sta­ dium expansion), all designed to make LU more viable for Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) status, the highest level of competition for college football.34 William Baker writes that contemporary religious leaders’ embrace of sport represents a longer process of mutual accommodation wherein religions relaxed their moral codes and sport adopted a more moralistic focus on rule and order. Denominational colleges and universities benefited especially as they adopted an emerging and uniquely American approach to leveraging sport for greater national

58 Daniel A. Grano

visibility and alumni support. Thus, a model for accommodating “religion to sport” shaped the histories of a range of denominational institutions, including “Methodist Duke, Baptist Baylor, Catholic Notre Dame, Mormon Brigham Young University, Jewish Brandeis,” and evangelical LU.35 LU football stretches these agreements close to their breaking point. Falwell Jr.’s hiring of McCaw was an especially egregious test of how far Christian forgiveness could be corrupted at the “altar of football.”36 McCaw has maintained his inno­ cence in the Baylor rape scandal, but a court filing revealed that he was aware of at least some of the assaults and had encouraged cover-ups. In 2016, Baylor’s Board of Regents announced that an inquiry found evidence of assaults on seventeen women by nineteen football players, including four gang rapes. A 2017 lawsuit alleged that thirty-one players committed fifty-two rapes over a four-year period.37 Falwell Jr. has defended McCaw as blameless and characterized public criticism of his hire as a sign of how the news media regularly “target” LU.38 Following LU’s expected justification for controversial hires, McCaw claimed that God led him to the university because, “These people are forgiving.” And while some students accepted forgiveness as an a priori reason for McCaw’s hire, others rejected what they viewed as a perversion of grace that put students in danger.39 As LU student Hannah Hartsook argued, administrators’ and students’ defenses of McCaw leveraged forgiveness as a “manipulative tool” in order to advance an uncritical demand: “Forgive me because the Bible says so, even if I never have to take responsibility for anything I did wrong.” Shielding leaders from accountability for their actions could not be reconciled with the mission of a Christian university. Fellow student Joel Schmieg identified this violation of LU’s purported values as “the biggest step in Liberty putting sports above everything, just like any other school.”40 Former star LU football player Eric Green argued similarly that the university was sacrificing core values in the name of growing athletics and announced that he would never allow his son to attend Liberty.41 Controversial decisions like the McCaw hire can survive such internal divisions in part because they fit into evangelicals’ longer-term efforts to infiltrate popular culture. Tom Krattenmaker writes that contemporary evangelicals’ embrace of sport exists against the backdrop of a quarter century of hard work by evangelical Christians to assert themselves in the public square, to grab hold of the tools of culture—television, movies, technology, media, politics, sports—and use them to spread their message and their values.42 Michael Butterworth argues that as a result Christianity and sport have merged around a “promotional logic” that de-emphasizes doctrinal adherence in order to transform faith-based identity as something to be chosen and consumed in a contested market­ place.43 Particularly important are investments in feeling of shared cultural victimage.44 This orientation toward persecution constitutes what William Connolly calls the “capitalist-evangelical … resonance machine,” a mechanism that forms affinities across

Forgiving Freeze 59

variously secular and religious “creedal differences” through a shared “disposi­ tion” toward social existence.45 Outwardly, LU asks evangelicals to forgive as an affirmation of doctrinal commitments, but those commitments have already been adjusted to capture political and capitalist power, and each subsequent request—Trump, McCaw, Freeze—tests the forgiver’s commitment to choose within a marketplace of oppositional cultural identities, to affirm the primacy of collective resentment over personal piety. The evangelical leaders who most successfully co-opted sport throughout history tended to be former salespeople, media-savvy revivalists (including Billy Graham), and figures who placed marketplace pragmatism over evangelical doctrine.46 Falwell Jr. fits neatly into this lineage. He is fond of telling people (especially when setting up a political statement) that he is not a pastor but a businessman. When Falwell Sr. died, it was his younger son Jonathan who took over as senior pastor at the family church, while Jerry Jr. took over at Liberty.47 Serving on the business and political side of his family’s operation, Falwell Jr. claims sport as a force for fighting cultural degeneracy. That message is rooted in the muscular Christianity movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—when sport emerged as force aimed at counteracting urbanization, feminization, and immigration.48 It is also traceable through jeremiads against moral decline since the 1960s, which have condensed evangelicalism, private morality, masculinity, and sport in the USA.49 These linkages between sport and cultural grievance are also reinforced through conservative evangelicals’ embrace of Trumpism. As David Andrews notes, Trump has relied upon sport to support the “nostalgic masculinism” and whiteness of his political message. By approaching sport from the perspective of an “indignant fan,” Trump has capitalized on a number of grievances (the “softness” of modern-day football, the patriotism of Black athlete-activists) to depict a nation in crisis needful of his restorative populism.50 When Liberty finally gained FBS status (as an independent program) in 2018, Falwell Jr. announced the realization of his father’s vision, emphasizing that Liberty now had the resources to compete at the highest levels of college sport.51 In 2018, the university expanded its football stadium to seat 25,000 fans, and in 2019 it performed a major renovation of its football operations center.52 The Freeze hire seemed to pay off as well; in his first season as head coach the team defeated Georgia Southern in the Cure Bowl, a small but seemingly important step toward Liberty’s aspirations.53 All it took was a pipeline full of online education money, and a little bit of forgiveness.

The Politics of Forgiveness, Evangelicalism, and Sport Sport repetitively stages forgiveness dramas, providing both a site for publicizing the sins of athletes (or coaches) and the institutional mechanisms (e.g., team struc­ tures, disciplinary programs, mentoring) presumably necessary for their redemption. Popular belief in the reformative potential of sport grants sporting institutions the authority to shape standards for forgiveness around inequitable (e.g., racialized,

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gendered, class-based) understandings of violation while aligning these standards to the advancement of those institutions’ economic and social priorities.54 Sport thus represents the dangers of public forgiveness that Jacques Derrida warned against. According to Derrida, whenever institutions appropriate “the language of forgiveness,” the concept becomes emptied of its radical potential and reduced it to instrumental ends.55 Even in secular contexts, that language borrows from an Abrahamic tradition that requires individuals to “forgive the unforgivable, and without condition,” an “impossibility” meant to stand apart from the world of “juridico-political” power.56 By way of contrast, acts of public contrition bring forgiveness into “the field of politics,” where individuals and communities seek facile and finalizing forms of reconciliation (e.g., forgetting, closure) that advance their self-interests.57 Evangelical co-optations of sport rely upon this general instrumentalization of forgiveness while imposing uniquely doctrinal standards for redeemability. Consistent with the political definition of “evangelical” that guides my analysis, I view these standards more in light of their particular social applications than in terms of the theological universality that evangelical institutions rely on publicly.58 Yet these two categories—the social and the doctrinal—are, as Jeffrey Scholes and Raphael Sassower argue, ultimately inseparable in contemporary “postsecular” sport culture, where the sacred and the secular share overlapping vocabularies, forms of expression, and cultural priorities.59 So, Falwell Jr.’s construction of evangelical forgiveness, as well as the theological and narrative associations it implies (e.g., substitutionary atonement, the David story), take shape around an analogical movement between doctrinal and political interpretation that can always be directed toward political ends.60

Substitutionary Atonement, Evangelical Forgiveness, and Retributive Politics LU’s theological/political approach to forgiveness is perhaps best encapsulated by the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement—an increasingly contested but still predominant understanding of the meaning of Jesus’s death in evangelical Protes­ tant Christianity.61 Darrin W. Snyder Belousek summarizes the doctrine as follows: God, who is righteous and holy, must satisfy his wrath against sin by punishing sinners with death; but God, who is also merciful, provides sinners an escape from divine wrath and retribution by ordaining and accepting Jesus’ sacrificial death as punishment in their place. On the cross Jesus suffered in our place the death penalty that God had decreed as just retribution for our sins … thereby making it possible for God to forgive the sins of humanity in accord with God’s law.62 Substitutionary atonement has come under recent criticism as some Christian thinkers associate the doctrine with evangelicals’ embrace of Trumpism. Mako Nagasawa, author and founder of the Anástasis Center, argues that the image of a

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simultaneously vengeful and loving God presents two conceptions of social order that have historically appealed to white evangelicals: “infinite retributive justice and unconditional forgiveness.” Upholding both ideas has facilitated conservative white evangelicals’ separation of faith and social justice throughout American history: personal salvation became aligned with individualistic understandings of social ills (making the church the “realm of mercy”), while God’s order became associated with a retributive state that could redress white evangelicals’ cultural grievances.63 Pastor and author Ken Wilson argues similarly that penal substitutionary atonement provides for an aggressively political appendage to evangelical forgiveness: “If love and punishing can co-exist in the divine, then a God of love could occasionally use a Punishing Strongman to advance his cause in the dirty world of politics.”64 Voting for Trump, then, was a retributive act—a way to punish the Republican “establishment” for failing evangelicals and a way to exact revenge against liberals, the media, political correctness, immigrants, and so on.65 Given its influence over white evangelical thinking on forgiveness, substitu­ tionary atonement need not be invoked as an explicit theological doctrine to pro­ vide a framework for determining Trump’s or Freeze’s forgivability. In fact, Falwell Jr. and other evangelical leaders constantly imply the doctrine’s retributive justifi­ cations when they defend Trump. Falwell Jr. argued in 2016 that evangelicals had been penalized for supporting candidates who were fellow believers only to be “betrayed” once these candidates were in office.66 He counseled evangelicals hesi­ tant about Trump that they needed a president, not a “pastor-in-chief.”67 During an address at the LU convocation, Ralph Reed, a leading figure on the religious right, warned ahead of the 2016 election that “retreating to the stained-glass ghetto from whence we came, refusing to muddy our boots with the mire and muck of politics is not an option for followers of Christ.”68 It was time, then, to “forgive” the immoralities that had limited previous political alliances, to benefit from the double retribution of penalizing the Republican Party and setting loose a new kind of “Christian” politician. As one pastor put it, only by putting “a street fighter in the White House” could evangelicals address the current crisis of social degeneration.69 The same logic applies to the role that controversial sporting figures might play in redressing Christian grievances. Freeze’s address demonstrates that while sport might afford a less conspicuously retributive tone, particularly for a sinner fluent in languages of confession and “brokenness,” a narrative of non-Christian opposition remains the most important framework for determining the forgivability of powerful evangelical figures.

Forgiving Freeze: Convocation, Confession, and the Value of “Brokenness” Convocation ceremonies are held on the LU campus at the Vines Center, a 10,000-seat arena that hosts sporting events, concerts, and other gatherings. Attendance is required for on-campus students, guaranteeing a packed house. Multiple cameras capture staging and choreography (lighting, large digital screens,

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colorful backdrops, music) that matches the tone and content of each presentation. The result is a highly produced event that offers LU a national platform on which figures from the worlds of entertainment, politics, religion, or sport can build or restore their public reputations.70 Freeze delivered his address on January 24, 2018, at the first convocation of the spring semester.71 Among the people joining him on stage were his wife, Jill Freeze; his pastor, Dr. Chip Henderson; LU Senior Vice President for Spiritual Development David Nasser, and Falwell Jr. This group sat at the back of the stage while Freeze spoke, ready to assemble for a post-talk roundtable after his formal remarks. As Jordan Ritter Conn wrote in a piece on LU football for The Ringer, con­ vocation was a “fitting setting for a public apology” because of its status as a redemptive space for sports stars and because (in an apparent nod to substitutionary atonement) forgiveness “is baked into the core of evangelical Christian theology, which teaches that Jesus’s crucifixion served as atonement for all of humanity’s sins.”72 Yet, as Conn gathered from interviews with LU students, the football program brought about debate over principled versus instrumental versions of for­ giveness. While some students affirmed LU as “a place where people come to get forgiveness from the public,” others discerned in the top-down, administrative command to forgive a brand of “weaponized theology” that set grace and justice against one another.73 Culture-war oppositions provide the primary bulwark against concerns over politicized forgiveness, particularly because the specter of a hostile mainstream society so readily translates forgiveness into a call to affirm Christian identity. Freeze capitalized in particular on constructions of evangelical identity around oppositional choice. Different from Falwell Jr.’s outwardly retributive strategy, Freeze rounded the edges of cultural resentment through a narrative of personal vulnerability. Freeze’s confession thus provided a dramatic counterpart to Falwell Jr.’s aggressive politicization, modeling the image of a fallen individual whom an unjust society had sentenced to endless, and therefore unfair condemnation. Nasser introduced Freeze as the first of several spring convocation speakers who would represent the university’s focus on “perseverance” and “redemption.” A biographical video reinforced these themes that depicted Freeze as a “big time coach” who made a “big time mistake.” The video narrator announced that Freeze would tell his story of “brokenness and restoration,” of “faith and forgiveness” to a live audience for the first time. Freeze emphasized personal sin and struggle from the first lines of his talk. He told the students that when he looked back on the year 2017 he realized that he had lost sight of his purpose (what he called his “personal it”): “to use the platform that God has given me to impact and influence people for His kingdom.” The “core values” that he built the UM football program and his own life around allowed things to go “right for so many years” before his personal failings derailed everything. Freeze would not, at any point in the presentation, actually name the sins for which he sought forgiveness. This was not an attempt at total concealment;

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a listener with no previous knowledge of the case could figure out before long that Freeze had committed adultery. Rather, Freeze omitted details about his mis­ conduct that could potentially invite attention to the violations of both private and public forms of trust behind his resignation. Consider, for example, Freeze’s claim that he had lived morally “for so many years,” a period of time that would have included not only his use of escort services but also the recruiting violations that ultimately made his case public. Investigations of Freeze’s phone and flight records revealed a “pattern” of calls to escort services during recruiting trips, when he flew on a plane owned by the university and used public resources (including a university-issued phone) at significant expense, all while he was the highest-paid state employee in Mississippi (at $4.7 million a year). The investigation into Freeze’s conduct could have included questions about inappropriate use of public funds, but UM realized it could dismiss him without such an inquiry.74 In addition, Freeze, like many evangelical coaches at major public universities, used the UM football program as a platform for proselytizing. He expressed an “unapologetic” commitment to make his UM team reflect his own Christian values and promoted the program on social media through Bible verses and faith testaments. He also held weekly Sunday services through the powerful sports ministry organization the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. These services were officially voluntary, but Freeze emphasized that they were personally “important” to him and stated publicly his desire to “attract” his players to Christianity.75 So Freeze came to convocation with a track record of willingly traversing the private/public boundaries of faith in order to build his personal brand. As we know from decades of feminist and queer theory, such strategic movement within and across public and private spheres is a marker of masculine privilege.76 The capacity to define sin as wholly personal is also a privilege of whiteness. As Jeffrey Scholes argues, powerful white, Christian college coaches rely upon an individualized conception of sin in order to ward off criticism of the structural inequities they perpetuate (e.g., exploitation of Black labor, capitalist greed). In doing so they benefit from conservative white evangelical beliefs that sin is a problem of indivi­ dual free will and personal relationship resolved not by public means (e.g., removal from positions of authority, policy changes) but by acts of confession and humi­ lity.77 Freeze’s strategy was to divide the public work of Christian head coaching (and the masculine goods of leadership and proselytization associated with it) from his private experience of temptation so that popular criticism of his faith commit­ ments became both irrelevant and unfair. Freeze emphasized these private themes by leveraging the generic conventions of public confession. Susan Wise Bauer argues that public confession arises out of an “essential likeness between American democracy and American evangelicalism,” with both relying upon historically religious imagery: the private act of confessing to repair a relationship with God and the public act of testimony to affirm genuine conversion. As it developed along the parallel tracks of popular religious program­ ming and electoral politics, public confession “became a ceremonial laying down of

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power, made so that followers could pick that power up and hand it back.”78 Dave Tell emphasizes that the power of a public confession depends upon its capacity to be recognized as a confession according to shared political conceptions of exigency (e.g., sexuality, race, democracy) and authenticity.79 Freeze built his confession around a narrative of intimate self-examination and “brokenness” that accorded with widely circulating evangelical conceptions of personal sin and situated this narrative against the persecutions of an unforgiving popular culture. He told the audience that the walls of his life “came crumbling down when what I thought was a private sin that I had struggled with” and “confessed to my wife” and friends “became public knowledge.” As he heard questions about whether his faith was “real” and “genuine,” he turned to scripture to see if it was “possible that you can have a genuine faith and also have a season in your life that you struggle with a sin.” He discovered that “every single believer” has had this struggle. Here Freeze offered his own story as evidence that Christians could turn away from the fleeting distortions of popular suspicion and ground their identities instead on the “solid rock” of Christ’s love, a therapeutic variant of more explicitly political calls to affirm an evangelical self against non-Christian society. As he told the students, “when all hell is breaking loose around you, and everybody has their opinion about what’s going on,” God’s love remains constant. In dividing Christian forgiveness and mediated condemnation, Freeze emphasized that public judgment could not provide evangelicals with a source for critical self-examination but only the motivation to turn inward, to realize that forgiveness required a closing of Christian cultural ranks. The necessity of this private turn became especially apparent as Freeze described his own experience of “brokenness,” which came after he let go of “false pride,” accepted his need for help from family and friends, and “owned” his sinfulness. Nancy Leigh DeMoss, a Christian radio personality and author, defines brokenness as a “moment-by-moment lifestyle of agreeing with God” about the “true condi­ tion” of one’s sin, a “shattering” of “self-will” that leads to total surrender.80 As the Christian author Brett McCracken argues, brokenness has become “the Holy Grail of authenticity” among modern evangelicals. A proliferation of books, blogs, and websites themed around self-indictment, self-deprecation, messiness, and rottenness demonstrate how “sins have become a currency of solidarity—something we pat each other on the back about as fellow authentic, broken people.”81 By trading in that currency, Freeze signaled to his LU audience that he was up to date on the latest terms for forgiveness. Moreover, he appealed to them as uniquely legitimate confessors. DeMoss emphasizes that Christians who commit to brokenness learn the truth about their “heart and life—not as everyone else thinks it is but as [God] knows it to be.”82 Beyond its therapeutic value, then, brokenness mobilizes Christians against the immorality of an outside world that does not understand their struggles with faith and sin yet still judges their actions. Christians unconditionally release the broken evangelical confessor from harm in the public sphere while mainstream culture sentences that same confessor to a cycle of endless blame—a source of perpetual grievance in conservative evangelical culture

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surrounding firings, product boycotts, and so on. Why, then, should figures such as Freeze or Falwell Jr. take seriously the criticisms of a society that proves its antiChristian biases by refusing to forgive? The most important consequence of this line of thinking is the one LU students identified when McCaw was hired: it extends the unconditional terms of personal forgiveness to a restoration of collective status so that being worthy of spiritual redemption and being fit for institutional responsibility become one and the same. As LU leaders have demonstrated, this conflation proves an effective countermeasure against both internal and external dissent, as concerns over the harms that controversial figures represent (to safety, reputation) can be deemed as not only secondary to but eliminated by the presumably transcendent requirements of forgiving.83 Freeze offered as models for brokenness the biblical figures of King David and King Saul, men who owned their sins and confessed them to God. Freeze dropped in brief references to David only twice in his address, but these references are worth pausing on, as David so predominantly links forgiveness and political power in con­ temporary evangelical culture. David has undergone a reassessment in both critical scholarship and popular culture.84 Yet his long-standing representation of masculine heroism85 remains important among white evangelicals who find in the figure of a sinful yet forgiven warrior-king—who God chose as “a man after my own heart” who “will do everything I want him to do”86—an appealing model for leadership. Falwell Jr. and other evangelical leaders have commonly cited David to defend their support for Trump, claiming that by choosing an adulterer and murderer to do his will, God demonstrated how “imperfect” men could bring about a more Christian society.87 The fact that David asked God to forgive him, while Trump is on the record saying that he has never asked for, nor needed, God’s forgiveness,88 has not been a barrier to evangelical leaders’ support. This constitutes a clear demonstration of the political-doctrinal flexibility of substitutionary atonement. The powerful Washington, DC, Christian political group The Family (also called The Fellowship) similarly models its conception of governing power around David on the belief that David’s chosen status placed him “beyond morality.” This claim to immunity circulates throughout Republican politics, particularly as a justification for elected leaders to remain in power after scandals.89 Central to David’s appeal is the idea that a man (specifically a man) willing to pursue power and pleasure through any means possible can, once forgiven, serve as a perfect chess piece in God’s plan. After all, forgiveness releases such a sinner for godly work but does not necessarily de-skill him; the virility, tactical acumen, and belligerence of his unsaved life all remain in reserve, emptied of their attachments to self-fulfillment and remade as instruments of divine will. A white, evangelical, Southern head football coach fits this image of leadership perfectly. As Freeze proved during his tenure at UM, elite college football coaches can mobilize the efforts of organized, masculine violence in the name of a public Christian mission and then seek out necessary resources in the shady worlds of recruitment, big-money donation, and state-sanctioned power. In addition, Freeze’s story replicated a predominant character arc in Southern evangelical sport cul­ ture: weakness in the face of sport’s temptations, and redemption after a return to family.

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Ted Ownby writes that commitment to recreation in the South emerged from “men’s desire for release from a strict code of evangelical morality” imposed by family life—a function for which organized sport eventually provided a “controlled environment.”90 White Southern men could thus experience the “masculine sinful­ ness” of sport and the evangelical moralism of home and church as “part of the same embrace of life.”91 The privilege to move freely within and across the differentiated spheres of sanctioned depravity and domestic rehabilitation offers a certain level of licensed misbehavior that prepares the grounds for forgiving male sin. In addition, such movement builds up a skill set uniquely suited to the roles that Christian head football coaches play. It was Freeze’s ability to master both the corruptions of elite college football and the reputational benefits of Christian witness that made him so successful at UM. The image that Freeze presented to recruits at UM and students at LU was a manifestation of these very masculine, evangelical privileges: the right to get dirty without losing a claim to Christian wholeness. The benefits of fronting with this image became most clear when Freeze claimed the redemptive influences of home and family. At different moments in the talk, he emphasized the value of confessing to his wife Jill (who he referred to as the “real hero” in his story due to her willingness to forgive him) and recalled his children’s capacity for grace. During the post-talk roundtable, Jill Freeze testi­ fied that her husband was “the godliest man I have ever known,” and that his infidelity caused her to turn inward, to pray for and find the capacity for forgive­ ness. Of all the participants onstage, Jill Freeze’s account arguably came closest to the ideals of unconditional, noninstrumental forgiveness. Yet in the form of public character testimony, it also portrayed the familiar image (as in cases of political scandal) of a wife standing by her adulterous husband, an image vital to restoring Hugh Freeze’s reputation given the notions of moral stabilization associated with women and the home in evangelical culture.92 In addition to representing the gendered benefits of evangelical forgivability, Freeze’s family also served to further amplify the separations of forgiving Christian communities and unforgiving publics. Especially important was the moment when Freeze marked his transition from private to public confession on stage. While he had already said to his family “I am sorry; please forgive me,” Freeze announced that “today” was “really the first day that I can tell the wider faith family ‘I am sorry; please forgive me’.” A student in the audience replied, “We forgive you!” This exchange reinforced the status of immediate family and extended faith family as the only confessors who could discern Freeze’s authenticity. Freeze followed immediately by noting that even as his family, friends, and pastor had forgiven him he had also “seen the other side of it, with people that are not quite as willing to forgive.” Among the unforgiving, Freeze identified journalists and “keyboard warriors” who wrote inaccurate stories about him. As he approached the conclusion of his address, Freeze encouraged the students that if they (like him) were persecuted for sinning they could “dive into the word of God” and “find out what it says about you as a child of the King, not what somebody else says about you.” Neither he nor the audience could “control what

Forgiving Freeze 67

people say, what people think,” but they could make up their minds to spend time with fellow Christians and to “move forward by the grace of God.” This was Freeze’s decision, and as a result he could look down a path cleared by forgiveness with a “settled” mind and a “full” heart. Freeze’s confessional approach carried over into the roundtable discussion that followed his formal remarks. Jill Freeze articulated a personal struggle with her husband’s betrayal and her own awakening to God’s voice. Dr. Chip Henderson described how he mentored Hugh Freeze with unconditional love. Nasser led intimate discussions on brokenness. The politics of the event were largely enclosed within a therapeutic, intimate structure until Falwell Jr. took the microphone and had the last word. Falwell Jr. said he was “proud” of LU’s students because they were willing to forgive at a time when too many “so-called Christians” had become “the most judgmental and unforgiving people in the world.” He then took out his cell phone to read a “draft tweet” that, he claimed, his wife Becki did not want him to post: During my lifetime … two Democratic Presidents were notorious adulterers in the Whitehouse, two Democratic Presidents admitted to using illegal drugs, six Presidents cursed vilely all the time, one was divorced, three committed crimes in office, and yet liberals say Donald Trump is too flawed to support. Falwell Jr.’s impulsive need to connect Trump and forgiveness broke with the introspective mood of the roundtable discussion and grafted an explicitly retri­ butive politics onto Freeze’s more subtle efforts to balance interior brokenness against external persecution. When Falwell Jr. turned to the audience to ask if they would allow him to tweet his complaint, the students (who throughout the convocation had listened with quiet respect) broke into raucous applause. The Freezes, Nasser, and Henderson laughed dutifully but seemed uncomfor­ table that the intimate tone they set had provided the buildup to a ribald political release. Yet Falwell Jr.’s boorish intrusion should not be understood as violation of the proceedings. Rather, it spelled out the terms of a partnership. Freeze’s motivations or sincerity matter less than his performance in an estab­ lished political space, one that accorded with LU’s mission and landed him a job. Falwell Jr.’s Trumpist coda illuminated the inherent politics of public forgiveness and the instrumental value that confession serves for institutional power. Falwell Jr. and Freeze converged most importantly around the idea that forgiveness constituted a world divided between evangelical forgivers and non-Christian (or anti-Christian) critics that could serve as a container for understanding and justifying administrative decisions. Insofar as this world is built upon the foundations of long-standing evangelical sport affiliations and culture-war grievances, it is ultimately more important than any individual who contributes to it. I want to conclude, then, by looking beyond Falwell Jr.’s resignation to assess the broader conjunctural possibilities of LU’s white, retributive appropriations of forgiveness for evangelicalism and sport.

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Liberty University Football and the Conjunctures of Evangelical Sport As LU demonstrates, religious terms such as forgiveness can provisionally ease tensions between sport and Christian doctrine; tensions that I mentioned earlier. Yet religious concepts can also exacerbate conflicts between the idealized promises of faith (e.g., grace, redeemability) and the corruption of these promises through politicization, thus establishing the conditions for conjunctural struggles over institutional authority.93 As Stuart Hall writes, a conjuncture is “a period in which the contradictions and problems and antagonisms” latent within a particular societal domain begin to “accumulate” around a point of rupture.94 Falwell Jr.’s resignation marks such a moment of accu­ mulation, when confrontations over LU’s racialization of forgiveness call into question the viability of the university’s vision for co-opting sport as an instrument of white, conservative evangelical power. Falwell Jr. resigned as president on August 25, 2020, after he posted a sexually suggestive photograph on Instagram that showed him on a yacht with his wife’s assistant, both of their pants unzipped and pulled down to the navel. Falwell Jr. had one hand around the assistant’s waist. In the other, he held what appeared to be a glass of alcohol, though he claimed in his caption that it was “black water.”95 The day before Falwell Jr. resigned, Reuters publicized details of a sexual relationship among Falwell Jr., his wife Becki, and a man who the couple formed a business partnership with when they first met Trump.96 So, after years of controversy— bullying of faculty, corrupt business deals,97 encouragement of violence against Muslims98—it was sexual promiscuity that caused Liberty’s board of trustees to finally push Falwell Jr. out.99 Keyvon Scott, a Black LU alumnus and (now former) LUO admissions coun­ selor, spoke to the “disrespect” of watching the board treat sex as unforgivable when only a few months earlier (in May) the same trustees had given Falwell Jr. a pass for a racist tweet.100 Falwell’s tweet was aimed at Ralph Northam, the Democratic governor of Virginia. It featured a medical face mask decorated with a photograph from Northam’s medical school yearbook; the photograph showed a man who might be the governor in blackface and had caused a major scandal for the Virginia Democratic Party one year earlier. Referring to the image, Falwell Jr. wrote that he was “adamantly opposed” to mask mandates but decided to “design” one featuring “Governor Blackface” that he would be willing to wear.101 While the trustees accepted a public apology from Falwell Jr. at face value,102 people of color associated with LU recognized the pattern of callous disregard for problems of structural racism that the tweet (and the trustees’ forgiveness) represented. A group of thirty-five African American alumni—including pastors, ministry leaders, and former athletes—wrote an open letter that condemned Falwell Jr. for bringing “disgrace to Liberty University and Jesus Christ.” The letter concluded that it was “obvious” Falwell Jr. cared “much more about politics than Jesus Christ, Evangelism, and the discipleship of students” and suggested he step down to “pursue politics full­ time.”103 Over the previous ten years, Black undergraduate enrollment at LU had

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dropped from 13 percent to 4 percent, due largely to the increased racism of the uni­ versity’s politics after Obama’s and Trump’s elections. Now a series of departures by Black figures—including Scott, LU’s director of diversity retention, several professors, and several athletes—signaled the further dwindling of support for the university among people of color.104 The departure of Black athletes is particularly consequential for LU’s athletic ambitions. As Joel Anderson writes in Slate, a series of transfers highlighted tensions at LU “between a culture of subtle—but persistent—hostility toward minorities” and Falwell Jr.’s mission to develop an elite athletic program, which depends “in large part on the recruitment of talented Black athletes.”105 Shortly after Falwell Jr.’s tweet, women’s basketball player Asia Todd announced she was transferring “due to the racial insensitivities shown within the leadership and culture.”106 Football players Tayvion Land (the highest-rated recruit in the school’s history) and Kei’Trel Clark similarly announced their plans to transfer. Land tweeted that he wanted to attend a school “that respects my culture and provides a comfortable environment”; Clark wrote that he was leaving “due to the cultural [incompe­ tency] within multiple levels of leadership.” Todd, Land, and Clark all emphasized that their time in the athletic program was positive, but their experiences of racism in classrooms, at campus events, and through administrators’ statements constituted an unwelcoming culture. Convocation was especially isolating. LU’s hosting of racist, xenophobic, and antisemitic speakers at the required events forced Black students and employees to experience the marginalization of sitting within a pre­ dominantly white audience listening in disbelief to what was being said onstage.107 At the center of this crisis are the white, personalized politics of LU’s (and in a broader sense conservative evangelicals’) approaches to forgiveness. An increasing number of conservative evangelicals have, in recent decades, expressed commit­ ments to antiracism and developed multiracial churches, yet many remain resistant to what they view as a leftist “social justice” agenda behind calls for systemic change.108 This skepticism toward structural injustice is a source of frustration for evangelicals of color109 that LU amplifies whenever it justifies support for racist and xenophobic figures in the name of personalized forgiveness. LU’s construction of forgiveness thus represents an emerging problem that cuts to the heart of evange­ lical institutions’ efforts to accumulate power by merging politics and sport: these institutions can retain the aggrieved, conservative power base that a retributive mission secures, but in so doing they potentially undermine their own efforts to infiltrate elite, commercial sport. This is largely because the grievance-based mechanisms for white, masculine control around which LU orders its politics are increasingly untenable in elite college athletics. To be clear, college athletic programs still maintain the structural inequities of what Billy Hawkins calls the “new plantation.”110 An over­ whelmingly white, male power structure (NCAA officials, university presidents, athletic directors, coaches) extracts enormous profit from the unpaid labor of pre­ dominantly Black bodies in the highest revenue-generating sports (in particular, football and men’s basketball),111 under the guise of an “amateur” model supported

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by majorities of white fans.112 This remains true even after college athletes won the right to profit from their names, images, and likenesses.113 College athletes have, however, organized in recent years for racial justice, labor equity, and increased legal rights, becoming prominent voices in a larger intensifica­ tion of athlete-activism.114 Todd has said that she is among the first of many Black LU athletes who will transfer,115 an indication that Christian universities are by no means immune from the activist tide reshaping commercial, secular sport. Indeed, these departures suggest that evangelical efforts to infiltrate the cultural and economic mar­ ketplace of high-power college athletics could be thwarted by the very terms for pri­ vate, forgivable racism that represent resistance to a perceived left/liberal approach to social justice, and that have long protected the power of white leadership. In the wake of nationwide Black Lives Matter protests in 2020—which responded most immediately to the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery, among other people of color both known and unknown—elite college foot­ ball programs became categorized according to how they would or would not respond to players’ demands for racial justice. For example, Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy faced a potential player boycott over his support for the right-wing television channel One America News Network, which called Black Lives Matter “a farce”; and University of Texas players threatened to sit out recruiting and donor functions until the university renamed buildings and donated money to antiracist organizations.116 Several prominent coaches took proactive measures. University of Alabama head coach Nick Saban, the most powerful figure in college football, participated in a Black Lives Matter march with hundreds of players, and the Alabama football team produced a video supporting the argument that “all lives can’t matter until black lives matter.”117 Even if we read these actions with appropriate levels of caution or skepticism, we can still cite antiracism as an emerging market priority in elite college sport, a gesture toward emerging forms of player empowerment and an anticipation of recruitment strategies that will require associations (whether manipulative or meaningful) between athletic programs and racial consciousness. White evangelicalism contains inbuilt resistances to structural antiracism that make such pivots more challenging. Consider the case of Clemson University head coach Dabo Swinney, the most prominent and successful evangelical figure in college football. Swinney has approached racial justice through a characteristically white, evangelical focus on private sin and social degeneration. When asked for an opinion on Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests, Swinney reduced Amer­ ica’s “race problem” down to a “sin problem.”118 He similarly blamed the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers on “a sinful, fallen world.”119 Frustrated over the inadequacy of Swinney’s response, former Clemson wide receiver Kanyton Tuttle publicized a 2017 incident where an assistant coach used a racial slur to address a Black player; Tuttle called out Swinney for failing to address the incident, and suggested that the coach was primarily interested in protecting his “brand.”120 While Swinney retained the support of most of his players, he still recognized a need to adjust. After meeting in private with Black coaches and players,121 Swinney spoke at a Black Lives Matter rally organized by the Clemson

Forgiving Freeze 71

team. There, Swinney said he was “embarrassed” over his failure to understand pro­ blems of injustice but that after listening he recognized the responsibility “to be more aware, to learn more and to speak out against racial inequality.”122 Sweeney’s shift raises obvious questions about expediency, but it more importantly signals the growing nonviability of reducing racism to personal (and thus instrumentally forgivable) sin. The elite college sport marketplace that LU wants to penetrate thus features a set of shifting calculations around race—manipulative in many cases to be sure but also responsive to increased player empowerment—that leaves Liberty in a poor competi­ tive position. The current redirection of racial consciousness from the personalized to the systemic—and the expectation that powerful white coaches and administrators adopt an informed, antiracist vocabulary—particularly undermines LU’s instrumenta­ lization of forgiveness and its licensing of retributive action (e.g., athletic program hires, political partnerships, diatribes against “political correctness”). If (as the Clemson case suggests) a model for race relations crafted from fairly anodyne evangelical state­ ments about fallenness and the need for Christian love proves insufficient for sustaining a college football program, how much greater are the problems for LU, which has built its brand around open white grievance? LU’s conservative, white power base would likely accept facile gestures toward racial inclusivity as strategically necessary (e. g., for recruiting), but real commitments to systemic change would set off alarm bells. Trump has agitated deep antipathies toward Black athlete-activists as figures who ille­ gitimately claim racial oppression and who are “ungrateful” for the gifting of cultural ascendancy supposedly afforded by white institutions.123 Such appeals are likely pow­ erful for the sizable bloc of evangelicals loyal to the president. In addition, white conservatives are disproportionately opposed to expansions of college athletes’ rights.124 So it is difficult to imagine LU creating meaningful spaces for athlete-acti­ vism and social justice organizing (which seem to be emerging as requisite competitive measures in collegiate sport) without risking its power base. At the same time, athletes of color—as Todd, Land, and Clark demonstrate—can read empty gestures for what they are and have the option to attend other schools (including other Christian uni­ versities) that better reflect their values and requirements for belonging. Conjunctures do not guarantee radical change, as new arrangements of power are often shaped around “the existing balance of social forces,” but they do open up possibilities for an alternative, and perhaps more just, future.125 At the very least, a post-Falwell LU might provide some measure of how white, conservative evangelical universities will navigate a condition where forgiveness increasingly breaks free from the moorings of a private, retributive morality to become mobi­ lized as a term for systemic resistance.

Notes 1 Andrew Beaton, “College Football: Behind the Ouster of a Star Coach,” Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2017. 2 Kyle Bonagura, “Review Shows Hugh Freeze Made at Least 12 Calls to Escort Ser­ vices,” ESPN, August 22, 2017.

72 Daniel A. Grano

3 Associated Press, “Ole Miss Disputes NCAA Lack of Institutional Control Charge,” June 6, 2017. 4 Adam Kilgore, “Freeze’s Fall Incudes Twists Worthy of Great Southern Novel,” Washington Post, July 22, 2017. 5 John Talty, “Hugh Freeze Proven to be a Sanctimonious Fraud,” AL.com, July 21, 2017. See also, for example, Geoff Calkins, “High Freeze Brought Down by Hubris, Vengeance and Sex,” The Commercial Appeal, July 21, 2017; and Dennis Dodd, “Hugh Freeze Is Gone, Ole Miss Is Damaged, and the Rebels Have Themselves to Blame,” CBS Sports, July 20, 2017. 6 LU is designated as a nonprofit institution for tax and regulatory purposes. Although LU’s approach to education resembles for-profit, online institutions such as the Uni­ versity of Phoenix or Devry, its nonprofit status provides a competitive advantage by shielding it from government regulation. See Tara Isabella Burton, “Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Liberty University Makes Millions of Dollars from Low-Quality Online Courses,” Vox, April 18, 2018. 7 Michelle Boorstein, “Cruz Speech a Graduation of Sorts for Liberty,” Washington Post, March 29, 2015. 8 Ted Allen, “Baseball Legend Daryl Strawberry Describes How God Restored His Life,” Liberty News, October 12, 2015. 9 “Ray Rice—Liberty University” [YouTube video], posted by Liberty University, December 6, 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=zer5cCGSSbU 10 “Michael Vick—Liberty University Convocation” [YouTube video], posted by Liberty University, January 29, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdBMsU7WVNE 11 Brady McCollough, “Jerry Falwell Jr. Wants Liberty to Be the Evangelical Notre Dame of College Football,” Los Angeles Times, August 27, 2019. 12 Patrick Redford, “Report: Liberty Hires Hugh Freeze, Because of Course They Would,” Deadspin, December 7, 2018. 13 Jason Kirk, “High Freeze to Liberty lmao,” SBNation, December 7, 2018. 14 Corbin Smith, “Holy Hypocrisy: Hugh Freeze, Liberty’s New Football Coach, Loves Prostitutes,” Daily Beast, December 8, 2018. 15 McCollough, “Jerry Falwell Jr.” 16 Perry Bacon Jr. and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, “How Trump and Race are Splitting Evangelicals,” FiveThirtyEight, March 2, 2018. 17 For more on these problems of definition, see Molly Worth, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3. See also Alan Jacobs, “The Word Evangelical Has Lost Its Meaning,” The Atlantic, September 22, 2019. 18 Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2020), 3–7. 19 Bacon and Thomson-DeVeaux, “How Trump.” 20 Eliza Griswold, “Evangelicals of Color Fight Back Against the Religious Right,” The New Yorker, December 26, 2018. 21 Daniel Cox, “Could Trump Drive Young White Evangelicals Away from the GOP?” FiveThirtyEight, August 20, 2019; Griswold, “Evangelicals of Color.” 22 Linda Feldmann, “Evangelical Clash Over Trump Reverberates at Liberty University,” The Christian Science Monitor, October 13, 2016; Samantha Schmidt and Amy B. Wang, “Jerry Falwell Jr. Keeps Defending Trump as Liberty University Grads Return Diplomas,” Washington Post, August 21, 2017. 23 William J. Baker, Playing with God: Religion and Modern Sport (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 214–215. LU started as Lynchburg Baptist College, an affiliate of Falwell Sr.’s Thomas Road Baptist Church. The college was renamed Liberty University in 1985. 24 Nick Anderson, “Virginia’s Liberty Transforms into Evangelical Mega-university,” Washington Post, March 5, 2013.

Forgiving Freeze 73

25 Jordan Ritter Conn, “Ready, Set, Trump: Big-Money Faith, Football, and Forgiveness at Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Liberty University,” The Ringer, December 20, 2019. 26 John W. Kennedy, “Liberty University Placed on Probation,” Christianity Today, February 3, 1997. 27 Alec MacGillis, “How Liberty University Built a Billion-dollar Empire Online,” New York Times Magazine, April 17, 2018. 28 MacGillis, “How Liberty University.” 29 Jack Stripling, “An Online Kingdom Come,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 23, 2015. 30 MacGillis, “How Liberty University.” 31 Anderson, “Virginia’s Liberty Transforms”; US News and World Report, “Liberty University,” Best Colleges Rankings, www.usnews.com/best-colleges/liberty-uni versity-10392/overall-rankings 32 Stripling, “An Online Kingdom.” 33 Will E. Young, “Inside Liberty University’s Culture of Fear,” Washington Post, July 28, 2019; Brandon Ambrosino, “‘Someone’s Gotta Tell the Freakin’ Truth’: Jerry Fal­ well’s Aides Break Their Silence,” Politico Magazine, September 9, 2019. 34 “Building for the Future,” Liberty Journal, May 20, 2013; Dan Wolken, “Liberty Has Dreams of an FBS Reality,” USA Today, August 19, 2014. 35 Baker, Playing with God, 3–4. 36 Michael Powell, “At Liberty University, All Sins Are Forgiven on the Altar of Foot­ ball,” New York Times, December 3, 2016. 37 Marc Tracy and Dan Barry, “Baylor’s Pride Turns to Shame in Rape Scandal,” New York Times, March 10, 2017; Marc Tracy, “Baylor Football Was ‘Black Hole’ of Misconduct, According to Court Filing,” New York Times, February 3, 2017. The 2017 suit was settled, and, at the time of this writing, the total number of cases remains unclear. 38 Kent Babb, “Liberty Campus Torn Over the Hire of Former Baylor AD,” Washington Post, December 9, 2016. 39 Babb, “Liberty Campus Torn”; Julie Zaumer, “Key Hire for Liberty U. Brings Controversy,” Washington Post, December 1, 2016. 40 Conn, “Ready, Set, Trump.” 41 Kent Babb, “The Power and the Glory of Football,” Washington Post, August 30, 2019. 42 Tom Krattenmaker, Onward Christian Athletes: Turning Ballparks into Pulpits and Players into Preachers (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 15. Also see Shirl Hoffman, Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2010), 127–143. 43 Michael L. Butterworth, “Saved at Home: Christian Branding and Faith Nights in the ‘Church of Baseball’,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 97 (3) (2011): 312–314. 44 Christian Lundberg, “Enjoying God’s Death: The Passion of the Christ and Practices of an Evangelical Public,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 95 (4) (2009): 387–411. 45 William E. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 40–42. 46 Baker, Playing, 194–196, 204–217. 47 MacGillis, “How Liberty University.” 48 Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 25–33. See also Roberta J. Park, “‘Soldiers May Fall but Athletes Never!’: Sport as an Antidote to Nervous Diseases and National Decline in America, 1865–1905,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 29 (6) (2012): 792–812; and Seth Dowland, “War, Sports, and the Construction of Masculinity in American Christianity,” Religion Compass, 5 (7) (2011): 355–364. 49 Tony Ladd and James A. Mathisen, Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of American Sport (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 1999), 203–213. 50 David L. Andrews, Making Sport Great Again: The Uber-Sport Assemblage, Neoliberalism, and the Trump Conjuncture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot, 2019), 119–121. For more on

74 Daniel A. Grano

51 52 53 54

55

56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73

how Trump capitalized upon sport to bolster his own masculinity, see Thomas P. Oates and Kyle W. Kusz, “‘My Whole Life Is about Winning’: The Trump Brand and the Political/Commercial Uses of Sport,” in Daniel A. Grano and Michael L. Butterworth (eds), Sport, Rhetoric, and Political Struggle (New York: Peter Lang, 2019), 207–221. Adam Wells, “Liberty University Football Team Approved to Join FBS,” Bleacher Report, February 16, 2017. Liberty University News Service, “Williams Stadium Expansion Taking Shape,” Feb­ ruary 23, 2018; “FOC Renovation Project to Bring Next Level Home to Liberty Football,” Liberty Flames, January 23, 2019. Tom Layberger, “Bowl Victory Capped Liberty University’s First Season under ‘Humbled’ Hugh Freeze,” Forbes, December 22, 2019. Daniel A. Grano, “Michael Vick’s ‘Genuine Remorse’ and Problems of Public For­ giveness,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 100 (1) (2014): 81–104; Daniel A. Grano, “For­ givable Blackness: Jack Johnson and the Politics of Presidential Clemency,” in Michael L. Butterworth (ed.), Handbook of Communication and Sport (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton), forthcoming. Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 31–32. For a similar argument on forgiveness and politicization, see Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 458, 488. Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism, 26–28, 39, 55. Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism, 31–32. See also Ernesto Vardeja, “Derrida and the Impossibility of Forgiveness,” Contemporary Political Theory, 3 (2004): 24–27. Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 5. Jeffrey Scholes and Raphael Sassower, Religion and Sports in American Culture (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014), 4–10. See also Jeffrey Scholes, “Sports in a Postsecular America: The ‘Tebow Phenomenon’,” Implicit Religion, 17 (1) (2014): 88–89. Daniel A. Grano, The Eternal Present of Sport: Rethinking Sport and Religion (Philadel­ phia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 2017), 15–17. Darrin W. Snyder Belousek, Atonement, Justice, and Peace: The Message of the Cross and the Mission of the Church (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2012), 83; Wes Markofski, New Monasticism and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 124–125. Belousek, Atonement, 85. Mako Nagasawa, “Atonement in Scripture: Why Trump and Cruz are the Direct, Logical Result of American Evangelical Theology,” The Anástasis Center for Christian Education and Ministry (previously New Humanity Institute), March 5, 2016, https:// newhumanityinstitute.wordpress.com/2016/03/05/atonement-in-scripture-why-trump­ and-cruz-are-the-direct-logical-result-of-american-evangelical-theology Ken Wilson, “The Evangelical ‘Gospel’ Is Breeding Ground for Trumpism,” Medium, March 29, 2019. Nagasawa, “Atonement in Scripture.” Clare Foran, “Jerry Falwell Gets Religion on Trump,” The Atlantic, January 26, 2016. Sarah Rodriguez, “Falwell Speaks; Interview Addresses Trump Endorsement,” Liberty Champion, March 8, 2016. Feldmann, “Evangelical Clash.” Greg Garrison, “Why Evangelical Christians Support Trump,” AL.com, August 29, 2018. Anderson, “Virginia’s Liberty”; MacGillis, “How Liberty University.” “Coach Hugh and Jill Freeze—Liberty University Convocation” [YouTube video], posted by Liberty University, January 24, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v= T4zq1KO7qII. All references to Freeze’s address are based upon my transcription of this video. Conn, “Ready, Set, Trump.” Conn, “Ready, Set, Trump.”

Forgiving Freeze 75

74 Beaton, “College Football: Behind the Ouster.” 75 Kent Babb, “A Play-Call to God,” Washington Post, August 31, 2014. For more on the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, see Annie Blazer, “An Invitation to Suffer: Evange­ licals and Sports Ministry in the US,” Religions, 10 (11) (2019); and Baker, Playing, 199–202. 76 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 21–39. A full treatment of feminist and queer scholarship on public and private is beyond the scope of my study, but I find Warner’s summary especially relevant. 77 Jeffrey Scholes, “Dabo Swinney, Universal Whiteness, and a ‘Sin Problem’,” Religions, 11 (4) (2020): 8–10. 78 Susan Wise Bauer, The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Sin and Public Confession in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), 3–8. For more on inter­ relationships between religion, confession, and conversion, see Elizabeth Ellis Miller, “Reframing Rhetorical Failure: Confession and Conversion in Sarah Patton Doyle’s Desegregated Heart,” Rhetoric Review, 35 (4) (2016): 294–307. 79 Dave Tell, Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-century America (Uni­ versity Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 1–5. 80 Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Brokenness: The Heart God Revives (Chicago, Ill.: Moody Pub­ lishers, 2005), 50–51. 81 Brett McCracken, Uncomfortable: The Awkward and Essential Challenge of Christian Community (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2017), 65. “Broken” and “brokenness” have also served as homophobic descriptions of LGBTQ+ persons in evangelical culture, and while there are no apparent connections to this meaning in Freeze’s invocation of the term (or in the authenticity claims it often signifies for evangelicals), it is important to be aware of this other form of circulation. See Eliza Griswold, “Millennial Evangelicals Diverge from Their Parents’ Beliefs,” New Yorker, August 27, 2018. 82 DeMoss, Brokenness, 50–51. 83 Ruth Graham, “How the Evangelical Culture of Forgiveness Hurts Victims of Sexual Abuse,” Slate, January 11, 2018. 84 For the connection between scholarly and popular representations, see Johanna Stie­ bert, “Man and New Man: David’s Masculinity in Film,” Journal of the Bible and Its Reception, 2 (2) (2015): 197–218. For queer readings of David’s masculinity, see James E. Harding, The Love of David and Jonathan: Ideology, Text, Reception (Sheffield: Equi­ nox, 2013); and Roland Boer, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door: The Bible and Popular Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 13–32. For a summary of controversies in biblical scholarship, see David A. Bosworth, “Evaluating King David: Old Problems and Recent Scholarship,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 68 (2) (2006): 191–210. 85 David J. A. Clines, Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 235. 86 Acts 13:22. 87 Jane Coaston, “The ‘Biblical’ Defense of Trump’s Affair with Stormy Daniels,” Vox, March 26, 2018; Benjamin Wermund, “Rick Perry Says Trump Is God’s ‘Chosen One’,” Houston Chronicle, November 25, 2019; Elio A. Cohen, “He’s No King David,” The Atlantic, December 2, 2019. 88 Eugene Scott, “Trump Believes in God, but Hasn’t Sought Forgiveness,” CNN, July 28, 2015. 89 Terry Gross, “‘Family’: Fundamentalism, Friends in High Places,” Fresh Air (NPR), July 1, 2009. For more, see Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2008). 90 Ted Ownby, Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 1–4, 13– 16. 91 Ownby, Subduing Satan, 13–14. 92 Ownby, Subduing Satan, 11–12. 93 Grano, The Eternal Present, 1–19.

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94 James Hay, Stuart Hall, and Lawrence Grossberg, “Interview with Stuart Hall, June 12, 2012,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 10 (1) (2013): 16–17. 95 Ian Lovett, “Jerry Falwell Jr. Says He Has Resigned as Liberty University President,” Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2020; Emma Green, “How Jerry Falwell Jr. Lost His Liberty Flock,” The Atlantic, August 9, 2020. 96 Aram Roston, “Business Partner of Falwells Says Affair with Evangelical Power Couple Spanned Seven Years,” Reuters, August 24, 2020; Frances Robles and Jim Rutenberg, “The Evangelical, the ‘Pool Boy’, the Comedian and Michael Cohen,” The New York Times, June 18, 2019. 97 Ambrosino, “Someone’s Gotta Tell.” 98 Jack Stripling, “At Home on the Range, Liberty U’s President Talks Guns and God,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 17, 2015. 99 Carol Kuruvilla, “Why a Sex Scandal Toppled Jerry Falwell Jr. When It Seemed Like Nothing Else Could,” Huffington Post, August 26, 2020. 100 Office of Communications and Public Engagement, “LU President Jerry Falwell Apologizes for Unintentional Pain Caused by Mask Tweet,” Liberty University, June 9, 2020. 101 Falwell Jr. deleted the tweet, but some news outlets saved it in screen captures. I have chosen not to cite any links to the image so as not to participate in its recirculation. 102 Office of Communications and Public Engagement, “LU President Jerry Falwell Apologizes.” 103 “Alumni Letter to Jerry Falwell Jr #LUDeservesBetter,” Change.org, June 1, 2020, www.change.org/p/liberty-university-alumni-letter-to-jerry-falwell-jr-ludeservesbetter 104 Kate Shellnutt, “Leaving Liberty,” Christianity Today, June 2020. 105 Joel Anderson, “Liberty Poured Millions into Sports. Now Its Black Athletes Are Leaving,” Slate, August 2, 2020. 106 Mechelle Voepel, “Liberty University Women’s Basketball Player Asia Todd Trans­ ferring, Cites ‘Racial Insensitivities’ at School,” ESPN, June 11, 2020. 107 Anderson, “Liberty University Poured”; Ruth Graham, “‘I Suppressed So Much of My Humanity In Being Here’: What It’s Like to be Black at Liberty University,” Slate, June 16, 2020. 108 Nancy D. Wadsworth, “George Floyd’s Killing Is Changing How Some White Evangelicals Talk about Race,” Washington Post, August 11, 2020. 109 Emma Green, “The Unofficial Racism Consultants to the White Evangelical World,” The Atlantic, July 5, 2020. 110 Billy Hawkins, The New Plantation: Black Athletes, College Sports, and Predominantly White NCAA Institutions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). See also Harry Edwards, The Revolt of the Black Athlete, 50th anniversary edition (Urbana, Ill.: Uni­ versity of Illinois Press, 2017), xii–xiii. 111 Patrick Hruby, “Four Years a Student-Athlete: The Racial Injustice of Big-Time College Sports,” Vice, April 4, 2016; Taylor Branch, “The Shame of College Sports,” The Atlantic, October 2011. 112 Will Hobson and Emily Guskin, “Majority of Black Americans Favor Paying College Athletes; 6 in 10 Whites Disagree,” Washington Post, September 14, 2017; Kevin Wallsten, Tatishe M. Nteta, and Lauren A. McCarthy, “Racial Prejudice Is Driving Opposition to Paying College Athletes: Here’s the Evidence,” Washington Post, December 30, 2015. 113 Will Hobson and Ben Strauss, “California Votes to Allow NCA Athletes to Get Paid,” Washington Post, September 11, 2019. 114 See, for example, Abraham I. Khan, The Renaissance of the Activist Athlete: Race, Labor and Protest in American Sport (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, forth­ coming); Joe Tompkins, “‘It’s about Respect!’ College-Athlete Activism and Left Neoliberalism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 14 (4) (2017): 351–368; Daniel A. Gilbert, “Not (Just) about the Money: Contextualizing the Labor Activism of College Football Players,” American Studies, 55 (3) (2016): 19–34; and Herbert G.

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115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125

Ruffin II, “‘Doing the Right Thing for the Sake of Doing the Right Thing’: The Revolt of the Black Athlete and the Modern Student-Athletic Movement, 1956–2014,” Western Journal of Black Studies, 38 (4) (2014): 260–278. Anderson, “Liberty University Poured.” Emily Giambalvo, “In College Football, a Shift in Formation,” Washington Post, June 26, 2020. Mike Rodak, “Nick Saban Leads Black Lives Matter March in Tuscaloosa,” AL.com, August 31, 2020. Scholes, “Dabo Swinney, Universal Whiteness.” Kent Babb, “As Ground Shifts at Clemson, Can Swinney Shift with It?,” Washington Post, July 26, 2020. Kanyton Tuttle (@_kinggtutt), Twitter post, June 2, 2020, 9:07 a.m., https://twitter. com/_kinggtutt/status/1267804952451256322?s=20 Babb, “As Ground Shifts.” Adam Spencer, “Dabo Swinney Speaks Out at Clemson’s Black Lives Matter Rally,” Saturdays Down South, June 13, 2020. Jelani Cobb, “From Louis Armstrong to the NFL: Ungrateful as the New Uppity,” The New Yorker, September 24, 2017. Hobson and Guskin, “Majority of Black Americans”; Wallsten et al., “Racial Pre­ judice is Driving Opposition.” Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees,” Journal of Communication Inquiry, 10 (2) (1986): 40–43.

PART II

Sport as a Religio-cultural Vehicle

4 STRUCTURING SPORTS, STRUCTURING COMMUNITY The Islamic Society of Chester County Debates a Basketball Court Megan Eaton Robb and Max Dugan

Introduction Plans for a new community center at the Islamic Society of Chester County (ISCC) have been ongoing for over fifteen years. At first the goal was to expand the space for Friday prayers and Ramadan gatherings, but in 2015 the congregants voted to include a basketball court in the building following a three-year debate. Sports have become integral to the planned Islamic center and to the ISCC’s plans for its future. Members supported the basketball court proposal for different reasons. One of the advocates of the basketball court, Salim Bootwala, saw a chance to recreate the many supportive religious and social institutions of his youth in India—the mosque, the cricket team, the local aid organization that helped his family pay school fees—in a single community center. Salim had been a successful cricket player during his youth in Mumbai, India, and while working for the multinational conglomerate Tata. His passion for sports fol­ lowed him when he moved to the USA in the 1990s as an IT professional. He founded his own local cricket club in Pennsylvania and began coaching basketball for the youth Muslim Interscholastic Tournament (MIST). Salim thought the new basketball court would make the ISCC an even more appealing and healthy environment for youth. Another advocate for the basketball court, Bushra Qureshi, was hesitant initially. Elected the president of the ISCC board in spring 2020, she remembers being unsure whether the basketball court was the best use of funds. After praying about the decision and recalling the sports facilities of her sister’s Islamic center in Texas, she became inspired. Not only is there no Islamic impediment to the inclusion of a sports space in the community center, she explained to us, but including an athletic facility could attract new members, retain old members, and provide an inviting space for young people to spend time together. The divergent responses to the basketball court, she reassured us, do not preclude unity but instead are characteristics of consensus building. DOI: 10.4324/9781003014621-7

82 Megan Eaton Robb and Max Dugan

Disagreements about the basketball court stemmed from different visions of the ideal religious community. For members of the ISCC, sports offered a discursive space to express aspirations for and concerns about the community’s future. This chapter describes how basketball, important for several community members, served not only those who love sports but also those who care little for it. For all members, sports were a space to consider local challenges, diasporic experience, and intergenerational tensions. Sports are essential to community restructuring in that—like consumption for women members of the Muslim Students Association in the 1960s and 1970s or nationally oriented institution-building in the 2000s—it provided a productive site for fostering American Muslim life.1 This essay demon­ strates that Muslims may translate their quintessentially American experiences through sports in ways that eschew cultural categories often applied to them.

Islam, Sports, and the “West”: Current Approaches and Paths Forward Sports are essential to the restructuring of the ISCC community by providing a productive site for fostering American Muslim life. Much of the literature on Islam and sports targets physical-education teachers and policy-makers, taking for granted that participation in sports culture is a positive good. Consequently, the extant literature focuses on obstacles to Muslim participation in sports, especially the participation of young Muslim women. Often dedicated to “reaffirming values of physical education,” this research advocates policies that encourage Muslim female participation in sports to facilitate the assimilation of Muslims into European national communities.2 An inverted image of this concern emerges in work on Islam and sports in the USA, which presents Muslim engagement with sports as evidence of American belonging.3 The troubling message in either case is that sports are important only when they facilitate, enable, or prove national integration of Muslims into “Western” societies. Although this scholarship may increase Muslim engagement with sports, and help educate non-Muslims about Muslim sports traditions, it often relies on a problematic distinction between Islam and “the West.” In this troubling formulation, the West indexes values like democracy, equality, and individual freedom. Juxtaposing sports culture, characterized even implicitly as Western, and Islamic cultures reifies what Kambiz GhaneaBassiri has coined “the Islam and the West binary.”4 Extensive scholarship has demonstrated the risks of depending on this sort of binary, especially with reference to knowledge production about the “Orient,” non-European societies, and non-Protestant religions. Edward Said famously con­ nects scholarship about the “Orient,” especially regarding Islam and Arab countries, with the entrenchment of colonial power.5 Dipesh Chakrabarty illustrates how even analyses which avoid explicitly Orientalist frameworks establish Western European history as the standard by which other countries and religious groups are measured. In this way, Muslim attitudes toward “freedom” and “modernity” imply comparison to a European norm. When this happens, scholarship that relies on a binary between

Structuring Sports, Structuring Community 83

Islam and the West risks understanding differences between the subject of research and European history as “inadequacy” rather than as valid social, cultural, and religious processes.6 Tomoko Masuzawa extends these insights by arguing that the “pluralism” model for studying religions emerges from and subtly reinforces the notion that Western Christianity is a lodestar.7 Scholarship which represents Islam and “the West” as historically distinct categories is not only inadequate but may actually perpetuate the effects of colonialism by inadvertently centering whiteness, Western European history, and Protestantism. While ISCC members may use the nation, the East, and the West as categories in conversation, the categories are by themselves obstacles to under­ standing the factors which motivated the basketball court decision. Instead, this chap­ ter turns away from the national to the local—namely conviviality, local geography, and diasporic nostalgia—to understand the reasons for and effects of the ISCC’s engagement with sports.8 Our approach is also social-constructionist, in that it avoids making a stark distinction between culture and religion. Thus, this chapter approaches Islam and “the West” as interrelated and con­ stituting each other. GhaneaBassiri observes that the “implicit assumption that Islam and ‘the West’ are inherently different” has brought to attention “how Muslims are faring in the United States rather than how they have actively participated in American history.”9 This trend in scholarship is a problem that this chapter helps solve by highlighting important trends in Islam and sport that do not depend on such a binary, implicitly or explicitly. While GhaneaBassiri’s work focuses on the history of Islam in America, scholarship on Islam and sports also distinguishes between Islam and “the West” in a way that obscures significant overlaps.10 Dependence on this binary oversimplifies Islamic cultures and misrepresents the often-blurred lines between Muslim and non-Muslim cultures. The framing of Islam as “other” may also have negative social and political consequences.11 This essay also challenges scholarship that depends on a model of assimilation to understand relationships between sport and Islam. For example, Steven Fink’s Drib­ bling for Dawah surveys lived, non-elite Muslim sports in Islamic schools, Muslim basketball leagues, and congregational spaces, arguing that sports “bond” Muslims communities and “bridge” Muslim and non-Muslim communities. He observes that sports have the capacity to build a pluralistic American consciousness by “spanning the gaps between” Muslims and non-Muslims.12 While useful as a recent history of basketball in revivalist-oriented Muslim communities, the work’s extensive attention to bonding and bridging assumes an Islamic–Western binary and reduces Muslim American difference. In our framing, sports contain various relational possibilities, including not only building and bridging but also dividing, resolving, stratifying, and negotiating. Building on the work of Daniel Burdsey, Stanley Thangaraj, and Rajinder Dudrah that demonstrates that “sports are a significant medium through which local experiences are translated, diasporic parameters reconfigured and national identity complicated,” this essay examines how engagement with sports expresses diasporic nostalgia, pragmatism, and a desire to restructure authority within the community.13 In the ISCC, the basketball court is not an indicator of a desire to assimilate into American life, nor do objections to it suggest a disinclination to

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American culture. Rather, the basketball court debate shows that sports have become embedded in how the community thinks of itself, works out its local character, and establishes an identity independent of national feeling. This is not to say that national belonging is unimportant to ISCC members but that overemphasis on the topic of assimilation and the national difference it implies reflect latent Orientalist thinking rather than the concerns of ISCC members. Many ISCC members agreed that bas­ ketball matters to the day-to-day life of members and how they think of themselves as a local community. Our analysis accepts that religion and sports are culturally mediated, with the “sacred” and the “secular” as categories whose meaning changes over time.14 While existing analyses reify a binary in which sports function as an internal glue in tension with the nation or as a binding agent to others in service of the nation,15 sports relates to community in more ways than just bonding and bridging. In fact, sports may stratify communities by gender and class, resolve conflicts between generations, or assist in the negotiation of competing local, national, and international concerns. Focusing on assimilation obscures how basketball is tied to the issues that matter most in the ISCC. Our chapter highlights productive aspects of the relationship between religion and sports, which include conflict and its resolution. This approach resonates with Jeffrey Scholes and Raphael Sassower’s observation that postsecularism “sees religious ideologies existing alongside and relating to secular ideologies in novel ways.”16 Building on postsecular approaches, this article is not interested in finding an essentially “Muslim” approach to basketball at the ISCC; in addition, we found no evidence that basketball is a secularizing force in the ISCC. Instead, sports is intertwined in the social and institutional dimensions of religious life in the ISCC. ISCC members were at pains to point out that the basketball court is not part of the masjid, or mosque, but also emphasized that basketball can be a coherent, healthy part of a Muslim life. In the ISCC, sports resonate with principles accepted as religiously significant: care for personal health, stewardship of the community, respect for elders, and respectful resolution of conflict. We collected qualitative and archival data in two phases over a period of ten months from September 2019 to June 2020. The first phase consisted of informal in-person conversations with adult community leaders, which illuminated several topics and tensions around which we designed our questionnaire. The ISCC’s proximity to Philadelphia allowed us to meet with community members and consider the impact of local geography, such as the condition of the current property and distance to neighbors’ properties. These conversations also allowed us to construct an oral history of the ISCC and the decision-making process for the new center. The second phase consisted of formal interviews with community members, which, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, were conducted by phone or Zoom.17 We supplemented our ethnography with archival research, primarily reviewing records of local construction proposals, deed records, and litigation, as well as the ISCC’s website and Twitter account. This archival research showed that the community was responsive not only to the needs of its members but also to external pressures. Since recollections of the

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timings of deeds of sale, meeting debates, and approval of construction proposals differed dramatically, the documentation allowed us to establish a more certain timeline. There were occasionally loud silences in the oral histories surrounding the resistance to an outdoor basketball court by non-Muslim neighbors, with a hesita­ tion among some interlocutors to dwell on a painful subject; county records help fill in those gaps as well.

Why Basketball? The ISCC chose to build a basketball court rather than a soccer field or tennis court because it connected to their existing youth programming, was popular with young people, and provided a flexible space easily repurposed for prayer, gather­ ings, and charity functions. Many young people in the ISCC play basketball as part of the MIST, coached by a youth group leader and board member Salim Boot­ wala.18 The prospect of a basketball court inspired enthusiasm among the young men who often play pick-up basketball or tag football together in the ISCC parking lot. Ibraheem, a teenager at the ISCC, mentioned that hearing about the basketball court proposal motivated him and his friends to develop a stronger interest in the community-center plans. While young people at ISCC enjoy many different sports, basketball is a common denominator. As Ibraheem explained, while some play baseball and others play soccer, “We all play basketball.”19 Hear­ ing about the proposal, children and teenagers took the initiative to bring up the topic with their parents, sharing their enthusiasm for the project. One teenager, Faraz, told his parents that a basketball space would “be an opportunity for the younger kids to bond.”20 College student Sophia explained that “when Muslims do face certain challenges that not every other group faces in this world, having sport as a way to bring Muslims together and find a way to combat these common challenges is really useful.”21 A few adults were enthusiastic about basketball spe­ cifically; for example, Salim was proud that he had successfully introduced girls as well as boys to the sport through involvement in the MIST.22 Abdul Mughees hoped that young people would be comfortable bringing their friends over for a pick-up game of basketball, furthering the interfaith mission of the ISCC.23 However, the flexibility of the basketball-court space also appealed to many ISCC members who cared less about basketball. An indoor basketball court can be used for many different activities and groups; many different sports can be played in the space, including volleyball, soccer, and table tennis. Fatima described an uncomfortable encounter at a local gym where she was singled out for wearing long sleeves and long leggings while exercising; one implication of this story was that in a Muslim community center modest exercise clothing practices would be considered normal.24 The basketball court could house other community events like breakfasts for local firefighters, charity soup kitchens, and social gatherings. It would serve as an overflow area for prayers during Ramadan, a time when space is at a premium. Fatima and Noureen both mentioned that the floor of the basketball court would be easier to clean than the carpeted floors of the current ISCC

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building.25 Additionally, some community members mentioned the importance of the mosque as the representation of the community in relation to other commu­ nities, gesturing in particular to the appearance of social class.26 Notably absent from many justifications for the court were details about the values that might be transmitted through playing basketball as opposed to any other physical activity that promotes health. This observation contrasts to attitudes toward basketball in the late-nineteenth-century YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) context, which initially emphasized basketball’s distinct ability to cultivate Christian, masculine virtues directly.27 While this study of the ISCC community center resonates with recent work on YMCA buildings as both literal and figurative spaces of identity exploration, there are key differences. In the early twentieth century, YMCA leaders saw themselves, in building basketball courts, as competing with cinema halls for their target audience of young, virile Christians; this rapid expansion, which resulted in the replication of a classic “YMCA building” across the continental United States, coincided with a growing “secularization” of the community center as its corporate prowess increased.28 In contrast, community centers like the one that the ISCC plans to build are hyper-local in funding and focus. Growing slowly and unevenly through grassroots action, they take inspiration from other Muslim community centers, each one a singular project committed to serving a nearby, often suburban community. The slow, uneven pace of community-center development, linked to the commu­ nity’s convivial debating practices and rotating board structure, suggest that secular­ ization is not a likely outcome of the basketball-court construction in this case. The YMCA’s rapid expansion through a centralized, corporate model alongside the expressed desire to compete with secular spaces for a target audience made the secularization of those spaces more likely. In contrast, the relative lack of a cen­ tralized model or distinct corporate identity inhibit the secularization of the ISCC and arguably other community centers like it. Regarding Muslim attitudes toward sports, every ISCC member who spoke with us explained that participating in sports is permissible and physical activity to maintain health strongly encouraged. Some members explained that sports are permissible in the way that any permissible activity can be considered Muslim. One of the youth at the ISCC, Sophia, responded to our question “Is there a place for sport in Muslim life?” with a gentle jibe: Yeah, most Muslims are people too and there’s a place for sport in everyone’s lives; so, why can’t Muslims have sports too? … There’s a place for sport in Muslim life because there’s a place for sport in everyone’s lives. Even though Sophia questioned the need for Muslim-only basketball leagues like MIST, like the ones her friends at the ISCC were involved in, she acknowledged that “especially when Muslims do face certain challenges that not every other group faces in this world, having sport as a way to bring Muslims together and find a way to combat these common challenges is really useful.”29 Salim said in response to the same question, “There should be sports in everybody’s life,

Structuring Sports, Structuring Community 87

regardless of what religion or ethnicity they belong to.”30 To Salim, sports was not only a way to promote health but was also a good in itself. Everyone could agree that since young people were already playing in the MIST tournament and excited about basketball, the basketball court would also have the additional benefit of bringing young Muslims (particularly young men) together to learn to face common challenges.31 While some ISCC members stated that sports did not need to be justified spe­ cifically in Muslim terms, others emphasized the positive obligation for Muslims to take care of their physical health as a reason to encourage basketball. Rakshan explained, “A healthy Muslim is a better believer.”32 To these members, playing sports helps Muslims stay healthy so that they can be of service to those around them and perform rituals. In response to the question “Is there a place for sport in Muslim life?” Bushra emphasized the Prophet’s exhortation for Muslims to remain healthy, explaining that playing sports would make performing prayers less taxing on the body.33 Several ISCC members mentioned that the Prophet took part in races with his wives as evidence that the Prophet approved of young people exer­ cising and that physical health has always been an important aspect of Muslim behavior.34 Fatima and Meena both mentioned prayer as a form of physical activ­ ity; Fatimah said “even our prayer is a whole exercise routine … I feel a stretch in my back, if I do it correctly.”35 Meena, who grew up with four brothers, was always encouraged to be physically active; in her response she drew our attention to historical Muslim contexts to demonstrate that the place for sports “is within every Muslim regardless of gender.”36 Every ISCC member with whom we spoke believed that basketball needed no special assimilation into Muslim life. The choice of a basketball court may also stem from the ISCC’s relations to other Muslim communities and the desire to signal prosperity or social class. Some members of the ISCC explained the importance of admirable features of other Islamic centers—including athletic facilities and youth programming—that they had encountered through family connections, travel for work, or organizational affiliations.37 Several of our interlocutors implied the importance of class when discussing the basketball court proposal. Mughees believes an impressive center will encourage young people to bring non-Muslim friends to visit: My vision was, they come in, they look at this place and say, “Wow, I want to show this to my friends. I want my friends to come and see my mosque. It’s mind-blowing, it’s amazing. It has a grand entrance; it looks like the foyer of a Marriot five-star hotel in the entrance.” Danish more directly connected the stature of a congregational space and the class and profession of its members when he compared a different mosque attended by “cab drivers, small business owners, things of that sort” and the ISCC, whose members are predominantly professionals.38 Mohsin demonstrated why members may be eager to have a building that reflected the strength of their community by contrasting the impressive, cosmopolitan mosques he previously attended with the

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relatively humble appearance of the ISCC’s current building.39 A recent professional transplant to West Chester who had only been attending prayers at the ISCC for a few months, Mohsin found the ISCC through a Google search (the mosque was a short drive from his new residence). When he arrived at the ISCC, he was surprised to see the mosque was “just … a house” in contrast to the more lavish mosque he previously attended. Mohsin said, “the mosque that I was going to in Texas40 versus this one … it’s like the Harvard of mosques, right? And this one is not even a community college, this one is just—you can see, it’s a house.” Mohsin’s comments suggest that the basketball court, as part of an expansive center, while expensive, could help demonstrate the community’s prosperity and vitality. The basketball court does present practical issues that concerned some community members. Most especially, building a basketball court is an extremely expensive endeavor. Restrictions on the financing of projects (in particular, the prohibition against riba-, or interest) complicate the completion of infrastructure projects. The prohibition against taking interest-bearing loans from any source to fund the con­ struction of the community center and masjid means that the capital for the project must come directly from members.41 Adding an expensive basketball court to the building plan jeopardized an expansion project that had already been subject to extensive litigation in the 2000s. Keeping these practical concerns in mind, it becomes clear that the community did not make a casual decision to construct a basketball court; instead, the court lies at the heart of ISCC community aspirations, particularly for its youth. In debates on the basketball court, generational divides and local contingencies came to the fore. Vying visions of ideal community played out across these divides; the convivial way in which these divides were bridged and tensions eased in the basketball-court debate highlights the depth of the relationships established between biological and nonbiological family members at the ISCC.

Local Contingencies, Diasporic Nostalgia, and Conviviality Anxieties and enthusiasm about the basketball court as a lodestone for community life have motivated some ISCC members to reimagine the community center as a third space,42 with the basketball court playing a key role. Many ISCC community members maintain strong connections to Pakistan and North India while remaining committed to remaking a new vision of Islam in America. Sports is a discursive space where local contingencies, diasporic identities, and convivial social relations are knit together.43 Even as ISCC members disagreed about its inclusion, the basketball court provided them a shared vocabulary and common set of concerns that they could use to discuss the future of their community.

Local Contingencies The ISCC’s local surroundings informed the decision to add a basketball court to the new center. The primary contingencies encountered by the ISCC have been their fluctuating and mobile congregation, the requirements of suburban life, a

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concern to raise funds ethically, the constraints of local permit processes, and dis­ proportionate scrutiny from neighborhood residents. The ISCC was founded in 1978 as an informal network of families meeting in a local YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association) to perform Friday prayers. Seraj, a civil engineer who had emigrated from Egypt to the USA, opened a phone book after arriving in West Chester and called the numbers listed next to Muslim-sounding names. When the stranger would pick up, Brother Seraj asked where he could pray with other Muslims on Fridays. Unmoored in a new place, he created a network of Muslims using publicly posted telephone numbers and creativity. Since there were no local prayer spaces at that time, Brother Seraj rented a room at the YWCA each Friday. The earliest gatherings of the ISCC were characterized by a sense of family, shared food, and storytelling. After the Friday gatherings gained traction, the founding families added a Sunday gathering that welcomed children.44 The ISCC first came into possession of a stable physical location when it pur­ chased a church in Kennett Square from the Kennett Square Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses (West Goshen Township 1988). The Kennett Square location was equidistant from far-flung groups of Muslims in the area. For example, Dr. Saeed Ahmad Usmani, who moved to West Chester from Pakistan to practice dentistry in the 1970s and joined the ISCC in its earliest days, drove fourteen miles multiple times a day to attend prayers, even for the fajr prayer, which occurs in the early morning hours before dawn.45 Despite its inconvenient location, Muslims drove from as far away as Delaware to attend prayers, a regional spread indicating the dearth of opportunities for congregational worship and socializing for Muslim families in that area in the 1980s. In this atmosphere of scarcity, the impact of additional mosques rippled through communities of Muslims in southeastern Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey. In the early 1990s, an individual donated land for the construction of a masjid in nearby Delaware. As a result, people who lived near the new masjid stopped travel­ ing to Kennett Square. This development spurred West Chester Muslims to look for a more centrally located space. While members like Dr. Usmani have long been with the ISCC, the attendee population at the ISCC is fluid. This fluidity is demonstrated not only in the families who attend but also in leadership; the board is composed of eleven members, whose terms of three years are staggered so that three members come up for election each year. Democratic leadership by congregants rather than the leadership of a single imam also poses pragmatic challenges to build­ ing consensus on a building design. On the other hand, the ISCC is influenced by competition to provide resources to attract families in the region, and dramatic improvements to the current building could do just that. A basketball court would align the ISCC more closely with rising standards for Muslim community centers, demonstrated most notably by the famous East Plano Islamic Center in Plano, Texas, which includes a recreational center alongside many other resources.46 In 1994, the ISCC purchased its current building: a 2,000-square-foot ranchstyle home located in a suburb of West Chester and within a mile of a large synagogue (Kesher Israel) and a large church (Trinity Assembly of God).47 After

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the purchase of the current building, the relationship among the ISCC, the township, and the courts slowed attempts to establish a firm foothold in the community. The township initially required the ISCC to build a public sewer and a public water source; these were costly demands, requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment. After the ISCC demonstrated the small size of its congregation, the judge waived the requirement for both. Then a neighbor offered to develop some of their land into a parking lot for use by the ISCC but asked for the land to be transferred into his name in exchange for his labor. The ISCC did not agree. In response, the neighbor, in apparent retribution, approached the town council to ask the ISCC to produce a proof-of-occupancy permit for a small house on the property that was used as a Sunday school.48 The ISCC had not applied to have the building rezoned into a school, as it had done for the main ISCC facility. Presumably they were then forced to pay to have the building rezoned to answer the neighbor’s displeasure at his failed attempt to trade his development labor in exchange for a portion of the ISCC’s plot. By the early 2000s, the ranch-style house was bursting at the seams, particularly during Ramadan and during monthly community halaqas, or religious gatherings for the purpose of study. While Kesher Israel, the synagogue down the road, offered the ISCC access to its parking lots during major community events to facilitate the application’s success, forty neighbors objected to the ISCC building’s expansion.49 When, after three hearings, the township finally gave permission for the building’s construction, neighbors extended the legal process by hiring a lawyer to represent them against the township. Although the ISCC finally achieved its legal victory on January 23, 2008, the approval of their application was moot in the face of a transformed community. In the meantime, children playing in the ISCC parking lot after breaking their Ramadan fast resulted in a spate of noise complaints that made ISCC members reluctant to invest in outdoor basketball facilities.50 The delay also reflected the difficulty of finding a reliable architect. In 2007, Salim Bootwala was a member of the five-person construction committee, a subgroup of the board dedicated to the new community center. According to Bootwala, this committee initially selected engineers and architects based on price and the social networks of board members. The businesses hired were sole proprietorships, which were less flexible than larger, team-oriented, multi-partner businesses. The board also frequently changed its mind about project parameters, causing difficulties with con­ tractors.51 More than once, the ISCC board members gathered to cajole architects to give updates only to have architects fall sick or move away.52 Since the architects used were sole proprietors of their own small businesses, one architect dropping out of the project meant long delays. In the meantime, the membership changed, and additions like Ejaz, who had many connections to mosques in the area, raised the proposal for a basketball court, an idea that took hold among members of the com­ munity. The plan for a larger expansion would not be covered by the previous development application, however. So, in April 2016, the ISCC ignored the previous development application despite its hard-won victory and put forward a new proposal to the West Goshen township planning commission for “the construction of two institutional buildings

Structuring Sports, Structuring Community 91

totaling 26,484 square feet (a mosque and an activity center), and 125 parking spaces.”53 Ongoing negotiations over how to proceed with the construction of a basketball court continue to balance the local contingencies of financing, taxation, parking access, and noise complaints. The history of the ISCC has been entangled since its inception in the local conditions of Chester County, from access to the local YWCA to local zoning laws. In the recent center discussion, the ISCC’s response to local contingencies has also been inflected by competing visions of the ideal community that fall partially along generational lines.

Diasporic Nostalgia Approaches to parenthood and its challenges in the USA also affect the decision to support the building of a basketball court. Many parents hope that their children’s passion for basketball will help make the Islamic center an important space for the rearing of a new generation of Muslims. While describing these hopes to us, those raised in South Asia expressed their desires for the ISCC in nostalgic terms. At the same time, they also expressed a desire to nurture their children differently than they were raised. ISCC members drew on memories of childhood in South Asia to imagine a childhood local to West Chester. Rather than showing some essential generational difference between those born in South Asia and those born in the USA, our research shows that while ISCC members shared South Asia as a touchstone for their imagi­ nations of an ideal future, they drew upon this nostalgia in different ways. Basketball was an important and diverse discursive space for thinking through diasporic nostalgia. The parents we spoke to, most of whom had been raised in South Asia, justified the basketball-court decision by referring to their children. They wanted to draw children to the ISCC and wanted their children to build positive connections with the center and with Islam; they wanted to pull children away from temptations and provide a space where Islam was normative in contrast to the world outside of the ISCC and their parents’ homes; and they wanted to bring non-Muslims into the ISCC space for formal interfaith work as well as for casual interactions. Parents who had immigrated from South Asia to the USA as adults wanted to provide a multigenerational community space that combined the strengths of the “American Medina”—to use Zareena Grewal’s term—while helping with the particular bur­ dens managed by South Asian–born parents.54 These parents were attempting to meet the parental responsibilities of the multigenerational extended family homes of their upbringing within the confines of a nuclear family household model. This last point is not one that has been discussed in literature on Islam in North Amer­ ica.55 The desire for vibrant community centers may in part be motivated by the desire to balance nostalgia for an extended family home with the positive features of the nuclear family model in the American context. Many adults saw the addition of a basketball court as showing how community formation must change with a shift to the USA, while also giving parents hope that the most treasured aspects of their childhood—a sense of community, rootedness, and family—could pass down to their children.

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Those raised in South Asia hoped a revitalized Islamic center, with a basketball court, could provide their children with the textures of Muslim family life that they see as touchstones in their identity. Parents realized they could not force their children to attend the ISCC if they wanted their children to love being in the space. Since so many children at the ISCC love basketball already, the basketball court would draw children to the space so that they could observe culturally sig­ nificant routines by osmosis. Fatimah Rasheed described waking up to the sound of her grandparents praying as an effective teaching tool: I kind of feel that sometimes parents here get stressed out, having to tackle that. And they’re still not able to handle it well. I remember learning from and watching my grandparents. Like, I remember my grandparents waking up early and then doing nama- z and then reading Quran, and we would get so upset because they would read it loudly and we won’t be able to sleep, well, and we would be like “What’s wrong with them?” and all of that. But we learned it in that effective way, that nobody had to tell us that you have to wake up for fajr, and do Quran.56 As a child, she did not understand her grandparents’ behavior, and even found it annoying. However, after becoming an adult, this fond memory illustrated that didactic lessons could not replace the importance of exposure to embodied, everyday devotion. She connected these reflections to her desire to promote a strong emotional connection with the ISCC space in her children; she was con­ fident that basketball was an excellent way to build these emotional bonds between her children and the ISCC. Basketball is significant to some ISCC parents as a way to make going to the ISCC fun and relaxing, building positive associations that her children could draw upon later in life to bolster their Muslim identity—in the same way that she drew upon fond memories of her grandparents in her middle age. This association between the community center and a familial context composed of both biological and nonbiological family members also sets the ISCC apart from histories of YMCA centers across the USA. Another woman in the community, Noureen, shared that the ISCC assuaged her sense of loss at being disconnected from family members. On the one hand, her move to the USA coincided with a spiritual awakening, inspired in large part by an influential member of the community, Bushra Qureshi. On the other hand, parenting teenagers in the USA generates anxieties about her children keeping a strong connection to their Muslim identity in Noureen—anxieties she hopes a space like an expanded center and basketball court will help to remedy. While Noureen, who is married to a board member of the ISCC, is thankful that her daughter’s closest friends belong to the ISCC community, and by implication are Muslim, she notes that in the absence of extended family the ISCC community members become like family, in at least one case even supplementing childcare for other parents. She was proud that ISCC community members ask after those absent from prayers, check in on members who are ill, and offer to help each other

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financially and emotionally. She sees elder members of the community like Bilquis Rashid as aunts and uncles and encourages her children to see them as surrogate grandparents.57 However, her children did not interact with elders in the com­ munity as frequently as she would like. In her estimation, there is great potential for positive character building when the elderly generation has regular interaction with the youth. A new center with extracurricular activities would facilitate that informal interaction.58 Both Fatimah and Noureen expressed a desire for their children to have access to other adults from whom they can learn etiquette and respect and ask important doctrinal questions instead of searching the Internet for answers. Fatimah explained to us the importance of a knowledgeable Sunday-school teacher; Noureen reflec­ ted on how children are more receptive to advice from elders compared to parents. For Fatimah and Noureen, having a basketball court as part of the community center could create a new type of third space where children could be surrounded by positive Muslim influences, not unlike an idealized version of an extended family home. Other members with the power to push forward the basketball-court project had a different vision, distancing themselves from the way Islam appears in Paki­ stan, where “a lot of Islam has become rituals.”59 Abdul Mughees Chaudhri, a member of the board and former president, discussed the limitations of Muslim ritual in Pakistan during a conversation with a group of his university friends who were all engineers on WhatsApp: I think here’s what happens, in any group [ … ] when you’re born and raised in a Muslim country, you’re [taken] for granted [as] Muslim. I was born in a Muslim family, I was a Muslim, guy came to my house, taught me to read the Quran, didn’t really teach me what the meaning was, I really didn’t care what the meaning was, I just wanted to run away from him. [ … ] [O]ne day, everybody was very happy, that “Oh, he’s finished the Quran.” I don’t know what that meant, but it was a joyous occasion. And then we learned [ … ] Islamic Studies in the college days. The school—there was one subject till twelfth grade that I had to pass, which was Islamic Studies. And that’s it! You get married, you had kids, and that was your Islam. [ … ] “Islam is following rituals.”60 For Chaudhuri, the emphasis on rituals in Pakistan allowed some Muslims to be “involved in things that as a Muslim you shouldn’t even think about.” In the USA, in contrast, he says, “at least I am thinking about what God wants you to do.” A dependence on ritual, by implication, might prevent openness to positive change on the one hand, while preventing the proper emotional or intellectual connec­ tions to Islam. Both Fatimah and Mughees shared memories of discomfort with their elders’ approach to Islam during their childhoods; while Fatimah came to understand and even revere the behavior of elders she observed in her childhood, Mughees’ childhood experiences made him more convinced of the positive aspects of American Muslim culture that had made him an “oddball” in his family.

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On the other hand, Mughees remained very concerned about his lack of knowl­ edge and control over his daughters’ daily lives, and he saw the basketball court deci­ sion, specifically, as going a long way to solving this problem. Even though Mughees does not feel nostalgic for the “very controlled environment” in which he attended high school in Pakistan, its distinctiveness from the American context highlights chal­ lenges that immigrants encounter raising families in the USA. While the fear of known challenges is great, the fear of unknown challenges is greater: I would rather have [youth] in the center in a controlled environment as compared to somewhere else where we have no idea what they’re doing. [ … ] Think what Muslim parents and—maybe that’s because I didn’t go to high school here, right? I didn’t go to any school in here other than my master’s classes, but by the time I’m doing my master’s I’m pretty old, so, and that might be true for majority of the parents. They don’t know what happens in high school. They don’t know. They—I can relate to a high school which I went to, which was a very controlled environment back home, uh, where I grew up in Pakistan. So, I think for our parents it’s very difficult to realize what kids go through on day-to-day life.61 The “controlled” high-school environment of Pakistan was not a negative feature for Mughees. Rather, he hoped the community center would allow him to check on his children, while they have fun with friends. For Mughees, the basketball-court proposal strikes a perfect balance between a desire for controlled exposure to Islam while acknowledging the different “mindsets” of their children. Fatima explained, “I get into a battle [with my children] almost every halaqa. [My children say] ‘Why do we have to go there? There’s nothing fun! They talk about the same things!’” She hoped the bas­ ketball court would make going to the masjid for four or five hours more palatable to her children. For Fatima, she supported the basketball-court plan in part because installing a basketball hoop in the parking lot had impacted her family positively. Before the parking-lot basketball hoop, when her children completed Sunday-school lessons they wanted to go home immediately. Parents picking up their children had little time to socialize. After the basketball hoop appeared, she said, “[Kids] wanted to stay there after their Sunday school was over. They were playing with their friends, and they would say ‘Oh Mom just one more minute, oh Mom just one more—’ Like, it was amazing!” Fatimah hopes that her youngest son will grow attached to the new center.62 Other board members shared this ideal image of the ISCC as a third space where non-Muslim friends as well as Muslims with shared interests and professions were welcomed. Abdul Mughees imagined the new community center as a place where his daughters and their non-Muslim friends could complete their homework, perhaps while drinking coffee. Salim Bootwala, another member of the board key in the movement to include a basketball court in the new building plans, founded a youth group active in the MIST for basketball. He described the ideal youth space as one that allowed for the same trifecta of study, prayer, and play that gave middle-class children some relief from the pressures of preparing for professional life:

Structuring Sports, Structuring Community 95

And lastly, having a place for the kids—for the youth—to hang out. So, a coffee room for the kids where they can have Wi-Fi, they can come in, they can hang out with their friends, they can do their homework, can bring their laptops in. And a place where they can play [ … ] We thought the community hall will double up as a basketball court [ … ] and this was very important for me: to make sure that we have an area for the kids in the future mosque where they can come out, they can be athletic, they can try to burn off some steam. They are busy in school all the—especially the ISCC kids. They are so much involved. If they can get away, come to the masjid for an hour, half an hour each day, play some basketball, hang out with friends, offer prayers when it’s time to offer prayers. They can do their homework. I think it’s just a winwin for both the parents as well as for the kids.63 For Salim, who grew up in India, there was no model there for an Islamic com­ munity center. However, he saw the ISCC as potentially providing resources in a single space that would be available through several institutions in India. When Salim was growing up in Mumbai in a majority Muslim neighborhood, he would go to mosques for prayers, with the occasional Iftar held in the open space near the mosque during Ramadan; some masjids had full-time madrasas, or Islamic schools, and others held halaqas, or religious gatherings for the purpose of study. Separate from those institutions existed charitable organizations and educational trusts, unaffiliated with the masjids but with their own offices to provide support to children for their education. Then, separate from those institutions, were sports opportunities for children. In Salim’s vision for the future of the ISCC, he sees the possibility of combining all these crucial institutions of community support under one roof. In the past two years, Salim had formed basketball teams for both boys and girls to compete in MIST in which high-school-age youth play fellow Mus­ lims. While Salim did not see the ISCC as analogous to any single institution or family he had while growing up, he described his vision that the ISCC could play multiple important roles that characterized the strength of his childhood home. The basketball court as part of a third space, the Islamic community center, interacted with diasporic nostalgia in different ways for ISCC community members who had been born in South Asia. For some, the ideal community center invoked positive memories of the advantages of extended family homes. For others, plans for the new ISCC center would balance positive features of South Asian childhood while accommodating the mindsets of their children who are growing up in the USA. Basketball was an essential site for navigating some adults’ nostalgia for South Asia since basketball would consolidate the community center’s place as a third space central to the diaspora community.

Conviviality Our interviews captured a snapshot of a community-restructuring process at the ISCC. Sentiments about the place of sports in the new center emerged from

96 Megan Eaton Robb and Max Dugan

different visions of the ideal community structure. Community members described this tension with generational and diasporic labels. While elders tended to char­ acterize the supporters of the basketball court as the “young generation,” the middle generation not only employed generational labels but also classified youth, adults, and elders (and themselves) according to their perceived degrees of diasporic and local belonging (in contrast to an “East/West” register, which did not emerge frequently in conversation). Adults said that young people were more likely to develop the right combination of commitments if a basketball court were included in the new Islamic center. Despite the disapproval of elders and some adults, most community members found the basketball court appealing. Nonetheless, the issue created tension within the community. Some members felt that their opinions were not sufficiently considered while others felt burdened by the weight of their vote since it led the ISCC to restart a costly construction process. Convivial practices helped smooth over tensions caused by profound disagree­ ments over the basketball-court decision. In describing behavior as “convivial,” we draw on Tilmann Heil’s framing of “conviviality” as the set of ways a community builds a social baseline in complex diasporic contexts where frequent disagreements occur.64 Heil has demonstrated that, for example, the language of greetings is key to maintaining conviviality in Senegal and Catalonia.65 Our interviews suggest the similar significance of linguistic etiquette in South Asian diasporic contexts. Also, the terms the ISCC members used to describe social relations with people with whom they disagreed similarly preserves community unity. In this case, “sincerity” and “respect” mark a shared commitment to the well-being of the community that supersedes different approaches to sports in the congregation. ISCC members affirmed the bona fides of all sides when describing divisive viewpoints about the basketball court. For example, Bilquis was disappointed that Dr. Usmani’s objections against the basketball court went unheeded, not least since she agreed with his argument that the choice prioritized boys over girls in the community. Nevertheless, she admired the younger generation’s dedication and sincerity even while she described their decision-making process as “emotional,” implying that the younger generation was guided more by feelings than other factors.66 She suggested that the presence of a professional imam—which several adult members also advocated, and which the ISCC does not have—would lead ISCC members to make educated rather than emotional decisions.67 Although she offered candid critiques, in the spirit of fulfilling her obligation as a wiser, elder member of the community, Bilquis concluded by affirming that “[The] new families [who] are there, they are extremely dedicated. So I wish the best for that mosque.”68 Danish, a vocal proponent of the design, also reiterated the importance of sincerity, telling us: “if you do things sincerely and you do things without ulterior motives, things will happen. And they will happen for the better, because you’re sincere, and people will see that sincerity in what you’re doing in the pro­ ject.”69 In Danish’s description, sincerity not only counterbalances divisive tensions but may even improve the outcome of a given plan by building community support.70

Structuring Sports, Structuring Community 97

Along with sincerity, community members committed to conviviality through a shared discourse of respect. The proponents of the basketball court always asked for elders’ opinions and made sure they had rides to meetings, even if younger mem­ bers knew older members were more likely to object to the building of the bas­ ketball court. Leaders on the board who supported the basketball court were insistent that we talk with elders as a matter of priority, knowing that the elders opposed its construction. The issue of basketball was extremely important to some members but not so important to preclude polite greetings, the assumption of bona fides, and deep respect to elder community members expressed through formal greetings and allowing elders to speak first. Similarly, ISCC members emphasized the respect that younger generations had for elders because of their shared South Asian culture. Salim, for example, specifically told us that, whenever socializing happens, whenever we meet with them, it’s always treating elders with respect. We know that this is the person who was against the basketball court. But when we meet with them, break bread with them, it’s the last thing on our mind. And we always, always, always respect them as if they’re our own parents. And I would say that, broadly, across the com­ munity, I don’t know anyone who would say a bad thing about an elder in the community.71 The rhythm of social greetings at gatherings also emphasizes this priority given to elders. Noureen explained that the youth’s most significant responsibility was to show respect to elders, by greeting them with salaam first when encountering them at the ISCC.72 Convivial practices in the ISCC have eased the shift in decision-making power that occurred during the basketball-court decision. The last section demonstrated the many ways adult ISCC members are using basketball to shape and express their diasporic nostalgia, leading to lingering tension in the community. ISCC members counterbalance those tensions through the language of respect and sincerity. Con­ viviality—shared goodwill and respecting others as if they are biological family members—have allowed community members to assuage tensions emanating from their views on the basketball court and the future structure of the ISCC. In this way, conviviality has allowed the ISCC to reconfigure their community to serve different generations and accommodate competing visions of the ideal American Muslim Islamic center.

Conclusion The new center design not only incorporates sports into the ISCC; it makes it a hub of a suburban American Islamic community informed by local contingencies, diasporic nostalgia, and convivial social practices. Through sports, the community modifies the material layout of its space, local function, and intergenerational rela­ tions. ISCC members expressed through debate on the basketball court their

98 Megan Eaton Robb and Max Dugan

respective visions of the most virtuous local Muslim community. The result of this negotiation is a design that, if built, will better compete with other suburban youth-oriented spaces that adults perceive as risky. Anxieties about youth behavior also reveal the concern about loss of Islamic and diasporic belonging for the whole community. As a third space, the new Islamic center debate has allowed the com­ munity to imagine an ideal future and cultivate religious, professional, and extra­ curricular success. Many of the anxieties that emerged in our conversations with the ISCC mem­ bers are typical of middle-class Americans regardless of faith background. Our approach has been social constructionist rather than essentialist; this perhaps makes this study unusual in studies of Islam and sport in the USA. While American Muslims hold a range of doctrinal beliefs and may connect their engagement with sports to elements of doctrine, just as importantly they engage with sports for other reasons. Some Muslims play sports not only because the Prophet advised Muslims to stay healthy but also because they love sports or because they are worried about their children and want to keep them out of trouble. If that conclusion seems prosaic and unsurprising, it is also an unusual conclusion for a study of Islam and sport. The results of this research demonstrate aptly the risks of distinguishing too abruptly between doctrine and culture in studies of Islam. Research should not need to unearth a sine qua non of Islam in order to contribute substantially to his­ tories of Islam and sport. Indeed, we have taken our cue from influential socialconstructionist approaches in not presuming an essential core of Islam, nor of sports.73 Our approach has been concerned instead with lived Islam and lived sports. This means we have taken our cue from ISCC members in recounting how the relationship between basketball and Islam is defined in that community. This essay has demonstrated that Muslims translate their heterogeneous and fluid belongings and experiences through sports in a way that eschews the cultural categories often applied to them. For our interlocutors, the nation, the East, and the West are categories that emerge in conversation but are, by themselves, coun­ terproductive as frames for understanding how sports restructured the ISCC. At the ISCC, while basketball is a good in itself for several members, for others the debate on the basketball court shows the substantial impact of diasporic nostalgia, con­ tingencies of local belonging, and convivial social practices that bind biological and nonbiological families together. In the process of building a new Islamic center, this community is structuring American life. Sports are essential to this restructuring.

Interviewees Akhtar, Noureen, interview by authors via Zoom, April 4, 2020. Anonymous (“Adnan”), interview by authors via Zoom, March 28, 2020. Anonymous (“Danish”), interview by authors via Zoom, April 5, 2020. Anonymous (“Mohsin”), interview by authors via Zoom, April 13, 2020. Bootwala, Ayman, interview by authors via Zoom, April 13, 2020. Bootwala, Faraz, interview by authors via Zoom, April 13, 2020.

Structuring Sports, Structuring Community 99

Bootwala, Salim, interview by authors via Zoom, April 13, 2020. Chaudhri, Abdul Mughees, interview by authors via Zoom, April 5, 2020. Mian, Asim Rasheed, interview by authors via Zoom, April 26, 2020. Pushtoonyar, Meena, interview by authors via Zoom, April 5, 2020. Qureshi, Bushra, interview by authors via Zoom, April 4, 2020. Qureshi, Ibraheem, interview by authors via Zoom, April 3, 2020. Qureshi, Sophia, interview by authors via Zoom, April 3, 2020. Rasheed, Fatima, interview by authors via Zoom, April 26, 2020. Rashid, Bilquis, interview by authors via Zoom, April 5, 2020. Syed, Anum, interview by authors via Zoom, March 27, 2020. Syed, Arisha, interview by authors via Zoom, March 27, 2020. Syed, Rakshan, interview by authors via Zoom, March 27, 2020. Usmani, Saeed Ahmad, interview by authors, West Chester, Pennsylvania, January 13, 2020.

Notes 1 Justine Howe, “Daʿwa in the Neighborhood: Female Authored Muslim Students Asso­ ciation Publications, 1963–1980,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, 29 (3) (January 2020): 291–325; Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Zareena Grewal, Islam Is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority (New York: New York University Press, 2014). 2 Symeon Dagkas, Tansin Benn, and Haifaa Jawad, “Multiple Voices: Improving Partici­ pation of Muslim Girls in Physical Education and School Sport,” Sport, Education and Society, 16 (2) (2011): 223–239. 3 William J. Baker, Playing with God (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007); Steven Fink, Dribbling for Dawah: Sports Among Muslim Americans (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2016). 4 GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam, 4.

5 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978).

6 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for

‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations, 37 (winter 1992): 1–26. 7 Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). 8 Raisur Rahman has also demonstrated the importance of localized concerns over national narratives in studies of modernity in South Asia, as has Megan Eaton Robb in her work on Urdu newspapers in South Asia and the significance of small town com­ munities in influencing broader cultural movements. M. Raisur Rahman, Locale, Every­ day Islam, and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Megan Eaton Robb, Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life, 1900–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 9 GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam, 4. 10 Paul De Knop, Marc Theeboom, Helena Wittock, and Kristine De Martelaer, “Impli­ cations of Islam on Muslim Girls’ Sport Participation in Western Europe: Literature Review and Policy Recommendations for Sport Promotion,” Sport, Education and Society, 1 (2) (1996): 147–164; Tess Kay, “Daughters of Islam: Family Influences on Muslim Young Women’s Participation in Sport,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 41 (3–4) (2006): 357–373. 11 GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam, 5.

100 Megan Eaton Robb and Max Dugan

12 Fink, Dribbling for Dawah, 2, 11. 13 Daniel Burdsey, Stanley Thangaraj, and Rajinder Dudrah, “Playing through Time and Space: Sport and South Asian Diasporas,” South Asian Popular Culture, 11 (3) (2013): 211. 14 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, and Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 5. Cited in Jeffrey Scholes and Raphael Sassower, Religion and Sports in American Culture (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014), 8. 15 Baker, Playing with God; Fink, Dribbling for Dawah. 16 Scholes and Sassower, Religion and Sports in American Culture, 8. 17 These conversations were guided by our questionnaire, which the board requested to review before formal interviews and resulted in no changes to our questionnaire design. The board of the ISCC was immensely helpful in the recruiting process: they distributed copies of our recruitment flyer and invited us to their current building to speak about our project to community members. In the formal interview phase, we conducted eighteen interviews with twelve adults (including one adult of retirement age) and six youths. 18 MIST was founded in Houston, Texas, in 2002 and by 2019 had developed fifteen regional conferences with national tournaments held in seven cities across the USA and Canada. See the MIST website, www.getmistified.com/our-story 19 Ibraheem, April 3, 2020. 20 Faraz, April 11, 2020. 21 Sophia, April 3, 2020. 22 Salim, April 11, 2020. 23 Abdul Mughees, April 5, 2020. Asim, Fatima, and Bushra also mentioned the draw of sports for youth and the community. Asim, April 26, 2020; Rasheed, April 26, 2020; Bushra, April 4, 2020. 24 Rasheed, April 26, 2020. Rakshan and Anum also mentioned the challenges that exer­ cise clothing might pose for some members of the ISCC. Rakshan, March 26, 2020; Anum, March 26, 2020. 25 Rasheed, April 26, 2020; Noureen, April 4, 2020. 26 Abdul, April 5, 2020; Danish, April 5, 2020; Mohsin, April 13, 2020. 27 H. Carpenter, James Naismith: The Man who Invented Basketball (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 2011); Rebecca Alpert, Religion and Sports: Introduction and Case Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 20–21. 28 Paula Lupkin, Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Urban Culture (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 29 Sophia, April 3, 2020. 30 Salim, April 13, 2020. 31 Noureen and Bilquis both see the decision as primarily benefiting young men, while Meena has both a daughter and a son who play basketball at the ISCC so sees the decision as benefiting all of the youth. Additionally, Faraz and Mohsin spoke about the religious value of sports as an outlet for stress and a means for staying active. Noureen, April 4, 2020; Bilquis, April 5, 2020; Meena, April 5, 2020; Faraz, April 13, 2020; Mohsin, April 13, 2020. 32 Rakshan Syed, March 26, 2020. 33 Bushra, April 4, 2020. 34 Abdul, April 5, 2020; Rasheed, April 26, 2020; Rakshan, March 26, 2020; Fatima, April 5, 2020. 35 Bilquis, April 26, 2020. 36 Meena, April 5, 2020. 37 Well-known centers such as East Plano Islamic Center in Plano, Texas, include impressive exercise spaces where youth enjoy playing sport and women can exercise in single-gender environments. Bilquis mentioned a mosque in Houston that is attached to a large commu­ nity center that includes a basketball court. While she did not specify which mosque, in Houston the following Islamic centers have basketball courts: Masjid Hamza, Maryam Isla­ mic Center, and Clear Lake Islamic Center. B. Rashid, April 5, 2020. ISCC members also mentioned the basketball court of the Muslim Association of Lehigh Valley, more locally.

Structuring Sports, Structuring Community 101

38 39 40 41 42

43

44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56

This is a pseudonym. This is a pseudonym. This location has been changed in order to anonymize Mohsin. The financial institutions that offer Islamically permissible loans are few and over­ subscribed. This chapter’s use of the term “third space” invokes a hybridity and neutrality, separate from both the home and the workplace, that create a sense of identity and belonging. It was Ray Oldenberg’s The Great Good Place (1991) that first used this term to explore keystones of community life, such as churches, coffee shops, parks, and public libraries. Leo Jeffres et al. expanded the domain of a third space to include places where sport could be conducted, including YMCAs/YWCAs and community centers. Leo Jeffres, Cheryl Campanella Bracken, Guowei Jian, and Mary Casey, “The Impact of Third Places on Community Quality of Life,” Applied Research in Quality of Life, 4 (2009): 333–345. In our description of sports as a “discursive space,” we do not mean that sports is an exclusively or even primarily linguistic phenomenon. Rather, we draw on Talal Asad’s widely influential description of Islam as a discursive tradition. For Asad, the tradition of Islam is characterized by shared patterns of reasoning and debating around issues of col­ lective concern. See Talal Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” 1986. For further examinations of Asad’s notion of a discursive tradition, Zareena Grewal and SherAli Tareen both effectively summarize his notion of discursive as a form of nego­ tiation and debate about a tradition according to certain patterns of reasoning and debate in Islam is a Foreign Country and Defending Muhammad in Modernity (2020). Saeed, January 13, 2020. Saeed, January 13, 2020. East Plano Islamic Center website, https://epicmasjid.org They bought the home for $225,000 in 1994, applying for a differential zoning of the building since it was in a residential area. Sunday-school programs are widespread in North American Muslim communities. For example, the Muslim Student Association spent considerable energy focusing on Sunday school as early as 1968, writing about it in The MSA Handbook (Muslim Students Associa­ tion, The MSA Handbook, Ann Arbor, Mich.: Muslim Students’ Association of the US and Canada, 1968, 59) and also fundraising to support Sunday schools, as part of their overall emphasis on rearing Muslim children via the nuclear family (Justine Howe, “Daʿwa in the Neighborhood: Female Authored Muslim Students Association Publications, 1963–1980,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, 29 (3) (January 2020): 291–325). Zareena Grewal also emphasizes the importance of Sunday schools in American Muslim pedagogical networks (Islam Is a Foreign Country). “Sunday school” is so widespread that it sometimes functions as a generic category for youth education classes; for example, in his introduction to The Practice of Islam in America: An Introduction (2017) Edward E. Curtis IV refers to the Qur’an classes in Muna Ali’s ethnography as “Sunday school classes” even though she avoids the term in her chapter on the Qur’an in American Muslim practice. Saeed, January 13, 2020. Ayman, April 13, 2020. Salim, April 13, 2020. Saeed, January 13, 2020; Salim, April 13, 2020. Paul Farkas, “Letter to Case LaLonde regarding LD-4-16-13740, on behalf of the ISCC, to Manager of West Goshen Township, 25 May, 2016.” The County of Chester Plan­ ning Commission Meeting Files, June 8, 2016, 50. Grewal, Islam Is a Foreign Country. Grewal, for instance, critiques attempts to characterize diasporic Muslim communities in the USA according to their roots in countries outside of the USA, arguing that this approach is equivalent to cultural essentialism that denies the unique power of the American context to “de-culture” Islam and provide opportunities for revival in a moral geography rooted in the Arab world (Islam Is a Foreign Country, 50). Fatima, April 26, 2020.

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57 The description of community elders as akin to parents or grandparents was corrobo­ rated by several other community members, including Salim and Rakshan. Salim, April 13, 2020; Rakshan, March 26, 2020. 58 Sophia, April 3, 2020. Many interviewees spoke about the importance of these small interactions, including Anum, Ayman, and Meena. Anum, March 26, 2020; Ayman, April 13, 2020; Meena, April 5, 2020. 59 Abdul, April 5, 2020. 60 Abdul, April 5, 2020. 61 Abdul, April 5, 2020. 62 Fatima, April 26, 2020. Ayman also mentioned his disappointment that he would leave the community for college before he could regularly enjoy the new basketball court. Ayman, April 13, 2020. 63 Salim, April 13, 2020. 64 Tilmann Heil, “Conviviality as Diasporic Knowledge,” African Diaspora, 11 (2018): 54. 65 Heil, “Conviviality as Diasporic Knowledge.” 66 Rashid, April 5, 2020. 67 Bilquis compared ISCC to two other mosques in the region which were led by imams—Devon mosque and Exton mosque—describing them as Ph.D.s and “experts.” For instance, she said, Devon mosque has a beautiful—he is a Ph.D. imam, which is called an Islamic scholar. And Delaware mosque has an imam. The problem with West Chester mosque is that they don’t have an imam. That is the biggest problem. But I say—as a wise and older person, and knowing the history and everything, I have to say the facts if I talk to anybody about anything—that is the biggest problem. So everybody there thinks “I am the imam”. Bilquis, April 5, 2020 68 Bilquis, April 5, 2020. 69 Danish, April 5, 2020. 70 Although our interviewees did not cast it in explicitly religious terms, “sincerity” may have additional Islamic significance. For example, the important Islamic virtues s.idq and ikhla-s are both frequently translated as “sincerity,” and “sincerity” appears in several translations of popular hadith. ISCC members may have meant “sincerity” to signify honesty or goodwill; they also may have evoked a range of different Islamic meanings with the word. 71 Salim, April 13, 2020. 72 Noureen, April 4, 2020. 73 For example, J. A. Beckford, Social Theory and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 2003); A. J. Blasi, Making Charisma: The Social Construction of Paul’s Public Image (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991).

5 DESIRING “DEEP COMMUNITY” Formations of Soccer and Evangelical Christianity in the British Columbia Christian Soccer League Nicholas William Howe Bukowski

Introduction In a meeting in July 2017, James, the lead pastor of North Shore Alliance Church in North Vancouver, Canada, emphasized to me that we live in a “culture that trends toward fracture.” James’s words jumped out to me that day as they reso­ nated with forms of contemporary social theory. The feeling of “fracture” that James wanted to emphasize fits well alongside frequent descriptions of precarity brought about by the actual fracturing of the welfare state by neoliberalism.1 In addition to a link with the feeling of precarity, fracture also resonates with the similar descriptive qualifier of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s idea of “liquid mod­ ernity.”2 Like an increasingly liquid world in Bauman’s formulation where things fail to recoalesce and resolidify, James’s description of a “culture that trends toward fracture” connotes a similar feeling of a world or culture of breaking apart and dispersing without solidity and stability. Intrigued by his mention of “fracture” as a force in the world, I asked James what he meant by it in his position as a lead pastor of an evangelical church. He responded by saying he wanted to focus on the following questions: “How do we bring people together? How do we connect them? And in particular how do we bring together people who may or may not prioritize a relationship with God?” James’s explanation to my question positioned his church in a particular direc­ tion toward a desire for connection with both others and God. In doing so, James was setting up the particular problem of how to move people from a position of individualism, this trending “towards fracture,” to a position of interconnection. This framing sets up a gap that needs to be mediated and bridged in some capacity. The following chapter argues that it is soccer at North Shore Alliance Church that mediates this desire for a move away from a “culture that trends toward frac­ ture” and toward connection with other people and God. The affect and form of DOI: 10.4324/9781003014621-8

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soccer makes it a particular sport within the church that allows for the turning away from an inward individualism toward the formation of bonds of interdependence rooted in an outward direction toward others and God. That soccer, as a medium, contains the necessary intensity to produce the required knowledge for a shift in direction and orientation from the inward self to the outward community. Ultimately, the soccer team offers an example of a social form that counters the trend of this move “toward fracture” and the uncertainty of contemporary neoliberal life. Soccer pro­ duces knowledge about the state of one’s heart that can reveal to the player about whether they are directing themselves for selfish motives inwardly or outwardly toward others and God. In this self-assessment, there is the projected belief that “deep community” will emerge out of soccer. “Deep community,” as described by John, the church’s outreach pastor and soccer coach, is the result of the formation of bonds of interdependence between the players. The focus of the remainder of this chapter are the two soccer teams at North Shore Alliance, an evangelical church in North Vancouver, Canada. For some members of the congregation, particularly middle-aged men, soccer is one particularly effective medium to mediate this gap between fracture and connection. Soccer serves as a space for a literal playing out that counters the fracturing force of contemporary life. That soccer is a medium, one among several at the church, for the realization of a particular form of evangelical politics centering on the bonds of connection and “renovated” transformed hearts that are orientated toward relationships with God and other people within and exceeding the congregation. Part of this capacity for the sport to act as a medium for this form of “deep community” is that soccer is played on fields that are marginal to the physical church building of North Shore Alliance. The soccer field exists within a broader landscape of North Shore Alliance. In understanding the particularity of soccer as a medium, and the spatial characteristics of the field within the whole institution of North Shore Alliance, this chapter is explicitly comparative in placing the sport in relation with other church practices. In comparatively situating soccer, the chapter is able to address how the triangular relationship among affect, space, and form, in this case soccer, produces certain kinds of knowledge that allows for particular social relations and political formations. Specifically, in this case centering on more collectivist modes of Christian being, namely the aforementioned “deep commu­ nity” as a direction away from the trend of “fracture.” The chapter asserts the importance of studying sports within religious institutions to further the bounds of “religion,” spatially and conceptually, to understand how these institutions exist spatially within different geographies in the world and, in turn, how that effects their politics and the possibility of emergent social relations. I expressly use the term “medium” to describe soccer as John, the church’s outreach pastor, soccer coach, and self-described “cultural architect of the church,” explained to me that he himself understood and used soccer as a particular medium within the broader institution of North Shore Alliance. In this fashion, John’s understanding and defining of soccer as a medium fits into recent scholarship that defines media in many ways that “vastly exceeds the realm of communication

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technology in an everyday sense” to include soccer.3 This positioning of soccer as mediation fits within the recent focus on the topic within the anthropology of religion.4 The topic of religion and media is most succinctly theorized by anthro­ pologist Birgit Meyer’s idea of “religion as mediation.”5 In Meyer’s view, “media are understood as intrinsic, rather than opposed, to religion,” that are involved in the act of “religious mediation that link humans with the divine, spiritual or transcendental.”6 In this fashion, media within religion is “intertwined,”7 and not oppositional, with the search for immediate contact with the divine or transcen­ dent. Moreover, media are not simply neutral transmitters but affect the nature of the divine and transcendent which they transmit.8 Meyer’s formulation considers the necessity of media within religion and also the particularity of different forms of media for mediation that “produce belief”9 in varying ways. From Meyer’s position of the necessity and particularity of media, the chapter considers the broader interrelated questions: if religion is mediation, then what forms of mediation exist within Christianity? Following from that flows the question: what might a broader consideration of mediation within Christianity outside of “marked” modes of reli­ gious practice and media tell us about constructions of Christianity as a spatial and conceptual practice? This chapter attempts to address these questions about social relations, media and Christianity based on research I conducted with the soccer teams at North Shore Alliance from March to August 2017. The bulk of that period occurred during the church soccer teams’ participation in the 2017 season of the British Columbia Christian Soccer League. That soccer season overlapped with a sermon series at the church on the Ten Commandments. This overlap provided for a dialogue to emerge between the two in their shared period of the church calendar, a dialogue between the abstractions of the sermon and the visceral play on the field. Most directly, the sport was discussed in several of the sermons. Moreover, the sermons expand upon Pastor James’ comments on fracture and connection discussed at the beginning of this chapter. The sermon series provides a fuller theological basis for the church’s desire for connection and belonging, which provides the context for where and how soccer is placed within the broader landscape of North Shore Alliance.

Theology of Connection and Sociality The sermon series at North Shore Alliance on the Ten Commandments served to provide a general political and social direction of the church revolving around questions of individualism and sociality. In the introductory sermon of the series, James explained that the “Ten Words,” the Ten Commandments, were about “about who He is, who we are, and how to live a life of freedom.” James’s ser­ mons tried to move away from an understanding of the Ten Commandments as only rules that regulate behavior. Instead, he stressed that they were primarily about freedom, as the Ten Commandments were given to Moses and the Israelites following their Exodus from Egypt and were provided by God to Israelites to “protect their newfound freedom.” The Ten Commandments, in this evangelical

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context, are about the fulfillment of “what true humanity is meant to look like,” and, thus, James situated them as a positive force to generate and ensure certain forms of freedoms rather than a negative denial of certain actions. Moreover, James told the church congregation “that God is not merely interested in correcting our behavior; He wants to renovate our heart.” In this understanding, the Ten Commandments are related to people’s fundamental motivations, drives, and emotions. Beyond rules, the Ten Commandments in this formulation are collectively a generative force to provide a broader direction or orientation, toward freedom, in the lives of Christians who attempt to follow them. For James, a central problem was the fulfillment of this desire to live in the freedom provided by following the Ten Commandments. The sermon series established a direction of “what humanity is supposed to look like” through God’s capacity “to renovate our heart.” Interestingly, he compared this desire and vision through an analogy to soccer. James explains that “soccer is a beautiful game, one that I know, and love” in which there are “eleven players a side, working together as one.” He then asked the audience, “I want you to imagine the game of soccer being played without any of the rules I’ve just mentioned.” Answering his own question, James said to the congregation “without rules there’s only chaos—no one’s safe, and no one can enjoy the game.” The rules in soccer, like the Ten Commandments, are understood as productive in creating certain freedoms such as safety and enjoyment. From James’s analogy, the Ten Commandments and soccer are useful and functional as they create the structures for a harmonious and coherent life and a positive outcome when they are respectively followed by the players on the pitch and Christians in everyday life. The difficulty facing the fulfillment of these analogous harmonious visions (soccer as a “beautiful game” and the Ten Commandments displaying “what humanity is supposed to look like”) was that for James they both exist within a broader, “current secular West Coast culture.” James would further describe that his own “unprocessed anger” toward his opponents in soccer, which he compared to “hazardous waste” that will always “come out,” was demonstrative of the indi­ vidualist forces of contemporary “current secular West Coast culture” that com­ promised the capacity for soccer to actually be played in a harmonious fashion. For James, this self-criticism of his own individualistic form of anger was fueled by the greater force of “secular West Coast culture” that structures and impinges on the members of the congregation at North Shore Alliance. James did not further address the particularities of “West Coast culture” in comparison to other parts of North America, and therefore it remains unclear whether he believes there are greater forces of secularism that confront his congregation in that specific part of Canada. Instead, the explicit mention of “West Coast culture” is a method to speak to the congregation’s shared sense of place in which they find their church. In the sermon series, James overtly described the proper Christian way of being in opposition to “the culture we find ourselves in.” The introductory sermon of the series laments that, “we live in place and at a time where the individual reigns supreme” and that this tendency toward individualism affects our reading of the

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Bible. For James, Christians read the Decalogue as “as an individual, moral code” due to a cultural assumption of individualism, “the idea that each individual has control over their own life.” In contrast to an inward individualism, for James the Ten Commandments are about the ability to “showcase who God is to the world” as relationality bound to humans through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. This rela­ tional positioning of the Ten Commandments as marking the bond between a collective humanity and God serves to distinguish from the individualism of the “secular West Coast culture.” In the orientation toward relationships with God and other people, James is further trying to move away from the forces of “a culture that tends toward fracture” that defines individualism as an atomizing process of the disintegration and the fracturing of social bonds and relationships. For James, the evangelicals at his church find it difficult to fulfill God’s intentions found within the Ten Commandments as “West Coast culture believes in the worship of the self,” which press upon the congregation. This “worship of the self” provides a particular direction toward inwardness, and thus for James, he wants his sermons to point to the “need to be aware of how divided our heart is.” Importantly, James links the fractured nature of individualism within the heart; that which is divided between an inward celebration of the self and God’s desire for an outward direction toward worship of God and a living in relation with other people. James’s words and the North Shore Alliance’s sermon series on the Ten Commandments established a gap between the actuality of contemporary secular West Coast culture-styled individualism, social fracture, and divided hearts, and the desire of fulfilling the biblical vision of “what humanity is supposed to look like” rooted in a relational life with God and others. The sermon series established the theological basis of this gap between fracture and connection by centering God’s relational bond with humanity. In turn, fol­ lowing the Ten Commandments offers the opportunity for a relational life of freedom beyond the confines of secular individualism. Through his analogy between the Ten Commandments and soccer, James emphasizes the importance of rule following within the sport placing a value on harmony on the field. A parti­ cular irony of this chapter is that contrary to James’s stated desire for harmony in soccer, as analogous to a life of biblically ordained freedom, it is precisely the excess, uncertainty, and disharmony of the sport that is necessary to produce the knowledge needed to mediate this stated gap between actuality and desire. Before a further discussion of the mediating capacities of soccer, it necessary to describe the church and situate it further within its local context.

Geographical and Church Context North Shore Alliance is a Protestant evangelical church in the city of North Van­ couver, British Columbia, Canada. The congregation, as described by a member of the said congregation, was largely middle-class and upper-middle-class, which reflects the socioeconomic composition of the city of North Vancouver. My own white, settler, male, upper-middle-class, Canadian, and urban social status resem­ bled many of the players on the team and at the church more broadly, although

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there was still considerable racial, ethnic, class, and gender diversity at the church. The city of North Vancouver, as a municipal entity, is part of Metro Vancouver sitting across an approximately two kilometer inlet, Burrard Inlet, from the City of Vancouver.10 Situated on the broader North Shore across from Vancouver, the city of North Vancouver was at once partly removed from the City of Vancouver by Burrard Inlet and highly accessible to the City of Vancouver with access via two bridges and its inclusion in a broader public transport system that connects several cities across Metro Vancouver. The church is a part of the denomination of the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Canada and in 2017 had an average weekly attendance of 600 across two Sunday services. The church, described as an “evangelical church” by James, its lead pastor, was the central node of period of fieldwork I completed between March and August 2017 that forms the basis of this chapter. The church’s services centered on many of the standard features of evangelical Christianity including a personal relationship with an active “living God,” the importance of mission, and the belief of the Bible as the true word of God.11 As explained by some of the congregants and soccer players themselves, sports were an especially prominent part of North Shore Alliance. As a church soccer player once simply told me, “If you want to know about sports and Christianity, then this is the church.” In line with general trends in evangelical Christianity, there was a desire within North Shore Alliance for an immersive form of faith extending to the play on the soccer field.12 As a younger soccer player at the church told me directly, “As a church and a Christian community you don’t really want to separate your belief from your sport or anything else you are involved in.” This desire of involving one’s faith in “anything” explains the motivating force to some of the rule changes that were implemented in the British Columbia Christian Soccer League. During the 2017 season, the British Columbia Christian Soccer League (BCCSL) was composed of thirty-four teams from thirty-three different evangelical, charismatic, and Pentecostal churches from Metro Vancouver and the neighboring Fraser Valley to the east of Metro Vancouver. North Shore Alliance was the only church with two teams in the league, an A and B team respectively composed of members of the church. The BCCSL implemented several changes to the standard laws of the game. The BCCSL had a particular yellow-card rule, where a player receiving a yellow card, on the basis of “un-Christian-like conduct,”13 had to sit on the bench for ten minutes for a cooling-off period. Alongside this “sin bin” yellowcard rule, the BCCSL had a system of “penalty points” in which teams received penalty points for yellow and red cards with excessive points given resulting in point deductions in the final standings.

Prayer and Tone on the Field These rule changes that attempt to codify and enforce “Christian” designated behavior can be seen as an extension of this desire for immersion of evangelical Christianity extending to “sport or anything else you are involved in.” Affect

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theorist Brian Massumi’s book Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation contains a section regarding the “modulation of potential” of soccer.14 Massumi posits that the rules of soccer “are retrospective” as they are “a codifying follow-up to emergence”15 that act to contain the possibilities and potentialities of becoming and change in the sport. This view of rules as regulating and codifying potential in which “becoming becomes reviewable and writable”16 can be applicable to the BCCSL’s own rule changes, primarily the yellow-card rule, that act to contain the excesses of intensity or feeling of the game that affect the behavior of the players, especially following receiving yellow cards. Massumi further explains that rules are a “codifying follow-up to emergence that folds back on becoming.”17 In this under­ standing, the yellow-card rule acts to limit the potential emergence of violence that then “folds back” on the possibilities of possible action, “becoming,” for a Christian soccer league. In this “folding back” of the yellow-card rule, there is the recognition of the affective potential in the sport that would prevent players from “behaving in a Christian-like manner,”18 as stated in the BCCSL’s own bylaws. Instead, the rule changes act to try to limit the emergence of that affective potential and excess latent in soccer that would alter the desired “Christian” quality of the league. The pregame prayer also shared these concerns of the potential of the excessive feeling and affect of the game leading to violence that is not fitting for a self-described “Christian soccer league.” Acting as form of public and internal distinction from other soccer leagues across Metro Vancouver, the prayer was given by the home team with all the players standing in the center circle. Alongside a consistent thanking of God for the sport and capacity to play with others, the pregame prayer also involved players consistently praying for the two teams “to not lose our heads” during the course of the match. They prayed not to be enveloped and consumed by a particular affect of the game that presses upon them in negative ways. Through the implementation of these forms of distinctions, a public pregame prayer, and rule changes, this self-described “Christian soccer league” can be understood as acting within this desire for immersion. Luke, a church soccer player in his forties who often gave the pregame prayer, told me that he felt it “set a good tone.” In turn, this “tone” would hopefully remind players and help prevent reckless play, swearing, and for players “to not lose our heads.” The very implementation of setting a tone, a background and underlying feeling that is generative of particular reactions acknowledges some other emergent non-desired possibility that can take place in soccer.19 For the prayer to “set the tone” is to try to generate a particular “affective quality”20 that will affect the assembled players in a certain way so as to try to generate particular dispositions in order to play soccer in a “Christian” fashion. Joseph, another player, similarly explained to me that the prayer hopefully “gets everybody’s headspace in the right space” so as to try to “curb the bad stuff in soccer” as they are reminded of God’s presence on the field. In this way, “the tone” is suggestive of a back­ ground foundation or baseline created through this encounter of prayer that will affect the play.21 In this attempted sealing off, through the tone of the prayer, of potential pressing emergent forces that produces violence and poor behavior on the field, there is the projection of the soccer field as being transformed into an

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evangelical space through a constraining of affect. Mirroring James’s description of soccer in his sermon, there is a desire in actualizing his projection of properly played soccer as a harmonious space and activity and thus, acceptable for a selfdescribed Christian soccer league. In focusing on tone, the players are trying to move toward restraint and a tampering of feeling. The particular irony of this intended direction is that the players were both unable to restrict the “affective quality”22 of the soccer field and their inability to do so was precisely why it was so valuable as a form of mediation that allows for God to “renovate” their hearts and in turn, live in relation with Him and others in a move away from the secular “worship of the self.” The affect of the field precisely allowed for the formation of more collectivist modes of evangelical social relations.

Affect of the Soccer Field One of the players, Edward, most clearly described the ineffectiveness of the prayer as a tone, as a force with effect, when he told me, “You all stand in the center circle and pray and everybody prays the same prayer and it’s a slightly loaded prayer. I love it, I think it’s hilarious… . As soon as the whistle blows, people forget that and goes mad.” Importantly for Edward, this process where it all “goes mad” is conditioned by the feeling of the field. He explained to me that “there are few places with as much raw emotion as a football pitch.” In this fashion, Edward was attributing a particular identifiable spatial and “affective quality” of rawness to the soccer field.23 Importantly, he attributed the “raw emotion” to the field itself, suggesting that there was a perceivable felt quality to it that exceeded the bodies playing the sport. Similarly, John, the church’s outreach pastor and soccer coach, described the soccer field as a space of “raw vulnerability.” Both descriptions of the field centering on rawness links it with particular understandings of affect. Most clearly the descriptions link with the anthropologist Kevin Lewis O’Neill’s description of affect as “raw, reactive sensation,” that exists as a form of intensity that is not yet subject to discursive qualification and render­ ing.24 Rawness is therefore characterized by an unformed intensity and feeling that exists prior to and perhaps in excess of qualified emotional responses and states of the players and feeling of the space.25 This space of rawness allows for revelatory forms of self-knowledge that can inform the players about the state of their heart and, thus, their relationship with God. In this way, there is a doubling of excess that follows from each other: the excess of the affect of the field in its rawness produces reactions of the players, driven by their heart, that may be in excess of their usual actions in spaces of less intensity. Drawing upon Luke 6:45,26 Edward linked the heart to the bodily reactions of players on the soccer field, in its raw emotion, as it is a particularly good medium and venue for this form of revelatory knowledge. Edward explained: Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks and when you are on the football field what happens when you get into a state, when you get into a

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state of heightened emotion the things that are buried, that are underneath, start to come through and if you are someone in tune with God’s spirit hopefully you will have the emotion, the same reaction to stuff as He does, is the idea anyway or more similar because who knows what God really feels, it’s God. More concretely, Edward further explained, “When you are on the soccer field and you are yelling at a guy because he is a moron and you hate him and that is the overflow of the heart.” On the field, as a site with a particular charged affect of rawness and vulnerability, we can see the possibility of an “excitable body”27 that can be open to a range of actions and responses to reveal the state of one’s poten­ tially overflowing heart. In dialogue with James’s sermons that frame this chapter, Edward is positioning the value of this kind of reaction to reveal one’s heart over James’s description of on-field anger as “hazardous waste.” Instead of avoiding it through properly following the rules as James suggests, Edward is questioning the very possibility of choosing to follow the rules within the raw emotions of the field that produces this “state of heightened emotion.” Instead, those players in line with God’s spirit will react in the way “He does” outside of a deliberate choice to do so.

Knowledge and the Heart This question of reacting in line with God’s spirit is related to the evangelical understanding of the “heart” within the players on the soccer team. The lead pastor James explained to me that the “heart” was the site of cooperation between a person and God. The heart as a site of cooperation is further seen in Edward’s statement of being “someone in tune with God’s spirit” and, thus, being led by God through the heart. Furthermore, the North Shore Alliance evangelical soccer players defined the “heart” in more bodily terms than other more linguistically focused work in the anthropology of Christianity.28 Peter, a player in his late forties with strong theolo­ gical knowledge, defined the heart in relation to the seventeenth-century English Protestant Nonconformists who had broken away from the Church of England and explained to me that it was: “The idea that it’s the seat of all the emotions, the motivations, the affects. The center of the being where we make our decisions. The whole person. The inner person.” Therefore, the heart drives people toward or away from sin or God. Edward similarly defined the heart as “the emotion element” of a person and “is a way of reorienting yourself as a person.” The “heart” then speaks to the forces, hopefully the spirit cooperating with the person, that guide, drive, and orient people in a direction toward or away, to bring back the lead pastor James’s words, “what God intends us to be.” Thus, the soccer field becomes a space of knowledge, as seen through the player’s actions, about the forces within the heart that drive them in particular directions while being affected by the very affect of the space, the feeling of “raw emotion” described by the players. This conceptualizing of the heart demonstrates how this particular construction of personhood socially establishes what forms of knowledge and mediation are deemed valuable within this evangelical church. That this particular kind of knowledge and mediation, as deemed

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worthy and useful, is entangled with this mode of evangelical personhood, as the person being driven by the heart. Soccer’s capacity to reveal the state of your heart and thus, your position as a subject who should live by God’s spirit, was tied to the form of soccer as a game of constant encounter and motion. The form of soccer as a highly mobile sport of quick play leads a certain quality of time that produces this kind of knowledge about the heart. As Jacob, a player in his mid-forties, explained to me: I think a lot of people battle with this sense of mentally that I can understand theologically, theological concepts or mentally I can understand faith but my heart it’s a lot harder to change. My soul is a lot harder to change and I think soccer or any other sport you are driven a lot more by your heart than your mind but our processing speeds, like soccer I have no time to think … It’s all instantaneous, your raw emotions come out. Jacob’s temporal description of soccer as “our processing speeds, like soccer I have no time to think … It’s all instantaneous, your raw emotions come out” is a description of how the body reacts within the form of soccer as a game of quick motion and mobility where the play is dictated by the speed of the ball.29 Within this form that leads to constant and shifting encounters with other players, Jacob is distinguishing between mental knowledge of theology gained in the more static environment of reading or a sermon and the actual lived embodiment of these concepts in the heart, which drives him when playing soccer. The display of “raw emotions” in their play, that have not been adjusted in reflection of what should be done, is valuable as the players’ “instantaneous” reactions on the field display whether theological ideas have actually been embodied directly in the corporeal body driven by the heart. For Jacob, this kind of visceral and immediate knowledge about the heart that comes from his own body’s play and “raw emotions” speaks to the particular pedagogic capacity of different spaces, when undertaken by certain forms of activity, within the broader landscape of the North Shore Alliance. The soccer field is able to teach the players whether they have changed their heart regardless of whether they understand theology and faith “mentally.” He, later in our interview, contrasted this capacity for bodily knowledge in soccer, deriving from the particular assemblages of bodies within the space of the field, to the feeling and form of the Sunday Service held in the physical church building of the North Shore Alliance.

Spatial Comparisons at the Church Compared with the “instantaneous” feeling of the soccer field, Jacob explained to me that there is the danger of church becoming a “country club,” as a place just for friendship. Jacob proceeded to tell me in an interview that

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I enjoy the country club and the friendship and the community but there is no deep sense of transformation. Playing soccer with those guys will bring it out. I think it’s revealing to us as individuals how we behave under stress situations. Unlike the safety and geniality of the country club, the soccer field is differentiated from the physical church service as a place in which the players are pressed upon in “stress situations.” Like the overflow of the heart, Jacob was describing the revela­ tory capacity of soccer, as mediated and brought “out” by the form of the game and feeling of the pitch, to teach people about gap between the state of their heart and what “He wants us to do” and be. In this way, the particular relationship among space, form and affect, that presses upon the players, on the field compared to the risk of only a “country club” feeling in the church building is crucial in allowing certain forms, bodily and immediate, of knowledge to emerge about this kind of gap. This revealed gap is tied directly to the evangelical process of transformation described by James in his sermon between actuality and desire. Soccer mediates the player’s understanding of their own place, individually and collectively, within this gap. Returning to immersion, the players did not necessarily have secularist spatial assumptions about the centrality of the physical church-building for their faith, as James said in a service “geography does not determine the sacred,” yet nonetheless different spaces, with differing intensities, offered differing opportunities for the mediation of certain forms of knowledge.

“Deep Community” on the Field Within this capacity of mediation, soccer is doubly able to both provide knowl­ edge of the state of one’s heart within this gap between the current actuality of inward individualism and desire for “what humanity is supposed to look like,” but also begins to close it through the very play on the field. The two ideas follow from each other with knowledge of the heart, in its “overflow” displaying your orientation away or toward God and thus with that knowledge, there is the sub­ sequent capacity of soccer to mediate this turn to a more collectivist mode of evangelical Christianity with close bonds between both congregants themselves and God. John, the church’s outreach pastor and soccer coach, had been involved with and played in the league for almost thirty years at the time of my research. Dedi­ cated to the maintenance of the league and the theological capacity and possibility of soccer as a worthy activity within North Shore Alliance, John particularly valued the sport as a space for divine modes of social relations, linked to creation, to be generated and be glimpsed at even as they may be hard to always actualize in the world. John explained his theological vision in an interview between us: What has been exposed or revealed in that way? Do you move on from there or sort of improve, or like, what does soccer do? JOHN: Let me go back a step because I do know why. I think that is how God made us. I think God made us for that deep community. I think in its purest NICHOLAS:

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form sports is a great place for that to play it out, I would say I have a theol­ ogy of sport and my theology of sports is that I think God wired us as humans that way and sports is a venue for that. The greatest and the worst of us to be brought up in a great way. By stating that soccer is a “venue,” alongside it being a “medium,” for the practice of “how God made us” there is an alignment of the sport as a Christian practice linked specifically to the nature of humans established in creation that he sees as fundamentally about relations with others and God, not as atomized individuals. John’s projection of soccer as a “venue” for the fulfillment of God’s creation rooted in “deep community” puts it into dialogue with James’s sermons on following the Ten Commandments as moving away from inward secular individualism of con­ temporary life that defines this societal trend toward “fracture.” John’s theology of sport of soccer becoming a “venue” for creation, as fundamentally relational, to “play” out offers one response to the problem of fracture and James’s earlier stated question: “how do we bring people together?” Like Jacob stated earlier, John tied this possibility of playing out the social rela­ tions, the “deep community” of “how God made us” to the form of soccer. He told me later in the interview: I think there is no better team sport than soccer. No better team sport and when you are playing soccer you can’t help but to get to know each other, trust each other and be to boiled down to your basics and to me that helps me and us to grow spiritually. For John, as players are “boiled down to your basics” there is a “raw vulnerability” and exposure that exists in soccer. This state of being “boiled down,” mirroring Jacob’s claims on the instantaneity of showing your “raw emotions,” is explained by John to produce evangelicals to be interconnected in each other’s lives as it allows “us to grow spiritually.” Being reduced to one’s “basics” speaks again to the evan­ gelical players’ belief that in soccer they are driven by their most fundamental part of their being: the heart. In this vision, this exposure of the heart or “basics” allows for a flattening of the distance between players and in turn, a common basis of collective spiritual growth rooted in a belief in more horizontal relationships. Pointing to the importance of form, soccer as a sport that requires constant teamwork, communica­ tion, and trust is a “venue” that allows for the development of how “God made us for that deep community,” which in turn makes soccer a space for the very unfold­ ing of creation. In providing the space and capacity for this literal playing out of John’s belief of “deep community” being “how God made us,” soccer is able to fulfill its positioning, by John, as a “medium” to offer an evangelical Christian col­ lectivist alternative to fracture, and individualism. In discussing the form of the sport, with both constant encounter, motion and the necessity of teamwork, John is offering one explanation of what makes soccer particular as a form of mediation within the church.

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Sport often has a very marginal or separate position from and within marked notions of “religion,” spatially, theologically, and conceptually.30 In this evange­ lical context, the very marginality of the sport outside of the comfort of the Sunday service allows for the particular affect of the field to produce certain kinds of knowledge for a reorientation toward the interconnected sociality of “deep community.” The very marginality of the sport allows for it to be a medium toward fulfilling “how God made us” in creation, a desire of central importance within the church as laid out in James’s sermons. The capacity of soccer to pro­ vide knowledge about evangelical soccer players’ relationship with God and evangelical beliefs more broadly is seen in the work of Annie Blazer’s ethno­ graphy on female evangelical soccer players.31 A difference with Blazer’s work is the explicit focus on the collective social relations that come out of soccer-pro­ duced knowledge by evangelical soccer players in North Vancouver over the individualist focus in Blazer’s work and the anthropology of Christianity more broadly.32 In this fashion, there is a triple form of marginality that play off each other. The marginality of soccer as a practice within evangelicalism, both acade­ mically and institutionally to churches, is tied to the marginality of the soccer field within the landscape of the evangelical church. This dual kind of marginality in part produces the conditions for the emergence of a marginal form of politics of collective interdependence, of the “deep community,” that exceeds the stan­ dard conservative individualist assumptions about the politics of evangelical Christianity.33 As anthropologist Omri Elisha asks, “Do we not risk accepting too readily the proposition that Western Protestants, including evangelicals, are nar­ rowly driven by moral individualism, to the exclusion of salient counternotions?”34 The understanding, most prominently by John, of soccer as tied to collective social relations provides one clear “counternotion” to affirm the pre­ science of Elisha’s question.35 This vision of “deep community” that is focused on close interconnected bonds between congregants, similar to what Omri Elisha calls the “immersive sociality”36 of evangelical relations, is projected to be played out and fulfilled in the moment of the game. Contemporary theologies of sport provide a useful framework for understanding John’s own evangelical vision of sport. Anglican theologian Lincoln Harvey’s views sport as a “liturgy of our contingency”37 in which human beings through the practice of sport, as an “unnecessary-yet-meaningful”38 practice cele­ brate and fulfill human’s foundational identity as “unnecessary-yet-meaningful” creatures of God. In a similar fashion, John’s “theology of sport” is a kind of “liturgy of our relationality” that allows for the divinely promised “deep commu­ nity” of intertwined subjects and lives to play out and be celebrated through soccer as a fundamental relational form of activity. In this way, form and content are linked in soccer, as a form of mediation in this particular evangelical church. With John declaring the content of sport as mediating relational bonds between players and God, through the form of soccer as a relational game where “you can’t help but to get to know each other, trust each other” as there is “no better team sport.” The relational as mediated through the relational.

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As part of a particular project in the church instituted by John, the soccer team remained caught between a projection and active formation of this kind of “deep community” and the actualization of this kind of interdependence. These modes of sociality seemed to me as a desire, at least for some players, that was always being formed and literally played out. One possibility of this interconnection was that it was a site for establishing intergenerational friendship at the church, as a sport that is accessible to people across a wide age range of people. Timothy, an older player on the A team in his early forties said that the teams had an “intermixing of gen­ erations,” which was a “great way of fellowship, great way to get out there with guys who you might not know.” Although the league was officially co-ed, which was surprising given my understanding of the often assumed-to-be-restrictive gender norms of evangelical Christianity,39 only one woman played on the North Shore Alliance teams during my period of fieldwork. The project and projection of “deep community,” in this part of the church, was limited to almost all men albeit across a wide range of ages.

Exclusions and Excesses of “Deep Community” The very possibility and need of soccer for this form of “deep community” and relational modes of being in part grow out of assumptions of different capacities related to gender at the church. John explained to me that “Women connect a lot more naturally, men need program, and I would say even more than that it’s hard to connect in their Bible study.” Moreover, John also told me that “for men to connect in relationships it doesn’t happen naturally. Either you work together or you play together.” Jacob also viewed the social importance of soccer in gendered terms as he told me, “I think people at church struggle to actually get beyond pleasantries especially guys; girls are so much better.” For James, the lead pastor of the church, the soccer team was needed, as “guys in general tend not to cultivate deeper relationships like women.” As a result, although the aspirations, universal possibilities, and principles of “deep community” as mode of interdependence and unity are not limited by gender,40 the possibility of formation and actualization are informed and guided by evangelical ideas that dictate the capacity of different genders, and, thus, the need for participation in particular activities to achieve these kinds of social relations. The actualization of “deep community” of interconnection was not limited to the soccer team within the North Shore Alliance. Instead, “deep community” as a form and framework of social relations could fold back and flow into other events and activities within the church. As a force within the church, the project of “deep community” exceeds the bounds of the soccer team and was present in a sermon John gave on one of the Ten Commandments, or “Ten Words” as the church called them: “You Shall Not Steal” (Exodus 20:15). John began the sermon by saying that “The Ten Words confront many aspects of our common life together” and further explained to the congregation “because in God’s economy wealth is meant to be shared he gave specific instructions for a new and different way of

Desiring “Deep Community” 117

living.” John was proposing that certain “principles” should guide a Christian mode of economic life including interdependence, selflessness, and care for others as stated by John in the following way: if we only think about sustaining our way of life and never consider others less fortunate, near and far, we steal, we are “kleptomaniacs,” and turn our backs on the precious value of interdependence to which God has called us. This sermon on “our common life together” is the articulation of this same mode of sociality rooted in forms of evangelical relationality and interconnection found in John’s projected vision of the church’s soccer teams as a site for “deep community.” From this particular evangelical economics based on a divinely “precious value of interdependence to which God has called us,” John then turned to a recent experience of finding a house to rent in the brutally unfair, speculative, and unequal Metro Vancouver housing market. While on the verge of tears in another moment of vulnerability, John told the church, “You see, I long to be self-suffi­ cient, for people to think I’ve got it all together.” While espousing a desired indi­ vidual self-sufficiency, as a marker of individual self-determination, he found a suitable house with God’s help and a community of interdependent “people from church, soccer, our home group, Coffee Time, over sixty different friends” that helped him find and fix up his new rented home. In the particular context of the deeply unfair Metro Vancouver housing market, this mode of evangelical “group­ ness,”41 centering on interdependence and divinely dictated “deep community,” spilled over from people John had bonded with in soccer as he explicitly mentions how players from the soccer team helped him find and fix up his house. Soccer, in this case, is part of building an evangelical community for the church’s “common life together.” In this way, John was setting up a particular geography of the church with bonds and forms of connection moving from one area, the soccer field, then flowing into another part of the church, helping other congregants finding and fixing up housing. In this there is a shift of connection from one site of intensity, the soccer field, to another, the brutal housing market, that helped overcome the affects of despair and rejection that John felt in looking for house. That the force of these bonds of connection mediated through soccer can help unlock and move beyond other affects, despair and frustration, within the geo­ graphy and landscape of the church. In returning to the sermon series on the Ten Commandments, in the project of “deep community” we can see a literal playing out of the Commandment “Thou Shall Not Steal” of that life of interdependence God desires for us, that has been formed in the bonds mediated by the soccer team.

Conclusion This chapter has presented soccer as a medium for interdependent social relations in a Canadian evangelical church. As summarized by church soccer player Peter, the value of soccer is that as a team you are “getting a sense that you are part of a

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group rather than individuals against the world.” Knowledge produced on the field, conditioned by the affect of the space, is able to produce a sense of direction for the players of either moving toward or away from God and other members of the congregation. In turn, this knowledge of the heart, as the directional center of persons, can be a confirmation or a reorientation toward living relationally with God and other people. In doing so, soccer becomes a mediator of a more relational and interdependent form of politics for North Shore Alliance Church. This mode of relational politics serves as an example of a way to counter the “fracture,” as described by the church’s lead pastor, that describes the feeling of the con­ temporary world. The paragraph directly above is the description and argument presented throughout the chapter. However, the understanding of soccer was also internally contested across the members of North Shore Alliance’s soccer teams. Almost all the players characterized soccer at the church with emphasis broadly on the “community” aspect of the team with varying groundings in theological and social terms often related to their strength of their commitment, participation and ties to North Shore Alliance. The material in this chapter instead focuses on some of the members of North Shore Alliances soccer teams most closely tied to the church, including two of the pastors at the church and members of the congregation who were both especially theologically engaged and knowledgeable. This contestation of the understanding of soccer reflects shifting interests, statuses and engagements of the players with the church and society more broadly. Beyond diverging interests this contestation of the understanding of soccer was also a function of the status of soccer as a less marked practice with this evangelical church. In contrast to other more clearly defined “sensational forms,” defined by the anthropologist Birgit Meyer as “relatively fixed modes for invoking and organising access to the transcendental, offering structures of repetition to create and sustain links between believers in the context of particular religious regimes,”42 soccer as practiced within North Shore Alliance did not have the same level of discourse sur­ rounding it as other practices in the church. With regards to sensational forms Birgit Meyer would further that a medium is “subject to social processes that shape religion mediation and authorise certain sensational forms as valuable.”43 Meyer’s positioning of mediation as authorized by social processes is valuable for this contestation of the understanding of soccer as there is precisely a lack of fre­ quent or periodic public discussion, via sermons, or other reading material, that serves to socially define and stabilize the meaning of soccer within a particular discourse at North Shore Alliance. Instead the marginality of soccer as an activity at North Shore Alliance opens it up to internal contestation and also its value as a mediator. That the understanding of soccer by the particular players discussed in this chapter represents one way some of the players act to “authorise certain sen­ sational forms as valuable.”44 In turn, the instability of meaning surrounding it, in comparison to prayer or other kinds of worship, makes it a riskier or more uncer­ tain form of activity in the church. This leads us to a final ironic doubling at play for these evangelical soccer players. The soccer field is a place of risk and

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uncertainty, with its particular affect of rawness, mirrors the social feeling that players position it as potentially overcoming, notably the “fracture” of contemporary neo­ liberal life that produces this sense of dispersing and instability. Suggesting the value of sport within this evangelical church lies in the possibility of mediating a political for­ mation of greater connection, and interdependence to create the social stability of “deep community,” precisely via a space of risk, intensity, and uncertainty.

Notes 1 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).

2 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (London: Wiley & Sons, 2012).

3 Patrick Eisenlohr, “Introduction: What Is a Medium? Theologies, Technologies and

Aspirations,” Social Anthropology, 19 (1) (2011): 1. 4 Eisenlohr, “Introduction: What Is a Medium?” 5 Birgit Meyer, “Mediation and Immediacy: Sensational Forms, Semiotic Ideologies and the Question of the Medium,” Social Anthropology, 19 (1) (2011): 28.

6 Meyer, “Mediation and Immediacy,” 23.

7 Meyer, “Mediation and Immediacy,” 27.

8 Meyer, “Mediation and Immediacy,” 28.

9 Meyer, “Mediation and Immediacy,” 29.

10 Metro Vancouver is defined as “a federation of twenty-one municipalities, one Electoral Area and one Treaty First Nation that collaboratively plans for and delivers regionalscale services” (Metro Vancouver). Metro Vancouver is an area including the city of Vancouver and surrounding suburbs. These municipalities include Anmore, Belcarra, Bowen Island, Burnaby, Coquitlam, Delta, Electoral Area A, Langley City, Langley Township, Lions Bay, Maple Ridge, New Westminster, North Vancouver City, North Vancouver District, Pitt Meadows, Port Moody, Richmond, Surrey, Tsawwassen, Vancouver, West Vancouver, White Rock (Metro Vancouver). 11 The Christian and Missionary Alliance in Canada, Manual of the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Canada 2016 (Toronto: The Christian and Missionary Alliance in Canada, 2018), 4. 12 Anna Strhan, Aliens and Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 13 “BCCSL By-laws,” BCCSL, www.bccsl.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/ BCCSL-Bylaws-Final.pdf 14 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 77. 15 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 78. 16 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 78. 17 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 78. 18 “BCCSL By-Laws.” 19 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 77–78. 20 Sianne Ngai. Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 47. 21 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 43. 22 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 47. 23 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 47. 24 Kevin Lewis O’Neill, “Beyond Broken: Affective Spaces and the Study of American Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 81 (4) (2013): 1095. 25 O’Neill, “Beyond Broken,” 1095. 26 “A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of” (NIV).

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27 O’Neill, “Beyond Broken,” 1102. 28 Susan Harding, “Convicted by the Holy Spirit: The Rhetoric of Fundamental Baptist Conversion,” American Ethnologist, 14 (1) (1987): 174. 29 Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 224–228. 30 Jeffrey Scholes, “Sports in Post-secular America: The ‘Tebow Phenomenon’,” Implicit Religion, 17 (1) (2014): 81–82. 31 Annie Blazer, Playing for God: Evangelical Women and the Unintended Consequences of Sports Ministry (New York: New York University Press, 2015). 32 Omri Elisha. Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2011). 33 Elisha, Moral Ambition. 34 Elisha, Moral Ambition, 21. 35 Elisha, Moral Ambition, 21. 36 Omri Elisha, “Sin, Sociality, and the Unbuffered Self in US Evangelicalism,” in Simon Coleman and Rosalind Hackett (eds), The Anthropology of Global Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 43. 37 Lincoln Harvey, A Brief Theology of Sport (Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf & Stock, 2014), 83. 38 Harvey, A Brief Theology of Sport, 83. 39 Blazer, Playing for God, 141–142. 40 Elisha, “Sin, Sociality, and the Unbuffered Self.” 41 Courtney Handman, “Becoming the Body of Christ: Sacrificing the Speaking Subject in the Making of the Colonial Lutheran church in New Guinea,” Current Anthropology, 55 (S10) (2014): S206. 42 Meyer, “Mediation and Immediacy,” 29. 43 Meyer, “Mediation and Immediacy,” 31. 44 Meyer, “Mediation and Immediacy,” 31.

6 SPORT, RELIGION, AND ABSENCE The Subfield of Religion and Sport as an Explanatory Tool for the Moment Terry Shoemaker

Introduction The protocols and logistics of the mandated shutdowns pursuant to the COVID-19 pandemic demanded that most social events be suspended in an attempt to slow the biological transmission of the virus. As the confirmed cases and deaths across the globe became apparent, sporting events in the USA were understandably canceled or sus­ pended in the spring of 2020. The NBA, for instance, was one of the first organiza­ tions to make the decision to suspend play to ensure the safety of athletes, staff, and fans. Other sporting institutions, such as the NHL and MLB, quickly followed. The absence of sports, both professional and amateur, while difficult for athlete and fan alike, offers an opportune time to consider the importance of athletic competition, fandoms, and individual sporting participation. This chapter argues that the work being conducted in the subfield of religion and sport furnishes us with insights into the brief suspension of sports and athletic competitions brought on by the pandemic in March through July 2020. Specifically, analyzed in this chapter are the Marxist “opiate” application to sport, the relevance of sport in relation to time in the modern world, and the integral nature of sports in human identity. Furthermore, the unavail­ ability of sports viewing for the fan as well as the proscriptions on player involvement due to the pandemic also offers interesting ways to further develop previous research directions. These insights, intensified by the suspension of sports, will hopefully con­ vince the reader that sports are more than mere entertainment; they are an essential component of modern life.

Sport, COVID-19, and Absence Humans are active creatures, and are socially complex. The history of human evolution demonstrates that the development of Homo sapiens was dependent on DOI: 10.4324/9781003014621-9

122 Terry Shoemaker

multiple factors including mobility and social organizing to mitigate external threats and allocate resources.1 These threats ranged from other competing species to natural disasters and emerged at particular times to challenge the survival of Homo sapiens. Yet, at some point in human development, even in the midst of impending threats, humans creatively constructed a level of security that allowed for spaces for sport and play that tended to mimic survival behaviors.2 As humans advanced, more historical examples of better-organized and recurring sporting activities in societies occurred such as the Olympics and Mesoamerican ball games. Hence, a natural part of human development included the implementation of designated times that included play and leisure. In modern history, however, there have existed times when sport and play had to be suspended in order for more pressing social issues to be addressed—such as when the 1944 Summer Olympics were canceled due to World War II or after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 in the USA. Similarly, in 2020, a highly contagious virus resulted in mandates to suspend sports in the USA and other parts of the globe. The COVID-19 pandemic was unique in the temporary discontinuance of sports in that the best approach for safety was delaying or modifying the majority of social activities for an extended period of time. The need for physical social distance demanded that people everywhere implement sacrifices in an attempt to mitigate the transmission of the virus. Many employees worked from home, and people everywhere redefined during this time what constituted essential activity. At various levels, the cancelation of major sporting events carried with it disruptions in travel plans and performance opportunities as well. For audiences committed to following and supporting their sports, game watching and other gaming rituals such as tailgating, this was a significant loss. Professional athletes, who gear up for each season or event, were held, like everyone else, in a holding pattern, waiting to see if and when they might have opportunities to compete. Adding to the loss of professional and collegiate sports was the fact that even youth leagues halted along with workout facilities, yoga studios, and community recreational centers. Due to the novelty of the virus and its rapid effects on social life, there exists scant research on the relationship between sports and the COVID-19 pandemic. How­ ever, there is plenty of research dealing with the connection between sports and other pandemics. Many of these studies highlight ways in which sport has been uti­ lized to engage with threats to human survival. For instance, sport is offered as an ameliorative solution for inactivity and the “global physical inactivity pandemic.”3 Another example includes the global HIV-AIDS pandemic of the 1980s and early 1990s that forced a rethinking of sports and its relation to stigma, and the spreading of viruses.4 In numerous publications, the potential of sport in educating and reme­ diating individuals about the nature and effects of the AIDS virus is analyzed and explicated.5 “Sport,” argue Lindsey and Banda, “has been used in a variety of loca­ tions … as a popular and appropriate forum through which information about the [HIV/AIDS] virus can be disseminated as well as a tool to encourage personal and social development.”6 These studies demonstrate the value of analyzing sport and play during pandemics.

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Although these studies certainly expand our knowledge of the benefits of sport studies, they offer little in the way of understanding the absence of sport during the COVID-19 pandemic. In other words, these studies are based on the assumption that sports are available and accessible for problem solving in specific pandemics. What they fail to offer are the deeper anthropological, phenomenological, and sociological analyses of sport and play that can help explain what is lost when sports are inaccessible. This is where scholars in religious studies have offered insights regarding the importance of fandom, athletic competitions, and the cultures sur­ rounding sport activities. The study of human phenomena from scholars in the subfield of religion and sport shows that there is something profound and mean­ ingful that is missed in the pandemic moment with the suspension of sport and play for athletes and fans across the globe. Religious-studies scholars have postulated over the past four decades that sport and play are essential for humans because they are integral parts of meaningmaking. In other words, these studies utilize theories of religion and spirituality to better understand sport in the contemporary world. Annie Blazer offers an astute survey of the field of religion and sports, though permit me to do my own brief review of some of the ways that scholarship has expanded the field over the past five years.7 Eric Bain-Selbo and Gregory Sapp’s work Understanding Sport as a Religious Phenomenon argues that the basic elements of traditional forms of religion are discovered in contemporary sports.8 This work expands Bain-Selbo’s previous work in Game Day and God and makes a broad conversation about sport through theoretical lenses of religion.9 Likewise, Onaje X. O. Woodbine’s work Black Gods of the Asphalt investigates how playing basketball in inner-city Boston ritualistically fulfills emotional and psychological functions such as that of religion.10 Robert Ellis’s The Games People Play provides a Christian theological framework for understanding sport as a transcendent aspect of human life.11 Each of these works argues that sport is a meaningful part of human life that extends well beyond eco­ nomic or entertainment values. The corpus of works that engage religion and sport also provide us with investiga­ tive tools that can be used to help us understand phenomena outside of religion and/or sport. These studies suggest that there is a direct and important relationship between specific religious traditions and sport that must be recognized to fully understand spe­ cific circumstances. Take, for instance, Blazer’s Playing for God, which demonstrates that the intersection of sport and gender in conservative Christian circles can create gender and sexuality tension within many female collegiate athletes.12 Similarly, Rebecca Alpert’s Religion and Sports gives us numerous case studies wherein conflict emerges between religious and sporting commitments while also discussing some current ethical dilemmas in sports today.13 Tracy Trothen’s Winning the Race brings together theology, religious studies, ethics, and technology to analyze contemporary enhancement issues.14 Studies like these reveal the relevance of religious studies in understanding a wide array of current phenomena, especially in Western countries. Taken together, the collective material within religion and sport studies proposes that, like religion, sport is a creative space for human expression and reveals much

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about how and why humans organize, watch, and participate in sporting activity and games. Yet, like the previously referenced sports and pandemic research, each of these studies is based on assumptions that sports are accessible and ready-at-hand whenever one wants. The mandates to self-isolate, social distance, and quarantine create a period of distance from those things that we carry assumptions about always being there. This, then, speaks to some of the deeper ways in which sports are crucial for modern humans. In what follows, I map three ways in which sport fulfills certain human needs during the pandemic. I build upon my previous research and other religious-studies scholars who analyze sport in America. Because I am trained as an Americanist, I focus on the USA, and, to reiterate, I am writing about a time when all sporting activities have been canceled or suspended with only unofficial rumors of sports’ return. Moreover, I use the lack of sport to show how each of these threads might be utilized in furthering research projects.

Sports as a Necessary Distraction Karl Marx famously called religion “the opiate of the masses.”15 Marx understood religion as a tool to secure existing class systems via the deflecting of workers’ atten­ tions from their current conditions so as to prevent the revolting against the inequal­ ities that they faced. For a political philosopher bent on analyzing unequal wealth distribution, it is easy to imagine that religion seemed to cultivate a complicity and acquiescence with the status quo. From the Marxist position, religion is an impediment to the real work that needs to be accomplished of redistributing resources. Like reli­ gion, other cultural phenomena such as art and literature might also supply a means of diverting attention from existing material inequalities in societies. Working from Marx’s ideas, scholars debate whether sport, like religion, is either a part of the cultural structures that could be a tool of the bourgeois apparatus of control or as a potentially beneficial leisure and restful activity.16 Richard Giulianotti captures this both/and perspective of Marx: “Bourgeois-controlled sport must be interpreted as a regressive and ideological force,” but “only a communist revolution would negate [sport’s] commodification and alienation” providing a necessary outlet for workers.17 William John Morgan argues using Marx’s view of labor that sports contain inter­ related material and social properties.18 By doing so, sport, from Morgan’s argument, is not merely a social necessity but is distinguished from ordinary life since sport “com­ mands our attention,” because “we don’t get a chance to do or see such things in everyday life at all.”19 Sport, then, from a Marxist application, has the potential to be co-opted for hegemonic means or supply something meaningful for people in society. Bain-Selbo and Sapp’s work engages the Marxist cultural critique of religion and applies it directly to sport, admitting a negative evaluation of sport as a diversion from important societal matters.20 In their application, they argue that sport— especially high-revenue-generating sporting events such as American football and soccer—can obfuscate issues like race and class. They contend, “[Sport] provides us an escapist path to an illusory world, preventing us from genuinely engaging reality and thus stopping us from addressing injustices and changing the world for the

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better.”21 Again, “While providing some measure of equal opportunity for all, sport paradoxically conceals and reveals the underlying injustices of society … [Sport] is increasingly becoming the new ‘opiate of masses’.”22 It is certainly easy to read current revenue-generating sports in the USA as a distraction from deeper systemic issues. From the Marxist interpretation that argues that religion is a negative distraction from reality, an application like Bain-Selbo and Sapp’s, situates sport as similar to religion in this way. Bain-Selbo and Sapp are certainly astute in their application of the Marxist critique to sporting events in the modern world. In the analysis they offer, sports as a cultural diversion is considered in a negative evaluation when compared to the importance of addressing social inequalities. I agree that, comparatively, sports can serve as an escape that obfuscates racism and classism in America; yet the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic reveal the oddly positive value of sports as a distraction. The pandemic leveled inaccessibility to many cultural luxuries while also broadly bringing human vulnerability to the surface: no matter one’s economic standing or amount of disposable income, the pandemic shut­ down created conditions where most leisure and cultural activities (sports, music concerts, etc.) were suspended. At the same time, everyone was confronted with the stressors of the pandemic. Because everyday life was restricted to in-home activities, many Americans were confronted with the banality of life. In the stressful moment of the coronavirus, sport would offer a kind of wanted “opiate” to provide, even if momentarily, relief from the harsh realities of the everyday. Thus, the “opiate” effects of religion and sport could be thought of as a positive contribution during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even before the COVID-19 outbreak, I discovered in a recent research project that sport was embraced as a specific kind of positive distractor. In the research, some interlocutors who are deconverting from their family’s religio-political traditions find that sport fandom serves as a shared bond that keeps the family together despite losing other shared commonalities.23 My interlocutors found that sport offered a reprieve from religion and politics; sport provided families moments to share sporting commitments. Likewise, sport can offer safer spaces for mental and emotional dis­ tresses during times of social distancing. Or, stated otherwise, one aspect that the isolation required during the pandemic demonstrates is that many need sports as a coping distraction more than ever. Drew Brees, quarterback for the New Orleans Saints, said in an interview, “The American people need sports right now.” Life during the COVID-19 pandemic creates heightened feelings and awareness of insecurity, and sport could offer a needed and soothing diversion to keep Americans occupied. Some sport­ ing institutions eventually worked to offer revised versions of the sports that so many fans love and cherish. MLB devised a shortened season that was played without fans but televised. The NBA embarked on the playoffs with a modified format in a “bubble” to protect players. These sporting institutions detected the demands of the American populace: the absence reveals sport as a valuable opiate more than ever.

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Sports and Time Structuring Over the course of history, humans have devised ways to order time and space. Ancient humans used the stars and seasons as a means to compute and structure calendars. A key aspect of these calendars historically has been the designation of certain days, months, and sometimes even years as special or unique. Religion has been the instrumental mechanism in many societies to accomplish this ordering. In many societies across the globe, religious traditions continue to manage calendars, often with recurring rituals and festivals. On this topic, Mircea Eliade proposes that human activities around festivals, the maintenance of liturgical calendars, and the re-enacting of divine myths constitute a sacred time, which is “indefinitely reco­ verable, indefinitely repeatable.”24 It is through constructing and engaging with a recurring calendar of rituals, previously expressed through religious systems, that humans are able to perceive themselves in a way that transcends what Eliade calls “the historical present.”25 Joseph Price brilliantly explicates the relationship among sacred time, place, and sport in his book, From Season to Season.26 Price argues that various sports calendars structure time in contemporary society, much like what liturgical calendars did in the past. With many people abandoning religious commitments, humans still seek ways to structure time and connect themselves to their world. Price offers, “Like most religious calendars, the primary function of the American sports calendar is to provide some kind of ritual transition from the chaos of secularity to the cosmos of sports, from cultural malaise to corporate hope.”27 Offering a celebration of “the possible newness of life, of teams, of players, and of fans,” sport schedules create an ordering of time.28 Accordingly, many modern fans base their personal calendars on opening days, regular seasons, and tournaments. And these calendars are shared and, often, con­ nected to the seasons. Baseball fans know that winter is coming to a close when spring training begins. Many basketball fans anticipate the summer season toward the end of the NBA playoffs. When the weather begins to cool, football season is around the corner. Student athletes as well as other students likewise mark the academic year in response to sport seasons. Runners anticipate races that are held the same weekend of the month each year, and every Duke student knows it’s basketball season when the tents containing students waiting for tickets up in “K­ ville”—a makeshift area on campus named for famed coach Mike Krzyzewski—are erected. In each of these examples, the fans and athletes are connected through shared commitments of time. For fans and athletes alike, there is a rhythm to the sports year that’s integral to an overall rhythm—a way to structure human time that fills the everyday, or mundane, with energy and excitement. Many anticipate new season prospects or specific games with higher levels of interest like games with a rival opponent. It is in this way that sports provide anchor points for the temporal nature of human life. The need to suspend collective events has created a moment that is unstructured and therefore sporadic for many people. The period of absence without most social

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opportunities, including sports, brought on by the pandemic counters, or mini­ mally reduces, Eliade’s claim that the ritual markings of the season are “indefinitely recoverable, indefinitely repeatable.” The suspension of sports, along with other ritualized seasonal markers, stalls the “indefinite” nature of cultural constructs creating moments of questioning. With the COVID-19 pandemic and absence of sports, we could say that without sports, anthropologically and sociologically, many people might lose track of who they are because they do not know when they are. What is valuable for many sports fans are scheduled moments, events, and outings that mark, along with other culture components, special, even sacred, occasions. Without sporting events, life can be mundane for athletes and fans, marked with little to no significance. Moreover, established liturgical calendars can inform those outside of the traditions as well. Many people in the USA who do not affiliate with Christianity are familiar with and participate in Easter and Christmas holy-day celebrations. This does not make them Christians per se; instead, this power of the traditional calendar demonstrates how reli­ gious calendars can affect those outside of its confines. Likewise, many people describe themselves as nonfans; yet they, too, might be informed by the seasonal activities of sporting events more than they would like to admit. For example, many non-football fans anticipate the NFL’s Super Bowl due to specific foods used during the event or the commercials throughout the programming. The temporary disruption in the social timekeeping mechanisms of both religion and sport gives a glimpse into just how essential cultural expressions, like sports, are to calendaring in modern life.

Sports as Identity Preserver Humans are composed of a constellation of identities including sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, etc. For many sports fans, sporting identities are a key part of this constellation. Some fans intensely associate with one sports team or an individual player understanding themselves as a member of that team organization.29 These identities might be instantiated through symbols like team mascots, geographic ties such as cities and states, and other programmatic efforts such as meeting players for signatures. The social bonds of fandom create special connections to societies and people within those societies. To proclaim oneself as a Phoenix Mercury fan, for instance, is to imply that one is part of a group of fans devoted to that team and the broader fan base, referred to as “The X Factor.” Sporting identities are also dynamic and related with other parts of individual and collective identities like religion. For example, a student of mine once described her family as “off-season Christians.” She explained that during the professional American football season, her family members are committed Arizona Cardinal fans, devoting their time and energy on Sunday to football. When football is out of season, they attend church services. Thus, certain identities are prioritized at specific moments. Commitment to these teams often extends well beyond mere spectating. I once witnessed Baltimore Ravens football fans paying homage to the Ravens team pregame at the Edgar Allen Poe memorial at Westminster Hall and Burying

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Grounds. The Ravens’ team name is drawn from Poe’s famous poem “The Raven.” Even in frigid temperatures, fans wearing Ravens gear stopped to offer their time and some loose coins to bring good fortune to their beloved team. This is a ritual that some Ravens fans perform that is connected historically to a “Pen­ nies for Poe” drive conducted by the city of Baltimore. To be a Ravens fan is to be connected to the genius of Poe and the history of Baltimore. This is a great example of how teams extend well beyond fields or courts into social lives and the practices required to maintain those commitments and identities. Like the Ravens fans, many people rely on sport institutions to preserve and main­ tain aspects of their identities. Identification with a sports team is connected to con­ sumer identification and “common antecedents such as family socialization, geography, and media influence,” and the sporting organization is central to facilitat­ ing fandom.30 Because fans carry deeply held commitments to their teams, Eric BainSelbo and I argue that some sporting institutions, particularly in the Bible Belt region, serve as identity and cultural preservers.31 In our work, we focused primarily on the institutions of college football and NASCAR as institutions that abet American Southerners in maintaining key aspects of what it truly means to be a Southerner. We posit using assemblage theory that: The assemblages of stock car racing and college football include athletes, coaches, spectators, referees, and workers engaging with economic endeavors, athletic public events, and the rules of the game by incorporating symbols, rituals, shared spaces, and myths predicated on traditions, legends, icons, histories, heritages, and sensibilities—all engendering a Southern identity characterized by a strong work ethic, patriarchal leadership, competitiveness, suspicion of authority, individual­ ism, and pride.32 Applied more broadly, our work indicates that it is not simply that a person is a (fill in the blank with their team) fan, but a part of an institutional and geo­ graphical history. Team legends (saints), stories (myths), and pregame activities (rituals) provide religious like touchstones for fans—what they hope to achieve and how to achieve it. The accompanying culture, preserved and maintained by certain sporting institutions of those teams, helps fans know who they are. Admittedly, there are negative aspects to institutional preservations even as it relates to sporting institutions. Yago Colas argues that college and professional basketball in America, tied to capitalist exploitation, creates a “white basketball unconscious,” which is “a hypothetical container constituted by its contents: the wishes, terrors, and impulses related to race and basketball.”33 This “white basket­ ball consciousness” can sanitize racial histories of specific sporting institutions and repress the tensions of the white organizational leadership of sports like basketball in relation to current dominance by black athletes. Likewise, Howard Bryant argues that sport in America extends beyond fandom. Sport is “political, selling touchdowns and beer, three-pointers and homeruns, but also fidelity to police and military and to a point of view that accepted the American government’s war on

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terror.”34 These two examples highlight the ways that sports institutions can be manipulated to serve ulterior purposes, but they also support the claim that sport­ ing institutions preserve cultural elements beyond the game. “The shutdown of sports will hurt more than we think,” states Joan Ryan, a San Francisco Giants baseball fan and journalist, because “the bond we feel with our sports teams can be as strong as the bond with family and friends.”35 Her argument centers on a bond between fans that she is missing during the pandemic. In sum, Ryan details how desperately she is missing the baseball season because of a socio­ logical need of human interdependency. Ryan is correct that the absence of sporting events will harm more than we think—in these times of isolating, we are missing a critical piece of many people’s identity. Sports and fandom are crucial elements that help navigate each human being through the modern world. Remove sport, and we are stifled. Combined, these three examples illustrate why we miss sports at absentee cul­ tural moments in human history. Sport and play provide distractions, ways to construct our concepts of time, as well as important aspects of identity main­ tenance. In short, sports help humans answer questions like: Who are we? What do we do? When are we? Or how do we live out our commitments? The previous examples get at the deeper meaning of sports, beyond mere entertainment, for people in the modern world and provides explanations as to why the absence of sports can be detrimental for many. The current moment of trying to reduce the spreading of COVID-19 also pushes scholarship in new directions for studying religion and sport. In the following section, I introduce a new thread that scholars could analyze related to sporting replays and rebroadcasts.

Sport Replays and Rebroadcasts Current technologies increase the transmission of sporting events exponentially through extending broadcasts across the globe in real time and providing access to important sporting events. Fans across the globe can watch a live sporting event simultaneously. A key aspect, for this study, of modern technology is instant replay and rebroadcast capabilities. With instant replay, sporting feats can be repeated as sports analysts adjudicate the athleticism, decision-making, and legality of specific plays. As such, postgame discussions depend heavily upon their ability to review specific moments of competitions. Was the player in bounds? Were all rules fol­ lowed? Did that coach throw the red flag appropriately or not? And, now, did the rules expert in the New York studio agree with the call? How did the athlete make the game-time decision that they did? Did the final play “beat the clock”? Sports analysts and media outlets focus intensely on specific plays, especially spectacular displays of scoring and defense. Take, for instance, Kawhi Leonard’s final shot in the 2019 NBA playoffs. In a tied basketball game with 4.2 seconds remaining, the Toronto Raptors basketball team inbounded the ball against the Philadelphia 76ers from the sideline. Marc Gasol, the Raptors’ center, passed the ball to Leonard at the top of the key.

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Leonard spun and drove to his right toward the corner baseline. After taking a few dribbles, he squared up while fading to his right and shot the ball. The basketball bounced on the rim numerous times. In fact, the basketball took so long to enter into the goal that Leonard has time to squat down and watch the shot along with his teammates on the bench before the ball eventually finds its way through the net. There is an audible hush across the stadium, then as the ball enters the goal, the crowd erupts along with the Raptors’ entire team. This shot was rebroadcasted numerous times across various media platforms. Like Leonard’s final shot, there are numerous other famous basketball sporting feats—like Michael Jordan’s jump shot in 1989 against the Cleveland Cavaliers. It would be easy to enumerate hundreds of similar sporting events where time, the moment, and special feats of athletic ability under extreme duress are captured in video. Because of technology, many fans have immediate access to replay these events. Fans, athletes, and analysts have access to play again these moments as much as they would like via the Internet. Replay can be transmitted in slow motion so that more microanalysis can be conducted of the events. Yet replay stands as secondary to the actual live play and spectating in real time. Similarly, rebroadcasts of specific games or matches are qualitatively different from the live occurrence of the sport­ ing activity. During the hard shutdown of the pandemic, replays and reruns of sporting events were the only option for sporting events since all sports were sus­ pended. For example, CBS aired recasts of famous NCAA basketball tournament games in place of the canceled men’s basketball tournament. These replays and reruns attempted to fill a sporting void when live games were suspended. The rebroadcasting of previous sporting events might have reminded some fans of past highlights or spectacular games, but, in light of the suspension of sports, the reruns simply did not meet the expectations of sporting fans. The religious-studies canon could offer an explanation of why rebroadcasts and replays are less-embraced, secondary versions of sporting events, giving insight into why replays are not as pertinent as the in-the-moment spectating of sports. Look­ ing through the lens of religion may help theorize the in-person experience of live broadcasts versus replayed experiences. Most sporting fans would obviously admit that these are different experiences: to be in a stadium feeling, smelling, touching, and witnessing the event or sitting in one’s living room watching a live sporting event is qualitatively different from watching a rebroadcast of the event after the fact. But why? Attempting to get at the essence of religion, some scholars of religion prioritize the experience and emotion of primary religious experience over and against the institutionalized or liturgical aspects of religion. Rudolph Otto theorized that true religion is about an at-the-moment experience, not necessarily the tradition or institutions that emerge from the experience.36 This religious experience is inef­ fable, and the emotions of the experience cannot be duplicated with human engi­ neering. Religion then “must be directly experienced in oneself to be understood,” argues Otto.37 Traditional or institutionalized forms of religion, according to Otto, emerge as an attempt to recreate or recapture the initial religious experience of

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specific individuals. Likewise, William James defined religion as an experience that altered people’s trajectories.38 These deeply meaningful experiences are not humanly fabricated in worship services or formal rituals, which are of a second order, but are spontaneous first-hand experiences. James states, “We must search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters.”39 The kinds of religious experience that both Otto and James discuss are moments in human life that are not replicable because they are utterly unique. What Otto’s and James’s arguments denote is an ordering of human experiences. Applied to aspects of religion, direct experience supersedes any attempt to recap­ ture the initial experience. The ideas of James and Otto related to religious experience can be applied more broadly to sporting experiences. Applied, these theories provide an ordering of the difference between live sporting experiences and the replaying and rebroadcasting of sporting events. Spectating a live sporting event is the first-order experience; replaying sporting events, with all of its benefits, is a second-order experience—it is not the actual experience itself. Yet there is something about the human condition that necessitates trying to replay or duplicate the sporting event, as if the moment can be recaptured. Sports replay simply does not meet the level of expectation that the initial experience, cloaked in mystery, novelty, and awe, does. Otto’s and James’s work both supply a phenomenological insight into trying to readminister a true experience—true being defined by those who experience. The pandemic shutdown limited first-order authentic sporting experiences and set up a situation wherein fans relied on second-order experiences, which failed to adequately fulfill the human desire for sports. A phenomenology of sporting absence can begin with religious-studies material to qualify these distinctions and propel research forward.

Conclusion The subfield of religion and sports is useful in understanding the pandemic moment of cultural absence, as I have called it. With the suspension of sporting events, both professional and amateur, the shared human moment of void reveals much about what is considered important in the modern world. Specifically, in an American society that is often privileged in accessing sports and broadly maintains levels of comfort where many citizens can participate and spectate in sport and play, there exists a more revealing aspect to the current pandemic. This moment of sporting absence reveals the need for distraction as a social, coping mechanism that can ameliorate modern stress. In addition, this absence highlights the modern condition of relying on sporting institutions to preserve identity markers and construct a social calendar. Scholars in the subfield of religion and sports have enumerated each of these, and the current pandemic both affirms aspects and pushes their theories further. The suspension of sports also extends future research. I have offered one exploratory path that might be productive. This path concentrates on the human

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desire to replay events. Through technological advancements, humans have a dif­ ferent access to sporting events, but, as Otto argues, humans have always tried to reconstruct the lost original experiences. Our current moment foretells that second order experiences are inadequate. More should be researched regarding sporting replays and human experience. The pandemic shutdown of social gatherings is temporary—a mere blip on the human historical radar. Certainly, the pandemic has and will continue to affect how societies operate and function across the globe. The restarting of social events and, eventually, the move to resume sports also offer an opportunity to reconsider the value of sports globally and in America. Is the restarting of sports appropriate or opportune when so many people are struggling? At macro and micro levels, many societies will want to offer some signal that life is returning, and the pandemic has been controlled. Sports might be a symbolic signal that life can be resumed and restored. The field of religious studies has much to contribute to understanding the value of sports and other cultural phenomena in the pandemic moment of absence through its many interdisciplinary lenses. Analyzing secular forms of ritual, sacrality, and meaning-making is embedded in this work because sports play an integral role in many modern societies.

Notes 1 Literature on human evolution is extensive and much debate centers on what makes Homo sapiens unique compared to other species. Robert Foley and Clive Gamble offer an interesting take on how social structures formed in early hominin evolution. See Robert Foley and Clive Gamble, “The Ecology of Social Transitions in Human Evo­ lution,” Philosophical Transactions of the British Royal Society B, 364 (2009): 3267–3279. Another valuable resource is the journal of Evolutionary Anthropology, which includes a special edition focusing on the value of human mobility in relation to adaptability and global distribution of Homo sapiens (see Evolutionary Anthropology, 25 (2016) for more information). 2 Michael P. Lombardo, “On the Evolution of Sport,” Evolutionary Psychology, 10 (2012): 3. 3 See Joe Piggin and Alan Bairner, “The Global Physical Inactivity Pandemic: An Analysis of Knowledge Production,” Sport, Education, Society, 21 (2016): 131–147; Trish Groves, “Pandemic Obesity in Europe,” British Medical Journal (clinical research edn), 333 (2006): 1081; Paul Spanier, Simon Marshall, and Guy Faulkner, “Tackling the Obesity Pan­ demic: A Call for Sedentary Behavior Research,” Canadian Journal of Public Health, 97 (2006): 255–257. 4 Lucie Cluver, Frances Gardner, and Don Operario, “Effects of Stigma on the Mental Health of Adolescents Orphaned by AIDS,” Journal of Adolescent Health, 42 (2008): 410–417. 5 Iain Lindsey and Davies Banda, “Sport and the Fight against HIV/AIDS in Zambia: A ‘Partnership Approach’?” International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 46 (2010): 90–107; Ruth Jeanes, “Educating through Sport? Examining HIV/AIDS Education and Sport­ for-Development through the Perspectives of Zambian Young People,” Sport, Education and Society, 18 (2013): 388–406; Roger Levermore, “Sport: A New Engine of Devel­ opment?” Progress in Developmental Studies, 8 (2008): 183–190. 6 Lindsey and Banda, “Sport and the Fight,” 91.

7 Annie Blazer, “Religion and Sport in America,” Religion Compass, 6 (2012): 287–297.

8 Eric Bain-Selbo and Gregory Sapp, Understanding Sport as a Religious Phenomenon: An

Introduction (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

Sport, Religion, and Absence 133

9 Eric Bain-Selbo, Game Day and God in the American South: Football, Faith and Politics in the American South (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2012). 10 Woodbine, Onaje X. O., Black Gods of the Asphalt: Religion, Hip-Hop, and Street Basket­ ball (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 11 Ellis, Robert, The Games People Play: Theology, Religion, and Sport (Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf & Stock, 2014). 12 Blazer, Annie, Playing for God: Evangelical Women and the Unintended Consequences of Sports Ministry (New York: New York University Press, 2015). 13 Rebecca Alpert, Religion and Sport: An Introduction and Case Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 14 Tracy Trothen, Winning the Race: Religion, Hope, and Reshaping the Sport Enhancement Debate (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2015). 15 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 16 See William J. Morgan, Leftist Theories of Sport: A Critique and Reconstruction (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Richard Giulianotti, Sport: A Critical Sociology (Cam­ bridge: Polity Press, 2005); Robert Redeker, “Sport as an Opiate of International Relations: The Myth and Illusion of Sport as a Tool of Foreign Diplomacy,” Sport in Society, 11 (2008): 494–500. 17 Giulianotti, Sport, 64. 18 Morgan, Leftist Theories of Sport. 19 Morgan, Leftist Theories of Sport, 45. 20 Bain-Selbo and Sapp, Understanding Sport, 111–123. 21 Bain-Selbo and Sapp, Understanding Sport, 115. 22 Bain-Selbo and Sapp, Understanding Sport, 122. 23 Terry Shoemaker, “Deconversion, Sport, and Rehabiliative Hope,” Religions, 10 (2019), 341. 24 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959), 68. 25 Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 70. 26 Joseph L. Price, From Season to Season: Sports as American Religion (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2001). 27 Price, From Season to Season, 57. 28 Price, From Season to Season, 56. 29 Jeffrey D. James, “Sports Teams and Their Communities: Examining the Influence of External Group Identities on Team Identity,” Journal of Sport Management, 21 (2007): 319–337. 30 Shaughan A. Keaton, Nicholas Watanabe, and Christopher C. Gearhart, “A Comparison of College Football and NASCAR Consumer Profiles: Identity Formation and Specta­ torship Motivation,” Sport Marketing Quarterly, 24 (2015): 45. 31 Eric Bain-Selbo and Terry Shoemaker. “Southern Reconstructing: Sport and the Future of Religion in the American South,” in Brad Schultz and Mary Lou Sheffer (eds), Sport and Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2016), 133–151. 32 Bain-Selbo and Shoemaker, “Southern Reconstructing,” 142. 33 Yago Colas, Ball Don’t Lie: Myth, Genealogy, and Invention in the Cultures of Basketball (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 2016), 27. 34 Howard Bryant, The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2018), 114. 35 Joan Ryan, “Life in a Pandemic: Why We Miss Sports So Much,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 29, 2020. 36 Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958). 37 Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 10. 38 William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin Classics, 1982). 39 James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 6.

PART III

Religion, Sport, and the Market

7 FOUCAULT FOR HEISMAN College Football and the Liturgies of Power Jason M. Smith

Introduction Perhaps this is too bold, but I think the question of whether or not sport is a reli­ gion has become a bit tired. Scholars of far greater merit and ingenuity than myself have analyzed such a question from just about every conceivable angle. The answer seems to be a bit “yes” and a bit “no,” and it mostly depends upon how we define the terms in question. Sport certainly bears notable similarities to religion that shed new light on both sport and religion. Sport possesses, as Ludwig Wittgenstein would say, a “family resemblance” to religion in many important respects.1 Yet sport also, at least in my mind, does not explicitly seek the fundamental transfor­ mation of personal and communal identity to which religions, as performed phe­ nomena, aspire. I say this as one who has, on many occasions, found myself experiencing something like ecstasy while watching sport. American college foot­ ball, in particular, has been my obsession since childhood. As Eric Bain-Selbo has so helpfully detailed, college football is certainly one of the best examples for the sport–religion comparison, but I still feel, even if I cannot adequately articulate precisely why, that there is a real difference between the joy of football and the experiences of spiritual transcendence.2 In other words, sport and religion bear a family resemblance—they are clearly kin, as we say in the South—but no one ought to mistake them for being in the same family. In this essay, I want to use college football to stake out a different way of thinking about the religious aspects of sport. The need to relate religion and sport, in light of this particular North American example, must shift from a focus on parallels in form of practice to a focus on parallels in modes of power. While there is clear value gained in the communal practice of spirituality, there is also a notable dark side—namely, when institutions seize upon the power of embodied practice to work on the soul through the body, as Michel Foucault would put it. It is not, DOI: 10.4324/9781003014621-11

138 Jason M. Smith

in other words, so much that sport looks a lot like religion in its crafting of physical space, its embodied practices, or its search for transcendence. What matters more in describing the family resemblance between religion and sport is more the way in which power functions within these discourses that help express their family resemblances. Thus, this essay will investigate the manner in which sport, particularly college football, functions like forms of religion in the way that power is imposed upon subjects via embodied practice. My thesis, to put it plainly, is that collegiate ath­ letics function as a regime of what Foucault called “disciplinary normalization,” meaning that the particular form of governance leveraged upon college athletes, from the institutional seat of the NCAA to the more intimate work of the nutri­ tional staff in a college athlete’s home university’s athletic department, works to mold athletes according to a presupposed norm. The “liturgies,” as I will call them, of big-time college football function as circuits of normalization that seek to shape the soul by imposing discipline upon the body. They work, in short, much the same way that the practices of observation, examination, confession, and discipline work within a monastery, with the goal being not just the avoidance of sin but the securing of an individual’s salvation through devotion. This Foucauldian approach to college football is useful for several reasons. First, it will help explain some of the seemingly contradictory or hypocritical behavior of those in authority over amateur athletes. The seeming absurdity of school’s selfreporting NCAA violations for excessive amounts of pasta, butt-dialing a recruit, or serving recruits “impermissible iced decorations” on cookies suddenly make a great deal more sense when seen under the lens of normalization.3 Second, and more importantly, examining the sport–religion connection based on similarities in modes of power rather than similarities in practice will help illuminate new ways of imagining how amateur athletics might be governed. Foucault called freedom the art of “voluntary inservitude.”4 I believe a genealogy of college football opens up the horizon for thinking the future of big-time college sports as imbued with just this sort of inservitude. How then to proceed? Obviously, a Foucauldian genealogy of North American collegiate athletics, not to mention college football alone, is beyond the scope of this essay.5 What I want to do instead is to try and show the particular ways that normalizing power works in college football by detailing the content of the norm for college football and contemporary practices that attempt to produce it. So, first, I want to sketch Foucault’s conception of power, its effects, and the ways in which those effects are seen in its deployment within a particular religious context, namely monastic life, one of Foucault’s favored examples. Second, I want to give a brief sketch of the origins of college football as it relates to this prior analysis of normalizing power. I hope to show the deep family resemblance between the two, particularly the way in which college football was seen as a path to good health as well as an essential tool for the task of training young men in virtue. I then also want to speak to the ways in which these liturgies of normalization, as I will call them, continue today.

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But why liturgy? A brief answer seems necessary before I proceed further. The original use of the word liturgy—leitourgia—referred to public, ritual acts of service or largesse from Greco-Roman elite, acts that typically funded some type of public good. The literal translation of the word as “work of the people,” however, is closer to my intended use of the word than obligatory acts of public charity. Liturgy as a work of the people is a patterned ritual form of action that aims at accomplishing something within and for the people. The liturgy of anointing the sick, for example, is a ritual action aimed at accomplishing some form of healing, physical or otherwise, among the people of God. On the other hand, a liturgy of power, as I am calling it, is a patterned ritual work that accomplishes something through the myriad force relations that power, according to Foucault, is said to organize and marshal. I shall say much more about this below, but the point to be made now is that I turn to the concept of liturgy to capture the way that pre­ scribed ritual actions are deployed to shape the character, even the very being, of another person or groups of persons, through that which is nearest to us all as human beings—our bodies. Thus, my ultimate claim will be that religious studies can bear fruit for the study of college football (and sport in general) not because football is a sort of crypto­ religion but because it is governed by and through a particularly religious mode of power. I will conclude with a brief sketch of the ways in which Foucault’s work might aid in the attempt to imagine new possibilities for how collegiate athletics as a whole might be governed.

Foucault on Power Let me first clarify just what “power” is within Foucault’s larger body of work. Admittedly, this is not a simple task. Foucault went through many iterations on this topic, analyzed the notion within several vastly different contexts, and famously attached several key modifiers to the noun “power” within his first major work History of Madness to his final volumes from the History of Sexuality trilogy before his untimely death in 1984. Foucault spoke of “disciplinary power,” “normalizing power,” “power/knowledge,” and “biopower,” just to name a few of the way he conceived of power. Yet within all of these examples I think the clear “first prin­ ciple,” so to speak, of Foucault’s analysis of power might be a sort of interpretation of power as transcendent spectacle. In other words, Foucault’s interest in power was to ignore the way that power was often analyzed in a descending order, i.e. we tend to disregard the “sovereign,” the state or the law, and as we move downward to note the ways in which the ultimate seat of power is able to exercise that power at every level. Foucault instead favored an “ascending analysis of power,” whereby we begin with the ordinary ways in which power operates in and through imma­ nent relations and institutions that affect us now.6 Only after such an analysis of the ordinary effects of power can the “higher-ups” so to speak be taken into account. This passage from the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality is perhaps his most famous statement of this methodology:

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The analysis, made in terms of power, must not assume that the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law, or the overall unity of a domination are given at the outset; rather, these are only the terminal forms power takes. It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support for which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the laws, in the various social hegemonies.7 This is obviously a quite convoluted quote. The point here, I think, is that power is not often thought of as a diffuse reality but rather as one fixed point of authority. Foucault’s great help to us is to dismiss precisely this primacy of singular authority in our thinking about power. He continues: Power’s condition of possibility, or in any case the viewpoint which permits one to understand its exercise, even in its more peripheral effects, and which also makes it possible to use its mechanisms as a grid of intelligibility of the social order, must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate; it is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable.8 Hence, one of the most difficult aspects of Foucault’s work on power is that it is the upswell of manifold force relations that operate everywhere and from every­ one, never exists without an intention; but this intention or, more often, set of intentions is never the precursor of the subjective calculation of one particular subject. The damnable thing about power, according to Foucault, is that one can never pin its effects on a single person or group’s willful calculation. Power escapes this simplistic analysis. “Let us not look,” as Foucault writes, “for the headquarters that presides over [power’s] rationality.”9 This means that “resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power,” but resistance, rather, operates within the nearly inscrutable multiplicities of power to varying effects. Ultimately, Fou­ cault is trying to resist traditional analyses of power that focus on the will and actions of a sovereign person or group and move, and instead, toward a more immanent analysis of power—an account of the everydayness of power and its relational effects among us. Foucault is not, it is vital to say, even interested in proffering a theory of “what power is.” In fact, he explicitly denies, in one of his series of lectures, that this is what he is attempting:

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[T]he analysis of these mechanisms of power that we began some years ago, and are continuing with now, is not in any way a general theory of what power is. It is not a part of even the start of such a theory.10 To put it in religious terms, you might say that Foucault was on the hunt for a study of power in its “immanent” rather than “transcendent” forms. Perhaps Foucault’s most significant argument with regard to power and its his­ tory is that power underwent a dramatic and radical shift in the nascent stages of what we now call modernity. Foucault invokes one particular example to illustrate what he sees as a pivot in the shape that power takes among us—that is, the example of lepers and the plague. History of Madness has perhaps Foucault’s most eloquent description of the plight of lepers: At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western world. At the edges of the community, at town gates, large, barren, uninhabitable areas appeared, where the disease no longer reigned but its ghost still hovered. For centuries, these spaces would belong to the domain of the inhuman. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, by means of strange incantations, they conjured up a new incarnation of evil, another grinning mask of fear, home to the constantly renewed magic of purification and exclusion.11 In telling the history of our relationship to what Foucault called “unreason,” the leper was a perfect encapsulation of the logic that reigned at the beginning of the Classical age—that is, the logic of exclusion. Importantly, this logic had a religious correlate. For the other members of the city saw in the lepers’ exclusion a higher truth: “their existence still made God manifest, as they showed both his anger and his bounty.” Foucault puts this even more strongly, Hieratic witnesses of evil, their salvation is assured by their exclusion: in a strange reversal quite opposed to merit and prayers, they are saved by the hand that is not offered. The sinner who abandons the leper to his fate thereby opens the door to his salvation.12 By being excluded, the leper found an “unusual form of communion” with God in that God’s grace was with them in their sickness, even if their sickness required an exclusion from the mundane communion of their neighbors. The disappearance of leprosy, however, did not disperse this logic of exclusion. Indeed, the logic of exclusion as a salutary reality for those who are excluded from society survived, even as leprosy died off. This is why Foucault will speak of exclusionary power beyond this very specific example of leprosy and as a general “mode” by which power is exercised upon others. For the role of the one saved by their dispersal from society would shift away from the leper, since leprosy was no longer an issue, and onto a variety of other “abnormals” throughout the beginnings of modernity.13

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Yet exiling and banishing those deemed abnormal is not the sole paradigm of power that Foucault sought to analyze. Critically, in the Middle Ages, Foucault argues that a new mode of power began to emerge. Rather than being character­ ized by exclusion, exile, and public expulsion, this new mode of power was char­ acterized by its intimacy with those upon whom it acted. Modern forms of discipline might seem exclusionary to our view. After all, if you go to prison or are admitted to a mental-health facility by court order you are seemingly excluded from ordinary society. However, Foucault’s point is that these mechanisms of social control are just that, control to the point of one’s entire life coming under the control of representatives of society. Thus, the power that comes into view during the Middle Ages does not banish and give the leper no further thought; rather, this form of power aims at constructing individuals according to a predetermined norm. Foucault uses the social response to pandemics and plagues to make his point. This passage from his Security, Territory, Population highlights just how different this sort of power was: The plague regulations formulated at the end of the Middle Ages, in the six­ teenth and still in the seventeenth century, give a completely different end, and above all use completely different instruments. These plague regulations involve literally imposing a partitioning grid on the regions and town struck by plague, with regulations indicating when people can go out, how, at what times, what they must do at home, what type of food they must have, pro­ hibiting certain types of contact, requiring them to present themselves to inspectors, and to open their homes to inspectors. We can say that this is a disciplinary type of system.14 Disciplinary power, a power that includes rather than excludes, that establishes a fundamental intimacy rather than distance, a power that utilizes a multiplicity of interventions rather than a single and final one, now begins to take center stage as the predominant mode of power active within the whole economy of human relations. Security, Territory, Population is also quite significant because within it, Foucault links two modes of power that one might have been tempted to treat as distinct— namely, disciplinary power and normalizing power. The seeming division appears to follow Foucault’s two major works on power: Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality. As regards the former, you have the power just mentioned: a power hell­ bent on constant surveillance, regulation, and an infinitesimal series of interventions within a given community, however broad or vast. With the latter, you have the power of normalization: a more socially activated power meant to ostracize abnormality, subject it to a series of redhibitory mechanisms, and by doing so recreate the border between normalcy and abnormality. As the later publication of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France would make clear, however, such a distinction never really existed. “I think it is indisputable, or hardly disputable,” Foucault says, “that discipline normalizes”:

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Discipline, of course, analyzes and breaks down; it breaks down individuals, places, time, movements, actions, and operations. It breaks them down into components such that they can be seen, on the one hand, and modified on the other … That is to say, on this basis it divides the normal from the abnormal. Disciplinary normalization consists first of all in positing a model, an optimal model that is constructed in terms of a certain result, and the operation of disciplinary normalization consists in trying to get people, movements, and actions to conform to this model, the normal being precisely that which can conform to this norm, and the abnormal that which is incapable of conform­ ing to the norm. In other words, it is not the normal and the abnormal that is fundamental and primary in disciplinary normalization, it is the norm. That is, there is an originally prescriptive character of the norm and the determination and identification of the normal and the abnormal becomes possible in relation to this posited norm.15 To bring our discussion back to the shift in modes of power, let me say this in light of the passage above: The great shift that Foucault is chronicling is power’s movement away from exclusion and toward inclusion, away from the aim of excision and toward the aim of construction. Power now takes on a positive rather than negative effect. Disciplinary power and normalizing power are not about removing certain types of persons from society but about establishing a norm and then acting upon and through individuals in order to construct individuals in accordance with that norm. This form of power focuses on building something by building up particular sorts of someones, if you will. This is the shift Foucault realized through the changing shape that power took within the multiplicity of relations in which it found itself active. Now that we have a sense of what Foucault meant by power—a small sense, but a sense nonetheless—I want to link this notion of power to religion. In a way, I have done that in my title by speaking of power as in some way liturgical. Why say that power, as Foucault has defined it, has “liturgies?” From a theological per­ spective one might argue that the everydayness of our lives is characterized by liturgies, secular or sacred. We are “liturgical animals” as James K. A. Smith has said, and the various liturgies in which we involve ourselves—the ordinary ways in which we worship such realities, you might even say—fundamentally shape us as subjects.16 “We are what we love, and our love is shaped, primed, and aimed by liturgical practices that take hold of our gut and aim our heart to certain ends.”17 So if, as Foucault argues, “power is everywhere,” then we might expect it to take on a liturgical form.18 Now, a dyed-in-the-wool Foucauldian might be skeptical of this claim, but I think there are reasons from within Foucault’s own work to think of power as taking on, or even needing a liturgical form. In fact, the notion of liturgy as an embodied procedure meant to evoke, provoke, or reveal the truth of the subject is a vital through-line of Foucault’s lectures. The purpose of the section that follows will be to lay out the liturgical nature of disciplinary normalization and the religious nature of its roots in what Foucault called the “Christian pastorate.”

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Power and Its “Liturgies”: The Christian Pastorate Michael Jordan’s “flu game” is stuff of legend. Most sports fans know of Jordan’s 38-point performance in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA finals while ridden with intense flu-like symptoms, but I think it ought to be perhaps not as grandiose a legend but noteworthy all the same that Foucault had what one might call a “flu lecture.” For while himself beset by the flu, Foucault gave one of his most influ­ ential lectures on “governmentality” in February 1978 at the Collège de France. After he had recovered from the illness, he devoted several lectures—collected within Security, Territory, Population, a two-day lecture series at Stanford entitled “Omnes et Singulatim,” and another series of lectures at the Collège de France entitled On the Government of the Living—to the theme of the “Christian pastorate.” I want to examine this theme of the Christian pastorate or pastoral, not simply to put even more exposition of Foucault on the table but rather to show how it is that the particular shift in power Foucault has been describing above takes on a fundamentally religious character. This will inform deeply my contention that the primary way sport and religion share a fundamental resemblance is in operative modes of power rather than spiritual practices. If the broad movement from the Middle Ages to the nascent stages of modernity is the movement away from a form of exclusive power and toward a more inclusive (and thereby disciplinary and normalizing) power, then we might perhaps think of the Christian pastorate as the catalyst for that shift. For, strikingly, Foucault avers of the Christian pastorate that it is “the birth of an absolutely new form of power.”19 How could that be? Foucault answers that the Christian pastorate solved a very particular problem, namely, how is it that power can affect the whole group and the individual at the same time? This is why Foucault’s lectures at Stanford are entitled “Omnes et Singulatim,” all and each—meaning that the sort of innovation Foucault is suggesting is a manner of exercising power on the one and the many simultaneously. The term “pastoral” likely evokes within the reader images of itinerant shep­ herds, and for Foucault that is precisely intentional. The paradigm of the sort of power that Foucault is trying to get at in the pastoral mode of power is exemplified by the shepherd. Foucault goes so far as to claim that this combination of a gen­ eralized power with a centralizing or individualizing tendency signals the very birthplace of the modern state. Yet, what does this sort of pastoral power look like? Taking the shepherd as an example, Foucault describes it thus: The shepherd’s power is exercised not over a territory but, by definition, over a flock, and more exactly, over the flock in its movement from one place to another. The shepherd’s power is essentially exercised over a multiplicity in movement.20 Not only is such power defined by its itinerancy, it is also characteristically beneficent. Pastoral power is the power of care. It looks after the flock, it looks after the individuals of the flock, it sees to it that the sheep do not suffer, it

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goes in search of those that have strayed off course, and it treats those that are injured.21 Lastly, this power is not shown forth in dazzling displays of strength and sovereignty but rather shows itself in an endless sort of keeping. The shepherd’s power manifests itself, therefore, in a duty, a task to be undertaken … The shepherd keeps watch. He “keeps watch” in the sense, of course, of keeping an eye out for possible evils but above all in the sense of vigilance with regard to any possible misfortune.22 Of utmost importance here is that this task of keeping watch is quite lit­ erally a zero-sum game. In other words, the watch of the shepherd must individualize each member of the flock as singled out for care because the shepherd’s success depends upon not losing a single individual sheep. As Fou­ cault puts it: the shepherd counts the sheep; he counts them in the morning when he leads them to pasture, and he counts them in the evening to see that they are all there, and he looks after each of them individually. He does everything for the totality of his flock, but he does everything also for the sheep of the flock. And it is here that we come to the famous paradox of the shepherd, which takes two forms. On the one hand, the shepherd must keep his eye on all and on each, omnes et singulatim, which will be the great problem both of the techniques of power in Christian pastorship and of the, let’s say, modern techniques of power deployed in the technologies of population I have spoken about.23 Pastoral power is, then, the exercise of power aimed at working up each singular individual, and, through that constant governance of each individual, power imposes itself upon the entirety of the population. If one had any doubt on the religious nature of this power, Foucault himself makes the link explicit: The powers held by the Church are given, I mean both organized and justi­ fied, as the shepherd’s power in relation to the flock. What is sacramental power? Of baptism? It is calling the sheep into the flock. Of communion? It is giving spiritual nourishment. Penance is the power of reintegrating those sheep that have left the flock. A power of jurisdiction, it is also a power of the pastor, of the shepherd. It is this power of jurisdiction, in fact, that allows the bishop as pastor, for example, to expel from the flock those sheep that by disease or scandal are liable to contaminate the whole flock. Religious power, therefore, is pastoral power.24 In other words, it is not just that the image of the shepherd carries with it religious connotations; therefore, a power that is analogous with shepherding must be reli­ gious by default. Rather, the church structured its care and governance of its

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members through the individualizing-cum-universal mode of power. This power, however, does not remain confined solely to religious spaces but marks allegedly secular spaces as well. I shall say more about this below, but an obvious example from college football that must be noted here is that of the head coach. In big-time college football, a head coach carries the power of jurisdiction—to expel and to welcome back straying members of his “flock.” More importantly, it is the head coach who is (ideally) held responsible for the individual sins of each sheep. Head coaches have obviously gotten much better at avoiding taking this responsibility, but I would argue that when sports fans think through the misdeeds of a college athletes there is always, for them, the theoretical possibility that the coach could have prevented the misdeed if he had been more vigilant in his care for his flock. Finally, one curious feature of pastoral power that Foucault insists on, which is quite apropos to our current moment in sports, is that pastoral power remained “distinct from political power.” Indeed, this was pastoral power’s “absolutely fun­ damental and essential feature” throughout Christianity. Now, there are, of course, several historical objections to this assertion. Foucault admits that there were, in fact, “a series of conjunctions” in which the “intertwining of pastoral and political power” became a “historical reality” in the West.25 However, Foucault still asserts that despite these rare conjunctions, at least prior to the eighteenth century, pas­ toral power simply worked differently in its “form, type of functioning, and internal technology” from political power.26 What, then, are pastoral power’s main directives? What is this unique mode of power attempting to accomplish? Foucault claims that the primary goal, on the surface, is salvation however defined, although this is not the singular goal of this power move. The innovation of the Christian pastorate is to take particular reli­ gious categories—salvation, law, grace, truth—and develop a particular series of techniques by which these might be realized in the subject. The pastor’s aim is to lead his sheep to the quiet waters; to save them, ultimately, from the perils and trials of the wilderness. As the shepherd is in a uniquely accountable position with regards to the fate of his sheep, the pastor is similarly judged based upon what Foucault calls the “principle of analytic responsibility,” meaning that the fate of every single sheep, not just the majority, rests upon the pastor’s head. This jeopardy placed upon the pastor’s soul subsequently necessitates a very distinct relationship to truth, and this is one of the key aspects of this religious mode of power. In order to prevent a failure within the flock, a straying into sin, the pastor is responsible to analyze not just the numbers of the sheep but something far more onerous. As Foucault recounts, “[The pastor] will have to account for every act of each of his sheep, for everything that may happened between them, and everything good and evil they may have done at any time.”27 Not only that, but the pastor shall also bear guilt on account of each the failings of the individual members of his sheep. “He must take delight in the good of the sheep with a particular and a personal joy, and grieve or repent of the evil due to his sheep.”28 Spurred on by his pastoral task, an innovative economy of fault and merit develops. Since salvation requires not just the presence of truth within the one who submits to the guidance of the

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pastor but also requires the public display through some form of outward expression of this very truth, a series of exchanges and other ritual practices come to produce the confession of fault and the rewarding of merit.29 Pastoral power, then, helps construct what Foucault called “regimes of truth,” that is, social institutions concerned with drawing out, analyzing, and ritualizing the out­ ward expression of the hidden truth of the subject, their secret faults and their humble merits. As a result, the Christian pastorate is and must be liturgical. For its great inno­ vation is not in centralizing salvation or merit or fault, for the final say on salvation lies with God, not the pastor. Rather, the great innovation of the Christian pastorate is to be found in the mode of power or the series of techniques by which it causing the subject to produce obedience. Allow me one final quote from Foucault here: So, the Christian pastorate is not fundamentally or essentially characterized by the relationship to salvation, to the law, or to the truth. The Christian pasto­ rate is rather, a form of power that, taking the problem of salvation in its general set of themes, inserts into this circulation, transfer, and reversal of merits and this is its fundamental point. Similarly, with regard to the law, Christianity, the Christian pastorate, is not simply the instrument of the acceptance or generalization of the law, but rather, through an oblique rela­ tionship to the law as it were, it establishes a kind of exhaustive, total, and permanent relationship of individual obedience… . And finally, if Christianity, the Christian pastor, teaches the truth, if he forces men, the sheep, to accept a certain truth, the Christian pastorate is also absolutely innovative in establishing a structure, a technique of, at once, power, investigation, self-examination, and the examination of others, by which a certain secret inner truth of the hidden soul, becomes the element through which the pastor’s power is exer­ cised, by which obedience is practiced, by which the relationship of complete obedience is assured, and through which, precisely, the economy of merits and faults passes.30 In short, the unique thing about the Christian pastorate was not its particular doctrinal themes but, instead, the form that it took, its scope, and the end toward which it oriented itself—the production of obedience through outward displays of the truth. Let me turn now to the ways in which precisely this sort of religious power has shaped college football.

The History of the Present of College Football I realize that I have spoken very little of football thus far, and I have perhaps tested the reader’s patience in this regard. So, let me get to the point. Foucault famously ended the opening section of Discipline and Punish with the following passage: I would like to write the history of this prison, with all the political investments of the body that it gathers together in its closed architecture. Why? Simply because I

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am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one means writing the history of the present.31 What would it mean to tell the “history of the present” of college football, parti­ cularly in light of the explication of a Foucauldian notion of power we have just traversed? I want to focus my attention on three aspects of college football that I think demonstrate its deep connection to Foucault’s account of power and the Christian pastorate that I have just elaborated. There is here no transition, as in Foucault’s genealogy of power, from a premodern form of exclusionary power to a modern form of inclusionary power. There was no premodern form of collegiate athletics that might be put forward as a time innocent of disciplinary normalization. Instead, we begin searching for the Christian pastorate within an institution that bills itself as secular, and my contention is that we find this religious mode of power present in the first moments of college football’s existence. Ultimately, college football provokes the religious question by showing forth religious modes of power in its seemingly innocuous and irreligious facets. Hence, I first want to elucidate what I think is the “norm” of the normalizing power at the root of the entire enterprise of college football, which means ana­ lyzing some of the earliest discourses about what football was for in the broadest sense. What, in other words, did people think football was trying to make out of the young men who played it? Second, I want to examine contemporary practices of disciplinary power within the modern game of college football—practices that I see as the mechanisms of power’s imposition onto the bodies of college athletes. I want to highlight three practices, though there are plenty more, that are particu­ larly apropos: the nutritional regimen of athletes, the unnecessary celebration rule, and the mandatory statements of noncompliance. Finally, I want to bring in our analysis on the Christian pastorate and show the ways that the role of coaches and athletes mirror the elements of the Christian pastorate, particularly its concern with liturgies that produce the truth of the subject. So, as before, we will move to the most general elements of power to the specific norm those practices are aimed at producing and finally to the pastoral nature of the work of that very production. First, to college football’s first storytellers. College football began as an odd amalgam of what we now know as soccer and rugby. Depending on the two schools that were competing, the game might look more like soccer than rugby and vice versa. The original competitors within the sport often favored rules changes that brought the sport more in line with the style of play they were best at—hence, why some figures often resisted reforms to remove “mass formation” play from the game on account of its brutality. What concerns me in the earliest moments of football, however, is less the rule reforms that turned the game into the oddly American spectacle we now enjoy and more so the story that people came to tell about college football. Crises brought on by the brutality of the game, forced upon the earliest proponents of the college football the question: What is football for? My contention is that, wrapped within that answer, we find evidence of

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a norm toward which normalizing power was aimed to produce normalized bodies through disciplinary mechanisms. Collegiate athletics bears a telling historical semblance with the roots of Christian monasticism. From their inception in the early nineteenth century, sporting con­ tests taking place on college campus were often an instance of spirited rebellion against a paternalistic and hierarchical institution. The first games were student-led attempts to establish some form of leisure that was a clear break from the rule of the collegium to which they were subject as students.32 This meant that most college sports began as something basically private, having no effect whatsoever on the broader culture. They were, seemingly, communal activities, but ones that had no intention of being public-facing, so to speak. This was not to last, obviously, as the surrounding communities latched on to these leisurely pursuits as an entertaining spectacle and a means of showing pride in a communal identity. With this increase in popularity, the home institutions gradually reclaimed control of these athletic pursuits from the students and did so as an attempt to rein in their excesses and bring them to heel under a more stable form of governance.33 Early monasticism, Foucault notes, had a similar historical trajectory. The foun­ dation of the earliest monasteries was not on account of the desire to retreat from a sinful world and a church prone to excess and syncretism. Instead, the need for a rule was to combat an “untrammeled intensification of ascetic practices current at the end of the third and start of the fourth century.” In other words, the problem was not that the church lacked sufficient asceticism within it, rather the forms that were burgeoning were out of control and prone to extravagance. A wild intensification taking the form of an individual asceticism with no rule, of a geographical vagrancy, but also an uncontrolled speculative vagrancy and wandering accompanied by a blossoming of exploits, visions, extraordinary ascesis, miracles, and rivalries and jousts in ascetic rigor as well as in thauma­ turgic marvels. This multifarious field of ascetic practices had to be “taken in hand, regularized, and brought back into the ecclesiastical institution in general and the dogmatic system that was being constructed at this time through successive expurgations of heresies.”34 Walter Camp’s earliest writings bear out this seemingly counterintuitive concern. As Michael Oriard tells it, “[t]he most pressing initial need, according to Camp, was simply for order.”35 Yet, the kind of order that Camp envisioned was not value-neutral.36 Indeed, for Camp the goal of the sport soon became to stake out its difference between what he saw as the chaotic and disordered play of European rugby. So the progress to order through meticulous and even “technocratic” management was also the path to “perfection of play” and a sense of uniquely “American achievement.” It should come as no surprise, then, that Camp’s ideal for order was “the rationalized, bureaucratic, specialized corporate work force,” complete with a hierarchical structure, organized by skill and executive ability.37 Consider this passage from one of his later essays:

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But where did the coach come from and why did he come? He was devel­ oped by the exigencies of the case, and he came because team play began to take the place of ineffective individual effort. The American loves to plan. It is that trait that has been at the base of his talents for organization. As soon as the American took up Rugby foot-ball he was dissatisfied because the ball would pop out of the scrimmage at random. It was too much luck and chance as to where or when it came out, and what man favored by Dame Fortune would get it. So he developed a scrimmage of his own, a center-rusher, or snap-back, a quarter-back, and soon a system of signals. One could no more prevent the American college youth from thus advancing than he could stop their elders with their more important and gigantic enterprises. But all these things led to team play, at the sacrifice, perhaps, of individual brilliancy, but with far greater effectiveness of the eleven men in what for them was the principal affair of the moment—the securing of goals and touch-downs.38 Such was one key part of the original ideal to which football as an enterprise was oriented—the creation of a sense of order through structured hierarchy, centered around a managerial elite in control of a compliant group of subordinates. Football acted as a shaping of bodies through disciplinary practices to fill these roles. Yet this disdain for “individual brilliance” on Camp’s part could not hold as the modus operandi for the game that Camp created. In an ironic twist of fate, the highly ordered game that Camp so revered was too boring for spectators to enjoy. Desire for the chance to see individual achievement in more of an “open play” format soon came to change the game in significant ways. While one might be tempted to think that this resistance to a form of play that was more managerial and techno­ cratic in form would amount to a resistance to normalization, the opposite turned out to be the case. The turn to an open game in search of individual genius only strengthened the pull toward an imagined norm and the disciplinary practices that one could use to construct that norm. Once the transition to an open game was complete, the norm of collegiate ath­ letics became a complex amalgam of at least three types. First was the technocratic ideal of a disciplined teammate, preparing to contribute to the American workforce. Second was the virtuous amateur, who eschewed the compensation of professional­ ism and played the game according to a gentlemen’s code. Finally, and perhaps present in both of the prior types, was a vision of the amateur athlete as the paragon of manliness. Athletes that played college football were held to the standards of all of these types simultaneously, as practices of disciplinary normalization sought to pro­ duce truth-acts in keeping with each type, despite their contradictions. The two mechanisms that attempted to produce these sorts of ideals within the bodies of college footballers were the physical regimens set forth by their now professional coaches—most of whom were from the coaching tree of Walter Camp, though not all—and the narrative of the daily presses, which shaped the cultural narrative around college football for the majority of the literate country. There are examples in the daily presses of each type. Consider this entry from the

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New York Herald on the efforts of Frank Butterworth in Yale’s victory over Harvard in 1893: This man attempted no play independent of his team. He did not seek the applause of the galleries nor did he try to distinguish himself by individual efforts of a spectacular nature. He simply gave himself up to his part in the machine of which he was the wheel, but in performing this part he won the game. He was as the driving wheel to a great engine.39 As to the second type, the virtuous amateur, the case of Caspar Whitney’s writings in Outing are of particular note. In his 1893 column “Amateur Sport,” we find the following complaint about a controversy over eligibility requirements: It is shameful that all this political claptrap and legislation should be tolerated. We had rather see football forbidden by the university faculties than pained by the exhibition of our college boys, sons of gentlemen, resorting to the intrigues of unprincipled professionals.40 I emphasize the phrase “sons of gentlemen” because for Whitney this was meant quite literally. The purpose of amateur sport was to instantiate the values of the ruling class and as such, for Whitney, “[t]here are no degrees of amateurism.” Hence, despite his admiration for Camp’s technocratic approach to football, Whitney polemicized the rise of professionalism in amateur sport and often pre­ dicted the imminent demise of amateur sports should not dramatic reforms be undertaken. Whitney thus argued for an embrace of football as play in keeping with the emphasis in traditional amateurism on disinterestedness to the outcome of the game or any rewards brought on by winning. Such compensation was, according to Whitney, “as disgraceful to the honor of gentlemen as it is destructive to the health—even the life—of amateur sport.”41 Finally, almost as an aside, we also see in Whitney one of the first advocates for a type of pastoral position for the head coach. Despite his deep enmity toward the idea of paid coaches, Whitney did at one point ask the following: “Why does not Yale make Walter Camp alone responsible for the ethics of its teams?”42 Within the ideal of the amateur, then, there is already emerging, at the very same time, the ideal of the Coach as shepherd of the flock, as the one who is morally responsible for the purity of each individual under his charge. Finally, the third type—manliness—is extensively opined upon within the daily presses in the earliest days of college football. There was no adjective so often associated with the purpose of football as was “manly,” and if there is a provisional answer for the question, “What is football for?” it would surely be to inculcate manliness. I find one particular example to be of particular note here—that is, the death of Richard Von Gammon and his mother’s subsequent appeal to the gov­ ernor of Georgia to veto a bill that would have banned the playing of football in the state of Georgia. Von Gammon was killed in a game versus the University of

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Virginia on Halloween, 1897. The Georgia legislature immediately passed a bill banning the play of football in the state of Georgia, but before the governor could sign the bill, he received a letter from Von Gammon’s mother that contained the following line: His love for his college and his interest in all manly sports, without which he deemed the highest type of manhood impossible, is well known by his class­ mates and friends, and it would be inexpressibly sad to have the cause he held so dear injured by his sacrifice.43 The daily presses filled out this vision of manhood in the coming years. Football’s brutality was acknowledged, but such roughness was good because “Christian manliness demands stern virtues.”44 Indeed, it is important to point out here that while the daily presses were rarely explicitly racist, the manliness in question and meant to be proved on the gridiron was always the manliness of white Europeans. Ultimately, football as a testing ground for true manliness became one of the principal cultural meanings of football and such a fusion among corporate submission, disin­ terested amateurism, and Christian manliness has remained a predominant feature of the game up to its current form.45 I must leap over many significant moments in the history of college football. I do so in order to turn briefly to contemporary college football and the disciplinary practices inherent to the game as we know it today. Student athletes at “big-time” institutions often live in a paradoxical position with regards to surveillance. Student athletes are highly surveilled and analyzed during required athletic practices but not always so highly surveilled when it comes to their class attendance. That is, they are not so highly surveilled until their grades dip near a mark that would jeopardize their academic eligibility requirements, in which case, the surveillance ramps up considerably. Hence, while the levels are not always consistent, I think the point of surveillance of student athletes strikes me as an attempt to inculcate and maintain a form of health or truth. This means that it is also a surveillance geared toward staving off the sort of “degeneracy” and “abnormality” through processes of dis­ ciplinary normalization. The degeneracy to be avoided is both a physical and a spiritual degeneracy. Thus, surveillance of student athletes focuses on physical practices on the one hand—their workout routines, nutritional regimen, and bio­ metric data recorded during practices—while, on the other hand, such surveillance is also geared toward displays of virtue—class attendance, volunteer activities, and participation in nonmandatory religious service.46 What comes to be produced by these contemporary disciplinary practices is an amalgam of the initial conflict between ideals in the nascent stages of college football—the technocratic and the heroic. The college athlete is both the honer of a “craft” preparing for the abrogation of individual will in their role as worker as well as the virtuous amateur who seeks not a salary but the game for the game’s sake. The athlete is not just an athlete but a student-athlete, an amateur seeking an education and the exercise of virtue, first and foremost, and only after that a mode

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of compensation based on his individual athletic prowess. The main point, how­ ever, is that these positive results are evinced by public displays of truth. This is why the actions of student athletes provoke such fervent controversy in the world of “sports-talk” because what is at stake in the public actions of amateur athletes is the success of the system as a whole.47 A recent example of this is Chubba Hubbard issuing an apology for (rightly) criticizing his head coach, Mike Gundy, for sup­ porting the far-right news outlet, One America News Network, despite never receiving a personal apology from Gundy. The public action of amateur athletes is meant as a test, an ordeal meant to show forth the results of this complicated liturgy of normalization. On the field and in the press conference, athletes are being asked to show the truth of themselves, to display the truth of their virtue through a public act of truth-telling, and if such truth-telling fails or is doubted, then some form of conflict is sure to follow. This desire for truth acts also makes sense of the NCAA’s expectation that the athletic institutions themselves issue what are called voluntary declarations of non­ compliance. In essence, the NCAA expects that athletic departments will self-report violations of NCAA rules to the NCAA, with no guarantee that such self-disclosure will result in a more lenient punishment. This strikes me as a clear example of a public-facing truth act aimed at rooting out “abnormality” within institutions which are committed to instantiating states of normalcy. One odd example is from the University of Oklahoma in 2013. In their self-report of violations to the NCAA, many sportswriters seized on an odd entry for what was termed “pasta in excess of the permissible amount allowed.”48 Apparently, at a graduation banquet, three stu­ dent athletes were served pasta beyond the “permissible amount allowed” and were required, in order to be reinstated to their respective teams, to donate the value of the excessive servings—a whopping $3.83—to a charity of their choice. Students were then given further training on the precise nature of the NCAA rules with regards to pasta consumption and sent along their way. While the idea that $3.83 worth of pasta is a pernicious moral incursion from the vile ideology of profession­ alism is patently ridiculous, the impulse behind the need to resolve this violation can now be explained. The point is not the following of the rules but producing the sorts of people who tell the truth about the rules. The point is not the resolution of the violation but the reporting of the violation as a truth act toward the NCAA The wandering astray of just one single sheep—or in this case, three sheep wandering toward a tower of linguine—jeopardizes the salvation of the shepherd. Thus, even for something as odd and, frankly, petty as pasta in excess of the permissible amount, disciplinary normalization requires that the truth be set forth in a visible way. One essential contention of Foucault’s that I must note here is the idea that normalizing power is inherently racialized. Normalizing power breeds what Fou­ cault called the “racism against the abnormal.”49 The final thing to argue with regards to contemporary practices of normalization in college football is that such normalization is also racialized. The ideal that the positive technologies of power at work in amateur athletics are attempting to produce is based in whiteness. The most prominent example of this racialization of the norm, I would argue, is the

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“excessive celebration” penalty. The NCAA version of this penalty punishes actions that range from taunting an opponent to bowing at the waist after a good play.50 Such a penalty, I have argued elsewhere, is a fitting example of the positive rather than negative sort of power that disciplinary normalization utilizes.51 The excessive celebration penalty is not an attempt to stop a certain kind of behavior but to inculcate and produce behaviors more in keeping with the norm—where the abnormal is here associated with blackness and the norm associated with whiteness. That disposition, at least it seems to me, is that of the disinterested amateur who needs not celebrate individual athletic accom­ plishment but instead either directs all praise to his teammates or shows his class by treating an instance of individual achievement as nothing all that special. The celebration penalty is meant to produce players who, as the colloquialism goes, “act like they’ve been there before.” Here, again, however, the rule is aimed at staving off a sort of abnormality or degeneracy—in this case, the vice of pride or unsportsmanlike conduct. Yet normalizing power reveals that its vision of abnormality is racialized by policing the celebration of Black athletes as fundamentally more “arrogant” or “unsportsmanlike” than the celebrations of white athletes. In fact, in a recent study it was shown that this is not a bug of the language of the rule but is rather a feature of even ordinary fans. A group of seventy-four MBA students were given scenarios to read in which Black athletes and white athletes were said to have scored and then either celebrated or did not. Participants were then asked questions regarding compensation, i.e. whether the player who scored should receive a bonus for the play, and questions regarding arrogance, i.e. whether the celebration after the touchdown was evidence of the player’s arrogance or not. Researchers found the following: Study 1 demonstrated that Black football players who behaved in an arrogant manner were punished more than Black football players who behaved in a humbler manner. However, there was no difference in penalty between arro­ gant and humble White players. Furthermore, the magnitude of penalty against Black players was significantly correlated with the degree to which they were perceived as arrogant.52 Our perceived conception of humility, in other words, is already skewed toward whiteness, and our preconceived notion of blackness is already skewed toward arrogance. So while a pursuit of instantiating the norm of humility might be a worthwhile goal, our preconceived notion of the ideal of humility will always be prone to visions of whiteness. The difficulty, therefore, is finding another way of imagining the governance of amateur athletics, a way of governance perhaps beyond the norm of the amateur. What could this vision of a new present for college football look like and what could religion have to contribute to such a conversation? Let me, in conclusion, turn briefly to these questions.

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Conclusion: The Art of Voluntary Inservitude There is a powerful sort of pessimism often associated with Foucault’s analysis of power. If power is everywhere, one might argue, then there is no escape from processes of disciplinary normalization. If, as I mentioned above, resistance never occupies a place exterior to power, then what is the point of resistance? We find ourselves perhaps remarking, as the Frankfurt School once did, that “Every spiritual resistance it encounters serves merely to increase its strength.”53 Or we might take up more of a Marxist perspective which may provide more of a practical solution to power’s reach within collegiate athletics. I am not, I must ironically confess, an expert on Karl Marx. His work has produced several excellent articles on collegiate athletics from Nathan Kalman-Lamb, but beyond directing the reader toward Kalman-Lamb’s work I can offer little more in that direction.54 Yet perhaps there is more to Foucault’s project than a doom-and-gloom resigna­ tion to the inevitability of power’s grip on us. Indeed, in a recent essay on Foucault and freedom, Saul Newman notes that freedom is actually a principal preoccupation of Foucault’s and not merely out of Foucault’s cynicism toward its possibility. Fou­ cault’s broader project seems to be building toward finding a place for freedom within and against the seemingly omnipotent confines of power. Even more importantly, however, Newman argues that, for Foucault, freedom is the original first principle. It is not, in other words, that we need to accomplish some great revolutionary victory in order to emancipate ourselves from power. Instead, it is the first fact about us as human beings that we are free. Or freedom is foundational rather than derivative. We seem habitually to surrender that freedom to power and so the preoccupation of Newman is to highlight just how it would be that we might practice the “art of voluntary inservitude.” Just as Foucault wished to practice the “art of the self,” how might we come to practice the art of inservitude to the gov­ erning mechanisms that push us toward a predetermined norm? In football terms, how might we come to imagine a mode of governance of college athletes that is free, to as large an extent as possible, from the processes of normalization? First, Newman notes that for Foucault critique is the beginning of this sort of involuntary servitude. He notes this passage from an essay on Immanuel Kant: If governmentalization is really this movement concerned with subjugating individuals in the very reality of social practice, by mechanisms of power that appeal to a truth, I will say that critique is the movement through which the subject gives itself the right to question truth concerning its power effects and to question power about its discourses of truth. Critique will be the art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility.55 Hence, while it might sound a bit self-serving for a scholar committed to produ­ cing a genealogical account of college football to, say, one of the first ways of imagining new means of governance is continuing to tell the story of the con­ tingencies of amateurism. The point is to show through genealogy that the forms

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of governance that are active in our current moment have only earned their authority through a sedimentary accumulation of a faux timelessness. Yet once their histories are told, and the contingencies of history that led to their coming into power are laid bare, the possibility of indocility to their social effects becomes a real possibility. Religion scholars, I want to say, are in a particularly good position to make just this critique, since they can expose not only the political machinations or cultural dynamics that make amateurism possible but also the religious condi­ tions of amateurism’s possibility. This is, I think, one key task that lays before scholars interested in the religion-sport connection. The practical implications of Newman’s argument, however, are quite vast. He argues that the above-cited passage reveals the “ontological primacy of freedom” for Foucault. “Rather than power being the secret of freedom, as Foucault has so often been interpreted as saying, freedom is the secret of power.”56 This means that two “star­ tling revelation[s]” are both true: first, that “every system of power/knowledge depends on our will, our acceptance,” and that, consequently, “the reversal of this system is equally a matter of will, of decision, of free volition.”57 The way in which a new form of governance for amateur athletics emerges is that we decide that it shall. But, of course, simply stating this is quite easy. Actually, fostering such a decision is far more complex. I am not in a position to advocate for any particular decision in this regard, but I do think that one role that scholars of religion and sport ought to take up in the days to come is one who teaches athletes the nature of the prior decision to submit. In so doing, we offer up the possibility that the reimagining of amateur governance might come not from faculty but from the athletes themselves. For, regardless of what faculty might desire for good or ill with regard to collegiate athletics, the desire no longer to be governed in such a way, the desire to no longer be unreflectively docile, must come from the athletes themselves. In conclusion, the reader will note I have not considered any significant critiques of Foucault’s project or of his specific arguments on religion. I leave the task of modifying this argument via engagement with such critiques to a scholar of greater merit (and with a greater remaining word count!) than I. Instead, I want to return to Walter Camp. In Walter Camp’s Book of College Sports, there is a curious and uncharacteristic account from Camp of the final plays of the Princeton–Yale game of 1885. Somewhat surprisingly, given his connection to Yale, Camp served as the game’s sole referee that day, which is surely part of why the game left such an impression upon him. Camp, as detailed above, the advocate always of team and control, devoted considerable space within his Book of College Sports to praising a single moment of physical brilliance by an individual player. Yale led Princeton in the late stages of the game and had two options for securing their lead. They could either continue to run the ball, which, provided they didn’t fail to make the required five yards within three downs, would make it impossible for Princeton to score before time ran out. Or, they could kick the ball downfield in the hopes that Princeton would fumble the ensuing return, giving Yale the last score that they needed to put the game away. Yale’s captain, Peters, surprisingly elected to kick, a decision that Camp calls “generous” since Yale was not, at least according to

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Camp, down to their third and final down. Still, the kicked ball was “perfect” according to Camp and, sure enough, the Princeton man that attempted a catch had the ball bounce off of his chest—just the fumble Yale had wanted to cause. Yet, to everyone’s surprise, a young Princetonian named Lamar rushed toward the bouncing ball and by some struck of luck had the ball land in his hands off the bounce, right in his stride. The Yale team, having now over-pursued the kick, were dumbfounded to see Lamar slip past the rushers and up the field into open space. Lamar is then met by two Yale defenders who have the proper positioning to tackle Lamar and end the return, but Lamar, as Camp tells it, “made a swerve to the right, and was by them like lightning before either of them could recover.”58 The only man who can catch Lamar now is Peters, with only one hope to save the upset victory for Yale. Camp describes the drama of the final pursuit thus: Then began the race for victory … Peters, a strong, untiring, thoroughly trained runner, was but a few yards behind [Lamar] and in addition to this he was the captain of a team which but a moment before had been sure of vic­ tory. How he ran! But Lamar—did he not too know full well what the beat of those footsteps behind him meant! The white five-yard lines flew under his feet; past the broad twenty-five-yard line he goes, still with three or four yards to spare. Now he throws his head back with the familiar motion of the sprinter who is almost to the tape, and who will run his heart out in the last few strides, and, almost before one can breathe, he is over the white goal-line panting on the ground, with the ball under him, a touch-down made, from which a goal was kicked, and the day saved for Princeton. Poor Lamar! He was drowned a few years after graduation, but no name will be better remembered among the foot-ball players of that day than will his.59 Even Camp, as committed as he was to a model of college football molded to a sort of paternalistic control, could not escape the inbreaking of something within the very sport he helped create—the sheer vivacity of embodied life, the freedom song of the body in motion. If college football is structured around the creation of docile bodies, if such is its modus operandi, then we should also expect, as readers of Foucault, to see such inbreakings of the remainder, of freedom, of that voluntary inservitude that precedes power’s impositions. This must be, for those of us who attempt to theorize college sports, the first truth of these sports—not the docility imposed by disciplinary normalization. To apply a Nietzschean framework, there is Dionysian as well as Apollonian energy at the root of this game that so many love—both an energy of ordering and an energy of the undoing of any and all order. I do not wish to leave the reader with the notion that it will take a removal of religion or religiosity from the mode of governance within collegiate athletics to make this sort of freedom more possible or frequent. I wonder instead if there is not something to the notion that both the disciplinary mechanisms meant to mold athletes toward the norm and the ebullient burst of Dionysian, chaotic energy described above by Camp are not both fundamentally religious. From a Christian

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perspective, it is perhaps a fundamental good to seek order, virtue, and humility through submission and mortification of sinful desire. But now, Scripture tells us, is the time of the Spirit, and the Spirit blows where it wills (John 3:8). In short, the work of religious scholars interested in intervening in the sport/religion relation­ ship, will mirror, in many ways, the use of Foucault’s oeuvre for religious studies— that is, as a cataloger of the conditions for the possibility of our present within the religious modes of power that seek ever to present their formations or structures as eternal verities. Foucault’s “care of the self,” an art of self-making inherent in the vision of freedom I mentioned above, shows that religious askesis or self-discipline is not at all inimical to this form of freedom and, in fact, might require it.60 Thus, the role of religious scholars, particularly those of us who are Christians ourselves and have some “skin in the game,” must be to tell the stories of, as I said earlier, the religious conditions that make amateurism possible. Beyond that, scholars, particularly theologians, also must point to ways in which the Christian vision of order and chaos, that odd mean between Calvary and Pentecost, offers to us an ecstatic vision of human freedom that is often incompatible with the mode of pastoral governance taken up by the NCAA, its member athletic departments, and their head football coaches. The study of collegiate athletics would thereby benefit from a critique of its religious foundations, as well as a reimagining of its future form from a religious perspective.

Notes 1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (London: Blackwell, 2009), 67. 2 Eric Bain-Selbo, Game Day and God: Football, Faith, and Politics in the American South (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2012). 3 These examples are drawn from self-reports of NCAA violations from the University of Oklahoma and the University of South Carolina. 4 Saul Newman, “Critique Will Be the Art of Voluntary Inservitude: Foucault, La Boetie, and the Problem of Freedom,” in Sophie Fuggle, Yari Lanci, and Martina Tazzioli (eds), Foucault and the History of Our Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 5 I use “genealogy” here instead of something as general as “history” to signal a specific research task that I think this essay attempts to begin. Indeed, a Foucauldian treatment of college football has thus far been lacking in the fields of sport history, the philosophy of sport, and religious studies. There are several major treatments of college football from a traditional historical perspective, with John Sayle Watterson’s College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy and Robert Smith’s Sports and Freedom being two of the exemplary works in the field. These are valuable works of history, but, in my estimation, there exists a need for a specifically genealogical account of the sports origins from a Fou­ cauldian perspective. I try to show the preliminary reasons for why such an account would benefit sports history, the philosophy of sport, and religious studies in the pages to follow. Such, however, are the reasons that I will not be using something as broad as “history” in what follows because I mean a specific kind of historical treatment of the sport. For more on “genealogy” in the broadest sense of its philosophical meaning, see Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2013). 6 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 30.

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7 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), 94.

8 Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. I, 94.

9 Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. I, 95.

10 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2009), 1. 11 Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jean Khalfa and Jonathan Murphy (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 3. 12 Foucault, History of Madness, 6. 13 Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–75, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003). 14 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 10. 15 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 55–56. 16 James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2009), 34. 17 Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 40. 18 Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. I, 95. 19 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 183. 20 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 125. 21 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 127. 22 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 127. 23 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 128. 24 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 153. 25 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 154. It is unfortunate that Foucault does not say with much specificity what historical instances prior to the eighteenth century are examples of a conjunction between pastoral and political power. 26 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 154. 27 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 170. 28 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 170. 29 As a Protestant myself, I should note that the idea of ritual confession and public pro­ fession under the direction of a pastoral figure might seem foreign to most of us who have not yet swum the Tiber. Part of Foucault’s framing here has to do with the fact that the text he is analyzing at this point in Security, Territory, Population are from the early Church Fathers, before the fight over just how pastors were involved in salvation at all brought on by the Reformation. Still, I want to point out that even the con­ temporary evangelical vision of salvation as “accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior” involves an interior embrace of the truth followed by a semi-ritualized public manifestation of that inward truth—usually in the form of believer’s baptism and being presented before the congregation for membership. So, Foucault’s description of salva­ tion here is not as foreign to Protestantism as one might expect. 30 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 183. 31 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 31. 32 Robert A. Smith, Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 22. 33 See Smith, Sports and Freedom, 191–208, for the history of this flailing and often entirely ineffective reclamation of control by faculty. One of Smith’s principal insights that should not be missed here, however, is that collegiate sport, including football, arrived as an always already commercialized game. Ticket sales actually give an apropos example of flailing faculty control over college sports. In 1870, the Harvard faculty banned the practice of collecting money from spectators at the gate on campus, which surely means that money was being collected at college football games prior to that time. The Har­ vard students, ever an innovative bunch, were so determined to collect this money, however, that they moved their baseball games into Boston and kept right on charging fans at the gate. See Smith, Sports and Freedom, 169.

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34 Michel Foucault, On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–80, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2016), 292. 35 Michael Oriard, Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 41. 36 A similar read of Camp, among others, can be found in Allen Guttmann, From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 117–162. 37 Oriard, Reading Football, 41. 38 Walter Camp, The Book of Football (New York: The Century Co., 1910), 333–334. 39 As quoted in Oriard, Reading Football, 178. 40 Oriard, Reading Football, 154. 41 Oriard, Reading Football, 158. 42 Oriard, Reading Football, 156. 43 Fiza Pirani, “118 Years Ago UGA Football Almost Died,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 29, 2015. 44 Oriard, Reading Football, 207. 45 See Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); Tony Ladd and James A. Mathisen, Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of American Sport (Ada, Mich.: Baker Books, 1999). 46 For more on these nonmandatory religious services that are often still monitored in an unof­ ficial capacity, see Freedom from Religion Foundation, “Pray to Play: Christian Coaches and Chaplains Are Converting Football Fields into Mission Fields,” FFRF Report (2015). 47 I should note here that I do not think the solution is simply getting rid of all “sports­ talk.” As I have argued elsewhere, there seems to be something about the human con­ dition as such that draws us toward discourses of truth and blame in analyzing sporting outcomes. We need, rather, to find an ethical way of speaking and thinking about the results of games. See Jason M. Smith, “Phenomenology in the Bleachers: Heidegger and the Truth of Sport,” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 46 (1) (February 2019): 82–97. 48 Ryan Aber, “OU Releases List of Self-reported NCAA Violations,” Oklahoman, February 18, 2014. 49 Foucault, Abnormal, 316. 50 The full list of “unsportsmanlike acts” reads: (a) Pointing the finger(s), hand(s), arm(s) or ball at an opponent, or imitating the slashing of the throat. (b) Taunting, baiting or ridiculing an opponent verbally. (c) Inciting an opponent or spectators in any other way, such as simulating the firing of a weapon or placing a hand by the ear to request recognition. (d) Any delayed, excessive, prolonged or choreographed act by which a player (or players) attempts to focus attention upon himself (or themselves). (e) An unopposed ball carrier obviously altering stride as he approaches the opponent’s goal line or diving into the end zone. (f) A player removing his helmet after the ball is dead and before he is in the team area (Exceptions: Team, media or injury timeouts; equipment adjustment; through play; between periods; and during a measure­ ment for a first down). (g) Punching one’s own chest or crossing one’s arms in front of the chest while standing over a prone player. (h) Going into the stands to interact with spectators, or bowing at the waist after a good play. (i) Intentionally removing the helmet while the ball is alive. (j) Dead-ball contact fouls such as pushing, shoving, striking, etc. that occur clearly after the ball is dead and that are not part of the game action. (k) After the ball is dead, using forcible contact to push or pull an opponent off the pile. See National Collegiate Athletic Association, 2020 NCAA Football Rules and Interpretations, FR 97–98 I should also note that the NFL has recently loosened their penalties for excessive celebration, allowing choreographed celebrations provided they are done as a group, not individually. 51 Jason M. Smith, “The Abnormal Amateur: Or Why Tim Tebow Never Got Flagged for Excessive Celebration,” The Other Journal, 26 (June 2016).

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52 Erika V Hall and Robert W. Livingston, “The Hubris Penalty: Biased Responses to ‘Celebration’ Displays of Black Football Players,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48 (4) (2012): 901. 53 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1982), 6. 54 See Nathan Kalman-Lamb, “Athletic Labor and Social Reproduction,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 43 (2019): 515–530; and Nathan Kalman-Lamb, “Imagined Commu­ nities of Fandom: Sport, Spectatorship, Meaning and Alienation in Late Capitalism,” Sport in Society, 24 (6): 922–936. 55 Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?” in James Schmidt (ed.), What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1996), 386. 56 Newman, “Art of Voluntary Inservitude,” 63. 57 Newman, “Art of Voluntary Inservitude,” 63. 58 Walter Camp, Walter Camp’s Book of College Sports (New York: The Century Co., 1893), 146. 59 Camp, Book of College Sports, 146. 60 See, for just one example, Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. III: The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1988).

8 “BE MORE HUMAN” CrossFit, Reebok, and Sporting Consumerism Cody Musselman

The sun is high in the bright blue sky and crowds of people are streaming into the Alliant Energy Center in Madison, Wisconsin, by the time I arrive midmorning for the first day of the 2018 CrossFit Games. I stop at the entrance to gain my bear­ ings. The sprawling compound comprises four competition locations, including North Park, an outdoor football field equipped with rigging for specialty exercises such as rope climbs and ring muscle-ups; the Age Group Pavilion, where teenagers and “masters” (athletes older than thirty-five) compete; the battleground obstacle course sponsored by the US Marine Corps; and the Coliseum, an indoor arena where athletes compete under stadium lighting to a deafening roar from the crowd. I rush to North Park to watch the CrossFit Total, an event where elite athletes push their strength to its limit, moving weight on a barbell in a back squat, a shoulder press, and a deadlift. The event is exhilarating, and the crowd’s hopes and disappointments are audible as they cheer on the defending champion for the women’s division, Tia-Clair Toomey, who at 50 4 and 128 pounds is initially struggling to stand under the weight of a 325-pound loaded barbell. When she prevails, spectators chant her name and whoop in glee at her success. As the event comes to an end, the crowd empties out of the bleacher seats and into the fairgrounds. There is plenty for spectators to do during a lull in competi­ tion over the four-day festival of fitness. The beer garden fills up, and lines begin to form at concession stands that sell “Caveman Coffee” and paleo-diet-friendly açai fruit bowls. People start to populate vendor booths that sell grip tape for gymnastic movements, self-massage tools for muscle recovery, and weighted vests to amplify the intensity of workouts. Exiting North Park, I find myself in a vendor village tailored to CrossFit’s health-conscious crowd. The people flooding past me are indistinguishable from the athletes who, moments ago, were competing on the pitch. Everywhere I look I see visibly muscular men and women who are mostly white. In the summer heat, the informal dress code appears to be wearing as little DOI: 10.4324/9781003014621-12

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as possible. I am awash in a sea of skin and muscle. Men wear shorts and tank tops or no shirts at all. Women wear sports bras and tight-fitting spandex booty-shorts. Everyone is wearing sneakers and looks like they could work out at a moment’s notice. I suddenly feel out of place in my jean shorts, T-shirt, and baseball cap. I’m here as an ethnographer, but I look like a camp counselor who has stumbled onto the proving grounds for “the ultimate test in fitness.”1 I stick out and begin to crave the anonymity that conformity can provide. It is then that I see the consumer solution to my wardrobe woes: the Reebok tent. Set squarely in the middle of the sporting complex, the pop-up Reebok store is abuzz with activity. Reebok is the official sponsor of the 2018 CrossFit Games. It will provide some of the prize money for winners and has equipped each of the elite athletes with special-edition gear and apparel. Walking over to the Reebok tent, I spot a temporary billboard placed in front of Reebok’s tent. It is made up of three panels. The left panel has a black and white picture of a muscled shirtless white man in the middle of performing an overhead squat. His legs are bent, his bottom is low to the ground, his torso is tall, and his arms press a weighted barbell over his head. The right panel, also in black and white, features a fit young white woman in a strappy black tank top with black booty-shorts in the middle of a bar muscle-up. Her stomach rests on the bar, and her arms are at a right angle ready to push the rest of her body up over the bar. The overhead squat is an Olympic weightlifting move, and the bar muscle-up is a gymnastic maneuver. Both are common in the world of CrossFit, which combines weightlifting, gymnastics, cardio, and odd-object movements in its functional fitness regimen. The ultimate goal in CrossFit, as its founder Greg Glassman has frequently stated, is to specialize in nothing and to be decently good at everything.2 The implied message in the photos on Reebok’s billboard and in its sponsorship of the games is that, regardless of what kind of activity is being intensely pursued, Reebok’s apparel has got both the serious and the casual CrossFit athlete covered. The middle panel of Reebok’s billboard communicates a different message, however. In white letters against a red background, it simply states: “Be More Human.” This phrase befuddles. Is it a commandment? Is it a promise? In an online search I discover that these three words are not just present at the CrossFit Games where seemingly superhuman feats of strength are on routine display. Rather, they form the foundation of a much more expansive advertising campaign, complete with online quizzes, videos, and real-life challenges. To “be more human,” Reebok states, is a brand manifesto.3 It is the brand’s declaration of an aim. Yet, this ambition is hardly self-explanatory. What does it mean to be more human? The study of religion is uniquely equipped to take on such a question. Religion is that which helps explain how humans make sense of their predicament as embodied beings who are self-reflexive about their own existence. At issue in much religious questioning is a debate around the existence of something more; particularly how a greater entity relates to the human condition. As I stand in front of the Reebok billboard, I am brought up short by the brand’s solicitation of an ontology of more. Its message is deeply compelling and yet it chafes against some

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ingrained sense of limitation. Further, the call to “be more human” does not initially strike me as common to corporate idiom. Yet, in this state of uncertainty, religion is also doing work. As Kathryn Lofton explains, “religion is a word that helps identify the necessary simultaneity of feasible and implausible claims of consumer­ ism.”4 Religion sets and breaks the horizon of possibility. It calibrates desire and stakes a claim on futurity. Here Reebok, like other consumer-oriented companies, makes a bid to share in this claim through its opaque invocation of more. The question of what it means to be more human grounds this essay. I seek to analyze Reebok’s “Be More Human” campaign within the history of CrossFit as a sport. By focusing on these two brands and their relationship to a shared group of consumers, I aim to create a space within the study of religion and sport for the attendant economies of equipment and apparel. Over the past few decades, scholars of sport and religion have been primarily preoccupied with debating whether or not sport is a religion.5 More recent scholarship forgoes this debate and instead understands sport and religion as occupying similar and sometimes overlapping areas of life. Jeffrey Scholes and Raphael Sassower, for example, productively situ­ ate the relationship between religion and sport in the North American postsecular context in which arguments that rely upon the strict demarcation of the sacred from the secular are moot. “This is a world where sports can be ‘sacralized’ and religion can be ‘secularized’, and through these dual movements, the boundaries that used to contain and insulate religion and sports are crossed repeatedly,” they write.6 Furthermore, such movements and muddling of the sacred and profane are made more fluid by the ubiquity of commerce and capital in the postsecularist present. By embracing the postsecular—that is, the comingling of religion and the secular—scholars can more easily examine the peripheries of sport, particularly the commercial enterprises that equip and accessorize aspiring bodies such as the apparel industry. Scholars of sport and religion have not wholly ignored the economies of sport. Indeed, most make some tacit acknowledgment of the role money and capitalism play in sustaining the relationship between the two. As William Baker puts it, “religion and sport especially are joined at the altar of commercial interest.”7 Yet a sustained analysis of this commercial interest is missing. This essay begins to fill this void. To that end, I argue that Reebok’s “Be More Human” advertising campaign draws inspiration from and ultimately feeds into CrossFit’s teleology of progress and perfection. This interplay of lofty ideals and bodily aspirations came together materially in the form of apparel and economically in the form of sales. To make this case, this essay progresses in three acts. First, I introduce the cul­ ture of CrossFit, including the lifestyle it promotes and its history as a sport. Here I detail the brand partnership that made Reebok the official apparel partner of the CrossFit world. Then I take a closer look at Reebok’s “Be More Human” adver­ tising campaign. Here I examine how Reebok was able to conscript consumer desire by building a brand campaign out of the CrossFit community’s principles and ambitions. Lastly, I focus on how gym members at Reebok’s flagship CrossFit gym in Boston attempted to live out the call to “be more human” through a

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month-long “challenge.” Together, these three sections demonstrate how integral consumer companies, like Reebok, are in linking the physical with the metaphy­ sical in the creation of a “lifestyle” in the postsecular present. Throughout this essay I understand the particularity of the CrossFit lifestyle to operate in service of religion. In its most basic sense, the lifestyle of CrossFitters, which covered in greater detail below, unites its disparate global members as a community. It also underscores CrossFit’s distinctiveness and enables CrossFitters to understand themselves as somehow different from others outside the CrossFit community. Here the centrality of community echoes the religious theorization of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim who understood all religion to be rooted in group activity.8 Further, adhering to a particular lifestyle is not merely reminiscent of other, perhaps more readily recognizable, religious groups like Orthodox Jews or Sikhs. Rather, a “life­ style” also serves as an important mediating concept for religion within postsecular consumerism. In the twenty-first century, brands have sought to sell lifestyles, and bundled within lifestyle marketing are aspirations, rules for a way of life, a way of approaching the world, a built-in community, and, of course, products and services that make all of the aforementioned aspects of a lifestyle brand feel more tangible and attainable. Successful lifestyle brands, like CrossFit, attend to nearly every aspect of the consumer-adherent’s life, including diet, social group, bodily practices, ritual holidays, identity formation, insider vocabulary, and, not least of all, claims about human exis­ tence. Crucially, lifestyle brands tend to demur on the question of religion, making them suitable for a pluralist world in which diehard CrossFitters can claim a CrossFit identity while remaining faithful Muslims. Through the buying and selling of lifestyles the plurality of the marketplace meets the plurality of the religious marketplace, creating new configurations of consumer religion and adherence. All of this is at play when sporting goods and apparel companies want to share in the creation and profits of a particular lifestyle. As we will see with Reebok, this meant crafting a brand identity in the image of CrossFit’s convictions about what it meant to be human, and how to strive for more.

On Being CrossFit CrossFit began in Santa Cruz, California, in the late 1990s when Greg Glassman and his then-wife Lauren created a gym experience that combined the community aspects of group fitness with the special attention and coaching of a personal trai­ ner. Glassman, a former gymnast and cycling enthusiast, had been a personal trainer for several decades, refining his renegade approach to fitness that blended strength training and high-intensity cardio into short (usually 3–25 minute) exercises. Early adopters of Glassman’s methodology appreciated the efficiency of the workouts and loved how they left feeling exhausted. He gained a small but loyal local following in Santa Cruz. Then, in 2001, Glassman began posting his workout of the day (WOD, in CrossFit parlance) online for free, and crossfit.com was born. Unbe­ knownst to the Glassmans, this would be the first step in building a worldwide brand.

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The WOD exercises were varied, never routine, and their emphasis on functional fitness (i.e. they mimicked everyday movements like getting up from the floor or carrying heavy grocery bags) meant they could often be done with little to no equipment. Because of this, the “mainsite,” as original CrossFitters called the website, began to attract a larger following with participants further afield, particularly military personnel who were stationed abroad without access to much fitness equipment. People started recounting their experiences with the workouts in the comments section of the mainsite. They posted how long a workout took them and how much weight they used. Glassman assigned points to some workouts, and people began posting their scores. Encouragement and some light smack talk circulated among comment posters. An insider language developed, and an online community formed in parallel to Glassman’s brick-and-mortar gym.9 Crucially, the website also became a forum in which Glassman could develop and spread his philosophy of fitness. His self-publication of the CrossFit Journal contained articles like “What Is Fitness?” and “Understanding CrossFit” that would become foundational to the CrossFit community. In these and other articles he emphasized the value of empiricism—the measuring and recording one’s progress. He developed a continuum of health that charted one’s trajectory from sickness to wellness to fitness. Glassman also identified ten domains of fitness including cardi­ ovascular and respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy. He advanced the notion that “the needs of the elderly and professional athletes vary by degree, not kind,” and made suggestions for how to scale workouts and substitute movements to accommodate people of all physical capacities. He developed ideas about diet and lifestyle (“off the carbs and off the couch”), and he gave people a purpose in their training by suggesting that they were gaining and maintaining fitness in anticipation of “the unknown and the unknowable” events that lie ahead. These musings would later form the foundation of CrossFit’s instructor trainings.10 As Glassman’s approach to fitness gained popularity, he and Lauren were soon approached by others who wanted to open CrossFit gyms elsewhere. In 2002, a CrossFit devotee opened an affiliated gym in Washington, used the same methodol­ ogy as Glassman, and paid him to use the name CrossFit. From there the affiliate model spread, with other personal trainers paying CrossFit Inc. for instructor certifi­ cations and a flat annual fee for use of the name CrossFit and opening CrossFit gyms (or “boxes,” as CrossFitters call them) all over. The growth of CrossFit in the early 2000s was explosive, with fifty boxes in 2004 growing to nearly 5,000 by 2012.11 Most gyms were in North America, but soon CrossFit found its way overseas. Greg Glassman remained a valorized figure in the community, but he and Lauren, still at CrossFit Headquarters in Santa Cruz, did little to dictate the culture of each new box, which allowed for special-interest groups and distinctive box cultures to form. Nevertheless, a common language of WODs, metcons (metabolic conditioning), AMRAPS (as many rounds as possible), and HSPUs (handstand push-ups), alongside an online forum, helped build a broader sense of community among CrossFitters spread out across the globe.

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As the CrossFit community became more and more rabid in its devotion and evangelistic about their love of the brand, comparisons to religion inevitably fol­ lowed. Outsiders began to call CrossFit a cult, and, all combined, CrossFitters’ insider language, their common commitment to elective suffering, their reverence of Glassman as a charismatic leader, and their shared dietary practices of eating “meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar,” did little to contradict the observation that they were, at the very least, cult-like.12 As outsiders to the mainstream fitness industry and as self-professed renegades, CrossFitters embraced the cult accusation as a point of pride. CrossFit Valdosta in Georgia even began a blog post on its affiliate website by provocatively stating, “CrossFit is a cult.” The post expanded, “CrossFit comes into our lives and for most, makes a huge impact. That’s right, it changes our lives.”13 Glassman often joked with journalists that CrossFit was like “a religion run by a biker gang.”14 The comparison of CrossFit to a religion was further heightened by the embrace of CrossFit by many evangelical Christians, some of whom became icons within the community, like the four-time CrossFit Games champion Rich Froning. Christian CrossFitters became a prominent special-interest group within the CrossFit com­ munity and actively set up CrossFit church services and created a network of CrossFit prayer groups.15 It is not unusual to find evangelical Christians establishing ministries through emerging and popular sports, as scholars like Annie Blazer have detailed.16 Yet, beyond CrossFit’s associations with more established religious groups, religion factors into the CrossFit world in more subtle ways as well. Most potently, CrossFit is a lifestyle with a distinctive worldview. One of the primary perspectives undergirding the CrossFit worldview is that, in life “what awaits us all is challenge.”17 In response, CrossFit prioritizes preparedness with programs designed to “best prepare trainees for any physical contingency— prepare them not only for the known but for the unknowable.”18 Within this logic of preparedness, routine is verboten, and variability reigns. In an effort to shape preparedness, CrossFit also emphasizes functional movement, meaning “universal motor recruitment patterns,” or everyday movements like carrying gro­ ceries or lifting a heavy suitcase into an overhead compartment on an airplane. Functional movements are, according to the CrossFit Level 1 Training Guide, “nat­ ural, effective, and efficient locomotors of body and external objects.”19 Within this description lies a keyword for understanding CrossFit: natural. Spend any time among CrossFitters and you’ll hear talk about what is natural and unnatural for the human body to do. It is natural to squat; it is unnatural to sit all day. It is natural to eat meat and vegetables; it is unnatural to eat processed foods and lots of sugar. Experts on human evolution may debate the finer points, but the widespread reach of these claims remain. If one further unpacks claims of what is natural and unnatural according to CrossFit, one quickly discovers value claims. The natural is coded as good whereas the unnatural is coded as bad, particularly when claims about what is natural have to do with humanity. Embedded within discussions of the “natural human” is a trust in the primacy of human evolution—a sense that humans have evolved to an

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optimal state. Yet the presence of chronic diseases would seem to undermine such a claim. The charge of the unnatural therefore proffers an enemy: modern life. Modern life, with its processed foods, its sedentarism, and its isolation of individuals from the support and encouragement of a local community is to blame for wide­ spread ill-health. Enter CrossFit. “We sit collectively in unique possession of an elegant solution to the world’s most vexing problem,” states Glassman.20 The problem, according to Glassman, is obesity and chronic disease, which are exacer­ bated by refined carbohydrates and insufficient physical activity. The solution lies CrossFit’s mantra of “off the carbs, off the couch.” “If you’re eating carbs you’re not really doing CrossFit,” Glassman lectures a crowd at a 2017 instructor train­ ing.21 Such assertions have prompted CrossFitters to adopt low-carbohydrate diets, including the paleo diet, a diet attributed to humans’ paleolithic ancestors that suggests that humans did not evolve to eat many carbohydrates. While the aims of CrossFit are strictly focused on humanity in the here and now, the narrative underpinning of its worldview is one of a fall and redemption. The goals of the CrossFit community then, which are to “collectively advance the art and science of optimizing human performance,” is a quest to return the human to its optimal, natural state.22 With a trust in nature as their guide, CrossFitters can endeavor to predict a humanity of the future and begin to optimize its minds and bodies for it. In their storied return to a more “natural” humanity, they can begin to explore what it might mean to be more human.

The Rise of the Fittest on Earth In 2007, the CrossFit community witnessed the apotheosis of CrossFit’s dictum that claims to fitness must be “measurable, observable, repeatable” in the birth of the annual CrossFit Games.23 Glassman invited CrossFitters to a ranch in Aromas, California, owned by one of his seminar staff members, Dave Castro, who is now the director of the CrossFit Games. There, roughly 100 CrossFit enthusiasts would put the CrossFit methodology to the test to see if their “general physical preparedness” had readied them to encounter any test of fitness. To specialize in not specializing—to be generally good at all physical endeavors—is a main tenet of CrossFit, and to underscore this, Glassman randomly selected at least one workout for the first CrossFit Games by writ­ ing down various workout elements on scraps of paper, putting them into a hopper and then pulling them out. The ultimate goal of the competition weekend was to crown “the fittest man” and “the fittest woman on Earth.” While athletes tested their fitness at the ranch, a sizable crowd of onlookers socialized over burgers and beer, earning the CrossFit Games the nickname of “the Woodstock of fitness.” The event further cen­ tralized the fervor around CrossFit and as interest in competing in and spectating at the CrossFit Games grew in subsequent years, CrossFit introduced international qualifiers, streamlined the qualification process within the USA through the CrossFit Open and regional competition, and moved the location of the Games to Carson, California, and then Madison, Wisconsin, to accommodate more athletes and a larger number of fans. Competitive CrossFit became “the sport of fitness.”24

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It is misleading to think that the birth of the CrossFit Games inaugurated the sporting mentality among CrossFitters, however. In many ways, the CrossFit Games were a natural extension of the competitive spirit that already existed within the boxes. Competition was baked into the CrossFit culture from the start, with timed workouts, scores, and increased workloads. Many boxes kept leaderboards to stoke competition among members. Local competitions popped up across the USA where casual CrossFitters could vie for bragging rights and modest amounts of prize money. The sporting mentality of CrossFit infuses all aspects of the CrossFit experience, including its nomenclature. Trainers go by “coach” and coaches refer to members as athletes, regardless of whether or not they ever compete in local competitions or at the CrossFit Games. The CrossFit Games were never meant to usurp the CrossFit affiliate boxes as the main focus of CrossFit Inc. Rather, the event was intended to build community among existing CrossFitters and act a kind of advertisement to attract the broader public who saw the competition among elite athletes broadcast on television. Yet, within a few years of its inception, the event ballooned. During the 2019 Open, over 327,400 people registered and competed (some more seriously than others) for a spot at the CrossFit Games.25 That same year, roughly 80,000 people attended CrossFit Games in Madison, Wisconsin, as spectators, and over 11 million people tuned in to watch online or on television.26 The growth of the CrossFit Games mirrored the continued expansion of CrossFit, which as of 2020 had over 15,000 gyms in 162 countries. With so many eyes drawn to the emerging sport of fitness, the CrossFit Games began to attract more sponsors. Most notably, in 2010, the fitness apparel company Reebok formed a brand partnership with CrossFit, signing a ten-year contract. While Reebok had been popular during the fitness and aerobics boom of the 1980s, it held a significantly decreased share of the US footwear market in 2006 when the German sports apparel company Adidas bought the company with plans to revive the brand to better compete with Nike for US customers.27 With con­ tracts to outfit the NFL and the NBA coming to a close in the early 2000s, Reebok pivoted to designing for more niche community-focused “tough fitness groups.” Reebok’s partnership with CrossFit signaled a turn away from premiere athlete sponsorships and toward the average group exerciser. Here, old marketing tactics such as inspiring sporting fans to buy the apparel they saw on their favorite all-star athletes became irrelevant because so many of CrossFit fans doubled as participants. The consumers were built into the audience. For Reebok, attaching itself to the rapid global growth of CrossFit had clear benefits, but the partnership aided the CrossFit Games initially as well.28 For one, CrossFit Inc. now had help shouldering the multimillion-dollar costs of running the Games. With Reebok sponsorship, the CrossFit Games was also able to increase its prize money from $25,000 for the men’s and women’s first place finishers in 2010 to $250,000 the next year. The CrossFit Games was also able to increase prize payouts for other placements and for individual event wins with an eventual prize purse of $3 million in 2020.29 The significant increase in prize money available attracted more

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competitors with 4,500 registered athletes competing to qualify for the Games in 2010 increasing to 29,000 registered participants the next year.30 Corporate sponsorship made the prospect of training full-time and making a living wage into a reality for up-and-coming athletes. If CrossFit had made a bid to be considered a sport before, now it could boast a full roster of professional athletes. With more on the line for athletes to win or lose—an annual income, micro-fame, and brand deals—the stakes of the Games became greater, which created an even more captivating spectator experience. The building excitement and enthusiasm around CrossFit, and particularly the CrossFit Games, prompted Forbes to deem CrossFit “one of the fastest growing sports in America” in 2011.31 While CrossFit was not the only brand Reebok partnered with in its turn to “tough fitness” and community-focused fitness (it also made deals with Spartan Races, for example), its alliance with CrossFit was the most prominent, suffusing many aspects of the company. The Reebok headquarters in Canton, Massachu­ setts, got an in-house CrossFit gym and hired two top-level CrossFit coaches. The Reebok box housed regular members, including many Reebok employees, but it was also home to a handful of elite athletes who trained there and then competed in the team division of the CrossFit Games. Several years into the brand partnership, Reebok’s embrace of the CrossFit clientele was also soon reflected in its adoption of CrossFit’s attitudes toward fitness and life, including an emphasis on hard work, mental toughness, self-improvement, measurement, and aspiration. Out of this context Reebok’s 2015 ambitious multimedia “Be More Human” advertising campaign emerged.

On Being More Human Before the New England Patriots played the Seattle Seahawks in the 2015 Super Bowl, Reebok ran a 60-second television ad. The commercial, Reebok titled as “Freak Show,” opens on a shot of a middle-aged African American man squatting low to get his hands underneath a large tractor tire lying on the ground. We hear him grunt in exertion as he tips the tire up and then over, moving it along a back alley. The camera cuts to a close-up of a different young man’s face. He is per­ spiring, and he winces in discomfort. The camera goes wide, and we see him outside on a porch. His hands are planted firmly on a yoga mat as his legs float off the ground in Astavakrasana pose. In a firm yet rhetorical tone, the male voice over asks the viewer: “Are we obsessive? Can we be fanatical? Extreme?” Images of a white woman running uphill through rain flash by, and in the next frame the camera rests on the face of an Asian woman looking down at her hands. They are covered in chalk and her torn callouses form bloody wounds on her palms. “Okay, just a little,” the voiceover concedes. Next, viewers see how the woman got her bloody palms by performing kipping pull-ups alongside three men on a gymnastics rig. “But maybe you have to be a little bit crazy to spend every day beaten, muddy, and sore,” the voiceover continues. Images move quickly among a group of people doing rope climbs over a mud pit, a shirtless white man doing ring

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muscle-ups in an empty gym, an exhausted man lying on the gym floor breathing heavily, and a determined-looking woman carrying a man over her shoulders as she runs outside. “Why do we do it?” the voiceover asks. Without missing a beat, he answers the question he has just placed in the viewer’s mind. “We don’t flip tires to be better tire flippers. We’re doing it to be better, period.” The camera follows a man trail-running through the woods with a headlamp at night, and a tight shot lingers on his face, illu­ minated by his headlamp. A split-second later his face is illuminated by a different kind of light. He is now in his firefighting gear, and fire engine lights flash behind him. “We do it to be better leaders,” the voiceover states. “Better parents.” Here we see a woman leading a kick-boxing class, only to go home and play with her daughter. “Better, stronger, more determined humans. Capable of anything.” In a quick montage, viewers watch a paraplegic man swimming in a pool, a couple in running gear racing through the streets, a woman in a CrossFit tank top picking up a heavy concrete stone and tossing it over her shoulder, and another woman doing a bar muscle-up in a gym.32 The video ends with a dramatic flourish as the anonymous narrator continues to answer the question of why people would do any of this: “To honor our bodies and sharpen our minds. To be more human.” In the last scene, a white woman in tight athletic shorts and a bra hurdles over a wall of logs that are on fire. The words “Be More Human” appear on the screen, and she beams a triumphant smile at the camera. The scene cuts to black as Reebok’s new delta logo appears with a website address for curious viewers to visit. This video helped launch their “Be More Human” campaign and announced to millions of viewers who tuned in for the Super Bowl that, once again, they could equate Reebok with fitness. This was not the Jane Fonda aerobics fitness of the 1980s, however.33 This time it was a grittier, edgier, tougher, more metaphysical kind of fitness. A visit to the Reebok website reveals the extent to which the marketing campaign is fully integrated into the brand’s new identity as the outfitter of the everyday aspira­ tional exerciser. Before the homepage appears, a loading page marks the passage of time. Against an all-black screen, a white outline of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man occupies the center of the screen. Behind him is a subtle animation of shifting colors. Muted red fades into muted gray, which brightens to become muted red. The user is waiting. Underneath the Vitruvian Man sits Reebok’s name and new logo, the delta. The selection of the new logo “coincides with Reebok’s singular focus on fit­ ness,” a press release explains.34 Its selection reflects its status as a symbol of change and transformation. That the delta is paired with the Vitruvian Man, a symbol in its own right of enlightenment, empiricism, the pursuit of knowledge, and the blending of math and beauty, seems fitting. Just as Leonardo drew the Vitruvian Man to detail nature’s ideal body proportions for humankind, CrossFitters are likewise slamming medicine balls, grinding out box jumps, and swinging kettlebells in search of their own ideally proportioned selves. Reebok, this loading page suggests, is here to help the consumer achieve just that. Yet, what is most striking when one gets past the loading page and onto Ree­ bok’s homepage is that Reebok’s products are not front and center. Instead, they

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are tucked away in drop-down menus. Prior to the launch of the “Be More Human” campaign, Reebok’s website was bright white with sneakers and apparel immediately visible. Consumers could click on an icon for the sport they were shopping to equip, like running, studio fitness, yoga, cross-training, dance, walking, or CrossFit, and be led directly to the products.35 Now the consumption of goods and the generation of profit—Reebok’s ultimate aims in all of this—appears sidelined for a more immersive experience; the “Be More Human Experience” to be exact. The icons that used to direct consumers to their activity of choice are gone and instead white words pop against a completely black background. Reebok entreats the visitor to begin the journey, stating, “When we test our physical limitations, we transform our entire lives.” It continues, “This is a story of constant progress. A charge for willing souls to better themselves and the world around them. A jour­ ney to explore and test our humanness. You in?” The website makes an intriguing and almost irresistible proposition to test, probe, and explore humanness. The three features of the experience, including the “Human Score” which is covered in more detail below, lure consumers into considering some ethically weighty and philo­ sophically loaded questions like “What does it mean to be human?” and “Is there a human essence? If yes, where does it come from and is it fixed or malleable?” en route to purchasing the latest Nano shoe.36 Clues to how Reebok envisions humanity are scattered throughout the website. First, the images on the site feature men and women as well as a wide range of ethnic diversity, but most are able-bodied and relatively young. Second, the people featured in their videos are often covered in sweat and mud. Some are grunting while others are screaming. The overall effect is to portray humans who are more in touch with the animalistic facets of being human. Third, Reebok’s use of the word “souls” winks at a divinity within, yet whatever subtle deity or superhuman force Reebok gestures toward is clearly incidental to human action and agency, which Reebok continually underscores as the core of the pursuit of self-betterment. Similarly, its emphasis on progress and on being “more” implies that their vision of human nature is not fixed. The “Freak Show” video, which appears again on the homepage, suggests that people—and perhaps especially people who buy Reebok gear and do tough fitness things like CrossFit—can make their own destiny. Reebok uses social, emotional, and rational marketing techniques in its bold metaphysical advertising campaign, and these approaches comprise the three pillars grounding the interactive “Be More Human Experience.” The social pillar uses hashtags and social media to engage consumers. Reebok encourages exercisers to post photos of themselves after their workouts using the hashtag #Breakyourselfie and to post pictures with the hashtag #badgesofhonor to display the wounds that hardcore exercisers endured while pushing past their limits. These hashtags suggest that the kind of beauty that should be posted to Instagram is exemplified by someone pushing their body beyond its limits. Through hashtags, Reebok and Reebok-apparel-wearing CrossFitters can better track the proud and vocal mem­ bers of their community, and exchange virtual high fives and cheers of encour­ agement. The hashtag component of the campaign not only brings the brand out

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of the retail shop and into the gym, but it also brings the members out of the gym and onto screens of their tough fitness comrades across the globe. This straightforward social-media campaign yielded some results with roughly 17,000 posts combined on Instagram. The emotional approach is a bit more involved, however. On Reebok’s homepage viewers are directed to three text boxes, one of which hosts the Human Score, a “test to explore and discuss our human-ness.” On a new page, the “Human Score” experience begins with a prompt to watch either a new film or to take a test. The text on the page is lighthearted reading: “Here it is. The Human Score. A single test designed to quantify your human-ness. A bold and absurd objective, indeed (one only a bunch of curious, forward-thinking humans would endeavor to create).” The tone is notably different from the bold con­ fidence encountered on the previous page. The slight self-deprecating humor— such as the admission of the test’s absurdity—sets the scene for what follows. Clicking on the video link, viewers immediately see the New York City skyline and soft piano music builds. Semitransparent numbers and words like responsibility, fitness, morality, inspiration, and sociability appear amid the bustling city scene. The effect is akin to a Google Glass overlay, which seamlessly imposes a high-tech vision onto the low-tech pastime of people-watching. A voiceover begins and lays out the now familiar questions that are foundational to the campaign: “What does it mean to be human?” A pause while the camera shows two old men playing chess in a park, the words “morality” and “inspiration” appear by their heads along with numerical scores. Then, as the viewer watches someone in a gym doing a deadlift, the voiceover further queries, “What does it mean to be more human?” As the video continues, viewers meet the narrator, David McRaney, a science journalist who helped Reebok design a test meant to “distill our humanness down to a single numeric value.” Perhaps McRaney will finally provide an answer to the enigmatic question that holds the campaign together. McRaney takes to the streets of New York City to interview pedestrians, asking them to identify the most important traits humans should have. They give answers like persistence, con­ fidence, generosity, humor, health, faith, empathy, discipline, and courage. These answers are good, but they do not satisfy McRaney. The real question he seeks to have answered is “what role does fitness play in this [human] equation?” He interviews professors from Stanford and Harvard who underscore the importance of grit and social connection, both of which can be gained through exercise. McRaney’s voiceover resumes as he tells viewers that exercise amplifies the best parts of humanity and helps us become more social, more confident, more focused, more compassionate, and ultimately more human. A montage of exercisers pairs with the music’s crescendo, leaving viewers with one final question: “What’s your Human Score?”37 The video does less to satisfy the question of what it means to be more human (although we now know that exercise is involved) than it does to further pique curiosity. Viewers click on the Human Score test and are prompted to answer a series of equally perplexing questions like, “You’re at a party teeming with inter­ esting guests. Who will you mingle with?” You have the option of a life coach or a

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novelist; a psychologist or a firefighter; a nutritionist or an activist. One wonders why you cannot just mingle with them all, or if any of the people at the party hold more than one identity marker. What if I want to talk to a firefighting life coach who writes novels on the side? Such complexity is not accounted for in the either/ or questioning of the Human Score test. Halfway through the questioning, viewers are introduced to a new hypothetical scenario: a genie who grants wishes. Here the viewers are confronted with their first question of real seriousness. As the genie grants wishes, do you choose to “be a good person to whom bad things happen” or a “bad person to whom good things happen”? Gamified surveys are excellent ways for companies to collect more data on their consumers, but one wonders what Reebok is getting after with this theologically loaded question. The next question is equally weighty and moves the consumer onto firmer spiritual territory, wanting to know if you’d rather have proof of an afterlife or find a cure to cancer. Spirituality and morality are clearly a part of being human, Reebok communicates, but the test does not linger on these questions for long, lest Reebok reveal it is out of its theological depth. Finally, the test reaches a category of questions that are more thematically consistent for a sports apparel brand. “We all honor our bodies differently,” the website states. “Which workouts do you currently participate in?” Here the CrossFit bias rings through every question. Do you like workouts where people are supportive and actively cheering you on? Do you like workouts that “are scientifically proven to have physical, mental or social benefits”? Do you like workouts coached by certified experts. Do you like something competitive where you can achieve some form of recognition? Would you prefer a workout where you have to dig deep physically and mentally? What about workouts that leave you feeling clear-headed and refreshed? The final read-out of the Human Score is a number which is given a category. If your number is 81, you’re a Brain Buff, meaning you scored high on intellectual curiosity. If you got a 93, you’re a Fit Spirit and at 80 you’re an Aspirer. My score was 74, a Guardian. The final graphic shows you how highly you ranked in the qualities of humanity that the experience was designed to test. There is fitness, grit, intellectual curiosity, sociability, inspiration, responsibility, morality, independence, reputation, and spirituality. A little written blurb describes your score. “The Guardian’s social nature makes them great candidates to try group-oriented work­ outs like CrossFit,” my Human Score tells me. In the end, the test that promised to reveal something intrinsic about humanity most resembles a personality quiz. Yet the emotional and psychological impact it has is significant. The viewer has just spent fifteen minutes or more connecting their workouts to their self-reflection. They are now focused only on themselves, on their humanity and on their aspirations. Enter, the final pillar of the experience. The rational module, entitled “Gray Matters,” shows a 3D rendering of a brain. “Fitness feeds the brain,” a subtitle reads, as it entreats the viewer to learn more by interacting with the brain. One click reveals that “When I dance, I am better at the social dance,” and the words neurotransmitters, cerebellum, corpus striatum,

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Hippocampus, and frontal cortex appear in a bar-graph-like image with bars of varying lengths extending from each word to imply activation in these parts of the brain. Another click shares, “When I run long-distances, I am getting younger.” At this point in the interactive experience, viewers have been primed by the “Human Score” to think about humanity through their individual experiences and the first-person text in “Gray Matters” further encourages the viewer to stay in this mindset.38 This overriding emphasis on the self is perhaps the only place where Reebok’s advertising campaign significantly diverges from representing CrossFit’s values. While CrossFit certainly praises and encourages self-improvement, much of its global success comes from its ability to create and sustain community within its local gyms. In nearly every other respect, Reebok adequately signals to CrossFitters that it understands them, their lifestyle, and their principles. The Human Score emphasized empiricism and a preoccupation with metrics. The “Freak Show” video underscored a perseverance and grit mentality. The #Breakyourselfie cam­ paign highlighted limits pushed or broken. And the overall campaign aesthetic, from its Vitruvian Man to its slogan, accentuated CrossFit’s fixation with the dynamic interplay between philosophies of “the natural” and “the ideal.” While glimpses of community appear in the “Freak Show” video, a communal ethos is not at the forefront of the online experience. Here, right when the consumer approaches the edge of the point of sale, Reebok distills humanness into the unit of the individual who is solely responsible for his or her own progress and success. In pursuit of optimization this is a lonely place to be. Yet, it is also exactly where the consumer must be to seek deliverance from the plight of being an ordinary human through the products and promises of the retailer. Reebok, the campaign conveys, is here to help.39

On the Challenge of Being More Human While flashy ads, brand endorsements, and multimillion-dollar sponsorship deals may seem incidental to sport, the products sporting goods companies hawk can, at times, make all the difference. Any athlete can attest that a leaky pair of swim goggles, a crumbling pair of cleats, and a defective set of track spikes can derail even the most stellar athletic performances. Equipment and apparel are meant to aid an athlete; they are meant to help them accomplish more than they could on their own. This simple truth was underscored for me in a CrossFit gym in New Haven, Connecticut, where, after perusing the “Be More Human Experience” online, I spotted a gym member wearing Reebok Lifters. These shoes are designed for Olympic weight training. When I inquired after the shoe, the member recounted that she was initially skeptical that buying branded shoes would help her lift more weight. Yet, her CrossFit coach repeatedly told her that she was physi­ cally unstable while doing her lifts, so she decided to buy the shoes. The promise of stability was built into the Lifters’ design. The shoes have raised heels that help lifters keep their weight in their heels, which is necessary for proper lifting form. The raised heels also help increase the ankle’s range of motion, allowing the

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Achilles tendon to stretch more as the athlete settles into a deeper squat. Unlike sneakers, with their soft and squishy soles, the Lifters have a hard sole for the ath­ lete to push more firmly against. This allows them to generate more power in their lifts.40 The soles also help with stability, the member told me, for when she moves a loaded barbell onto her chest in a front squat, or over her head in a clean and jerk, snatch, or overhead squat movement. All of this has the potential to enable her to lift even more weight. “Even if it’s five pounds more, that matters to me at this point,” she said.41 In her pursuit of optimal physical performance, incremental gains were still gains. This member, who was not an elite athlete but was a dedicated gym-goer who went to CrossFit classes five times a week, was not alone in her desire to improve. She wanted to reach her maximum capacity and to edge out her nearest compe­ titor. With thousands, possibly millions, of “tough fitness” exercisers around the globe, Reebok had tapped into a new market with its CrossFit partnership. And, in turn, Reebok was now feeding and shaping a new landscape of desire. Its con­ sumers were no longer focused on siphoning off the “cool factor” from free-throw shooting NBA players. Instead, they were motivated by their own incremental gains, bodily aspirations, and technologies of self. They needed Lifters. They wanted clothing that did not get in the way of their handstand push-ups. They needed sweat-wicking fabrics and versatile styles. They required equipment and apparel that did not hold them back from their pursuit of more. In this new partnership Reebok could have done what many apparel companies do: bring in elite athletes to talk about what they need to enhance their perfor­ mance and then test the products in the real world and give the designers and engineers feedback. Reebok did this, but it also surpassed this industry standard by turning many of its employees into its consumer demographic. The Reebok Training Center at the Reebok headquarters in Massachusetts was at the heart of it all. Or, as the general manager of the facility put it, the fitness center was “the epicenter of the brand.”42 This was the place where certified CrossFit coaches helped Reebok employees internalize the metaphysics of CrossFit’s embodied culture—a metaphysics that found its way into the product design and the “Be More Human” advertising campaign. Several years after the launch of the campaign, the Reebok CrossFit coaches decided to push employees to further live out the brand philosophy of more by implementing the “Be More Human Challenge.” In a video released from the Reebok Training Center, the general manager, head coach, and CrossFit Games athlete, Austin Malleolo, stared into the camera and stated “the purpose of this challenge is to maximize your human potential.”43 Later, in an interview, Malleolo described the company’s internal purpose of the challenge as a way “to keep on brand message and to inspire the community.” The challenge would serve as an opportunity to further inscribe the identity of the brand onto the identity of its employees. Over the course of five weeks the challenge urged participants to make consistent improvement in seven categories, including fitness, nutrition, hydration, sleep, mobility, meditation and mindfulness, and random acts of kindness. The plan

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was ambitious, encouraging participants to eat mostly protein, vegetables, fruit, healthy fats, nuts, and seeds, to drink up to eight cups of water per day, to sleep at least seven hours a night, to stretch approximately 20 minutes a day, to meditate, to work out regularly, and frequently to perform random acts of kindness. The coaches recognized that these guidelines for better living might not be easily met by their busy corporate clientele. Still, the message was clear: “Never be content with where you are at, strive to go outside your comfort zone, and realize your full potential.”44 Against the backdrop of videos like “Freak Show,” in which images of feats of strength conveyed a tough-minded perseverance, the relative simplicity and uni­ versal applicability of the Reebok Fitness Center’s “Be More Human Challenge” threw into stark relief how challenging it is to be human in the first place. For harried and hurried modern humans, the more in the “Be More Human” campaign gets transfigured from a call to exceed the bounds of known human capacity into a call to simply meet one’s basic needs through more sleep, more exercise, more water, more good-natured connection, and more moments of quiet reprieve. The hashtag accompanying the challenge, #AlwaysTraining, sums up how the aspiration of more begot a condition of always. To be any kind of human, not least of all one aspiring to be more, is to be continually striving. For the average participant, the desire to reach one’s maximum potential can quickly fade under the relentless grind to meet the minimum requirement of self-sustenance. The difficulty of living out the pro­ posed disciplinary lifestyle was evident when, a year later in 2019, Reebok held another “Be More Human Challenge.” “It’s a continuation of our other chal­ lenges,” Malleolo told the camera during his YouTube channel announcement, “but it’s a lot more simple.”45 This time, instead of seeking improvement in seven categories, the Reebok Training Center limited its challenge to nutrition and movement. The challenge was also shortened to fifteen days from five weeks. This time, instead of assuming that participants were being inherently motivated by the pursuit of perfectibility, participants were entered into a raffle to win a prize. Four years out from the onset of the inspiring and aspirational “Be More Human” ad campaign, the relentless demands of more had caught up to the Reebok gym members. Outside the gym the advertising campaign was also losing steam. It was no longer a novel campaign, instead it was a well-worn slogan that did less to inspire new extra-human feats as time wore on. In many ways, the diminution of the “Be More Human Challenge” prefigured the end of Reebok’s “tough fitness” era and its positive affiliation with CrossFit. The ten-year contract, signed in 2010, was set to expire at the end of 2020 with no plans to put a new contract in place. The relationship between CrossFit and Reebok had soured over the past decade. In 2018 CrossFit brought a lawsuit against Reebok over a failure to properly calculate and pay royalties. The two companies settled months later for roughly $5 million, but the ordeal tarnished the trust and goodwill that initially characterized the brand partnership.46 In the summer of 2020, CrossFit’s founder and CEO caused hurt and division in the global CrossFit community with a racially insensitive Tweet that led to his removal

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from leadership and his sale of the company.47 Reebok seized upon the moment to announce that it would no longer be affiliated with CrossFit. By distancing itself from Glassman’s tactless actions, Reebok was also distancing itself from CrossFit just in time for its contract to run out. Times were changing, yet the identity Reebok had carved out for its company as a rough and ready ally of the CrossFit box member would not disappear overnight. For a decade CrossFitters had heard, seen, and lived the message to “be more human.” It was a message they had inspired. It was a message they used to discipline their bodies. It was a message that formed the crucial link among their consumer practices, their athletic ambitions, and their personal identities.

On Being More To examine the “Be More Human” campaign and the convergence of the Reebok and CrossFit brands is to highlight how important seemingly peripheral economies of sport are within the postsecular study of sport and religion. The economic ramifications of sport and religion form critical junctures for scholars to scrutinize and doing so promises to better reveal the material consequences of the comingling of religion and the secular. As the “Be More Human” campaign demonstrated, there are times when the ancillaries of sport find themselves at the center. If, within the postsecular context, we are to understand religion and sport as occupying similar and often overlapping areas of life, then it is perhaps unsurprising that Reebok settled on a slogan that was both motivational and metaphysical. Reebok is surely not alone in its willingness to employ religiously loaded imaginaries of human thriving to make a sale and it is in this arena—of supplements, equipment, blood tests, recovery accessories, apparel, and of lifestyles—that scholars may yet find the richest examples of religion and sport in the postsecular. Through the course of their brand partnership, Reebok attempted to insert itself fully into the logic of CrossFit and, in doing so, it made a bid for CrossFitters’ psyche as well as for their pocketbooks. For nearly a decade, the “Be More Human” cam­ paign helped wed the CrossFit identity—its values of grit and perseverance, its trust in nature as guide, and its goal of mental and physical optimization—to the Reebok brand. Such signification allowed CrossFitters to project, enact, and reify their iden­ tities as “tough fitness” exercisers through their purchasing power. It also allowed the CrossFitter’s higher values, aspirations, lifestyle, technologies of the body and assumptions about humanity to spread farther and faster, with the help of Reebok’s global supply chain. In the end, the Nano shoe became an emissary of the CrossFit lifestyle, pounding pavement and evangelizing to onlookers who saw CrossFitters lift more, squat more, and do more in the name of health and humanity. Back at the 2018 CrossFit Games, I enter the Reebok tent. It is buzzing with activity. Men, women, and children are combing through the racks of clothing looking for the right souvenir shirt, the best-priced shorts, the most high-tech sports bras, and the exact same pieces of apparel the games athletes are wearing. As the weekend wears on, the difference between competitor and spectator further

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blurs as more and more people around me purchase and wear Reebok items like the Nano 8 shoe, the Micro Bra, the ACTIVchill sweat-wicking shirts in Mendota Blue, the limited-run shorts and leggings in Stone Camo, and the booty-shorts in white and pink.48 Along the back of the tent people are trying on shoes. With the help of a clerk, they fit the shoes on, stand up, walk around, and drop into a squat. Clutching their goods, spectators-cum-consumers wait in the long S-shaped lines that form in front of cashiers. I wander through the tent taking it all in before I set out in earnest to find the most stereotypical CrossFit outfit I can find. I am new to the sport, to the culture, and to the games, but I soon find a rack of branded booty-shorts and a crop-top tank that says CrossFit in big letters across the chest. In the dressing room I slip out of my jean shorts and squirm to fit the tight-fitting shorts over my thighs. The air-conditioned air pumped into the tent flows past my exposed midriff. Once the outfit is assembled, I stand back and look at myself in the mirror. I hardly recognize myself, but with Reebok’s CrossFit-inspired messaging burned into my mind, I recognize what I could be. Images flash in my mind of how I’d move in this outfit as I leaped during a box-jump, swung from a gymnastics rig, climbed a rope, or dropped under a barbell mid-snatch. Perhaps, in this outfit, I could belong more within this sporting community. Perhaps I could better embrace the CrossFit lifestyle? Perhaps I could do more? Perhaps I could finally seize upon whatever latent potential lay within? Fitting the clothes back onto their hangers, and placing them on the return rack as I walked out of the dressing room, I would not find out. Not that day. But the CrossFit Games was a five-day affair. There was still time to observe more. To purchase more. To be more.

Notes 1 Tony Budding, “Testing Fitness as Sport,” The CrossFit Journal, September 2010.

2 Greg Glassman, “What Is CrossFit?,” The CrossFit Journal, March 2004.

3 Maureen Quirk, “Introducing the Heroine of ‘25,915 Days’,” Reebok US (blog), April

2016, www.reebok.com/us/blog/300218 4 Kathryn Lofton, Consuming Religion, Class 200: New Studies in Religion (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 5. 5 For examples, see: Robert J. Higgs, God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1995); Joseph Price, From Season to Season: Sports as American Religion (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2001); Eric Bain-Selbo, Game Day and God: Football, Faith, and Politics in the American South (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2009). 6 Jeffrey Scholes and Raphael Sassower, Religion and Sports in American Culture (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014), 11. 7 William J. Baker, Playing with God: Religion and Modern Sport (Cambridge, Mass.: Har­ vard University Press, 2007), 4. 8 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: The Free Press, 1995), p. 41. 9 Two published histories of CrossFit exist. One is by a CrossFitter by a popular press, and the other is a case study published by Harvard Business School for use in teaching. J. C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness (New

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10 11 12

13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27

28

29 30

York: Three Rivers Press, 2014); Shikhar Ghosh, Ali Huberlie, and Christopher Payton, CrossFit (A): Case Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business School, 2015). Greg Glassman, “What Is Fitness?,” The CrossFit Journal, 2002; Greg Glassman, “Understanding CrossFit,” The CrossFit Journal, April 2007. Ghosh et al., CrossFit (A), 1. The Morning Chalk Up, a CrossFit-centered news outlet, reported 15,000 gyms worldwide by 2018. Scott Henderson, “CrossFit’s Explosive Affiliate Growth by the Numbers,” Morning Chalk Up, October 23, 2018. CrossFit®, The Foundation Is Nutrition, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcL86Lv_ jsQ. For instances in which CrossFit was called a cult in major news forums, see Cliff Weathers, “CrossFit Is a Cult: Why So Many of Its Defenders Are So Defensive,” Salon, October 22, 2014; Ragan Sutterfield, “The Cult of CrossFit: How the Workout Can Bring Out the Best (and Worst) of Faith,” Washington Post, March 24, 2015; Karli Burghoff, “CrossFit: A Cult or a Community?” Medium, December 11, 2018. CrossFit Valdosta, “CrossFit Is a Cult,” CrossFit Valdosta (blog), June 9, 2017. Catherine Clifford, “How Turning CrossFit into a Religion Made Its Atheist Founder Greg Glassman Rich,” CNBC, October 11, 2016. For an example of the evangelical Christian CrossFit networks, see “Story—FAITH RXD,” FAITH RXD, https://faithrxd.org/story; Cody Musselman, “Training for the ‘Unknown and Unknowable’: CrossFit and Evangelical Temporality,” Religions, 10 (11) (November 2019): 624. Annie Blazer, Playing for God: Evangelical Women and the Unintended Consequences of Sports Ministry (New York: New York University Press, 2015). King of CrossFit, 60 Minutes (CBS News, 2015), www.cbsnews.com/video/ king-of-crossfit CrossFit, The CrossFit Level 1 Training Guide, 3rd edn (CrossFit, 2002), 2. See also Musselman, “Training for the ‘Unknown and Unknowable’.” CrossFit, The CrossFit Level 1 Training Guide, 2. CrossFit®, Greg Glassman: The World’s Most Vexing Problem, 2017, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=vPujtrae_WM&feature=youtu.be CrossFit®, Greg Glassman: The World’s Most Vexing Problem. CrossFit®, Greg Glassman: The World’s Most Vexing Problem, 4. Glassman, “Understanding CrossFit.” CrossFit Games, “Finding the Fittest on Earth: History of the Games,” https://games. crossfit.com/history-of-the-games; CrossFit®, CrossFit Games History: 2007–2013, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y92hjZNEjI; CrossFit Games, The Test of Fitness, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eGgWEr-Vv8 Scott Henderson, “So How Many People Participated in the 2019 CrossFit Open?,” Morning Chalk Up (blog), April 1, 2019. Bashir Aden, “CrossFit Games Brings Worldwide Audience to Madison for 3rd Year,” Wisconsin State Journal, August 2, 2019; Justin LoFranco, “CrossFit Games Racks Up 11.6M Views on YouTube, Facebook,” Morning Chalk Up, August 27, 2019. Associated Press, “Sportswear Maker Adidas to Buy Reebok,” NBC News, August 3, 2005; Herbert Hainer and Robin Stalker, “Reebok Transaction and First Half Year Results 2005 Financial Results Presentation” (adidas-Salomon, n.d.), accessed August 3, 2005. Adidas has since divested from Reebok: press release, “Adidas Stars Divestiture Pro­ cess for Reebok” (adidas group, February 19, 2021), www.adidas-group.com/en/media/ news-archive/press-releases/2021/adidas-starts-divestiture-process-reebok As an example of how Reebok financially benefited from targeting the CrossFit con­ sumer, it recorded eleven consecutive quarters of growth in 2016. https://medium. com/above-the-noise-by-mavrck/how-reebok-achieved-11-consecutive-quarters-of­ growth-through-micro-influencers-ad60b291731d Patrick Rishe, “CrossFit’s Relationship with Reebok Enhances Its Financial and Commer­ cial Credibility,” Forbes, July 22, 2011; CrossFit, “CrossFit Games Prize Purse Grows,” July 7, 2014, https://games.crossfit.com/article/crossfit-games-prize-purse-grows Rishe, “CrossFit’s Relationship with Reebok.”

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31 Rishe, “CrossFit’s Relationship with Reebok.” 32 Reebok, “Freak Show,” 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_dTf1j5y4c 33 Nicholas Smith, “How Jane Fonda Helped Inspire Reebok’s Freestyle Fitness Sneaker,” Time, April 20, 2018. 34 “Reebok News Stream: Reebok Signals Change with Launch of New Brand Mark” (Reebok, February 27, 2014), https://news.reebok.com/global/latest-news/reebok-signals­ change-with-launch-of-new-brand-mark/s/ff399034-0aac-4263-99ed-6104ef4eda20 35 “Reebok Footwear and Apparel: Official Reebok Online Site,” accessed February 26, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20141102062521/http://www.reebok.com/us 36 Much of the Reebok website during the launch of the 2015 “Be More Human” campaign can be found via the “Way Back Machine” on web.archive.org. See Reebok, “Be More Human: Physical Fitness Transforms Your Life,” Fitness.reebok.com, March 21, 2015, https://web. archive.org/web/20150321131848/http://fitness.reebok.com/Be-More-Human 37 Reebok, “The Human Score Video,” 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDdVbFs9ERU 38 Screenshots from 2016 in author’s personal collection as well as graphics on web.archive. org and artists’ portfolios reveal the various Gray Matter graphics. See: Ezra Paulekas, “Online Portfolio: Reebok—Be More Human Experience,” accessed February 14, 2021, https://polykiss.com/reebok-be-more-human-experience 39 Reebok, “Reebok News Stream: Reebok Challenges the World to ‘Be More Human’ with New Brand Campaign,” January 28, 2015, https://news.reebok.com/global/latest-news/ reebok-challenges-the-world-to-be-more-human-with-new-brand-campaign/s/47377c4e­ 0eb6-451e-966e-7029cb41ed9a 40 Kimitake Sato, Dave Fortenbaugh, and David S. Hydock, “Kinematic Changes Using Weightlifting Shoes on Barbell Back Squat,” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 26 (1) (January 2012): 28–33. 41 Personal communication, July 26, 2017. Follow-up via Facebook Messenger, September 12, 2017. 42 Personal communication, July 7, 2018. 43 Reebok Training Center, Reebok’s 2018 “Be More Human” Fitness Challenge, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=fupPpxCVVHE 44 Reebok Training Center, Reebok’s 2018 “Be More Human” Fitness Challenge. 45 Reebok Training Center, Be More Human Challenge 3.0, 2019, www.youtube.com/watch? v=aRLjsnYVOso 46 Justin LoFranco, “CrossFit Sues Reebok,” Morning Chalk Up, June 18, 2018. 47 Isabel Togoh, “Reebok and Athletes Cut Ties with CrossFit Over Founder Greg Glassman’s George Floyd Tweet,” Forbes, June 8, 2020; Justin LoFranco, “Breaking: Reebok Cancels Future Games Negotiations,” Morning Chalk Up, June 7, 2020. 48 Maureen Quirk, “This Is What Athletes Will Wear in the 2018 Reebok CrossFit Games,” Reebok US (blog), July 2018, www.reebok.com/us/blog/302950-this-is-what­ athletes-will-wear-in-the-2018-reebok-crossfit-games

9 FANDOM TRANSFIGURED Fantasy Football as Neoliberal Religion Jeremy Sabella

Introduction For tens of millions of Americans, fantasy football is an obsession. Over the course of the NFL season, the fantasy faithful immerse themselves in the roles of team owners and managers, drafting and trading players as they vie for league cham­ pionships. The tangible reward for their efforts typically takes the form of a nom­ inal cash prize or a league trophy. But what keeps people coming back year in and year out are the intangibles: the competition and camaraderie, bragging rights over friends and colleagues, sustained engagement with the game one loves and those that play it. Indeed, fantasy football becomes so engrossing that it can function as a surrogate for organized religion. As Rodney Ruxin, a character from FX’s fantasy football-themed sitcom The League (2009–2015) declares, “Fantasy football is my religion … Sunday is my Sabbath. And Mondays, and Thursdays, and Saturdays in December, baby!”1 Behind every play that drives the rise and fall of fantasy leagues are flesh-and-blood human beings putting their bodies on the line in a brutal contact sport. The stat-driven format of fantasy football incentivizes participants to overlook the human element. As Thomas Patrick Oates observes, fantasy football is “organized to reward deep knowledge of NFL players as commodities to be acquired, traded, or discarded.”2 The players themselves are painfully aware of this dynamic. Following the injury of teammate Chris Carson in 2017, all-pro cornerback Richard Sherman observed, This is really devastating. I think a lot of people, a lot of fans out there have looked at players less like people because of fantasy football and things like that. You go and say “oh, man this guy got hurt.” But you aren’t thinking “hey man, this guy got hurt, he’s really physically hurt and he is going to take some time to recover and it’s probably going to affect his mental state and DOI: 10.4324/9781003014621-13

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now he has a long rigorous rehab.” You are thinking “oh man, he’s messing up my fantasy team.” Sherman continued, Your fantasy team may not win and hey, guess what? You’ll live the next day. This is their wellbeing. They may not ever get another shot. They may never get another down, another play. I think that is why it is so devastating for players.3 How do we get from jaw-dropping catches and bone-crunching tackles on the gridiron to the neatly ordered spreadsheets of the fantasy football league? Why has leveraging player-generated data in competition with others become a bingeworthy leisure activity? And why does the illusion of exercising management and ownership over predominantly Black NFL players appeal to audiences that are overwhelmingly white and male? I explore these questions using the tools and perspectives of religious studies. Whether coded as important or frivolous, serious or fun, activities that elicit intense devotion and create new forms of human community shape cultural norms and sensibilities. When such communities become national in scale, they reveal what animates a society: its hopes and fears, its conscious and subconscious value systems, its competencies and dysfunctions. For all their differences, organized religions and spectator sports alike qualify as such activities. As I aim to show, fantasy sports, and fantasy football in particular, do as well. Following a brief overview of the history of fantasy football, I examine how three categories drawn from religious discourse—enchantment, conversion, and fanaticism—shed light on how fantasy football transforms the experience of NFL football. After arguing that fantasy football arises out of and perpetuates a neoliberal economic order that relentlessly elaborates new ways of organizing and commodifying human labor, I turn to the religious dimension of neoliberalism— more specifically, what Kathryn Lofton calls “binge religion”—and examine how fantasy football connects with it. I conclude by arguing for fantasy football as a form of neoliberal religion.

Fantasy Football: A Brief History Fantasy football got its start in Oakland, California, in 1962, where Oakland Raiders partner Bill Wikenbach and several others affiliated with Raiders organization first convened the whimsically named Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prog­ nosticator’s League (GOPPPL). Although GOPPPL inspired the formation of several other leagues, fantasy football remained a largely regional affair in its early days, pri­ marily because the statistics on which fantasy football depended were tough to come by. Members would assemble and manage their teams based on what they gleaned from newspaper box scores and radio and television broadcasts. But without quick and easy access to data, fantasy sports remained a niche hobby with little broader impact on NFL fandom.4

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All that changed once the Internet became widely available. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the fantasy gaming industry exploded into the mainstream and has grown at a torrid clip since.5 From 2004 to 2013, market share tripled.6 As of 2019, approximately 20 percent of Americans over the age of eighteen participate in fantasy sports.7 Their relative affluence and avid consumption habits make them a coveted consumer demographic. As the Fantasy Sports and Gaming Association concludes, fantasy players “over-index on nearly every level of consumption.”8 In the American fantasy sports world, fantasy football is the industry juggernaut, engaging 80 percent of all fantasy sports players.9 This overwhelming popularity is partly why fantasy football lends itself to being described and analyzed in religious terms. As one of GOPPPL’s founding members observed, “Pro football isn’t a game. It’s a cult. And [fantasy football] is close to a cult.” Author Mark St. Amant counters, “Fantasy football is more than a hobby, more than an obsession, It’s more than a cult … it’s a cult on creatine.”10 This particular “cult” draws disproportionately from one demographic. Fantasy football participants overwhelmingly male (80 percent) and even more over­ whelmingly white (90 percent),11 even though nearly three-quarters of NFL players are Black and brown.12 This disparity becomes especially concerning in light of fantasy football’s basic premise of exercising ownership and control over the players. As Kellen Hoxworth observes, “Fantasy football habituates fans to fantasies of ownership in which they may draft, trade, buy, sell, promote, demote, and release (‘fire’ or ‘cut’) athletes.” Immersion in the role of team owner enables “predominantly white, male participants” to “elicit and enjoy real affective pleasures of control and domination.”13 The fantasy, in other words, helps perpetuate the racial hierarchies on which our contemporary neoliberal economic order is built. Scholars such as Hoxworth, Andrew Baerg, and Meredith Bagley have situated fantasy sports within our contemporary neoliberal context. Baerg observes that “neoliberalism has served as the guiding governmental rationality of late twentieth and early twenty-first century democracies.”14 This “governmental rationality” prioritizes the careful management of financial risk. Fantasy football is struc­ tured to reward those who master the techniques of risk management by prioritizing “the quantitative over the qualitative, measurement over inter­ pretation, effectiveness over empathy” as they weigh who to draft, trade, and cut in the interest of maximizing their team’s output.15 By assuming the role of team owners, fantasy-football participants also implicitly assert the superiority of management over labor—and, more specifically, of predominantly white man­ agement over predominantly Black labor—as they indulge the fantasy of “enacting their sovereign will on the wealthiest, most physically imposing black bodies in the US American public sphere.”16 Bagley concludes, “fantasy sport play coaches a citizen/subject well suited to decisions and priorities in the interest of neoliberal capital”17—and, we might add, in the interest of perpe­ tuating the racial hierarchies on which the extraction and accumulation of that capital is premised. Fantasy football, in short, “represents the extension of … neoliberal subjectivity in leisure space.”18

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Largely absent from these studies, however, is a robust account of what makes fantasy football so compelling to begin with. People don’t join fantasy football to hone management techniques or cement their place in the social hierarchy; they join because they find fantasy play fun and engrossing. To tens of millions of Americans, it has become a bingeworthy activity that elicits intense attention and devotion. To unpack the broader significance of fantasy football’s bingeworthiness, I will turn to Kathryn Lofton’s notion of “binge religion.” But first I examine how fantasy football transfigures the experience of fandom. In what follows I explore categories that help explain this transfiguring process and locate fantasy football in relation to religious experience: enchantment, conversion, and fanaticism.

Transfiguring Fandom Fantasy football transforms the spectator experience. It offers a paradigm-shifting vantage point that radically alters how one views and interprets what takes place on the gridiron. Where the conventional fan ultimately cares about whether their team wins, the fantasy football participant takes an avid interest in even the minute details of a game featuring their or a competitor’s fantasy picks: how the quarterback distributed his passes, how many carries a particular running back got, whether a certain wide receiver will return to the game after a hard tackle. Consequently, fantasy football devotees experience the game in a fundamentally different register from the conventional fan. Religious language is useful for describing this kind of wholesale shift in perception. As Catherine Albanese points out, one of religion’s chief functions is to help human beings navigate moments of transition in individual and communal life.19 Religious terminology can thus be quite useful for describing transitions that we do not typically think of as being religious in character—such as when the NFL fan becomes a fantasy football aficionado. We begin with the term that captures arguably the most basic shift in perspective that fantasy football introduces: enchantment.

Enchantment Anyone who has experienced a close contest in a packed stadium knows the excite­ ment that sports can generate. The ecstasy of watching one’s team pull off a stunning victory is routinely described in terms befitting a dramatic religious experience. But, in conventional fan experience, such moments are often the culmination of a series of mundane, even tedious events: the long slog of the regular season, the games where one team mounts such a commanding lead that the outcome is all but assured, the seemingly interminable stretches where no one scores, the long pauses in the action for time-outs and huddles. But what if every play, no matter how inconsequential it might seem, is potentially charged with significance? Where every game, from opening day to end-of-season contests between teams with losing records, commands our attention? What if we could follow a sport such that there were no inconsequential moments left? This is precisely what fantasy football

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offers: the opportunity to view the game through an enchanted lens in which every moment matters. The term “enchantment” conjures images from fairy-tales: castles where inanimate objects talk and forests are inhabited by spirits. Here, however, I use it to describe the experience where the formerly nondescript becomes charged with deeper meaning. The explosive appeal of fantasy football is rooted in its capacity to enchant the spectator experience. Although fantasy football has morphed dramatically since its early days as a niche hobby for sports nerds, it has consistently expanded on and refined a simple core insight: virtually every data point that athletes generate on the gridiron can become significant above and beyond the outcome of the game itself. Fantasy teams are made up of players from across the NFL. On a given day, the NFL team to which one’s fantasy player belongs may lose. But if the fantasy player in question was, say, a running back who rattled off multiple long runs or a wide receiver scored multiple touchdowns, he will generate points for the fantasy team. Conversely, the NFL defense one chooses for their fantasy team may win on the gridiron. But if that defense surrendered a lot of points en route to victory, it could hurt the fantasy team’s standings. Fantasy league fortunes can also hinge on moments that have no effect whatsoever on who wins or loses on the field, such as whether a coach decides to go for a touchdown or run out the clock in the final seconds of a blowout win. No matter who wins or by how much, every touch­ down, every pass caught, every yard gained—or on the defensive side, every goal line stand, interception, or tackle—has the potential to shape fantasy outcomes. Harvesting data from the game used to be a much slower, more labor-intensive process. In the pre-Internet age, only the most dedicated hobbyists invested the time and effort into combing box scores and following broadcasts on multiple TV and radio stations.20 Without the digital aids we now take for granted, there were only so many ways for leagues and spectators alike to translate action on the field into data. Then came the Internet age. Computing power and digital technologies expanded the volume and variety of data to be extracted from the field of play. Once dial-up became widely available, one could summon any number of box scores at the click of a button. Easy access to troves of data pushed fantasy sports into the mainstream, as tens of millions of fans took advantage of the opportunity to experience sports in an enchanted mode where every play of every game had the potential to shape fantasy league outcomes. Pro sports leagues like the NFL were slow to recognize the differences in how fantasy players experienced the game or what this meant for league revenues. Initially, fantasy leagues were perceived as competitors for market share that incentivized participants to become invested in the performance of individual players on fantasy rosters rather than whether the team that player belonged to won or lost. This threatened to undermine the fantasy sports participant’s affinity for and rooting interest in a particular team.21 Weakened team attachments would diminish interest in the live game experience, affecting everything from ticket sales to TV ratings to advertising revenue.

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The feared drop-off never materialized. To the contrary, the NFL’s revenue has grown at a torrid clip throughout the fantasy era.22 This is due in part to the fact that the NFL has launched its own fantasy league and formed strategic alliances within the fantasy sports industry.23 But it is also because of the voracious con­ sumption habits of fantasy participants, who, on average, consume up to nine hours of NFL content per week.24 In every season, there comes a point where only a handful of teams are in playoff contention. As the field narrows, so do the number of games that appeal to fans interested in watching their team win it all. Even the teams with the most loyal followings see TV ratings and game attendance drop off once they fall out of contention. The fantasy league participant, however, is working with an entirely different set of incentives. These kinds of consumers don’t merely keep track of one game, but every game in which one of their fantasy picks is playing. It is not only the exciting moments that catch their attention, but any moment where their own or a competitor’s fantasy pick is in on the play. As an ESPN executive observed, “even if you don’t care about the teams, you’ll stay up late to watch if one of your players is playing.”25 Every moment of every game potentially has league implications, creating incentives to subscribe to services such as NFL Redzone that enable the tracking of multiple games at once. This drives up game viewership and ad revenue across the league. And perhaps most surprisingly, fantasy participants are even more likely to attend live games than fans who do not belong to a fantasy league.26 This may be due at least in part to the fact that fantasy football caters primarily to an affluent demographic that can afford tickets, con­ cessions, and other costs associated with the live game experience. But it also reflects the fantasy player’s heightened investment in the game itself. If one is watching an enchanted game in which every play matters, there is no such thing as a fruitless viewing experience. Why not watch the action unfold live—particularly when you can fill the breaks in the action by checking your smartphone for realtime updates on your fantasy stats?

Conversion NFL football has long featured prominent displays of religious piety that draw heavily from evangelical Christianity.27 It is fitting, therefore, to use an evangelical Christian understanding of conversion to shed light on the fantasy experience. In the evangelical Christian imagination, conversion describes the moment that an individual accepts the Jesus Christ into one’s heart, inaugurating a new way of seeing the world. In this reconfigured world, rituals and behaviors that once seemed devoid of meaning—saying grace before a meal, setting aside time to read the Bible and pray, listening to praise and worship music—become engrossing and significant. The convert adopts new ways of organizing their time and energy because, in a spiritual sense, they have become a new person that assigns meaning and value to the world differently from before. Their friend group might change. They may stop smoking and drinking and start adhering to evangelical sexual mores. Their political outlook might shift dramatically. The break with their

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former life can become so pronounced that it is, in Christian parlance, akin to being born again.28 Joining a fantasy league transforms the fan experience in similarly thorough terms. Once they have a taste of what it’s like to step into the role of a fantasy team owner—of acquiring and trading players, of adjusting the roster from week to week, of watching the fortunes of their fantasy team ebb and flow according to a different set of metrics from the final outcome of a given game might suggest— fantasy-football participants start to see the game in a whole new way. Meredith Bagley highlights how this phenomenon manifests in how the NFL has chosen to market its own fantasy leagues. In one ad from the NFL’s “reality of fantasy” series, Tennessee Titans running back Chris Johnson gets the cold shoulder as he runs errands around town after a mediocre performance. In a grocery-store checkout line, the teenage clerk quips, “Man, no touchdowns?” “What do you mean? We still won,” Johnson replies. “Yeah,” the clerk retorts, as he drops a gallon of milk on a carton of eggs, “but I didn’t.”29 In the pre-fantasy world, fans overlooked underwhelming individual performances as long as their team won. From the reconfigured vantage point of the fantasy-football participant, however, individual performance always matters. Once the conventional fan has been reborn as a fantasy player, old ways of interpreting outcomes lose their appeal as new evaluative frameworks take their place. And for many a fantasy convert, there simply is no going back. Just as the evangelical who has undergone a dramatic born-again experience may no longer want to return to a former way of life lacking a crucial spiritual dimension, the fantasy-football participant may no longer want to go back to caring only about who wins and who loses. Do they still cheer for their favorite team? Of course. But they also have a whole slate of games on any given football weekend to hold their attention. The added intrigues of the fantasy league prove too compelling—too enchanting—to pass up.

Fanaticism The term “fanatic” demonstrates how sports culture has appropriated and transformed religious terminology. In religious contexts, it typically describes excessive, even dan­ gerous devotion to one’s faith. It is fanatics who proselytize from door to door, form cults, or engage in acts of violence in the name of God. In sports, the truncated term “fan” has largely been shorn of these negative connotations. Run-of-the mill followers of a particular sport or league are described as “fans.” Devotees whose zeal verges toward excess are “superfans.” In both religion and sports, however, the term “fanatic” signals an intensity of devotion. It is precisely this kind of intensity that fantasy football cultivates in its participants as they outstrip the zeal of the ordinary fan in the time, attention, and money they devote to the game of football. In so doing, they become voracious consumers of bingeworthy content, and, as we shall see, model practitioners of “binge religion.” What is it about the game that elicits such zealous devotion? It’s not loyalty to a particular team: the fantasy roster mixes and matches players from throughout the

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league. Nor is it an affinity for particular NFL stars: in any marginally competitive fantasy league, prioritizing players one likes over those with the best statistical output is a sure way to lose. Might it be loyalty to the league itself? In a narrow sense, perhaps. It is not unusual to remain in the same league with friends or coworkers for years, even decades. Although it’s a different kind of loyalty than one has to a regional team. In certain parts of the country, fandom is practically a birthright (think Green Bay’s affinity for the Packers or Pittsburgh’s allegiance to the Steelers). By contrast, fantasy leagues are communities we choose to join later in life. Whatever loyalty these leagues command, their structure also places parti­ cipants in competition with one another. Devotion to outdoing one another is a strange kind of loyalty indeed. Perhaps it is most helpful to think of the die-hard fantasy leaguer as devoted to honing a particular set of skills. Exceling at fantasy football requires mastering techniques for aggregating, interpreting, and leveraging data—the very tools one needs to succeed in a twenty-first-century economy. In cultivating these tools, participants are “in league with one another in forging a consensus around the national, neoliberal order of things.”30 And they devote themselves to this project with a kind of religious zeal. Like a religious devotee who goes above and beyond the rank and file by attending daily Mass or scrupulously following every feast and fast in the liturgical calendar, fantasy-football participants outdo conventional fans in their willingness to watch blowout games till the end and tune in to end-of-season contests featuring teams with losing records. They are to the NFL what the zealot is to the religious community: the fanatical true believer.

Fantasy Football as Neoliberal Construct By offering an enchanted experience of the sport and a new way of engaging the game, fantasy football transforms fans into superfans who consume far more of the NFL’s product than allegiance to a particular team would incentivize. But fandom is never merely about the game. The outlooks, attitudes, and behaviors that fandom encourages both reflects and influences its broader cultural context. Which is why fantasy sports—and, in particular, its leading representative in fantasy football—merits close scholarly attention. The technologies of data-processing and surveillance that make fantasy sports in their current form possible are integral to our neoliberal social order in which market triumphalism has rendered virtually every aspect of life subject to data harvesting and monetization.31 Precisely because of the incentive structures this order creates, the largest, most powerful corporations of our age, such as Google and Facebook, aggregate and manage vast quantities of data. The source of this data? The individual consumer. Fantasy-football participants seek to understand and relate to themselves, fellow league participants, and NFL players in ways that reinforce the value systems and skill sets required to succeed within this order. Hence, this is why Kellen Hoxworth describes fantasy football as a “laboratory for the remaking of fandom as a mode of entrepreneurial investment in human capital.”32

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By examining how fantasy football intensifies and transforms NFL fandom, we will learn about the value systems that animate American society and how they operate in relation to fantasy football leagues. Understanding fantasy football as a form of neo­ liberal religion provides a framework for making sense of this value system and the individual’s place within it. The term “neoliberalism” describes the economic order that emerged in response to the Keynesian model that prevailed in the West from the end of World War II through the 1970s. In contrast to the Keynesian emphasis on the need for strategic government interventions in the economy, neoliberal apologists insisted on the primacy of market forces, the need for limited government (or more accu­ rately, the illusion of limited government), and the importance of championing individual freedom. The neoliberal model gained traction in the USA in the 1980s through the trickle-down economics policies of the Reagan era and spread globally as the USA emerged as the world’s lone superpower following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Critics have pointed out that the “free market” language underpinning the neoliberal model is not value-neutral as it purports to be. It promotes a particular understanding of freedom, who gets to inhabit it, and on what terms. Bagley identifies two “core and contradictory characteristics” of the neoliberal model: the “intense promotion of individual freedom and choice while maintaining a role for government power by encouraging or managing this specific type of freedom.”33 Within this model, “subjects have the ability to act freely, but this freedom operates within boundaries and parameters established by the government for governmental objectives.”34 Governments, in other words, carefully deploy their regulative and legislative power to encourage people to see themselves first and foremost as indivi­ dual actors who cultivate their freedom through strategic marketplace intervention, competition, and consumption. Following the incentive structures of this carefully managed “free market,” however, enshrines and perpetuates a particular set of gender, race, and class hierarchies without naming them explicitly. These management mechanisms do their work most effectively when they operate unnoticed, as the example of fantasy football illustrates. It presents itself to us as a lei­ sure activity that vastly improves the fan experience, and, for many, it does. Yet fantasy football intensifies and transforms fandom in ways that make neoliberal values and hierarchies seem natural even as it trains us in how to navigate within and perpetuate them. Fantasy football, in short, is a neoliberal indoctrination tool par excellence. Although treated as a leisure activity, fantasy football offers an intensive form of skill-building for neoliberal economies. Our late capitalist moment is characterized by what Randy Martin calls the “financialization of daily life,” by which market logic insinuates itself into virtually every sphere of human activity.35 This has advanced to the point where, as philosopher Michael Sandel argues, we have transitioned from having a market economy to being a market society in which “social relations are made over in the image of the market.”36 He explores how market logic has permeated a range of goods and services that used to be allocated on the basis of a tacit social contract rooted in notions of fairness and the common

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good. Carpool lanes were instituted to incentivize ride-sharing and lower carbon emissions. Long lines at amusement parks were once an equalizing rite of passage for rich and working class alike. Today, certain metro areas permit solo drivers to use the carpool lane during rush hour for a fee, while the wealthy can purchase VIP passes to skip the line at the amusement park.37 Sandel goes on to argue that both examples illustrate how market logics deepen class divisions and condition us to see one another as marketplace competitors rather than fellow citizens with shared commitments to the common good. In a similar vein, fantasy football pro­ vides striking evidence of how market logic pervades the ostensibly fun and escapist realm of fandom, incentivizing us to see fellow fantasy participants not as united by a shared love of the game but as competitors who assert dominance by mastering the data-crunching and management skills of the marketplace. Fantasy football thus comes to represent the “extension of neoliberal subjectivity in leisure space.”38 With its emphasis on teamwork and physical prowess, the game of football appears to espouse a different value system from neoliberalism, and, in a sense, it does. Daniel Gilbert explores how professional football valorized the cooperative spirit of “rugged organization men” in the 1960s.39 Although the accomplishments of individual players have featured more prominently over time,40 the game con­ tinues to fuse athletic excellence with sophisticated modes of cooperation. That those who excel within this incentive structure are rewarded with wealth and fame appears to fly in the fact of neoliberalism’s emphasis on individualistic competition and data manipulation. But our perspective shifts if we think of the players as part of the organizational structure of an NFL team. Most athletes may be millionaires, but the teams are owned by billionaires. It is the owners and managers who wield the power to extract labor from the players and decide whether to sign or release them. While the football field elevates physical ability and discipline, front-office profit maximizers and risk managers have the final say. In neoliberal economies, “those who can calculate, measure, and know via statistical means possess greater power, or freedom, than those who are subject to the measur­ ing.”41 The number crunchers, in other words, control the laborers. For all on-field appearances to the contrary, pro football proves to be no exception. And, by enabling the casual fan to interpret data, manage risk, and sign and release players, fantasy football reinforces the neoliberal pecking order by inviting participants to subject NFL players to measurement: “behind countless cubicle walls and on every variety of Internet-equipped screen,” Gilbert writes, “millions of US workers take part in the imaginary management of NFL talent.”42 In the final analysis, the fantasy reinforces the neoliberal reality. This reality also reveals itself in the demography of fantasy football on the one hand and the NFL on the other. As we have seen, fantasy participants are over­ whelmingly white, male, and affluent. The NFL is predominantly Black—or, at least, its players are; front offices remain predominantly white.43 The “fantasy” that league participants take part in is not that of stepping onto the field but of taking on the role of team owner or general manager. In so doing, fantasy participants imaginatively inhabit the top of the NFL hierarchy where one manages the players

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as commodities to be bought and sold and leveraged. Regardless of why one joins a fantasy league—say, to connect with friends or earn bragging rights at the office—one emerges accustomed to and proficient at managing and leveraging the labor of Black and brown bodies. Fantasy football thus “reanimates deeply embedded and enduring tropes of US American racial governmentality,”44 which have maintained white supremacy from the days of slavery and Jim Crow through our current era of the prison-industrial complex and police violence.45 Although the American economy has transformed dramatically since the nineteenth century, techniques of racial governmentality such as redlining have helped maintain an ample labor pool of nonwhite workers while cultivating a white management class to extract and direct their labor.46 Neoliberalism is no exception: from agribusiness, to sweatshops, to the ride-sharing industry, neoliberal economies are designed to extract the maximum amount of labor at the lowest feasible price point. By incentivizing white participants to manage the output of predominantly Black and brown athletes as efficiently as possible, fantasy football trains them in the techni­ ques that perpetuate these structures. And, by placing them in the role of team owner and general manager, it accustoms them to “enacting their sovereign will on the wealthiest, most physically imposing black bodies in the American public sphere.”47 The “fantasy” thereby normalizes and reinforces the class and race hier­ archies on which the neoliberal model depends. The effects of this reinforcement come through in the sometimes menacing way that fantasy-football participants interact with players on social media. As one fan tweeted to running back Brandon Jacobs in 2013: “IF YOU DON’T RUSH FOR 50 YARDS AND 2 TOUCHDOWNS TONIGHT ITS OVER FOR YOU AND YO FAMILY.” Jacobs dismissed such tweets as the product of “little cyber-gangsters out there that try to be strong behind the keyboard.”48 But the fact remains that this fantasy participant exhibits the entitlement of actual team ownership to Jacobs’s labor without the team ownership’s obligation to cut Jacobs’s paycheck. As Hoxworth observes, even positive social-media posts praising athletes for their fantasy performance reinforces the implicit paternalism of entitlement.49 Fantasy football is emblematic of how market logics structure even that which we do in the name of leisure, fun, and escape. It has transformed the spectatorship of football into a vehicle for forming the identities, cementing the hierarchies, and honing the tools that perpetuate our social, economic, and political order. Fantasy football, in other words, trains us to be “productive, well-adjusted citizen in our twenty-first-century neoliberal context.”50 Perhaps this is what corporate bosses intuit, however subconsciously, as they look the other way when employees play fantasy football during work hours:51 according to one recent study, the lost pro­ ductivity costs employers $9 billion per year.52 But their workers are also getting top-notch job training. If they devote their leisure to honing the skills, outlooks, and behaviors of the late capitalist workplace, why not let them continue on company time?

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Fantasy Football as Neoliberal Religion We are still left with the mystery of why a game that hones the skills for the neoliberal workplace elicits such obsession. The modern office, with its rows of cubicles, labyr­ inthine bureaucracies, and mind-numbing tasks, is routinely depicted in popular cul­ ture and elsewhere as soul-crushing.53 Why are people so enthusiastic about a game that enhances their ability to perform jobs they may not particularly like? The answer may lie, not in what fantasy football trains people for but in the bingeworthy character of the game and the intensive forms of community that it fosters. Sociologist Émile Durkheim argued that religion arises out of and structures human sociality.54 Whether or not we name them explicitly, the rituals, norms, and behaviors that animate our social lives at a given moment serve the religious function of locating us within, and connecting us to, a greater whole. If we understand ourselves to be engaged in a secular pursuit, it may not occur to us to think of this activity as “religious.” But, regardless of whether we describe these behaviors as “religious,” they connect us to others, shape our sensibilities and behaviors, and impart a sense of purpose to our lives in much the same way as organized religion. This insight underpins much of the scholarship on religion and sports, from David Chidester’s groundbreaking analysis of the “church of baseball” to more recent work on stadiums as sacred space and sports calendars as marking sacred time.55 How might Durkheim’s view of religion help us make sense of the fantasyfootball phenomenon? For insight, we turn to Kathryn Lofton, who examines how human sociality takes shape in a neoliberal epoch characterized by the “inescapable logic of markets.”56 She writes that religion is a “way of describing structures by which we are bound or connected to one another. Religion is therefore also a way of describing structures by which we distinguish ourselves from others, often by uniting around things that claim universal interest.” She continues, “We distinguish ourselves from others the very moment we decide to join others in their liking.”57 This emphasis on “liking” places Lofton’s analysis squarely in the Internet age and the forms and the forms of sociality that Wi-Fi connectivity enables. She draws our attention to the particularly immersive and intensive form of liking demonstrated in the act of binging online content.58 In contrast to the tendency to describe online binging as a form of addiction,59 Lofton points out how it immerses us in the world of the pop-culture artifact being consumed and, by implication, in the communities that form around that artifact. The time and attention devoted to binging facilitates intensive forms of sociality within these communities. Lofton speculates, “Future scholars of religion may find … that the sharpest sectarian divides are formed between how you binge, on what, and when, and the commentary produced by those who decide something mean­ ingful happens as they watch their glowing screens.”60 Thus it is that cultural artifacts deemed bingeworthy—i.e. deserving of the intensive, even meditative engagement and immersion that binging facilitates—anchor communities that can be described as forms of “binge religion.”

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Fantasy football, I argue, is a prime example of a bingeworthy activity that fos­ ters binge religion. The technological infrastructure that enables streaming digital content on demand also made it possible for binge consumption of fantasy sports to go mainstream. Judging by its overwhelming market share, fantasy football is the most bingeworthy of the fantasy sports. What makes some objects bingeworthy and others not? I would suggest that bingeworthy objects satisfy a cultural longing or appetite. In the case of fantasy football, I argue that it speaks not only to the values of neoliberalism but also to the needs it leaves unfilled and the appetites it creates; not only to what it supplies but also to what it lacks. In so doing, it keeps us invested in the neoliberal order and its account of how the world works. This makes it not just a feature of neoliberal religion but one of its principal manifestations. Sociologist Peter Berger famously described the patchwork of values, rituals, and practices that make up society as a “sacred canopy” that protects the individual from the existential terror of a meaningless existence. Societies, Berger argues, are contingent human constructs. But when a society is stable it does not feel that way. It feels permanent, as natural and immutable as a sunrise or the law of gravity. This provides individuals the sense of security they need to thrive as social beings. For Berger, the historical function of religion is to legitimate the social order— that is, to supply an account of the world in which the social construct of a given moment feels aligned with the deeper truths of the cosmos. As Berger puts it, “religion is the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant.”61 As society has secularized, other modes of knowledge, such as science and economics, have supplied this legitimating role. In so doing, they take on the religious function of making secular social orders seem in synch with the cosmos, of holding together the sacred canopy that staves off chaos.62 The neoliberal model is a relatively recent construction. In its full-fledged form, it has only existed for a few decades.63 Yet the way that market logic has seeped into seemingly every facet of modern life points to neoliberalism’s success at structuring our sense of how the world works. Fantasy football presents an instructive case in point. Under the guise of bingeworthiness, it immerses partici­ pants in the logics of consumer capitalism: extract as much data as possible from the labor of others, leverage this data for financial benefit, regard even close friends as potential marketplace competitors. And, despite all the data consumption and manipulation that it requires, tens of millions flock to fantasy football. Why? Because it helps a certain type of person—overwhelmingly, the affluent white male profes­ sional—feel in sync with the cosmos that the neoliberal order has constructed. Fantasy football legitimates the neoliberal order for those most well positioned to benefit from and perpetuate it. This legitimating function is particularly important in light of what neoliberalism and its market triumphalism does not provide. It does not supply an account of life’s purpose beyond turning a profit. It does not foster a vision of the common good or the kind of social contract such a vision would require. Indeed, neoliberalism’s penchant for offering market solutions to virtually every human problem precludes

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robust accounts of the individual and their place in the cosmos. Neoliberal orders outsource the task of legitimation to organized religion, civic organizations, and other groups that can articulate and uphold such frameworks. With such groups in steady decline, the infrastructure for holding the sacred canopy together continues to dwindle.64 Which helps explain the zeal behind something like fantasy football. As social beings, people seek out and develop the communities that their social contexts and its incentive structures allow. Some of the most robust large-scale communities remaining in American society are found in sports. And as America’s most popular sports league, the NFL supplies a kind of lingua franca for its legions of fans. The neoliberal order may not offer guidance for how to build and maintain human communities, but it does offer extraordinarily well-developed tools for extracting data and converting that data into profit. Why not use these tools and the incentive structures in which they function to develop new, more elaborate communal forms around football fandom? Fantasy football is what intentional community looks like on neoliberal terms. Judging from the zeal these communities elicit, they help make life under late capitalism worth living. But, like all things neoliberal, this comes at a price. In exchange for immersion in an intense form of community and the sense of belonging this generates, we train ourselves to see other humans as means to the end of winning. In exchange for the sense of control we get from managing elite athletes, we perpetuate the pattern of predominantly white men profiting from and manipulating the output of predominantly black and brown bodies. Fantasy football may make us feel less alone in American society and equip us to function more effectively within it. But it also perpetuates some of its deepest dysfunctions while keeping us too engrossed in the act of consumption to imagine that things could be otherwise.

Conclusion Fantasy football enchants our most popular spectator sport. Under its spell, the NFL season becomes charged with significance from beginning to end. Experien­ cing the game in this transfigured mode converts legions of fans into superfans that binge on NFL content all season long. At the same time, fantasy football trains its participants in the outlooks, techniques, and behaviors of late capitalism. It teaches us to translate the output of other human beings into data and to leverage that data for profit and to view our friends and colleagues as potential competitors. It equips us with the tools to succeed in neoliberal economies where even our leisure is shot through with market logics. But it also inures us to the gender, race, and classbased forms of exploitation on which these economies are built. And it lulls us into taking neoliberal worldviews and disciplines for granted. As one of its most bingeworthy offerings, fantasy football helps legitimate our social order. It is, in short, a form of neoliberal religion.

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Notes 1 The League, Season 7, Episode 4. 2 Thomas Patrick Oates, Football and Manliness: An Unauthorized Feminist Account of the NFL (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 130. 3 Bob Condotta, “Richard Sherman: Fantasy Football Makes Some Fans Look at Players as Less Than People,” Seattle Times, October 2, 2017. For analysis of this excerpt, see Kellen Hoxworth, “Football Fantasies: Neoliberal Habitus, Racial Governmentality, and National Spectacle,” American Quarterly, 72 (1) (2020): 156–157. 4 Nicholas Bowman, Jessi McCabe, and Tom Isaacson, “Fantasy Sports and Sports Fandom; Implications for Mass Media Research,” in Adam C. Earnhardt (ed.), Sports Fans, Identity, and Socialization: Exploring the Fandemonium (Washington, DC: Lexington Books, 2011), 258; Shaun M. Anderson and Nicholas David Bowman, “The Origin of Fantasy Sports,” in Nicholas David Bowman, John S. W. Spinda, and Jimmy Sanderson (eds), Fantasy Sports and the Changing Sports Media Industry: Media, Players, and Society (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2016), 5–7; Oates, Football and Manliness, 134. 5 Anderson and Bowman, “The Origin of Fantasy Sports,” 5–7.

6 Jordan Weissmann, “The Insane Growth of Fantasy Sports: in 1 Graph,” The Atlantic,

September 10, 2013.

7 https://thefsga.org/industry-demographics

8 https://thefsga.org/industry-demographics

9 https://thefsga.org/industry-demographics

10 Mark St. Amant, Committed: Confessions of a College Football Junkie (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 29–30; emphasis original. 11 Anderson and Bowman, “The Origin of Fantasy Sports,” 9. 12 Nikhil Sonnad, “The NFL’s Racial Divide, in One Chart,” Quartz, May 24, 2018. 13 Hoxworth, “Football Fantasies,” 165. 14 Andrew Baerg, “Draft Day: Risk Responsibility, and Fantasy Football,” in Nicholas David Bowman, John S. W. Spinda, and Jimmy Sanderson (eds), Fantasy Sports and the Changing Sports Media Industry: Media, Players, and Society (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2016), 103. 15 Hoxworth, “Football Fantasies,” 163. 16 Hoxworth, “Football Fantasies,” 173. 17 Meredith Bagley, “Fulfilling Fundamental Fantasies: Cultural Discourse of Fantasy Football,” in Barry Brummett and Andrew W. Ishak (eds), Sports and Identity: New Agendas in Communication (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014), 299. 18 Baerg, “Draft Day,” 113. 19 Catherine Albanese, America: Religions and Religion, 4th edn (Belmont, Calif.: Thomson Wadsworth, 2007), 3–4. 20 Bowman et al., “Fantasy Sports and Sports Fandom,” 258. 21 Anderson and Bowman, “The Origin of Fantasy Sports,” 8; Bret Schrotenboer, “Leagues See Real Benefits in Daily Fantasy Sports,” USA Today, January 1, 2015. 22 “Total Revenue of All National Football League Teams from 2001 to 2018,” Statista, January 2020. 23 “NFL makes DraftKings First Official Daily Fantasy Partner,” October 26, 2019. 24 Andrew C. Billings, Natalie Brown Jeremy Lee, and Brody J. Ruihley, “The Effects of Fantasy Football Participation on Team Identification, Team Loyalty and NFL Fandom,” Journal of Sports Media, 8 (1) (2013): 222–223. 25 Steve Bien-Aimé and Marie Hardin, “Legacy Media and Fantasy Sports,” in Nicholas David Bowman, John S. W. Spinda, and Jimmy Sanderson (eds), Fantasy Sports and the Changing Sports Media Industry: Media, Players, and Society (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2016), 162. 26 Anderson and Bowman, “The Origin of Fantasy Sports,” 11. 27 Tom Krattenmaker, Onward Christian Athletes (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010); Jeremy Sabella, “Postures of Piety and Protest: The Politics of Kneeling in NFL

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28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53

54 55

56 57

Stadiums,” Religions, 10 (8) (2019); Jeffrey F. Scholes, “Pray the White Way: Religious Expression in the NFL in Black and White,” Religions, 10 (8) (2019). Jesus’s exchange with the religious leader Nicodemus in John 3 features an extended treatment of the notion of being born again. Incidentally, this section also includes the John 3:16 passage referenced repeatedly on handmade stadium signs and on the eyeblack of football players. www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzLs5FFkpqc Hoxworth, “Football Fantasies,” 162. Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2012), 3–15. Hoxworth, “Football Fantasies,” 162. Bagley, “Fulfilling Fundamental Fantasies,” 284. Baerg, “Draft Day,” 103. Oates, Football and Manliness, 140. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy, 11. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy, 18–21. Baerg, “Draft Day,” 113. Daniel Gilbert, “The Gridiron and the Gray Flannel Suit: NFL Football and the Modern US Workplace,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 42 (2) (2018), 138. Gilbert, “The Gridiron and the Gray Flannel Suit,” 138–139. Bagley, “Fulfilling Fundamental Fantasies,” 284. Gilbert, “The Gridiron and the Gray Flannel Suit,” 141. Sonnad, “The NFL’s Racial Divide.” Hoxworth, “Football Fantasies,” 159. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012). Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2017). Hoxworth, “Football Fantasies,” 173. “Enraged Fan Threatens Giants RB Brandon Jacobs on Twitter,” CBS New York, October 22, 2013. Hoxworth, “Football Fantasies,” 169. Baerg, “Draft Day,” 114. According to one estimate, the average employee in a fantasy league spends, on average, a half hour of every working day tending to their team. See Paul Ausick, “How Much the $7 Billion Fantasy Football Business Costs Other Employers,” 24/7 Wall Street, August 15, 2019. Ausick, “How Much.” Hollywood cult classics Office Space (1999) and Fight Club (1999) and the TV show The Office (2005–2013) are particularly well-known examples. For an analysis of the cubicle and its place in corporate life, see Kathryn Lofton, “The Spirit in the Cubicle: A Reli­ gious History of the American Office,” in Consuming Religion (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 34–58. Lofton, Consuming Religion, 18–19. David Chidester, “The Church of Baseball, the Fetish of Coca-Cola, and the Potlatch of Rock ’n’ Roll: Theoretical Models for the Study of Religion in American Popular Culture,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 64 (4) (1996): 743–765; Craig Forney, The Holy Trinity of American Sports: Civil Religion in Football, Baseball, and Bas­ ketball (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2007); Arthur Remillard, “The Shrines of Sport: Sacred Space and the World’s Athletic Venues,” in Stanley D. Brunn (ed.), The Changing World Religion Map (Berlin: Springer, 2015), 2881–2892. Lofton, Consuming Religion, 6. Lofton, Consuming Religion, 5.

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58 Although binging is not a precise category for all forms of online media, binge-watching has come to be defined streaming three or more episodes of a particular show in unin­ terrupted succession (Lofton, Consuming Religion, 22). 59 Lofton, Consuming Religion, 21. 60 Lofton, Consuming Religion, 32. 61 Peter Berger, “The Sacred Canopy,” in Susan C. Monahan, Michael O. Emerson, Sus­ anne C. Monahan, and William A. Mirola (eds), Sociology of Religion: A Reader (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2010), 10. 62 Berger, “The Sacred Canopy,” 12. 63 Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy, 6–8. 64 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); Michael Lipka, “A Closer Look at America’s Rapidly Growing Religion ‘Nones’,” Pew Research Center, May 13, 2015, www.pewresearch. org/fact-tank/2015/05/13/a-closer-look-at-americas-rapidly-growing-religious-nones

PART IV

Religion and Sport through a Racial Frame

10

TED CORBITT The Once-forgotten and Now-remembered Pioneer of American Distance Running Arthur Remillard

Introduction On the afternoon of February 23, 2020, Ahmaud Arbery took off for a run through his hometown of Brunswick, Georgia. At twenty-five years of age, Arbery had turned to running to keep fit after his days as a high-school football standout ended. By all accounts, Arbery enjoyed running, even though he didn’t consider himself a runner. Unfortunately, neither did the two men who pursued Arbery in a pickup truck and shot him to death on that fateful afternoon, prompted by a sus­ picion that Arbery had been the unknown person responsible for a series of breakins in the area. At first, Arbery’s death received little public attention, with the assailants claiming that the shooting was an act of self-defense. In May, however, graphic video of the encounter surfaced, leading to the arrests of Arbery’s killers and a renewed public interest in the case.1 “Can’t even go for a damn jog man!” exclaimed NBA star LeBron James on social media, echoing the frustration and fear of many who had seen the video.2 Indeed, Arbery’s death prompted a broader discussion on the unique perils of “running while Black.” “There isn’t a day that goes by that I run and don’t think about safety,” remarked one Black runner. Others outlined the exhaustive “mental checklists” they sort through as precautions for running. Before I step outside the house, I run through a set of questions: Is my beard too thick? Is it too dark outside? Am I dressed like a runner? Then, while on the run, I have to consider the following: Is my rap music too loud? Does my cap, worn backward, send the wrong message? Do I open up my stride now or wait until I get out of the neighborhood and into the open roads so that I don’t appear to be “running away” from something or someone?3

DOI: 10.4324/9781003014621-15

202 Arthur Remillard

Stories like these reveal that the lived reality of Black distance runners contradict a popular perception of this particular sport being “the great equalizer”—an activity where social boundaries evaporate as people of all backgrounds and abilities bond in their shared experience of laboring and loping forward on the roads and trails.4 This motif of sweat-based equality traces back to the commonly told story of the “running boom” of the 1970s. It began in the 1940s when noted New Zealand distance-running coach Arthur Lydiard theorized that long, slow distance running for average people could offer a range of health and wellness benefits. In the fol­ lowing years, Lydiard built up a community of “joggers” who came from a wide range of ages and abilities, all trotting through the countryside.5 Then, in 1962, University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman visited Lydiard in New Zealand and was astonished and inspired by what he saw. Returning to the USA, Bowerman began teaching jogging classes to university students and the community. Further momentum for this fitness movement came in 1972 at the Munich Olympic Games when American Frank Shorter gained national acclaim by dra­ matically capturing gold in the marathon. Capitalizing on the moment, Bowerman teamed up with Phil Knight, one of his former athletes, to launch what would become the Nike Corporation. As Bowerman and Knight marketed their shoes to a growing population of joggers, running clubs and road races sprang up all over America purporting to invite people from all backgrounds, places, and fitness levels to participate.6 “Jogging is free. It is convenient and enjoyable. It is safe,” exclaimed Coach Bowerman in his 1967 book, Jogging. “And it can benefit nearly everyone who is not ill or disabled.”7 As the decades passed, the sport of distance running grew and expanded with an outward ethos that championed equality through effort. With Arbery’s death, however, a latent racial gap in this origin story opened, revealing a dramatically different story for Black Americans who have sought to become citizens of this fitness community. None of this was lost on Mitchell S. Jackson. In a Pulitzer Prize–winning article for Runner’s World, Jackson identifies the ways in which Arbery’s death disclosed a racist rot present in American culture generally and within the sport of distance running specifically. Himself a native Oregonian, Jackson knows the story of the running boom well, reciting the account in his article. But he also knows the racial subtext. “Matter of truth,” Jackson explains, “around the time Bowerman visited New Zealand and published a bestselling book, millions of Blacks were living in the Jim Crow South.” The result was a very different social reality for Black Americans in comparison to whites. As Jack­ son summarizes, by 1968, Blacks diaspora-wide had mourned the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. And by the late ’60s and beyond, the Blacks of the Great Migration were redlined into ever more depressed sections of northern and western cities, areas where the streets were less and less safe to walk, much less run.

Ted Corbitt 203

Thus, the barriers for social progress in Black America extended to the realm of health and wellness. “Forces aplenty discouraged Blacks from reaping the manifold benefits of jogging,” Jackson concludes. “And though the demographics of runners have become more diverse over the last 50 years, jogging, by and large, remains a sport and pastime pitched to privileged whites.”8 In taking aim at the foundational story of the running boom, Jackson and others have begun to expose a fundamental contradiction between the values of the sport and the reality of Black people within it. This is significant because the story of the running boom is about more than a collection of names and dates from the past. It has instead become a mythology or a guiding narrative for expressing and shaping the values and beliefs of a given community. The words “myth” and “mythology” tend to evoke images of traditional religions and ancient cultures whose stories often have minimal grounding in objective reality. But the act of using sacred frames of reference to order events from the past—irrespective of their historical veracity—certainly exists in many contemporary forms that are not anchored in traditional religions. “A whole volume could well be written on the myths of modern man,” Mircea Eliade famously exclaimed, “on the mythologies camou­ flaged in the plays that he enjoys, in the books that he reads.”9 Sports would be another location where myths linger in the stories told about the movements of athletes and the devotion of fans. So while the running boom was not a religious movement in a conventional sense, its origin story does contain what David Chidester called the “traces of transcendence, the sacred, and the ulti­ mate.”10 While not derived from any particular faith tradition, the running boom’s “from the beginning” story deploys a memory from the past in order to give shape and direction to the present and future. It is, in other words, the story that makes the world within which runners have come to experience and understand their sport. In framing the running boom’s origin story as a mythology, then, we begin to see the creative ways that sports operate in, as Chidester phrases it, “character­ istically religious ways.”11 Additionally and importantly, in the wake of Ahmaud Arbery’s killing, this mythology has begun to take on new dimensions. While myths often project a sense of stability and unchanging truth, changes in social patterns tend to lead people toward what Bruce Lincoln has called a “strategic tinkering with the past.”12 In other words, people want stories from the past that explain their present and that offer a context for how “We” came into being. When the “We” expands and assumes a new shape, so too must their stories of origin. To this point, the curators and interpreters of distance running’s memory have begun recovering the names of those who have heretofore been systematically erased from the canonized account. Names such as Ted Corbitt figure prominently in this refiguring of the running boom’s mythology. In his time, Corbitt was instrumental in the popular­ izing of distance-running, particularly within New York City. But over the years, Corbitt and other Black distance runners have faded from memory. As more creative tinkering with the past continues, though, Corbitt’s name has reemerged, specifically as a “pioneer”—a label applied to the runner in his own time and into

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the present. The importance of Corbitt’s recovery is that it demonstrates a collective effort to address the lasting problem of racial inequity within the sport of distance running. In this way, the running boom’s refashioned myth of origin lives into the unfulfilled promise of the original account, seeking to tell a story about an inclusive past in order to produce a more inclusive future for the sport.

The Sports Pioneer In American history, the conventional image of a pioneer relates to the nineteenthcentury agent of westward expansion, the breaker of frontier soil, and the remover of native populations. This version of the pioneer story has become its own mythology; it is one that is as white, male, and Christian as Manifest Destiny itself. It is likely for this reason that in the summer of 2020, protesters toppled two pioneer statues on the University of Oregon campus.13 In modern sports, however, the pioneer has a different, largely positive connotation. Specifically, the pioneering athlete is, for better or worse, the standard-bearer of a marginalized group, thereby is largely remembered as someone who made space not only for themselves in America’s moral landscape but for those who they represent as well. The story of the sports pioneer emerged mainly in the middle part of the twen­ tieth century, when social forces like immigration, civil rights, and feminism brought new people and perspectives into the American fold. As historian Robert Cottrell concluded, it was into this setting that the modern sports pioneer emerged, becoming a character in the broader “American melting pot” narrative, which foregrounded a belief in the civic creed of “out of many, one.” To illustrate this point, Cottrell iden­ tified the Jewish slugger Hank Greenberg and Jackie Robinson as being “two pio­ neers” with similar and interlocking stories that led not only to the transformation of baseball but of America as well. The two had actually met on the baseball field when Greenberg was near the end of his career and Robinson was just getting started. The friendship that resulted grew out of a shared experience of facing down discrimination and creating space for others like them to follow. “Each was an American hero,” Cottrell stated. “Each represented the best that their country stood for: equality of opportunity and fair treatment for all.”14 With Cottrell’s observations in mind, we find that the pioneer in sports is a very specific kind of American hero, which in itself shines a light on the ways that sports operate in religious ways. In the Homeric tradition, heroes emerged from the unions of humans and mortals—demigods who occupied the uncomfortable place between eternity and the finite. They were both relatable and remote, offering to admirers a bridge between eternal truths and the limited understanding of humankind.15 As time passed, the religious residue of this ancient formulation would inflect how interpreters characterized noteworthy people in American history. “Oh Washington! Thou Hero, Patriot, Sage,” proclaimed a Boston newspaper announcing the death of George Washington in 1799. For the relatively new nation, the idea of George Washington as a national hero had powerful symbolic currency—memories and monuments to the founding president that wove in Christian and Greek images and symbols.16

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Similarly, sports have also become the hero’s stage in America, with boxers, baseball players, jockeys, and an assortment of other athletes all gaining public attention and adulation through their bodily movements. Significantly, interpretation has been cri­ tical to the development of heroic identity in sports, as it has been with political figures like Washington. “When a sportswriter stops making heroes out of athletes,” exclaimed the legendary sports journalist Grantland Rice, “it’s time to get out of the business.”17 Rice made a career out of applying this principle to his writing, producing an aura of otherworldliness around the activity of sporting events. In 1924, for exam­ ple, he penned what would become a legendary account of a football game between Notre Dame and Army. “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horse­ men rode again,” he opened, referring to the backfield of Notre Dame’s offense and writing overt Christian imagery into the story of football in a way that would leave an indelible mark on the game and sports journalism alike.18 When interpreters inscribe sacred meaning onto the motions and activities of the game, then, they transform actions and individuals into myths and heroes. For those interpreting the lives and careers of Hank Greenberg and Jackie Robinson, the heroic threads in their story spun around a particular understanding of the pioneer as one who breaks through social barriers in order to deliver on an American promise of equality for all. Ted Corbitt had a similar story told about him in his time and after, with the label “pioneer” in close proximity to his name and accomplishments. This is perhaps why one interpreter of his legacy called Corbitt, “distance running’s Jackie Robinson.”19

“Distance Running’s Jackie Robinson” The parallels between the lives of Robinson and Corbitt are rather astounding. To start, they shared birthday of January 31, 1919, were both grandsons of enslaved people, and were born in the South a mere 300 miles apart. They were similarly named after Theodore Roosevelt (Robinson’s middle name was Roosevelt). And both Corbitt and Robinson attended college in Ohio, served in World War II, and settled in Brooklyn in 1946 and 1947 respectively. They were registered Repub­ licans, both married to a nurse, and the two athletes are buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn—separated by a mere 200 yards.20 While Robinson and Corbitt never met, the significant overlap in their lives was more than a series of coincidences. Most notably, their presence and accomplishments within their sports did the work of resisting the racial status quo of the era. But, as we will see, when the mythology of the running boom emerged, Corbitt’s name was erased, even though his presence and contributions to the sport were such that much of what distance running would become owed a debt to him. To better understand why Corbitt should be included into the running boom’s mythology—its sacred origin story—it will help to first give a brief account of his remarkable career. For Corbitt, running was more than a means for fitness and competition, naming it instead as the perfect setting to feed his “fierce competitive spirit.” When his family moved from South Carolina to Cincinnati, Corbitt started running in

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high school and continued at the University of Cincinnati. Despite his talent, though, Corbitt was sometimes barred from competing at track meets against white athletes, who refused to share a track with Black athletes. It was a reality that Corbitt would continue facing after college, but he wouldn’t have to do it alone.21 After college, Corbitt served in the army during World War II and then used his GI Bill to complete a degree in physical therapy at New York University. Remaining in the city, Corbitt resumed his regular running routine and began to forge his identity as a “pioneer” in distance running. It all started, appropriately enough, in 1947, when he joined the New York Pioneers Club. Founded in 1936, the Pioneers sought to pro­ vide opportunities for health and fitness to Black youth of the city. Soon, many of New York’s best athletes gravitated toward the club, drawn in by its focus on inter­ racial cooperation through sports. In 1942, the Pioneers expanded its membership to whites, declaring in its new constitution that the club aspired to, “encourage and fur­ ther the ambition of our youth for higher education that they might become intelli­ gent, civic-minded citizens, and to work toward a better racial understanding through the medium of education and sports.”22 Joe Yancy was one of the co-founders of the Pioneers and served as the club’s longtime coach. His criterion for membership was simple. “All you have to do is have a notion that you might like to run,” he averred. “The Pioneer Club has always pursued the United Nations Open Door Policy.”23 Interestingly, many of the white athletes initially joining the Pioneers were Jewish, leading to the group taking intersecting stands against antisemitism and anti-Black racism. This was yet another similarity in the lives of Corbitt and Robinson, insofar as Jewish voices in the media were among the strongest advocates for baseball’s desegregation.24 While Robinson contended with Major League Baseball, Corbitt and his fellow Pioneers had the American Athletic Union (AAU). In 1946, the AAU’s national track meet was held in San Antonio. Organizers offered segregated facilities, but the Pioneers chose to boycott the meet rather than accept these arrangements. Similarly, in 1950, the AAU meet was in College Park, Maryland. That year, the Pioneers were unable to find lodging for their integrated team, so Coach Yancy arranged for them to stay 75 miles away at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Yancy himself also met with the indignities of racism within his sport. Despite having produced several Olympians through the Pioneers, Yancy was never asked to serve as a coach for the US Olympic team. Instead, he coached Olympic teams for Jamaica, the Bahamas, Trinidad, and British Guiana.25 Corbitt witnessed and participated in these institutional struggles, but he also dealt with racism in his daily life. Running through the streets of the city, Corbitt was fre­ quently met with racial slurs from disapproving white onlookers. Additionally, Cor­ bitt, who was known for his meticulous record-keeping, estimated that police had stopped him over 200 times during his many runs through the city streets. And then there were the less obvious slights. In 1958, after placing third in the International Trade Marathon in New Jersey, a two-page article in the Jersey Journal featured pictures of the first, second, and fourth-place finishers, while failing to show Corbitt’s image or even mention him in the article.26 Racism also lingered in the everyday expectations

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of fellow white runners. In 1955, the Saturday Evening Post ran a story about long-distance runners, one of whom had a particularly dim view of Black Americans. Reminded that noted runner Lou White was Black, the man responded, “Oh, that doesn’t count … Lou’s not really a Negro in my mind. He’s a real gentleman, a marathoner.”27 Fully aware that his skin color made him an anomaly and target within his sport, Corbitt focused on combating racism through his athletic performance. In 1952, at the Helsinki Olympics, he became the first Black American marathoner to compete at the games. After that, Corbitt returned to New York and made it his mission to build an interracial culture of distance running in the city and beyond. In 1958, he was among the founders of the Road Runners Club of America, and he served as the first president of the New York Road Runners. He also edited the club’s official publication, New York Runner, which published results, race calendars, and other helpful articles. Significantly, over half of the founding members of the New York Road Runners were fellow Pioneer Club members. It was their intention to graft the Pioneers’ ethos of inclusiveness onto this new venture.28 Then came the innovation that Corbitt called “easily the most important thing that I did in the long-distance running scene.”29 In 1964, he published a pamphlet that outlined in painstaking detail the accepted methods for certifying racecourse distances. Corbitt himself took a biblical view of course measurement, citing Pro­ verbs 20:10 in the opening: “Differing weights and differing measures—both of them alike are an abomination to the Lord.” For Corbitt, accuracy in distances meant that finishing times, which he called the “real prizes” of the sport, were legitimate and comparable. As the pamphlet started to circulate, it quickly became “the Bible” for race directors across America. The Road Runners Club of America used it as the basis for their course certification program, and Corbitt led the first national standards committee to advance this goal.30 As for his own running career, Corbitt was known for his extraordinary com­ mitment, regularly running 20 miles each day, sometimes trotting his commute to and from work. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, he coined a term that became a new classification in distance running—“ultrarunning,” signifying races of distances over 26.2 miles. It was in these races, he attested, that one had a true “spiritual test.” In 1962, Corbitt logged 300 miles in a single week, before traveling to England where he finished fourth in a 54-mile race from London to Brighton. This event had become the de-facto “World Championship” of ultrarunning at the time, but interest in such challenges was also gathering in the USA. Shortly after Corbitt returned stateside, President Kennedy unwittingly launched the “50-mile frenzy.” In years prior, Kennedy had announced concern about what he called “The Soft American,” his imagined man of the era who was more content watching sports than playing it.31 As president, then, he launched numerous fitness initiatives, to include in 1963 reviving an executive order from Theodore Roosevelt, which stated that all Marine junior officers should be able to complete a 50-mile hike in 20 hours. In February, newspapers began reporting on the Marines at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina carrying out the president’s challenge, which then led to

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civilians taking on the same task. “50 Miles for JFK,” proclaimed one placard, carried by a young man from New York determined to prove his generation’s commitment to fitness.32 The 50-mile frenzy largely faded with Kennedy’s assassination, but some of these events such as the JFK 50 Mile in Maryland evolved into lasting ultramarathons. Corbitt would have a lengthy and record-breaking career at such distances, col­ lecting track records at 50 and 100 miles, as well as a 24-hour distance record in 1973 where he completed 134.7 miles. Corbitt was fifty-four at the time.33 While age seemed to be no impediment for Corbitt, the following year his elite running career came to an abrupt end when doctors diagnosed him with bronchial asthma. Undeterred, he took up walking as a replacement to running and applied his competitive energies to pedestrian pursuits. In the coming decades, he walked the New York City Marathon nearly every year, along with other events of varied distances. When Corbitt was eighty-one, he completed in a six-day race and cov­ ered 240 miles. Determined to improve his finish the following year, Corbitt returned and walked 303 miles. Before dying in 2007, he had embarked on a venture to walk every street in Manhattan.34 By his own count, Corbitt ran 199 marathons and ultramarathons in his career, winning thirty of them. Despite Corbitt’s presence, longevity, and contributions to the sport, though, the story of the running boom that started to take shape in the 1970s rarely mentioned him. In the over 900-page behemoth The Lore of Running, Corbitt receives only passing mention. Other treatments of running’s history tend to follow this pattern, starting this story in Oregon and favoring names like Alberto Salazar, Frank Shorter, and Bill Rogers.35 For those familiar with Corbitt’s life, this omission has been a source of puzzlement and frustration. “He earned people’s respect, and changed their thinking,” said one admirer. “It’s a shame that many runners today don’t even know who he is.”36 Sportswriter Robert Lipsyte was similarly perplexed. In 1993, he wrote two feature pieces on Corbitt for the New York Times, as the aged athlete prepared to complete yet another New York City Marathon. Lipsyte posited that Corbitt’s quiet demeanor and withdrawn personality left him overlooked. “Corbitt was the inside man during the running boom,” Lipsyte explained, “while the more ambitious and extroverted gurus, Fred Lebow, Jim Fixx and Dr. George Sheehan, drew the crowds to run in them.” Still, Lipsyte hoped that people would come to recognize Corbitt’s significance, calling him “the last surviving spiritual elder of the modern running clan.”37 Joe Henderson was the editor of Runner’s World magazine and counted himself a fan of the person he called “Grandpa Ted.” Writing a year after Lipsyte’s columns, Henderson had a similar assessment of Corbitt’s lacking presence in the runningboom story. “Pioneers seldom receive much of the later glory,” Henderson wrote, “but that’s okay with the soft-voiced Corbitt. He never sought attention for him­ self.”38 Along these lines, Ted’s son Gary certainly saw his father as being a Jackie Robinson-like athlete for distance running but insisted that Ted never sought attention for anything that he did. “I’d call it quiet activism,” Gary Corbitt resolved, “letting his actions speak volumes.”39

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For many years, then, the interpreters and curators of Corbitt’s memory identi­ fied him as a pioneer—a hero who deserved a place within the mythology of the running boom. And yet, they lamented, his absence in this story of origin owed to his withdrawn personality. In the aftermath of Ahmaud Arbery’s death, though, Corbitt’s memory got a signal boost—in particular, from Mitchell Silver, the commissioner of the New York City Parks Department. In the summer of 2020, Silver held a series of virtual meetings with his staff to reflect on the history-making moment they were living through. Resolving that they wanted to do something meaningful in their professional capacity, the team developed a plan to rename parks and park features after noteworthy Black people and events. Among the dozens of renamings under consideration was the Central Park Loop, a project that was of particular interest to Silver. As a Black man and a distance runner, Silver knew that this iconic loop was the home turf of Ted Corbitt.40 Silver also knew that the running boom owed a great debt to Corbitt’s accomplishments, con­ tributions, and innovations. Specifically, for the city of New York in particular, there would be no New York City Marathon without him. It was, after all, Cor­ bitt who designed the course for the first event, held on September 14, 1970. Corbitt, who was fifty at the time, competed in the race and finished in fifth place with a time of 2:44:15. Corbitt wore bib number 1, an honor bestowed upon him by the race director Fred Lebow.41 In the early days of the marathon, Corbitt and Lebow had worked closely to broaden its appeal and to make the New York City Marathon into the event that it would become, drawing tens of thousands of runners to the city every year. Alberto Salazar won the race in 1980, 1981, and 1982, and for him, “the New York City Marathon was a pure product of the running boom.” Additionally, in Salazar’s eyes, the success of the race was entirely due to Lebow.42 Salazar is certainly not alone in his assessment. After Lebow died of cancer in 1994, one of his admirers launched a successful campaign to place a bronze statue of the race director near the marathon’s finish in Central Park.43 A sign near the statue reads in part, Lebow envisioned the New York City Marathon as a race for everyone—men and women of every color, creed and country, regardless of ability. Each runner seeks his or her own goal—whether to win, to achieve a personal best, or simply to finish.44 The symbolic work of this monument melds an imagined ethos of distance run­ ning with the person of Fred Lebow. But for all of the praise heaped upon Lebow, even he was fully aware of Ted Corbitt’s broader influence. It was Lebow, after all, who shortly before dying gave Corbitt one of his most lasting monikers—“the father of American distance running.”45 Mitchell Silver had seen the Lebow statue many times on his runs through Central Park and wondered about the disjuncture between this and Corbitt’s rela­ tive obscurity. Hence, on February 22, 2021, during Black History Month, Silver and the Parks Department announced the newly renamed Ted Corbitt Loop at

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Central Park. “May his legacy and pioneering spirit live on to inspire the next gen­ eration of runners to strive for greatness, progress, and peace,” Silver exclaimed.46 Corbitt’s son, Gary, who has developed an extensive archive on his father, was among those in attendance at the ceremony. For his part, Gary had long been active in promoting the memory of his father as well as for Black distance runners more generally. “My father and other men and women volunteers worked tireless hours to help invent the modern day sport of long distance running,” he announced. “This naming tribute celebrates all these pioneers.”47

A New Mythology With Corbitt’s name now prominently featured on one of the most visible running spaces in America, we have begun to see a “strategic tinkering” with the mythol­ ogy of the running boom. There are, though, many other stories left to include. To begin, there were several antecedents to Ted Corbitt, such as, for example, Eddie Gardner. In 1914, Gardner attended the Tuskegee Institute where he learned steam boiler repair and gained notice as a member of their track team. After school, Gardner returned to his hometown of Seattle and by the 1920s, he came to dominate the city’s competitive running scene. He also built an image for himself, training in a white sleeveless shirt, white shorts, and a white towel around his head. Onlookers took to yelling out to Gardner, “Oh, you sheik!” channeling the film roles popularized by Rudolph Valentino. In time, Gardner became “The Sheik of Seattle.”48 Gardner’s name and image gained national notoriety in 1928, when he com­ peted in the first transcontinental endurance race, nicknamed the “Bunion Derby.” Designed to start in Los Angeles and finish in New York City, competitors sought to cover 3,422 miles in eighty-four days, averaging 41 miles for each stage. In the early stages, Garner ran near the front of the pack, at times taking the lead. Once the race reached Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, though, Gardner found himself competing not just against other runners but also against Jim Crow racism. In these places, white onlookers hurled racist remarks and threats of violence at Gardner. One white farmer in Oklahoma went so far as to follow Gardner on a mule with a shotgun, threatening to shoot Gardner if he dared to pass a white man. Gardner had another brush with death when a mob in Texas surrounded his tent and threatened to burn it. All the while, though, Gardner took solace in the fact that thousands of Black onlookers also stood along the course, intent on supporting and protecting him. Gardner managed to finish in eighth place, winning $1,000.49 Gardner returned to the race the following year when the course switched directions going from east to west. This time, though, he trained with winning in mind, confident that he would contend with the nation’s top endurance athletes. He also saw it as his mission to honor all of those Black Americans who had sup­ ported him. Gardner was among the top three leaders when the race reached Missouri and passed through the site of the infamous East St. Louis Race War of 1917, wherein white mobs massacred scores of Black citizens and leveled their

Ted Corbitt 211

community. Gardner determined to take the lead in this very place, pulling away from the competition wearing his trademark sheik garb that also featured an American flag on his shirtfront. The symbolism sent a message to those who had sought to demean and harm Black Americans like him: this was their country too. A muscle injury soon limited Gardner’s stride, though, and he had to drop out. Saddened, Gardner knew that he was not just representing himself. “I am sorry,” he told a reporter, “I wanted to keep on running and win—FOR YOU, my people.”50 Gardner went on to make a living as a repairperson in Seattle before passing away in 1966. Few knew of his accomplishments then, but in recent years, his name has regained notice as a “forgotten pioneer” and a civil-rights hero.51 Indeed, many Black distance runners have braided together the rhythms of their sport with civil rights. Dick Gregory garnered national attention in the 1960s as a comedian and as political activist. But in his younger days Gregory was one of the nation’s best distance runners. In 1950, he won the Missouri state high-school crosscountry meet and then went on to record a mile time of 4:28—a national highschool record at the time. Much to Gregory’s dismay, though, when track and field’s official record book came out, it did not include his time. Record keepers of the era refused to recognize his time because of where it was run: the Missouri State Track Meet for Negroes.52 This injustice on the track led Gregory to protest the decision, which then opened him to the broader civil-rights struggle. Additionally, during the height of the running boom, Gregory began using his fame and his running to address causes that he considered significant. In 1976, for example, Gregory ran from Los Angeles to New York City to raise awareness and funds for global hunger. In towns and cities along the way, interracial groups of runners would join him, sometimes wearing shirts saying “Dick Gregory’s Food Run.” While certainly not facing the degree of hostility as Eddie Gardner decades before, running played a significant role in both athletes’ advancing of civil rights in America.53 The mythology of American distance running might also better incorporate the voices of Black women into the story. In 1975, Marilyn Bevans became the first Black women to win a marathon and, later, the first to run under three hours at the marathon distance. In 1977, she finished as the second woman in Boston with a time of 2:51:12. Much like Corbitt and others, though, Bevans repeatedly faced obstacles precisely because of her race as well as her gender. Bevans regularly endured racist taunts from pedestrians and developed a unique skill at ducking objects hurled in her direction from passing vehicles. Bevans ran with a transistor radio to tune out the noise and occupy her mind while she trained to run faster and further.54 One place where Bevans noticed silence, though, was at competitive road races. “When some runners ran, there were cheers,” she commented. “When I ran, you heard crickets. I was called the N-word sometimes.” And then there were the race directors who would chastened her for celebrating after a race, wherein, not insignificantly, she defeated scores of white men. “God forbid you beat a man,” she would later remark, “then you’re the worst thing ever. People would say the nastiest things.” In addition to the overt racism and threats to her safety, Bevans

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also faced the more subtle comments about her being “articulate” and a “credit” to Black America.55 With time, though, Bevans would slowly gain recognition. In 2014, Runner’s World counted her as a “pioneer” of the sport, and one year prior Bevans was among the first class of inductees into the National Black Marathoners Association’s Distance Runner Hall of Fame. Among the other inductees was Ted Corbitt.56 One finds indications that including names like Bevans into the distance-running mythology can have a meaningful influence on the present composition of the sport. In this way, recognizing Corbitt and others does more than simply diversify a mythology for the sake of diversity. It has a real consequence. Consider Sika Henry, an elite runner and triathlete. After finishing her collegiate career at Tufts University as a high jumper, Henry turned to distance running and soon rose up in the ranks. At the same time, though, she noticed the relative lack of people like her—specifically, Black women. This was even more evident in the sport of triathlon, where she would frequently be the only Black person at events. Deter­ mined to understand and change this situation, Henry joined the National Black Marathoners Association and Black Triathletes Association and began to learn the racial history of these sports. Specifically, she cited Dick Gregory, Ted Corbitt, and Marilyn Bevans as the people who “inspired me to chase [personal records] at the longer distances.”57

Epilogue: Jimmy and Me For decades, the origin story of the running boom had been told in such a way as to foreground inclusion as a cherished value. On the roads and trails, individuals of all abilities fuse together into a community defined by sweat, labored breaths, and lactic acid buildup. But, as the story of Corbitt and others has shown, accessing the promise of this story has been a supreme challenge for Black Americans. The post­ 2020 myth of origin for distance running, though, has begun to tell a new story, with aspirations of truly delivering on this promise. For my part, researching Ted Corbitt and the origin story of the running boom has made me recollect one of my most meaningful friendships. I first met Jimmy Price in the spring of 1993 when I arrived in Okinawa, Japan, in my first year in the Marine Corps. In addition to being new to the service and new to the island, I was also relatively new to distance running. Jimmy helped with all of my newness. A Black man from Louisiana with over a decade of service in the Marines at this point, Jimmy was married to an Okinawan woman and was among the fastest runners on the island. I immediately wanted to learn everything that I could from Jimmy, who kindly took me under his guidance. In addition to bringing me into the local run­ ning club, Jimmy and I frequently ran workouts together and participated in every race that the island had to offer. Through all the miles and all the conversations, Jimmy would occasionally share stories that showed me quite pointedly how our experiences within the distancerunning community were remarkably different. For example, at many of the island’s races, organizers would offer sports drinks and assorted fruit to runners at

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postrace events. Jimmy once confided to me that he intentionally avoided the watermelon at these tables, steering clear of stereotypes. Meanwhile, I grabbed as much watermelon as I could hold, never giving it a second thought. No doubt, Jimmy’s running life was one of constantly battling stereotypes. In high school, white runners and coaches just assumed that he was a sprinter trying to stay in shape for track. As a Marine, Jimmy faced similar queries, or they wondered aloud if he was Kenyan. Then there was the time early in his career when Jimmy was training for a marathon and running the roads outside of a military base in North Carolina. Suddenly in the middle of his run, a group of white men in a pickup truck harassed Jimmy with various threats and racial slurs. He learned in that moment to stay on base for his runs, monotonously circling the same patterns day after day. I too was stationed at this base for a brief time and frequently ran the roads in the area without fear or hesitation.58 My friendship with Jimmy taught me then, and has continued to teach me, to think carefully about what my “normal” is and why it is that way. This is why, for me, the emerging mythology of the running boom, which is doing better to feature names like Corbitt, has promise. Ultimately, it is my hope that distance running will truly uphold its own mythology and make Jimmy and everyone like him truly welcome.

Notes 1 Richard Fausset, “Two Weapons, a Chase, a Killing and No Charges,” New York Times, April 26, 2020. 2 Cindy Boren, “LeBron James on Ahmaud Arbery Shooting,” The Washington Post, May 7, 2020. 3 Kurt Streeter, “Running While Black,” New York Times, May 18, 2020. 4 Alison Mariella Désir, “Ahmaud Arbery and Whiteness in the Running World,” Outside Magazine, May 8, 2020. 5 In this essay, I will be using “jogging”/“jogger” and “running”/“runner” inter­ changeably, recognizing that ample debate exists over the distinctions between these classifications. For a summary of this debate, see Micah Ward, “Jogging or Running? Is There Really a Difference,” Runner’s Life, March 20, 2020, https://medium.com/run ners-life/jogging-or-running-81a2533c3a86 6 Timothy Noakes, Lore of Running, 4th edn (Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics Publishers, 2002). 7 William J. Bowerman and W. E. Harris, Jogging (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1967), 7. 8 Mitchell S. Jackson, “Twelve Minutes and a Life,” Runner’s World, June 18, 2020. 9 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1959), 205. 10 David Chidester, Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005), 10. 11 Chidester, Authentic Fakes,10, 2. 12 Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 20, 21. 13 Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600– 1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973); K. Rambo, “Pioneer Statues Toppled amid Protests at University of Oregon,” The Oregonian, June 14, 2020. 14 Robert C. Cottrell, Two Pioneers: How Hank Greenberg and Jackie Robinson Transformed Baseball—and America (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2012), 238.

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15 Jill Gordon, Plato’s Erotic World: From Cosmic Origins to Human Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 58–59. 16 Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 93; Catherine Albanese, Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1976); Peter Gardella, American Civil Religion: What Americans Hold Sacred (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 160, 136–137. 17 Stephen Amidon, Something Like the Gods: A Cultural History of the Athlete from Achilles to LeBron (New York: Rodale, 2012), 96. 18 Grantland Rice, “The Four Horsemen,” New York Herald Tribune, October 18, 1924. 19 John Hanc, “Ted and Jackie: Separated at Birth?” New York Running News, June/July 1997, https://tedcorbitt.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/49-_Ted___Jackie_Separa ted_at_Birth.pdf 20 Hanc, “Ted and Jackie.” 21 John Chodes, Corbitt: The Story of Ted Corbitt, Long Distance Runner (Los Altos, Calif.: Tafnews Press, 1974), 25. 22 Pamela Cooper, The American Marathon (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1998), 92. 23 Al Harvin, “Pioneer Club Co-founder Is Still Going Strong,” New York Times, February 28, 1971. 24 Rebecca T. Alpert, Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 25 Harvin, “Pioneer Club Co-founder.” 26 Gail Kislevitz, “The Ted Corbitt Legacy,” Marathon and Beyond, May/June 2010. 27 Cooper, The American Marathon, 101. 28 Chodes, Corbitt, 30–31. 29 Pamela Cooper Chenkin, “Ted Corbitt and the Modern Marathon,” New York Road Runners website, June 29, 2021, www.nyrr.org/run/photos-and-stories/2021/ted-cor bitt-and-the-modern-marathon 30 Ted Corbitt, Measuring Road Running Courses (New York: Road Runners Club, USA, 1964), http://legacy.usatf.org/usatf/files/23/238ac8e3-4d34-4ebd-bd1e-850f1b83aa4b.pdf 31 John F. Kennedy, “The Soft American,” Sports Illustrated, December 26, 1960. 32 “JFK Gets Nation on ‘Hup-2-3-4’ Binge,” The Oneonta Star (Oneota, N.Y.), Associated Press, February 13, 1963; “Elmira Youths on 50-Mile Hike,” Star-Gazette (Elmira, N. Y.), February 10, 1963. 33 Trishul Cherns, “Ted Corbitt: American Ultrarunning Pioneer,” Ultrarunning Magazine, December 1988. 34 Frank Litsky, “Ted Corbitt, a Pioneer in American Distance Running, Dies at 88,” New York Times, December 13, 2007. 35 Noakes, Lore of Running; Cameron Stracher, Kings of the Road: How Frank Shorter, Bill Rodgers, and Alberto Salazar Made Running Go Boom (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). See also Phil Knight, Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016). 36 Hanc, “Ted and Jackie.” 37 Robert Lipsyte, “Miles to Go and Promises to Keep,” New York Times, October 21, 1994; Robert Lipsyte, “One Runner who Has Logged His Miles,” New York Times, November 12, 1993. 38 Joe Henderson, Pacesetters: Runners who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most (CreateSpace Publishing, 2015), 59. Taken from a December article in Runner’s World. 39 “Remembering Ted Corbitt,” New York Road Runners website, January 31, 2019, www.nyrr.org/Run/Photos-And-Stories/2019/Ted-Corbitt-Pioneer-Known-for-Quiet­ Activism-on-the-100th-Anniversary-of-His-Birth 40 Keron Alleyne, “N.Y.C Parks Commissioner Mitchell J. Silver ‘Running the Parks’,” Midstrike Magazine, June 2, 2021. 41 Chodes, Corbitt, 113–118.

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42 Alberto Salazar and John Brant, 14 Minutes: A Running Legend’s Life and Death and Life (Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale Books, 2013), 98. It merits mentioning that Salazar has drawn heavy criticism in recent years as the head coach of the Nike Oregon Project in Port­ land, Oregon. While many of his athletes have gone on to great success within the sport, in 2019, Salazar was banned from the sport for four years for doping offenses. In 2020, allegations surfaced of Salazar’s sexual and emotional mistreatment, particular of female athletes under his charge. See Jeré Longman, “Alberto Salazar Is Permanently Barred from Track for Sexual and Emotional Misconduct,” New York Times, July 26, 2021. 43 Daniel S. Mitrovich, Forever at the Finish Line: The Quest to Honor New York City Mara­ thon Founder Fred Lebow with a Statue in Central Park (New York: Skyhorse, 2017). 44 “Fred Lebow Statue,” N.Y.C Parks Website, www.nycgovparks.org/parks/central-park/ highlights/11248 45 Litsky, “Ted Corbitt, a Pioneer in American Distance Running.” 46 New York City Parks Department, “N.Y.C Parks Names 6-Mile Central Park Loop for Storied Black Olympian Runner,” press release, February 22, 2021, www.nycgovparks. org/news/press-releases?id=21816 47 New York City Parks Department, “N.Y.C Parks Names.” 48 Charles Kastner, “Eddie ‘The Sheik’ Gardner,” BlackPast.org, July 1, 2014, www.blackpast. org/african-american-history/eddie-sheik-gardner-ultramarathoning-legend-and-unsung­ hero-struggle-racial-equality-am 49 Charles B. Kastner, Bunion Derby: The 1928 Footrace Across America (Albuquerque, N. Mex.: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 89; Marshall Ulrich, Running on Empty: An Ultra­ marathoner’s Story of Love, Loss, and a Record-Setting Run across America (New York: Penguin, 2011). 50 Kastner, “Eddie ‘The Sheik’ Gardner.” 51 Casey McNerthney, “Seattle’s First Distance Hero,” Seattle PI, November 23, 2007. 52 Eddie Tafoya, Icons of African American Comedy (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 51. 53 Dick Gregory, Callus on My Soul: A Memoir (New York: Kensington Publishing, 2003), 186; “Dick Gregory’s Food Run through Columbus,” 1976 image from Columbus Free Press Collection, Ohio History Collection, www.ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/ p267401coll32/id/28839 54 Amby Burfoot, First Ladies of Running (New York: Rodale, 2016), 187–195. 55 Percell Dugger, “Trailblazing Marathoner Marilyn Bevans Met the Challenges and Became a Champion,” The Undefeated, November 2, 2018. 56 Anthony Reed, “The Pioneer: Marilyn Bevans,” Runner’s World, December 10, 2013. 57 Sika Henry, “Triathlon Needs More Diversity,” Bicycling.com, May 3, 2021. 58 I confirmed all of this and received permission to use his name on a phone call with Jimmy Price on August 18, 2021.

11

SAVAGE SYMBOLS Native American Mascots in the USA Annie Blazer

Introduction There has been pressure on the Washington football team for decades to drop the moniker “Redskins” because it is a slur demeaning to Native Americans.1 Daniel Snyder, who bought the team in 1999, had controversially announced in 2013 that the team would “NEVER” change its name.2 Activism against the use of Native American mascots and NCAA reforms in 2005 successfully pushed many high schools and colleges away from these sorts of team names, but professional sports leagues have not adopted practices for monitoring team names, imagery, or mas­ cots. The Oneida Indian Nation launched their “Change the Mascot” campaign in 2013 targeting the Washington football team. Over the next few years, the Change the Mascot campaign promoted vocal opposition to the use of “Redskins” as a team name. They publicized bipartisan letters from the US House and Senate urging the Washington team to change its name, President Obama’s declaration that the team should consider a name change, and the United Nations call for the team to change its name. While the Washington football team held firm, the governor of California signed the California Racial Mascots Act, which eliminated the use of “Redskins” as a mascot in all the state’s public schools.3 Then, several years later, amid Black Lives Matter protests erupting across the USA in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020, at the hands of police officers, the pressure resumed on the Washington football team. Finally, after threats of corporate boycotts, Synder announced that the team would adopt a new name for the 2021 season and play under the name “Washington Football Team” for the 2020 season. The Navajo Nation released a statement on the name change, reading, “July 13, 2020 is now a historic day for all Indigenous peoples around the world as the NFL Washington-based team officially announced the retirement of the racist and disparaging ‘Redskins’ team name and logo.”4 The DOI: 10.4324/9781003014621-16

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context of Black Lives Matter protests is important because the use of Native Amer­ ican mascots and imagery is fundamentally about whiteness and particularly about continuing a European colonial idea of whiteness built on the social, cultural, and religious exclusion of African and Native American residents of the New World.5 This chapter brings together research on colonial narratives of whiteness, muscular Christianity, and history of Native American mascots to show that Native American mascotry relies on a stereotype of native savagery that developed alongside the idea of whiteness.6 Discourses of whiteness, civilization, and Christianity worked together to exclude and dehumanize Africans and Native Americans during the time of contact and European expansion in the Americas. Native American mascots emerged in the early twentieth century and are still in use today, continuing to glorify a sense of native savage violence while holding this violence at arm’s length from whiteness. Throughout the chapter, I return to the theme of European Christianity to show that paying attention to religion helps us understand the rise of Native American mascots as well as the impassioned debates surrounding the current use of Native American team names and imagery.

Civilization and Savagery The concept of “civilization” is essential to understanding European interaction with Native Americans. Europeans saw Christianity as inherent to civilization and sought to remake Native Americans in their image through their concurrent mis­ sions of conversion to both Christianity and to European laws and customs. By the middle of the seventeenth century, European populations of English, French, and Dutch had settled the American eastern seaboard, and, though this affected native populations in terms of disease and new patterns of trade, the native cultures remained largely intact. Three things began to change this situation: European rivalries deepened and brought Indian allies into violent conflict; settlers began pressing for Indian removal; and missionary efforts increased among the native population. European colonization of the Americas became destructive to Native American communities. This was the same period in which witchcraft accusations and trials declined in Europe, and historian Ronald Neitzen has suggested that European focus on the “lost souls” in the New World was a replacement for their previous focus on internal heresy.7 For example, the New England Puritans saw Indians as dominated by satanic influence. For the Puritans, this both confirmed their own sense of moral superiority and justified dispossession and violence toward native populations. Puritans saw Indian rituals as devil worship comparable to English witchcraft. From their point of view, both Indian rituals and English witchcraft were instances of manipulating sacred power that existed beyond the bounds of Christian authority. Additionally, the English perceived the land to be unoccupied because tribes cultivated very little of it. New England magistrates vehemently rejected the argument that Indians used the rest of the land for hunting and upheld the legal principle of vacuum domicilium, allowing them to seize land not being

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“used” by the natives. This emphasis on devil-worshipping and vacuum domicilium prevented New England Puritans from seeing the interconnectedness of spiritual and subsistence practices in the native population.8 After the Puritans established dominance with the Pequot War of 1636–1637, which decimated the Pequot population, they set out to convert Indians by creating “praying towns” where the colonists and Indians would live side by side, adhering to European cultural norms. English leaders prohibited native practices and apparel and intentionally constructed the towns to exclude the influence of non-converted Indians. Non-converted Indians viewed these alliances with suspicion, perhaps rightly so, since King Philip’s War of 1675–1676 destroyed all but four of the praying towns, and these four disappeared by the end of the seventeenth century. For the native population, the aftermath of King Philip’s War was disastrous; it was the bloodiest war per capita in American history, and even tribes allied with the English were forced to surrender their lands.9 Seventeenth-century Virginia provides another example of the conflation of civilization and Christianity. Over the course of the seventeenth century, Anglo-Virginians actively transformed the meanings of “Negro,” “Christian,” “Englishman,” “Heathen,” and “Infidel” to adhere to racial lines. They also invented a new category: “White.” Rebecca Goetz’s historical research focuses on how colonial Virginia’s legal documents show the development of attitudes toward race and religion.10 She shows that the ability of non-whites to convert to Christianity was a live question, making this a key moment for the articulation of race. AngloVirginians ultimately decided that Africans and Indians could not fully convert, and hence they redefined human value by differentiating bodies. This exclusion was deeply connected to the labor structures of early Virginia and contributed to settlers turning Indians against Africans to avoid revolt.11 Using a few verses from Genesis 9, Europeans developed a theory around a “curse of Ham” that explained human origins and diversity, including skin color. In this chapter, Noah is angry at his son Ham and so curses Ham’s son, Canaan. For Europeans theologians, Noah’s curse explained the existence of heathenism by identifying a lineage of people separated from God. Their theory described Noah’s three sons as having distinct lineages: Ham in Africa, Shem in Asia, and Japheth in Europe. Affiliating Africans with the curse of Ham led to a cultural assumption that people with darker skin were prone to sexual immorality, sin, and heresy. Addi­ tionally, Noah’s curse positioned the descendants of Ham as servants of the des­ cendants of Shem and Japheth, an arrangement that some used to justify slavery. Prominent English missionaries in the New World included American Indians in the lineage of Ham. Most seventeenth-century English theologians believed that the curse of Ham was reparable and that peoples of Africa could be brought back into the fold. In the same way, settlers of Virginia saw Indians as potential Chris­ tians who had within themselves a connection back to Noah and needed to be taught the error of their ways so that they could be divinely restored and redeemed. As such, Anglo-Virginians originally approached Indians as primitive pagans capable of redemption, but the lived experiences of war, struggle, and

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starvation challenged their view of a utopian commonwealth where Indians would embrace English cultural, political, and religious forms. The 1606 charter of the Virginia Company emphasized converting Indians to Christianity and tended to assume that Christianization would naturally follow from Indians adopting the norms of English civilization. In this way, conversion meant both acceptance of the Christian God and acceptance of English gov­ ernment and culture. The motley crew of Englishmen voyaging to settle Vir­ ginia were not ideal ambassadors for forming relationships with the Indians of the region, and by the end of the summer of 1607, native populations con­ sistently attacked Jamestown. By September, only forty of the original 104 men and boys were alive, and they were very ill and malnourished. In mid Sep­ tember, the Indians brought corn to the starving settlers. Prominent settler John Smith interpreted this as divine providence: God had put terror into the sava­ ges’ hearts. However, for the local tribal leader, a gift of food signaled the superiority of the giver, and the settlers’ acceptance of the food was a sign of subordination.12 Desperate, the English sometimes ate human flesh, both English and Indian. When new Englishmen arrived, they understood this as a “creeping heathenism.” Some English also left Jamestown to live among the Indians, who sometimes accepted the English and sometimes killed them. Desertion of English for Indian living was not something the English had anticipated. Settlers blamed Indians for their fellows’ reversion to heathenism and believed there to be powerful witches among the Indians. This sense of creeping heathenism, combined with a major Indian attack in 1622 that killed about a third of the residents of Jamestown (more than 350 people), led to decreased interest in converting Indians. The Virginia Company officially abandoned any attempts to convert Indians in 1623, and when the company dissolved in 1624, it left behind a legacy that Rebecca Goetz called “hereditary heathenism,” the idea that heathenism and Christianity are part of one’s lineage, not a matter of individual choice or action.13 The idea of hereditary heathenism had real social consequences for settlers and Indians. One consequence was the increased regulation of miscegenation by colonial authorities. Over the next several decades, colonial authorities imple­ mented harsher and harsher punishments for English–Indian and English–African fornication. There were also punishments for English–English fornication, but these were not nearly as severe. Authorities relied on a religious justification for the severity of these punishments, claiming that sex with a presumed heathen brought a shame to Christians and hurt the whole community by opening the community up to the danger of creeping heathenism.14 The pattern of disincentivizing marriage and relations between English and non-English persons continued over the course of the seventeenth century, and Virginia’s 1705 Law of Servants and Slaves made religious presumptions about race explicit. The law conflated Christian with white and non-Christian with Indian and African. According to Rebecca Goetz:

220 Annie Blazer

The act prohibited the whipping of a “christian white servant naked.” This was the first time that Christians were legally and explicitly defined by a physical distinction—skin color—and granted certain privileges based upon color and religious identity. The act also provided for the “christian care and usage of all christian servants” and forbade all “negros, mulattos, or Indians” from owning Christian servants. Christianity was thus strongly equated with whiteness.15 The 1705 law culminated a process by which Anglo-Virginians defined themselves by their religion and defined racial others (Africans and Indians) as incapable of it. Law of Servants and Slaves reiterated that baptism of servants could not result in freedom at any age. While some imperial missionaries had hoped that this stance on baptism would encourage planters to missionize their slaves (because conversion would not result in emancipation), instead these developments shored up an underlying understanding that only the English could be Christians and that slaves were heathens incapable of Christian conversion.16 Over the following decades, European settlements expanded westward, and conflicts with native communities continued.

Whiteness and the Expansion of European Settlement During the 1750s, stories of violent Indian attacks began to circulate widely. These stories tended to describe Indians killing families in a similar manner. A set of recurring tropes emerged: scalping, the ripping apart of families (sometimes in the form of a fetus ripped from a pregnant woman’s body), and vivid gore of unburied bodies. Historian Peter Silver called this the “anti-Indian sublime” and noted that as a rhetorical tool it was effective at uniting English-speaking culture against Indians and against political leaders who might stand in the way of vengeance against Indians.17 Mid-Atlantic Europeans developed a preferred image of themselves as a “bleeding country.” This image came with an agenda: to incite sympathy and by extension vengeance against Indians. According to Silver, the rhetoric of the anti-Indian sublime contributed to violent self-pity becoming one of our nation’s long-lasting cultural products. In the 1750s, during the Seven Years’ War, European settlers in the countryside felt that their only protection against Indian violence was solidarity. Promises to band together to fight the Indian enemy created a feeling of community, and sometimes countrymen would march long distances to come to the aid of other white settlers. The label of “white people” preserved this feeling of unity by rely­ ing on the assumption that being “white” affected how one thought and acted regarding the Indian war. “White people” tended to mean “the suffering European inhabitants of the colonies” and became the basis for the first mass political action of the middle colonies.18 The 1760s saw the rise of European expeditions meant to attack native populations preemptively. Governor James Hamilton of Pennsylvania, who had previously sought

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to draw a distinction between peaceful and dangerous Indians, began to see unpro­ voked violence against Indians as inevitable and urged Indians to relocate or suffer the consequences. Some settlers launched preemptive raids on native communities, using tactics that they associated with native violence, like scalping, and justifying their vio­ lence as a preemptive measure to prevent native attacks. Settlers were not always adept at distinguishing between threatening and peaceful Indians, and many peaceful Indians suffered brutal deaths at the hands of settlers.19 This could be construed as an early incident of “playing Indian,” which historian C. Richard King sees as linked to the later use of Native American mascots. He notes, “Playing Indian has enabled indivi­ duals to do and say things that they could not otherwise, often fostering savage acts beyond the bounds of civilization, acts at once excessive, insurgent, and even vio­ lent.”20 European–Indian relations during the eighteenth century matter because this moment saw the creation of “whiteness” as well as stereotypes of native savagery that continue to inform debates over Native American mascots today.

Muscular Christianity and Playing Indian Another important historical moment is the era of muscular Christianity. This time period of the 1880s to the 1920s is when we first see organized and institutionalized opportunities for white men and boys to “play Indian.” These decades were a time of Protestant innovation as white Protestant male leaders grappled with their fear of their boys becoming overly feminized through city life and the supervision of female teachers. Increasing waves of Jewish and Catholic immigration coupled with the Great Migration of rural Black south­ erners to the urban North contributed to white Protestant anxiety that these working-class populations were physically stronger. The arrival of these “out­ siders” called attention to white Protestants’ own physical weakness. This was also the time of the lowest populations of Native Americans in the USA— around 200,000 in 1910.21 During this era, the field of child psychology embraced a “recapitulation theory” of human development, claiming that as boys grew into men, they recapitulated each stage of historical development from savage to civilized. Under this theory, the boy was a little savage who needed rigorous physical conditioning to develop his moral sense. Historian Clifford Putney summarizes an article from 1887 titled “The Savagery of Boyhood.” The truth was, confided a writer for Popular Science Monthly, that boys were not “sympathetic” as women chose to see them; rather they were sadistic little “savages” who actually enjoyed pulling the wings off birds. Not that this was bad, he added; for “wholesome” boys were naturally cruel, whereas “good boy[s]” were “diseased.”22 Relying on this understanding of the boy as a work in progress from savage to civilized, the Rev. William Forbush, author of the best-selling text The Boy Problem

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(released in eight editions from 1901 to 1913), urged American Protestants to redirect their concern from the foreign “heathen” to the heathenism flourishing among American boys.23 One early organization that took this mission to heart was the Boys’ Brigade, founded in England in 1883 and imported to America in 1890. The Boys’ Brigade attempted to use boys’ fascination with the military as a means for religious educa­ tion. The brigade was eventually eclipsed by more nature-loving and America-cen­ tric organizations in the early 1900s such as Seton’s Woodcraft Indians (1901) and the Sons of Daniel Boone (1905). These organizations inspired Robert BadenPowell to invent the Boy Scouts in Britain in 1908 and in America in 1910. These organizations were aimed at and populated predominantly by white boys. Historian Rayna Green has noted the prevalence of playing Indian in the early decades of the Boy Scouts: Learning to walk, stalk, hunt, survive like an “Indian,” to produce beaded and feathered authentic outfits, to dance and sing authentic music, to produce tools and weapons, are the skills later to become fixed in the Order of the Arrow, Scouting’s highest achievement.24 All of these organizations used Indian imagery and mimicry in their mission to move the boy from savage to civilized. The “playing Indian” that emerged in boys’ organizations lumped all natives into the category of “savage,” and this under­ standing informed their activities. Concurrent with the rise of boys’ organizations, “Wild West” shows grew in popularity, thus cementing the image of the feather-headdressed Indian riding into battle. The most famous show by far was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, orga­ nized and orchestrated by William Cody, who portrayed Buffalo Bill. Cody hired thirty-six Pawnees from Indian Territory to perform in his first show in Omaha in 1883. A highlight of the show was an Indian attack on the Dead­ wood Mail Coach, successfully defended by Buffalo Bill and his partner, sharpshooter Dr. William Frank Carver. According to historian L. G. Moses: Audiences thrilled to the Indian’s attack on the Deadwood Stage. So enter­ taining was the Wild West show inspired by Buffalo Bill that within two years of its first appearance in Omaha, nearly fifty circuses, medicine shows, and rival Wild West shows had incorporated, and in some instances copied, many of its features.25 Over the course of 1883 to 1933, hired Indians performed across the USA and Europe; each performance added weight to the idea that Native Americans were dangerous attackers in elaborate costume and that they could be defeated by white men. These images endured through Hollywood westerns and began to emerge in sports contexts.26

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The Native American Mascot Sports historian Laurel Davis cites the earliest example she could find of a Native American mascot as the University of Wisconsin, Lacrosse, who were using the nickname “Indians” in 1909. Yet the use of Native American monikers was widespread by the 1920s.27 The late 1920s saw the beginning of college football halftime shows with costumed spectacles, and these increasingly began to feature faux Indians over the course of the 1930s and 1940s. This emerged from both the popularity of Wild West performances as well as the minstrel shows of baseball comedy performed largely by African Americans.28 One useful parallel example from Black baseball in the 1930s was the team called the “Ethiopian Clowns.” According to Rebecca Alpert’s historical research, the Clowns were a novelty team owned by baseball entrepreneur Syd Pollock and promoted by Abe Saperstein (who would later found the Harlem Globetrotters). Calling them “Ethiopian” was an attempt to capitalize on American awareness of Ethiopia due to the recent Italian invasion of the country. Ethiopia was an important symbol to Black Americans, and to call them “Ethiopian Clowns” was insulting. Pollock also backed the “Borneo Cannibal Giants” (also called the “Borneo Zulu Cannibals”) around the same time. By the end of the 1941 season, Saperstein and Pollock had made a lot of money off of the Clowns and the team’s star, Satchel Paige, but they had alienated the Negro American League owners. The Negro American League stopped including Pollock and Saperstein’s teams because they saw the teams as detrimental to Black people. In a 1942 compromise, Saperstein and Pollock agreed to drop “Ethiopian” and play simply as the “Clowns.” They also agreed to end the practice of wearing face paint in the style of “war paint” while playing.29 The 1920s–1950s were the height of popularity for Indian mascotry. One of the early mascots who set the tone for this period was Chief Illiniwek, the mascot for University of Illinois until 2007. Chief Illiniwek first appeared in 1926 in a halftime performance during a game between Illinois and University of Pennsylvania. The man who played Chief Illiniwek, Lester Leutwiler, was a white high-school senior who attended nearby Urbana High School and had made his Indian costume in 1925 at a Boy Scouts camp. Ralph Hubbard, an Indian dance enthusiast, operated the camp and taught scouts how to emulate Indian dance movements that he had learned from the Seneca in upstate New York and the Crow in Colorado. When Leutwiler returned from camp with his Indian costume, he and his fellow scouts performed what they had learned for Urbana High School. Leutwiler’s dancing got him an invitation to perform at University of Illinois in October 1926 during the halftime show. During the show, he emerged from a hiding place just beyond the stands and led the band down the field, dancing all the way. After bands from both schools performed, Leutwiler as Chief Illiniwek and UPenn’s mascot, Benjamin Franklin, met midfield to share a ceremonial catlinite pipe and left the field arm in arm. Interestingly, many fans thought that it was not Benjamin Franklin represented on the field, but William Penn, the

224 Annie Blazer

founder of the Pennsylvania colony. Historian Jennifer Guiliano theorizes that this mistaken identity likely stemmed from the long-standing myth that William Penn had peacefully and benevolently welcomed Indian coexistence in the colony, a myth that obscured the severe disruption that European settlement brought to the Lenape. In this way, the halftime performance succinctly enacted a negotiation between warring factions that resulted in the Indian leaving the ground of the fight. According to Guilano: The interplay between Leutwiler and the UPenn mascot can be read as a reenactment of American colonialism that elided actual consequences of vio­ lence, disorder, and disruption in favor of a more neutral narrative of equitable relations and white succession … There is no place for the “Indian” to remain in the stadium. He appears only to contextualize white inheritance of the field, the stadium, and the university.30 While the organizers of the 1926 halftime appearance of Chief Illiniwek intended this to be a one-time performance, the act so thrilled the fans that Leutwiler reprised Chief Illiniwek periodically during the 1927 season. In the 1928 season, Leutwiler’s performances became a regular feature of Illinois football halftime shows. Over the course of the late 1920s and 1930s, colleges and universities across the country adopted the “Illinois model” of a choreographed halftime show fea­ turing mascots and band accompaniment.31 College football during this time used faux Indian bodies, images, and sounds to assuage white middle-class anxieties about masculinity and, in turn, grow its audience. Anthropologist Michael Taylor offers an analysis of the racial consequences of playing Indian in his book, Contesting Constructed Indian-ness. Of Chief Illiniwek, he writes: Dancing mascots thus are the centerpiece in an entertainment vehicle designed to appeal to a White-majority audience that produces a substantial generation of revenue for a primarily all-White leadership structure. It is in institutional spaces as in school settings where White children and their parents regularly defend their “right” to “Indian” identities and use mascots to their own pre­ ferences of Indian display.32 Taylor emphasizes that performances like Chief Illiniwek inscribe colonial relations onto the body of the white man playing Indian; by constructing an idealized Indian other, the performer behind Illiniwek’s feathers affirms his own whiteness and sense of white superiority.

The Call to Change the Mascot Since the late 1960s, when the American Indian Movement sued to have Native American team names and logos dropped, many Native Americans have been organizing to protest the use of Native American mascots in sports. Their activism

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has sparked considerable backlash. C. Richard King speculates that there was a connection between the neoconservative politics that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s and the preservation campaigns around Native mascots: [N]eoconservatives sought to reestablish American identity, refusing negative critiques that had linked white masculinity with exploitation and exclusion, while reframing social problems, the role of government, and the meaning of history … Native American mascots, created during an earlier crisis around white masculinity, have proven central to neoconservative efforts to resolve a more recent crisis and defend America against multiculturalism and other assaults on traditional identity and hegemonic white masculinity.33 King conjectures that the defense of mascots constituted a defense of white mascu­ linity. He theorizes that the strong backlash in favor of keeping these mascots was related to white, conservative defensiveness about the meaning of gender and race in the contemporary USA. Similarly, in Andrea Smith’s work on white supremacy, she argues that the genocide of native peoples in North America is not separable from the enslavement of African Americans or from the othering of non-native-born American residents.34 These three ongoing legacies work together to shore up white supremacy by creating an idea of “whiteness” that maintains its own superiority through different and complementary mechanisms. The multivalency of whiteness as a construct held in place by these three pillars can help explain why the debate over Native American mascots and team names can function as a proxy for debates over political correctness, minority rights, and American identity. One provocative example of mascot debates as a proxy for debates over political correctness is the protests and backlashes in Minneapolis and St. Paul in fall 1991 and winter 1992 when the cities hosted the World Series (Minnesota “Twins” vs. Atlanta “Braves”) and the Super Bowl (Washington “Redskins” vs. Buffalo “Bills”). By the time of these protests, Native American parents had successfully campaigned against Native American mascot usage by Minnesota high schools, and twenty of the fifty schools that previously had Native American mascots or team names made a change. Police reported approximately 3,000 protesters at the Super Bowl, which was the largest showing of Native American activism since the Wounded Knee protest in 1973. The large Super Bowl protest crowd confronted the thousands of fans who attended the game. Vernon Bellecourt, the director of the American Indian Movement, called for the Washington football team to change its name, saying, “This is 1992. The name of your football team has got to be changed … The chop stops here.”35 For the most part, the team’s fans and administrators seemed bewildered by the protest. Team owner Jack Kent Cooke said in a radio interview after Washington’s victory, “There is nothing in the world wrong with the name Redskins.”36 Sociologist Laurel Davis analyzes the positions of those for and against Native American mascots during the 1991/1992 protests. She considers the prevalence of Western iconography in sports to contextualize why some fans and team

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administrators might defend the use of Indian monikers and mascots. This icono­ graphy is not limited to Native Americans but also includes pioneers, cowboys, ran­ gers, blazers, mavericks, mustangs, broncos, and buffalo/bison. She writes, “In this sports symbolism, parts of the past that were perceived as destroyed or conquered by the colonists, such as buffalos or Native Americans, are now eulogized.”37 In the nar­ rative of Western expansion and Manifest Destiny, all aspects of the “wilderness” are primitive and, therefore, one can present conquering these lands and peoples as achieving “civilization.” Davis contends that the reason supporters defended the use of Native American iconography is that challenging the use of that iconography hit a “raw nerve” by challenging a cherished version of American masculinity.38 Since the 1970s, nearly 1,500 native mascots have been changed, retired, or reworked, but at the end of the twentieth century, the sports teams at more than 2,500 schools still used Native American names, imagery, or references, including more than eighty colleges and universities. This began to shift with the 2005 NCAA ban on Indian mascots.39 The NCAA executive committee adopted a new policy that “prohibited NCAA colleges and universities from displaying hostile and abusive racial/ethnic/national origin mascots, nicknames or imagery at any of the 88 NCAA championships.”40 As part of the development of this policy, in November 2004, the NCAA had asked thirty-three schools to submit self-evalua­ tions to determine the extent of the use of Native American imagery on their campuses. Fourteen of these schools either decided to remove references to Native Americans or the NCAA determined that they did not use Native American ima­ gery.41 Most of these had team names like “Warriors” that could be retained with new mascots and logos. The NCAA concluded that nineteen colleges did not comply with their policy and would be unable to host NCAA championships with their current mascots.42 Subsequently, through an appeal process where colleges demonstrated that their teams’ namesakes were formally condoned by the tribe they named, the NCAA granted waivers to five colleges to retain their use of Native American team names.43 Even though some Indian activists disapproved of these exemptions, the NCAA’s appeal process made clear that if colleges could demonstrate tribal approval, they could maintain tribal monikers but not always Indian imagery.44 Beyond the scope of NCAA purview are the many sports-booster organizations that continue to use retired Indian logos in their fan apparel.45 The Washington football team has faced legal challenges regarding their team name. One challenge to the name “Redskins” came in the form of a legal battle over trademark usage. Since 1946, federal trademark law has included a provision that allowed the government to deny trademarks that are disparaging or offensive to a group of people. In 2015, a federal court upheld the canceling of the Red­ skins’ trademarks due to the court’s finding that the name and images were dis­ paraging to a substantial segment of the Native American population. However, in 2017, another court case reached the Supreme Court on a similar matter. The Asian American rock band “The Slants” had its trademarks canceled because its name was a derogatory slur for Asians. In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that “The Slants” could keep their trademarks because, even though their name was

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based on a derogatory racist slur, the group employed this term as a method of reclaiming and disarming Asian stereotypes. Daniel Snyder, owner of the Washington football team, saw the case as an unequivocal victory for his cause, stating that he was “thrilled” by the decision.46 It is worth noting that it was unlikely that Snyder would have been able to argue that his team’s use of a dero­ gatory racist slur was for the purpose of dismantling stereotypes.47 Change the Mascot in association with the National Congress of American Indians released the video “Proud to Be” a few days before the 2014 Super Bowl. It did not air on television at the time, but later had an ad spot during the NBA playoffs that June. The video is a two-minute montage of Native Americans that shows some images of tribal dress and others of Native Americans in casual clothing in common settings such as classrooms or doctors’ offices. The narrator lists a series of one-word labels including names of tribes, careers like “teacher” and “soldier” and adjectives ranging from negative descriptors like “forgotten” to positive descriptors like “resilient.” In the closing to the video, the narrator says, “Native Americans call themselves many things. The one thing they don’t?” He stops speaking as the image on the screen shows a Washington Redskins helmet.48 In August 2014, the Washington football team released the video “Redskins Is a Powerful Name.” It opens on a nearly identical image of the team helmet, zooming in on the icon of an Indian head and feathers. The two-minute video is a montage of interview clips with contemporary Native Americans who defend the name “Redskins” as a powerful warrior name. The video points out that the Washington Redskins logo was designed by a Native American and approved by Native American leaders. It also interviews Native Americans who attest to being more concerned about other challenges in their lives and communities such as health care, alcoholism, and reservation living conditions. According to one inter­ viewee, “I feel like it’s too insignificant to talk about when there’s bigger issues in Indian country.” And another attests, “If you could help in any other way, it would be greatly appreciated, but the mascot issue isn’t an issue for us, not for Native Americans.”49 In this way, the video makes the claim that focusing atten­ tion on Native American mascots is detrimental because it distracts from more meaningful activity that could improve Native American life. The closing screen of “Redskins Is a Powerful Name” directs viewers to visit Redskinsfacts.com to learn more. While this site is no longer available, it is acces­ sible via Archive.org, and in 2014, the site read: Here at RedskinsFacts.com, we’re thinking football fans. We’re passionate about the game, and even more passionate about the “Burgundy and Gold.” None of us believe in offending or discriminating against people of any eth­ nicity for any reason. We believe the Redskins name deserves to stay. It epitomizes all the noble qualities we admire about Native Americans—the same intangibles we expect from Washington’s gridiron heroes on game day. Honor. Loyalty. Unity. Respect. Courage. And more.50

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The site made the argument that the name “Redskins” was not offensive because a significant number of Native Americans did not find it offensive and because it was not intended to be offensive. In Mascot Nation: The Controversy over Native American Representations in Sports, broadcasting professor Andrew Billings and communication-studies professor Jason Black analyze American acceptance of Native American names, images, and rituals in sports. They analyzed YouTube commentators responding to “Proud to Be” and “Redskins Is a Powerful Name,” identified themes that emerged, and orga­ nized these comments into neocolonial and decolonial categories. They found that neocolonial defenses of Native American mascots tended to employ rhetoric of territoriality and possession while decolonial approaches tended to draw attention to asymmetrical power relations. In the case of the Washington football team, decolonial advocates of changing the team name pointed to America’s history of dehumanizing native peoples and argued that this dehumanization is preserved in names and images that treat Native Americans as objects and not people.51 In 2016 and 2017, Billings and Black conducted a survey of over 1,000 individuals, gauging their reactions to team names, logos, and fan rituals such as drumming, mimicking weapons, and chanting. Billings and Black argue that Native American mascotry is a neocolonial practice that does not respect native heritages or histories. According to the authors, the Washington football team’s name was the most offen­ sive of all team names, and if it were to change others would likely follow suit. Their survey data shows that while many fans tend to see the threat to change a mascot as an indication of liberal ascendancy in America’s culture wars, they also attested that a change in mascot would not diminish their fandom.52 Billings and Black recommend increased education in US schools about Native Americans so that residents would be better able to see why the mascots were not just offensive but also stood in the way of cross-cultural understanding.53 In addi­ tion to education, the authors note that economic boycotting of teams, sports journalists, and media outlets refusing to say or print derogatory names, and legal challenges to disparaging naming and iconography were opportunities to push for an end to the exploitation and degradation of Native Americans through mascotry. And this is precisely what has been happening in recent years. The University of Illinois discontinued its use of Chief Illiniwek as a mascot in 2007 under pressure from the NCAA but retained the team name “Illini” (allowed by the NCAA because it does not correspond to any Indian tribe and closely resembled the name of the state). Unofficial “Chiefs” continued to show up at Illini games, and it was not until August 2017 that the school officially banned the playing of its “war chant” at games. Earlier that summer, the Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, brought national attention to white-supremacy groups. The Chicago Tribune interviewed Charlene Teters, a Native American activist who fought against the use of Chief Illini­ wek in the 1980s and 1990s, on her response to the university’s retiring of the war chant. She said in the 2017 interview, “It’s interesting in light of Charlottesville. The power of imagery can move people. The Confederate flag and swastikas have power. Words have power. These chants are race-based. It’s time for the university to move away from it.”54

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For Teters and other activists, Native American mascots are reminders of whitesupremacist patterns in American society. Mass attention to the Unite the Right rally, and the death of protester Heather Hyer during the event, brought white supremacy into a national conversation that touched on anti-Black sentiments and antisemitism. Native American activists like Teters were able to connect this to the racism and white supremacy bound up in Indian mascots and pressure institutions like University of Illinois to take action to end game practices like its war chant and fans dressing in feathers. The Washington football team was the last team in the NFL to racially integrate in the 1950s. James Fenelon writes about the backlash to the team’s racial integra­ tion as fans joined with neo-Nazis marching under banners reading: “MR. MARSHALL KEEP REDSKINS WHITE!” Fenelon points out the deep irony of wanting to keep the team exclusively white when it is named for a non-white figure. He avers: The peculiar position of Native Nations and Indigenous Peoples in twentiethcentury America, that of being dually stereotyped as “hostile” and “noble” savages, which the term Redskins perfectly exemplifies, and of being geno­ cidally reduced to less than 1% of the population, thereby posing no distinct threat in numbers or policy to the dominant group, allows dominants to divide and separate Native peoples from other, more numerous, racial minor­ ity groups. Once reappropriated in this manner, the dominant group can interpret team names and symbols to mean whatever dominants want, even in the capital of the nation that almost completed the genocide of the peoples now racially subordinated to the dustbins of history.55 Fenelon’s analysis reminds us that white men controlled the naming and icono­ graphy of the Washington Redskins. He points out that white authorities often perceived Native activism as distinct from minority activism rather than as a branch of it. This allowed for swaths of time where Washington football administrators defended their iconography and moniker as a tribute to Native Americans rather than a slur. However, anti-racist activism that focuses on Black Americans can lead to changes in Native American mascotry. In summer 2020, following weeks of Black Lives Matter protests across the country, the Washington football team announced that it would change its name. The announcement came after significant pressure from FedEx, Nike, and Pepsi, as well as other corporations. FedEx held the naming rights for the stadium that the Washington football team used, Nike made their uniforms, and Pepsi was their snack and beverage partner. Over June and July 2020, all three companies experi­ enced growing pressure from shareholders to sever ties with the Washington foot­ ball team if it refused to retire the name “Redskins.” The investors’ letter to the CEO of FedEx tied their demands to the Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the country. The letter read in part:

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In light of the Black Lives Matter movement that has focused the world’s attention on centuries of systemic racism, we are witnessing a fresh outpouring of opposition to the team name. Therefore, it is time for FedEx to meet the magnitude of this moment, to make their opposition to the racist team name clear, and to take tangible and meaningful steps to exert pressure on the team to cease using it.56 Summer 2020 saw hundreds of corporations releasing statements pledging to take anti-racist actions. Products that relied on Black caricatures such as Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben began serious rebranding. Social-media platforms filled with dis­ cussions of whether corporate statements were lip service or an indication of changing policies. Accusations of hypocrisy led to corporations taking measures such as making large donations to racial-justice organizations, instituting workplace diversity training, making Juneteenth a company holiday, and instituting efforts to decrease discrimination against Black shoppers. In addition to the financial pressure on the Washington football team, summer 2020 saw a groundswell of sports journalists refusing to use the term “Redskins” in their coverage. Longtime NFL reporter for Sports Illustrated, Peter King, stopped using the name in 2013. He wrote in a note in one of his articles, “Here’s what it came down to for me: Did I want to be part of a culture that uses a term that many in society view as a racial epithet? The answer kept coming back no.”57 Others had previously made this decision or followed suit, and by 2020, many had adopted the practice of referring to the team as “the Washington football team” or “Skins.” While some might question why it took Dan Snyder so long to finally come to the conclusion that his team’s name had to change, the context of summer 2020 matters because the Black Lives Matter protests sparked a national conversa­ tion about anti-racism that allowed for the team name to fall under the umbrella of practices that preserve and promote white supremacy. Corporate sponsors could no longer justify supporting the team’s moniker under the significant cultural pressure generated by the Black Lives Matter protests, leaving Snyder little room to con­ tinue his defense of the team name. A few years before the Washington football team announced its intention to change its name, C. Richard King expressed doubts that such a name change would lead to the end of Native American mascots. I worry that the success may not be transferrable precisely because for many the problem is the slur … [I]t is this logic that makes the Blackhawks and the Chiefs seem acceptable to most in public: the r-word is a slur; it is bad; it must go; however, American Indian mascots can be okay, positive, and defensible. This contradictory thinking, which has its roots in white entitlement, the appropriations of settler colonialism, and erasures and inventions of antiIndianism, remains undisturbed by the focus on the slur and may make it dif­ ficult to harness the momentum …58

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Even as Native Americans celebrate the changing of the Washington football team’s mascot, activists have set their sights on other professional teams that rely on stereotypes of Native Americans like the Atlanta “Braves” and the Kansas City “Chiefs.” Time will tell if Snyder’s decision in summer 2020 was a tipping point or an isolated event. The history of Indian mascotry in the USA is tied to a long history of whites in America “playing Indian.” Whether through settler violence in the eighteenth century, boys’ organizations in the early twentieth century, or halftime entertain­ ment spectacles from the 1920s to today, whites have found comfort in stereotypes of Native Americans as savage warriors. This is deeply tied up in the Christian history of European settlement in the Americas. The European conflation of Christianity, civilization, and whiteness has allowed the maintenance of stereotypes of savagery. Bringing American religious history to bear on debates over Native American mascots reveals another layer to the defense of these mascots. To admit that these stereotypes are inaccurate and harmful would be to admit that there was no essential tie among whiteness, Christianity, and civilization; that white dom­ inance was undeserved; and that perhaps Western conquest was itself a savage act.

Notes 1 Some scholars have made the choice to use “R-dskins” in their writing. For this chapter, I have chosen to use the term unmodified when the term itself is under consideration and to use “Washington football team” in other instances. I include the term unmodi­ fied in all quotations and publication titles. I also use the terms “Native American” and “Indian” interchangeably in this text. 2 Erik Brady, “Daniel Snyder Says Redskins Will Never Change Name,” USA Today Sports, May 10, 2013. Synder’s exact quotation was, “We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER—you can use caps.” 3 Change the Mascot, “History of Progress,” www.changethemascot.org/history-of-progress. The California Racial Mascots Act affected four high schools who used the moniker “Redskins.” 4 Quoted in Rosa Sanchez, “NFL’s Washington Redskins to Change Name Following Years of Backlash,” ABC News, July 13, 2020. 5 This was not the first instance of Native American activism following on the heels of Black activism in the USA. The American Indian Movement, founded in 1968, drew much inspiration from the successes of the civil-rights movement. For an examination of how police brutality in communities of color influenced the American Indian Move­ ment, see Christine Birong, “The Influence of Police Brutality on the American Indian Movement’s Establishment in Minneapolis, 1968–1969,” dissertation, University of Arizona, 2009. For a historical look at the American Indian occupation of Alcatraz from 1969 to 1971, see Kent Blansett, A Journey to Freedom: Richard Oakes, Alcatraz, and the Red Power Movement (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018). 6 Stereotypes of Native Americans proliferate in American culture and range from intri­ guing beauties, peaceful land guardians, childlike innocents, drunkards, and savages (noble or ignoble). This chapter focuses on the most common stereotype employed in mascotry: the savage. For treatment of other stereotypes, see S. Elizabeth Bird (ed.), Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996). 7 Ronald Neitzen, Spirit Wars: Native North American Religions in the Age of Nation Building (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000), 13–14.

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8 Neitzen, Spirit Wars, 33. 9 For further analysis of European conflation of civilization and Christian conversion, see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006). For an example of missionary activity in the New World that did not rely on conflating civilization and Christianity, see Rachel Wheeler, To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-century Northeast (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008). 10 Rebecca Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). 11 Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975). 12 Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia, 35–36. 13 Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia, 42–45, 59–60. 14 Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia, 72–74. 15 Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia, 137. 16 Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia, 137. The understanding of native peoples as incapable of religion was not limited to the Americas. David Chidester’s Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 1996) investigates a pattern of European initial perception of Africans as a-religious or pre-religious. Once European colonial powers established local control, they “discovered” the religions of the Africans. Chidester argues that the initial denial of religion positioned natives as animals in comparison to Europeans. Their lack of religion signified a lack of human entitlement to land and property. An animal had no rights and could be exterminated. 17 Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008). 18 Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, 114. 19 Perhaps the most extreme example of this violence was the slaughter of pacifist Mor­ avian Indians at their settlement, Gnadenhütten in Ohio, in March 1782. Between 150 and 200 settlers formed a militia and decimated the settlement, systematically scalping the eighty or so Indians. Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, 265–276. 20 C. Richard King, “On Being a Warrior: Race, Gender, and American Indian Imagery in Sport,” in Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan (eds), Unsettling America: The Uses of Indianness in the 21st Century (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 28. It’s worth noting that the USA is also home to a longtime African American tradition of playing Indian in New Orleans’s Mardi Gras parades. For historical analysis of this phe­ nomenon, see Alison Fields, “Re-reading the Mardi Gras Indians: Performance and Identity,” Southern Quarterly, 53 (2) (2016): 182–194. 21 Rayna Green, “The Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in America and Europe,” Folklore, 99 (1) (1988), 37. 22 John Johnson, “The Savagery of Boyhood,” Popular Science Monthly, 31 (1887): 796– 800; summarized in Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protes­ tant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 101. 23 Putney, Muscular Christianity, 99.

24 Green, “The Tribe Called Wannabee,” 40.

25 L. G. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883–1933 (Albu­ querque, N. Mex.: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 23. 26 For further examples of the commercialization of Native American stereotypes, see Carter Jones Meyer and Diana Royer (eds) Selling the Indian: Commercializing and Appropriating American Indian Cultures (Tucson, Ariz.: University of Arizona Press, 2001). For analyses of portrayals of Native Americans in Hollywood westerns, see Jon Tuska, The American West in Film: Critical Approaches to the Western (Westport, Conn.: Green­ wood Press, 1985); Andrew Brodie Smith, Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood (Boulder, Colo.: University Press of Colorado, 2004).

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27 Davis points to YMCA and Boy Scouts’ use of Native American iconography as fore­ runners to this trend and theorizes that the use of Indian imagery emerged as part of the crisis of masculinity that occurred at the turn of the century. “It makes sense that if the rise of modern sport was linked to the crisis of masculinity, and served as a partial sub­ stitution for the frontier, then Western symbolism in sport could enhance the sportmasculinity connection.” Laurel R. Davis, “Protest against the Use of Native American Mascots: A Challenge to Traditional American Identity,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 17 (1) (1993): 19. 28 Jennifer Guiliano, Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 32–34. 29 Rebecca Alpert, Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 68–69, 72–74, 115. 30 Guiliano, Indian Spectacle, 40–41. 31 C. Richard King turned to the case of Chief Illiniwek to illustrate that native mascots tend to eclipse female athletes. The series of white men that have portrayed Chief Illi­ niwek have had their names preserved for posterity. During World War II, Illinois replaced Chief Illiniwek with an Indian princess for its halftime shows. When Chief Illiniwek resumed halftime performances after the war, the male performers literally erased the names of the female performers, scratching their names from the ceremonial placard that holds the names of all the men who have emulated Chief Illiniwek. King, “On Being a Warrior,” 32–33. 32 Michael Taylor, Contesting Constructed Indian-ness: The Intersection of the Frontier, Masculi­ nity, and Whiteness in Native American Mascot Representations (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2013), 89. 33 King, “On Being a Warrior,” 34. 34 Andrea Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethink­ ing Women of Color Organizing,” in INCITE! (eds), Color of Violence (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 66–73. Similarly, Sylvester Johnson has argued that it’s useful to see race as a function of colonial power that identifies one (or more) segments of the population as perpetually, ineluctably alien. He writes, “Race is a state practice of ruling people within a political order that perpetually places some within and others outside of the political community through which the constitution of the state is conceived.” Sylvester Johnson, African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 394. 35 Ken Denlinger, “Protest of ‘Redskins’ Draws 2,000 at Stadium,” Washington Post, Jan­ uary 27, 1992. 36 Quoted in Denlinger, “Protest of ‘Redskins’.” 37 Davis, “Protest against the Use of Native American Mascots,” 17. 38 In her investigation of masculinity, critical theorist Gloria Anzaldúa offers us a picture of men fettered by gender roles, afraid to show tenderness or vulnerability, and compen­ sating for this fear by denigrating women and minorities. She seems to suggest that this pattern is especially prominent for whites and calls upon white people to own the fact that you looked upon us [Chicanos/Indians] as less than human, that you stole our lands, our personhood, our self-respect. We need you to make public restitution: to say that, to compensate for your own sense of defectiveness, you strive for power over us, you erase our history and our experience because it makes you feel guilty—you’d rather forget your own brutish acts. Gloria Anzaldúa, “Mestiza Language of Religion,” in Sarah J. Bloesch and Meredith Minister (eds), The Bloomsbury Reader in Cultural Approaches to the Study of Religion (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 185 39 King, “On Being a Warrior,” 30–31. 40 NCAA, “NCAA News Release: NCAA Executive Committee Issues Guidelines for Use of Native American Mascots at Championship Events,” August 5, 2005, https:// tinyurl.com/mr2et2ez

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41 These fourteen colleges were California State-Stanislaus University (Warriors), Lycom­ ing College (Warriors), Winona State University (Warriors), Hawaii-Manoa University (Rainbow Warriors), Eastern Connecticut State University (Warriors), East Stroudsburg University (Warriors), Husson College (Braves, changed to Eagles), Merrimack College (Warriors), Southeast Missouri State University (Indians, changed to Redhawks), State University of West Georgia (Braves, changed to Wolves), Stonehill College (Chieftains, changed to Skyhawks), San Diego State University (Aztec Warriors), Wisconsin Lutheran College (Warriors), and the University of North Carolina-Pembroke (Braves/ Bravehawks). Additionally, the College of William & Mary (Indians) was given an extension to complete its self-study on the mascot issue. 42 These colleges were Alcorn State University (Braves), Arkansas State University (Indians), Bradley University (Braves), Carthage College (Redmen), Catawba College (Indians), Central Michigan University (Chippewas), Chowan College (Braves), Florida State Uni­ versity (Seminoles), Indiana University-Pennsylvania (Indians), McMurry University (Indians), Midwestern State University (Indians), Mississippi College (Choctaws), Newberry College (Indians), Southeastern Oklahoma State University (Savages), University of IllinoisChampaign (Illini), University of Louisiana Monroe (Indians), University of Utah (Utes), and University of North Dakota (Fighting Sioux). The College of William and Mary was also included with these schools because, even though the college had changed their team name from “Indians” to “The Tribe,” the NCAA denied them compliance because they were using feathers in their imagery. They subsequently dropped the use of feathers. 43 These five colleges were Catawba College (Catawba Indians), Central Michigan Uni­ versity (Chippewas), Florida State University (Seminoles), Mississippi College (Choc­ taws), and University of Utah (Utes). 44 For a critique of NCAA policies, see André Douglas Pond Cummings and Seth E. Harper, “Wide Right: Why the NCAA’s Policy on the American Indian Mascot Issue Misses the Mark,” University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Class and Gender, 9 (2009), 135–179. 45 For example, the University of North Dakota finally acquiesced to retire their Indian head logo in 2011 and their moniker “Fighting Sioux” in 2012, but organizations such as the Sioux Kids Club continued to make and distribute T-shirts with the retired logo. Taylor, Contesting Constructed Indian-ness, 22. 46 Erik Brady, “Redskins’ Daniel Snyder ‘THRILLED’ with Supreme Court Ruling,” USA Today, June 19, 2017. 47 Andrew Billings and Jason Black, Mascot Nation: The Controversy over Native American Representations in Sports (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 187–192. 48 National Congress of American Indians, “Proud to Be” [YouTube video], January 27, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR-tbOxlhvE 49 Redskins Facts, “Redskins Is a Powerful Name” [YouTube video], August 13, 2014, https://youtu.be/40SFqadRTQ0 50 Redskins Facts, “The Facts,” https://web.archive.org/web/20140812013623/http:// www.redskinsfacts.com/facts 51 Billings and Black, Mascot Nation, 50–61. 52 Billings and Black, Mascot Nation, 164–178. 53 For an eloquent call for foregrounding education about Native Americans as a corrective to mascotting, see Ellen J. Staurowsky, “American Indian Imagery and the Miseducation of America,” Quest, 51 (1999): 382–392. 54 Shannon Ryan, “Illinois Must Finally Remove All Links to Chief Illiniwek,” Chicago Tribune, August 26, 2017. 55 James Fenelon, Redskins? Sports, Mascots, Indian Nations, and White Racism (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017), 59. 56 Quoted in Alison Kosik, “FedEx Asks the Washington Redskins to Change Their Name after Pressure from Investor Groups,” CNN Business, July 3, 2020. 57 Peter King, “No. 10, 10 Years In,” Sports Illustrated NFL, September 6, 2013. 58 C. Richard King, Redskins: Insult and Brand (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 166–167.

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RACE, MAHMOUD ABDUL-RAUF, AND RELIGIOUS REALISM Lori Latrice Martin

Introduction It was during the 1990s that a talented and hardworking Black male athlete emerged as a rising basketball star. Born in Gulfport, Mississippi, Mahmoud AbdulRauf (formerly Chris Jackson), went on to become one of the best to ever play basketball at Louisiana State University (LSU). Abdul-Rauf still holds conference records and recently had his jersey retired at LSU. Abdul-Rauf would go on to live out the plan he had for himself and his family and play in the NBA. While Abdul-Rauf should be most known for his stellar perfor­ mance as a standout on the Denver Nuggets, he is arguably most remembered for staying in the locker room or hallway during the playing of the national anthem. Sports are an important part of American society. While many Americans view sports as a form of entertainment, sports are so much more. Collectively, sports represent a social institution that communicates the ways of society as agents of socialization. They help to communicate the norms of society and are affected by all of the -isms that shape the broader society. Sports are often used to commu­ nicate norms related to gender and race, for example. Historical and contemporary events highlight the role that racism plays in sports as a social institution. From the days of slave jockeys to the wholesale exclusion of Black people from sports such as tennis and golf, to the present-day, race and racism have always mattered in sports. It is important that we not confuse racism with prejudice or discrimination. Racism is not merely a set of widely held negative or positive beliefs about an entire group of people. Racism is also not just about limiting the behaviors and rights of people because they have membership in a particular racial group. Racism is a multilevel and multidimensional system of oppression whereby the dominant group scapegoats and limits the life chances and life opportunities of minority groups. Within the US context, perhaps the starkest contrast has been between DOI: 10.4324/9781003014621-17

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Black and white people. To be clear, when I, or other sociologists who study race and ethnicity, use the term “minority,” I am not talking about primarily about numbers but about power. From the founding of the nation until today, white people have wielded the most power over others both through private practices and public policies. High-profile athletes have at times tried to use their influence to draw attention to the social injustices resulting from the imbalance of power that is at the core of racism and the racialized social structures within which it operates. Scholars have focused on the places, methods, timing, modes, and reactions of protests by high-profile athletes, and addressed why high-profile Black players engage in public forms of protest but have largely ignored why the predominately white fan base overwhelmingly responds so fervently to these acts of resistance in a way that can be described as religious. Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf’s refusal in 1996 to stand on the court during the cus­ tomary playing of the national anthem has been lost in the storm of research on athletes and activism over the past decades. In this chapter, I will examine one of the few significant scholarly examinations of Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf’s experiences as a professional athlete in the NBA as well as analyze some related media accounts. Next, I discuss the religion of whiteness. Finally, drawing upon Derrick Bell’s work on racial realism, I introduce religious realism as a way of moving conversations forward about racism in sports and in the USA in general. Racial realism reflects an understanding about the permanent subordinate status of Black people in America. Religious realism, as I will argue later, similarly contributes to the understanding of the permanence of both whiteness as religious and the subordinate status of Black athletes and other Black people in sports.

High-profile Athletes and the Politics of Protests in the 1990s The 1990s are not remembered as the decade of the activist-athlete. Scholars and the general public remember the controversies surrounding the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City when an Australian athlete joined John Carlos and Tommie Smith in a protest on the medal podium. With the American flag staring them in the face and the national anthem playing in the background, Carlos and Smith raised their gloved fists in the air in an iconic symbol of Black power and Black solidarity. This bold gesture signaled their concerns about poverty in the USA and globally. They felt compelled to do something to draw attention to social injustices based upon their lived experiences, objective evidence of persistent racial inequality, and informed perspective gained from their interaction with critical Black scholars, especially Dr. Harry Edwards. Carlos and Smith’s willingness to shift attention away from their respective victories toward ongoing Black suffering and Black deaths is all the more honorable when thinking about the sacrifices made by Muhammad Ali before them. Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the US Army in 1967 based upon his objections to the treatment of Black people in America and nonwhite people across the globe rendered him unable to earn a living in the ring. While he was a hero among many Black people, he was hated by many members

Race, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, and Religious Realism 237

of the dominant group. Carlos and Smith understood at least some of the potential risks they faced with the action they took but thought the magnitude of the pro­ blem that is racism was worth whatever negative consequences might follow. For Ali, Carlos, and Smith, there were severe consequences for speaking out. To be clear, there were some high-profile protests by elite athletes during the 1990s. The Fab Five at the University of Michigan—Chris Webber, Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Jimmy King, and Ray Jackson—fundamentally changed big-time college sports.1 Not only did they prove that you could start five freshmen and win a lot of games, but they also showed a keen understanding of how social institu­ tions were organized in ways as to reap rewards for mostly white beneficiaries often off of the labor of Black bodies. As elite athletes receiving financial support from a storied program, they were very aware that one wrong move could mean that the proverbial golden ticket—playing in the NBA—could be forever beyond their reach. Nevertheless, the Fab Five decided to show their disapproval of the exploi­ tation of their Black bodies and that of other so-called amateur student-athletes in high-revenue generating programs by wearing T-shirts over corporate logos and in other similar actions.2 According to their own accounts, they received hate mail not only for their actions but also for merely being Black and having the audacity to invade white space by not conforming to the standards of normative whiteness. Boosters threatened to withdraw financial support of the basketball program as an expression of their dissatisfaction with the players. As was the case before the Fab Five and afterwards, Black athletes engaged in public forms of activism are often accused of being ungrateful and lacking in the requisite appreciation for all that white America has given them. Despite the Fab Five’s commitment to drawing attention to the impact of racism on their experiences as elite athletes and on Black people more broadly, most Black professional athletes remained relatively silent on issues about race during the 1990s. There is scholarship addressing Michael Jordan’s missed opportunities to speak out against racial injustices and support causes that would both empower and inform people for generations.3 For example, he refused to oppose segregationist Jessie Helms. Jordan missed the chance to criticize a Republican Party agenda that would perpetuate racial disparities. Jordan said that Republicans buy sneakers too. Jordan’s apolitical posture is in the service of his own economic gain while Black disempowerment continued all around him. It is a connection to the community that has endeared athlete activists like Ali, Smith, and Carlos to the Black community and elevated them to icons the world over. Surely Michael Jordan is beloved throughout the USA and the world; for many fans, he is the Greatest Of All Time (the GOAT), but the admiration that the Black community has had historically for Jordan has been for his contributions to the NBA and to popular culture.4

From Rodney King to Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf The 1990s started with one of the most horrific recorded scenes since the civilrights movement. Black people who proclaimed their humanity and rights to full

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citizenship were threatened with violence, faced physical attacks, and had their organizations infiltrated and hyper-surveilled by ordinary white citizens, lawenforcement officials, and the federal government in predominately Black com­ munities across the country, with Los Angeles the epicenter. On March 3, 1991, Rodney King was brutally beaten on the side of I-120 after a high-speed chase with the Los Angeles Police Department for allegedly driving drunk.5 Because America has a habit of not believing Black people, many thought that the fact that George Holliday, a civilian, had captured the assault on video for all the world to see would provide incontrovertible evidence. Finally, King (and, by extension, Black people as a whole) would finally get justice. Just as has been the case in the past, King’s testimony and battered body plus video evidence con­ firming these would not be enough to convince some members of the dominant racial group in America that he was the victim of an abuse of power, excessive force, and a crime against humanity. As many as fourteen officers were involved in the beating of King, and, eventually, four officers were charged. Despite the videotape evidence, three of the officers were acquitted. The all-white jury out­ side of Los Angeles, where the trial was moved, did not decide on one charge for the fourth officer. Shortly after the jury failed to hold the officers accountable for their inhumane treatment of King and violation of his civil rights, Los Angeles was literally on fire. Many people took their anger and frustration to the streets. Some had simply had enough of America’s long history of white supremacy, antiBlack death, and a lack of justice. The videotaped beating of Rodney King and the acquittal of the officers showed that Black lives did not matter much and that justice in America was far from color-blind. The aftermath of the beating of Rodney King and the LA riots affected many people, including many Black people.

Situating Abdul-Rauf One of the reasons Abdul-Rauf is more known for his protest than for his play is because of the media portrayal of him, including his race, religion, nativity, and the ungrateful-athlete trope, or the idea that wealthy Black athletes should be grateful to play and not complain about issues inside and outside of their respective sport. While one can find many news stories from the 1990s about Abdul-Rauf and the national anthem, there are very few scholarly academic journal articles focused primarily on his experiences and what they tell us about the relationship among race, racism, religion, and sport, but especially what they tell us about racism and the religion of whiteness. I defined the religion of whiteness in a book chapter I co-authored with Stephen C. Finley. We argued, as I do here, that whiteness may best be understood as a religious orientation as “a deep symbol that is connected in concrete ways to systems of unearned benefits in America, systems that deny others those same privileges.”6 We argued further that whiteness as a religious orientation “is the organizing principle of America, so deeply embedded in the structures that it functions as and through concealment.”7

Race, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, and Religious Realism 239

Abdul-Rauf recounts in several of his speeches, posted on social media, that, while an undergraduate student, he was introduced to The Autobiography of Malcolm X and that he began reading other similar literature. This book by Alex Haley shaped his view of the world and his place in it.8 Soon thereafter, he converted to Islam. Many scholars have written about Black Muslims in America.9 Sociologist C. Eric Lincoln wrote one of the earliest and most widely cited books on Black Mus­ lims in America.10 Lincoln coined the term “Black Muslims” in 1956. Lincoln mentioned that Black Muslims intentionally avoided the use of the term “Moslem” because they wished to distinguish themselves from small Moslem communities in the USA.11 They also did not, according to Lincoln, “subscribe to the familiar Moslem doctrine that a common submission to Allah erases and transcends all racial awareness.”12 Black Muslims are “probably America’s foremost black nationalist movement.”13 Black nationalism “seizes the conditions of disprivilege and turns them to advantage as a tool for eliminating the disprivilege.”14 At the time of Lincoln’s writing, Black Muslims demanded “that blacks be allowed to set up a separate within the United States, occupying as much as one-fifth of the nation’s territory.”15 Lincoln added that Black Muslims “played a major part in the devel­ opment of black pride and black self-confidence.”16 Individuals affiliated with the Black Muslims felt “a new sense of dignity, a conviction that they are more than the equals of the whites, whose ‘trickology’ is a constant threat to their well­ being.”17 The default association of Black followers of Islam as members of the Nation of Islam was and still is meant to signal an association with an organization that is primarily political using religion as a disguise and also anti-white and proBlack separatist. Oliver Jones described what he calls the Black Muslim movement as “rooted in black-white ‘crisis situation’.”18 He also explained the movement as an “escapist” Black religion born out of the misery of the early twentieth century.19 Jones fur­ ther contended, “relevant decision-makers are likely to be unwilling to recognize the movement as a legitimate religion, that is to say, to emblazon the movement with the same constitutional and legal rights accorded more traditional faiths.”20 Edward Curtis agreed with Jones in his work on Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam: 1960–1975.21 For the Nation of Islam, “Islam was not only a theology but also a system of ritualized practices that brought them what they described as dig­ nity, hope, civilization, self-determination, pride, peace, security, and salvation.”22 The followers engaged in “religious activism.”23 While much has been written about Black people who identify as Muslim, Zarenna Grewal is one of the few scholars to analyze what she characterizes as the controversy surrounding certain representations of Islam, Muslim Americans, and African American political consciousness in the media. Grewal brings some valu­ able insights with her analyses but does not go far enough on some key areas.24 Grewal highlights the divide between immigrant Muslims and Black Muslims in America, including the Nation of Islam.25 Grewal underestimated the significance of anti-Black sentiments in the framing of Black Muslims in the USA.26 For example, Grewal tried to identify “ways Islam is both raced and erased in the

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business of Black Muslim athletes into national heroes or villains.”27 The responses of white fans to various Black Muslim athletes are far more complex than presented in the article. Black Muslim athletes are not simply either heroes or villains, as Grewal argued. They may be viewed as both heroes and villains across place, time, and various groups. Grewal observed that Abdul-Rauf changed his name in 1993 and was warned that the name change might hurt his career, in part because the mostly white fan base would have trouble pronouncing his name and the fans that followed him to the league might not embrace his new identity.28 Still, Abdul-Rauf’s actions were viewed as courageous by many in the Islamic community, whether African American or not. Stephen C. Finley has shown in his work on the Nation of Islam that it is among the most misunderstood religious groups in the world. Although AbdulRauf was not a member of the Nation of Islam, people often assume that he and other Black Muslims are members and are often understood within that context. Finley states, “[Nation of Islam] is an orientation seeking to provide a stronger sense of individual and collective meaning.”29 Nation of Islam wanted to reclaim the self-image of Black people and make sure that Black people controlled their own destinies. Ellen McLarney explores American writer James Baldwin and his perspective on the use of language by Black Muslim language and the empowering effect it had on Black people more broadly. Baldwin credited Black Muslims with giving voice to the Black experience by outlining their experiences and declaring their humanity.30 McLarney observes that “their ideas continue to be of critical relevance to the politics of race today” as Black people continue efforts to control racial narratives about them and assert that Black lives matter.31 Several years after converting to Islam and after years of immersion into literature about injustices throughout the history of America, Abdul-Rauf came to the con­ clusion that he could not participate in a ritual and a myth about America that bothered his newfound consciousness. Abdul-Rauf decided to stay in the lockerroom during the playing of the national anthem, while his teammates were on the court, which was not only the custom but an NBA policy. Abdul-Rauf’s personal protest became public when asked about his absence during the playing of the national anthem. An angry group of fans took to the airwaves and flooded radio programs and mailboxes to express their outrage at Abdul-Rauf’s perceived antiAmerican actions. Without consulting the NBA Players Association, the owners added a statement in the operations manual requiring staff and players to “line up in a dignified posture along the sidelines or the foul line during the playing of the anthem.”32 The key term is “dignified.” What exactly does that word mean here and who gets to decide what is considered dignified or not? Additionally, while fans and team officials focused on what Abdul-Rauf did and why, few, including Grewal, have questioned why the national anthem is played at sporting events at all or call for the removal of it from public gatherings, including at sporting events.33 The fervent responses by mostly white fans were based on the media’s decision to include parts of his remarks regarding his stance and not others. Abdul-Rauf offered a critique of American society, especially with respect to racial inequities, but also said, “You can’t be for God and for oppression. It is clear in the Qu’ran.”

Race, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, and Religious Realism 241

Religious Realism Abdul-Rauf was, of course, not the last athlete to use his high-profile position to draw attention to America’s many shortcomings and because of an unwillingness on the part of many with membership in the dominant group. The white rage Abdul-Rauf experienced is similar to the case involving Colin Kaepernick. The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback decided to take a stand against persistent racial injustices by first sitting and later kneeling during the playing of the national anthem. Kaepernick began his protest in August 2016 and was later joined by his teammate, Eric Reid, and other athletes from across the sports league. It was an NFL rule for everyone to stand during the playing the national anthem, including players. Many—mostly white—fans voiced their concerns with Kaepernick’s ges­ ture both in the stadium and on various social-media platforms. Some fans turned in their season tickets and showed their disapproval in other ways. Like AbdulRauf, Kaepernick experienced a great deal of backlash. While Abdul-Rauf was traded and rendered relatively invisible by his new team and the NBA in general, he was able to continue his career and remains an active elite basketball player today, albeit in the lesser known and newly established Big3 league.34 Kaepernick, on the other hand, was not signed to any teams once he became a free agent. Despite an eventual tryout that caused some Kaepernick supporters to question the sincerity of the event, he remains unsigned today. Moreover, after the killing of George Floyd, Roger Goodell, commissioner of the NFL, issued a statement on behalf of the league where he apologized for not listening to the players about what they were actually protesting, but he made no mention of Kaepernick or its mistreatment of him. Nor did any team offer Kaepernick his rightful place on any roster. While the individual stories may change over time, from the days of Ali, Smith, Carlos, Abdul-Rauf, to Kaepernick, what remains the same is the sig­ nificance of the religion of whiteness. How might we explain the lack of sustained racial progress in sports and in American society despite the personal and collective sacrifices of some elite athletes and many members of the Black community? Legal scholar Derrick Bell would characterize events like the apology from the NFL and even the interracial pro­ testing following the killing of George Floyd as peaks of progress.35 Bell offers a strategy for coming to terms with the lack of long-term progress with respect to race relations in America.36 He proclaims, “racial equality is in fact, not a realistic goal” and describes America as “perilously racist.”37 Bell viewed racial realism as a “challenge to the principle of racial equality.”38 Racial realism calls for an acknowledgment of the permanence of the subordinate status of Black people in America. In so doing, Black people can “avoid despair,” which frees Black people “to imagine and implement racial strategies that can bring fulfillment and even triumph.”39 Bell warns that “contemporary color barriers are less visible but neither less real nor less oppressive.”40 Kenneth Fasching-Varner and his colleagues drew inspiration from Bell’s work on racial realism and introduced educational and penal realism.41 The concepts

242 Lori Latrice Martin

focused on race and the school-to-prison pipeline as well as residential segregation, respectively. In this chapter, I introduce religious realism. I define religious realism as the acknowledgment of the permanence of both whiteness as religious and the subordinate status of Black athletes and other Black people in the sport industrial complex. While Fas­ ching-Varner and his colleagues do not discuss the religion of whiteness or sports, the following six tenets, which were outlined in their article, should inform con­ versations about where we go from here regarding race, religion, and sports. First, racial disparities exist in sports and in society by design. While some people see sports as one of the few places in society where the playing field is level, there are many examples that this is not the case. One need only look at how Black and white athletes are represented differently in the media or compare the percentages of Black players in the National Football League compared to the number of Black majority team owners or even the number of coaches. American society is struc­ tured in such a way that these observed racial differences represent expected out­ comes and do not occur purely by chance. Second, policies aimed at addressing racial disparities in sports and in society often exacerbate disparities and seldom go far enough. Far too often American sports leagues, corporations, and communities attempt to address persistent racial disparities through the creation of seemingly race-neutral policies and practices. One cannot address racism in sports without adequately taking account of race. Hence, it means little in the grand scheme of things to revise policies about how one should conduct himself during the playing of the national anthem while doing little if anything to make whole the former player affected most by the league’s actions. Additionally, the recent changes to the Rooney Rule requiring now two external minority candidates for head coaching positions appears promising but does not account for the ongoing unequal treatment Black coaches receive when compared with white coaches. Black coaches are often terminated more quickly and held to different standards from white coaches across leagues. Hiring and retaining Black coaches must be a priority, and creating an environment that is welcoming to Black coaches is imperative but not likely. Third, the religion of whiteness is the catalyst for ongoing racial inequalities in sports and other American social institutions. Whiteness is a religious orientation. Indeed, it is a deep symbol that is connected in concrete ways to systems of unearned benefits in America, systems that deny others those same privileges. As with all symbols, it points to something outside of itself: meanings, practices, and structures that coalesce in the appearances of something intelligible in the world that requires shared semiotics for its appear­ ance and coherence.42 So much of what happens at every level of sports in America is driven by con­ cerns about how white people will respond and the economic implications of those responses. Because whiteness is an orientation, threats to it are often met with a great deal of fervor that can best be described as religious. Decision-makers in all

Race, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, and Religious Realism 243

parts of the sports-industrial complex will gladly “allow for human sacrifice; populations of color and those of poor-socioeconomic standing, consequently, are continually offered up in service to benefit the economic interests of Whites.”43 This is particularly true for Black athletes, Black people throughout the sports industrial complex, and Black people as a whole. Fourth, persistent racial inequality in sports creates a misery loop for Black people in the USA, the impact of which may be felt in other areas of social life. Scholars have written about racial battle fatigue and the health ramifications associated with living with racism. Black athletes and other Black people associated with sports in America live under the smog of terror as Henrika McCoy describes it, or in a state of intense or overwhelming fear.44 They live with the fear that anything they say or do that challenges whiteness may result in any number of consequences, from the loss of one’s career, violence, or threats of violence. This is in addition to the terror that Black athletes and other Black people in the world experience in the wake of threats to, and the killing of, Black people for just being.45 Fifth, protests by Black athletes will always be seen as a threat to the religion of whiteness. When Black athletes protest against injustices in America, they are debunking the myth that the country has long served as a liberator and not on the reality that America has been an oppressing force for most if not all of its history. The religion of whiteness enlists members of the dominant group that see themselves as virtuous, godly, and, in some cases, god-like.46 Thus, protests by Black athletes must not only be rejec­ ted, but the protesting Black athletes will be encouraged to adopt assimilationist princi­ ples geared toward the white decision-makers and the predominately white fan base. Six, Black athletes should continue to develop strategies to bring fulfillment and triumph in the sports-industrial complex and in the society at large without an expectation of equality or equity. For years Black athletes have used their positions to draw attention to racial injustices within their sport and in the broader society. In addition to the names already mentioned, we could add the names of people like Curt Flood, who likened the lack of free agency to slavery, or to Jackie Robinson, who was critical of Major League Baseball for the lack of Black representation on coaching staffs and front offices.47 Current and former elite athletes such as LeBron James and Magic Johnson should be commended for their investments in Black schoolchildren and Black businesses, for example, and for speaking out about racial inequalities. Black athletes and Black people as a whole should not despair when, despite their efforts (and the efforts of others), racial differences in America will persist.

Conclusion Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf’s challenge to America’s self-image in the 1990s and the reactions from the largely white fan base have not received much scholarly atten­ tion, and, although the scant scholarly treatments offer important insights, they tend to underestimate anti-Black sentiments in sports and in the country. I addressed this limitation through the discussion of the relationship among race, racism, and sport. In addition, I discussed the significance of whiteness, specifically,

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the permanence of whiteness as religious and the subordinate status of Black athletes and other Black people in sports. Lastly, I introduced religious realism as a way of moving conversations forward about racism in sports and in the USA in general with six important tenets. Abdul-Rauf was neither pessimistic nor idealistic. Abdul-Rauf and many other Black athletes engaged in various forms of direct action are realists, and reactions to their protests are met with white resistance. They are well aware that their status as Black athletes, and as Black people, is not likely to change fundamentally in their lifetimes but nevertheless find power in speaking truth to power. In Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” he responded to criticisms from a group of mainly white clergy about his involvement in direct actions in Birmingham, Alabama.48 In one part of King’s response letter, he stated, “You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping ‘order’ and ‘preventing violence’.”49 He added, “I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.” Then, King proclaimed, “I wish you had commended the Negro sit inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation.”50 Sports may best be understood as racial and political battlefields. Mahmoud AbdulRauf and other activist Black athletes show great courage and endure much suffering and are the real heroes, according to King.51 Black athletes are not immune from the impacts of racism. When Black athletes speak truth to power, they face resistance, especially from white fans and white decision-makers throughout the sports industrial complex. The religious fervor with which white people respond to Black athletes deemed out of place is worthy of further serious scholarly inquiry.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13

Lori Latrice Martin, White Sports Black Sports (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2015).

Martin, White Sports.

William Rhoden, Forty Million Dollar Slaves (New York: Broadway Books, 2007).

Rhoden, Forty Million Dollar Slaves.

Associated Press, “Rodney King Riot: Timeline of Key Events,” April 26, 2017, https://apnews.

com/fa4d04d8281443fc8db0e27d6be52081/Rodney-King-riot:-Timeline-of-key-events Stephen C. Finley and Lori Latrice Martin, “The Complexity of Color and the Religion of Whiteness,” in L. L. Martin, H. D. Horton, C. Herring, C. V. Keith, and M. Thomas (eds), Color Struck (Leiden: Senses Publishers/Brill, 2017), 180. Finley and Martin, “The Complexity of Color,” 180. Alex Haley interviewed Malcolm X and conducted related research. The book repre­ sents Malcolm X’s autobiography as told to Haley. Malachi Crawford, Black Muslims and the Law: Civil Liberties from Elijah Muhammad to Muhammad Ali (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2016); Dawn-Marie Gibson, “Con­ temporary Black Muslim Women’s Voices in The Final Call, 1979–2018,” Muslim World, 109 (3) (2018): 375–393; Hakim Zainddinov, “What Factors Account for Black–White Differences in Anti-Muslim Sentiment in the Contemporary USA?” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36 (11) (2013): 1745–1769. C. Eric Lincoln, Black Muslims in America (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1961).

Lincoln, Black Muslims in America.

Lincoln, Black Muslims in America, xvii.

Lincoln, Black Muslims in America, 2.

Race, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, and Religious Realism 245

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Lincoln, Black Muslims in America, 43. Lincoln, Black Muslims in America, 2. Lincoln, Black Muslims in America, 5. Lincoln, Black Muslims in America, 17. Oliver Jones, Jr. “The Black Muslim Movement and the American Constitutional System,” Journal of Black Studies, 13 (4) (1983): 418. Jones, “The Black Muslim,” 421. Jones, “The Black Muslim,” 425. Jones, “The Black Muslim.” Edward Curtis, Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960–1975 (Chapel Hill, N. C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Curtis, Black Muslim Religion, 6. Zareena Grewal, “Lights, Camera, Suspension: Freezing the Frame on the Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf-Anthem Controversy,” Souls, 9 (2): 109–122. Grewal, “Lights, Camera, Suspension.” Grewal, “Lights, Camera, Suspension.” Grewal, “Lights, Camera, Suspension,” 110. Grewal, “Lights, Camera, Suspension.” Stephen C. Finley, “‘The Secret of Who the Devil Is’: Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam, and Theological Phenomenology,” in Dawn-Marie Gibson and Herbert Berg (eds), New Perspectives on the Nation of Islam (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017), 154–173. Ellen McLarney, “James Baldwin and the Power of Black Muslim Language,” Social Text, 37 (1) (2019): 51–84. McLarney, “James Baldwin,” 54. Grewal, “Lights, Camera, Suspension,” 113. Grewal, “Lights, Camera, Suspension.” Gillian Brockell, “A National Anthem Protest Ruined His NBA Career. Now Abdul-Rauf Is Being Honored by LSU,” Washington Post, July 23, 2019; Jesse Washington, “Still No Anthem, Still No Regrets for Mahmoud Abdul-Raul,” The Undefeated, September 1, 2016. Derrick Bell, “Racial Realism,” Connecticut Law Review, 24 (2) (1992): 363–379. Bell, “Racial Realism.” Bell, “Racial Realism,” 363. Bell, “Racial Realism,” 364. Bell, “Racial Realism,” 374. Bell, “Racial Realism,” 374. Kenneth Fasching-Varner, Roland Mitchell, Lori Latrice Martin, and Karen BentonHaron, “Beyond School-to-Prison Pipeline and toward an Educational and Penal Rea­ lism,” Equity and Excellence in Education, 47 (4) (2014): 410–429. Finley and Martin, “The Complexity of Color,” 180. Lori Latrice Martin and Kenneth Fasching-Varner, “Race, Residential Segregation and the Death of Democracy: Education and Myths of Post-racialism,” Democracy and Edu­ cation, 25 (1) (2017), 8. Henrika McCoy, “The Life of a Black Academic: Tired and Terrorized,” Inside Higher Education, June 12, 2020. McCoy, “The Life of a Black Academic.” Stephen C. Finley and Biko M. Gray, “God Is a White Racist: Immanent Atheism as a Religious Response to Black Lives Matter and State-Sanctioned Anti-Black Violence,” Journal of Africana Religions, 3 (4) (2015): 443–453. Lori Latrice Martin, Out of Bounds: Racism and the Black Athlete (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2014). Martin Luther King, “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963, www.africa.upenn. edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html King, “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” King, “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” King, “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”

13

¿DIOS BENDIGA WHOSE AMÉRICA? Resisting the Ritual Theologizing of Nation Carmen M. Nanko-Fernández

Introduction In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, baseball was intimately tied to US neocolonial expansion with a decidedly Christian missionizing thrust. In this context, baseball assumed a role in Americanizing the other in their own land while traditioning patriotism at home.1 The singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at professional sporting events has its origins in baseball, as do efforts to domesticate resistance to such public ritualization of national identity. My aim here is to expose embedded theologies of nationalism played out in the contested spaces of stadiums and fields of play, and I will do so from a distinctively Latin@́ theological per­ spective. Such an exploration exposes critical questions about the supposed liber­ ating potential of professional sports, which some claim have become civil religion in the USA.2 Ordinary living—lo cotidiano—concretely provides content, ́ particularizes con­ text, and marks the spaces and place(s) from which Latin@s do theology.3 The representation of the daily, as imaged through professional sports, is not only reflective of life but is active in the construction of communal identities, in pro­ mulgating particular ways of life, in cultivating expressions of resistance. Sports are intricately woven into the fabric of our daily living and as such may serve as locus theologicus. An example arises from a careful study of the parallels between two protests by Black athletes in professional sports: the response of biracial African American Colin Kaepernick to “The Star-Spangled Banner” during the NFL 2016 season, and the opposition by Afro–Puerto Rican Carlos Delgado to “God Bless America” during the 2004 and 2005 MLB seasons. A brief survey of the premier role of baseball in evangelizing patriotism and militarism provides context. While a growing body of scholarship has drawn attention to these connections, especially after the attacks of September 11, 2001,4 few have explored the theological claims DOI: 10.4324/9781003014621-18

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communicated through such ritual practices, which are experienced by some as coercive and religious. The fact that in both cases this resistance emerged from athletes from marginalized communities makes it all the more important to exam­ ine their protests as well as the contested theologies of nation that underlie rituals of patriotism performed at stadiums and evangelized through sports.

Resistance in Two Movements Interpretations of a Genuflect Offense In the context of a football game, “genuflect offense” could be interpreted as a form of nonviolent resistance. In cases when a team is ahead, or miserably behind, or even dangerously overmatched, a quarterback “takes a knee” after the ball is snapped in order to end the play. Depending on the circumstances, this strategy functions to protect a lead, run out the clock, preserve players from injury, or survive loss by signaling concession. The action interrupts the flow of the game because it does not attempt to move the ball forward and discourages resistance from the opposing team’s defense. At times it serves to minimize damage in what is undeniably a violent sport. By early September 2016, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback’s personal protest of sitting through the national anthem in the NFL morphed into a growing movement of various expressions of protest enacted by athletes and others to draw attention to social injustices in the USA, primarily, though not exclusively, con­ nected to race and police accountability.5 After reflection, Kaepernick shifted tac­ tics and opted to “take a knee” during the anthem as a symbolic call to action on the myriad ways the USA does not live up to the promises the anthem purports to represent. Kaepernick’s move from sitting to genuflecting was intended as an effective offensive strategy to highlight the need for accountability in the presence of racial and social injustice. Yet some perceived it as an offense to the flag and disrespectful to those with military service.

Anatomy of a Protest Kaepernick’s Twitter and Instagram posts throughout July 2016 provide context for the protest that began silently in the first week of the preseason but did not get noticed until he was in uniform in the third week. The back-to-back police shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in St. Paul, Minnesota, evoked a social-media response from the quarterback. On July 6, he tweeted, “This is what lynchings look like in 2016!”6 with a link to his longer Instagram post that attributed “another murder in the streets” to the “color of a man’s skin.”7 He questioned when those who had the duty to protect would be held accountable for acts that violate the public trust.8 A day later, following Cas­ tile’s death, he tweeted, “We are under attack! It’s clear as day! Less than 24 hrs later another body in the street!”9 The end of July brought news that charges were

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dropped against the last of the Baltimore police officers accused in the custody death of Freddie Gray in April 2015. Again Kaepernick responded, concluding his Instagram post with “Apparently this is what our system calls justice.”10 His responses were noteworthy as he was among a small group of vocal athletes using their prominence and social media to speak out on an array of social issues.11 What started as a personal low-key protest of sitting through the anthem exploded into public recognition via Twitter with a photo by SB Nation beat writer Jennifer Lee Chan.12 Covering the San Francisco 49ers third preseason game, Kaepernick’s first in uniform, she tweeted a photo of the field during the national anthem from the press booth high above the 49ers bench. The tag line referred to a haphazard formation of 49ers during the anthem: “This team formation for the National Anthem is not Jeff Fisher approved. #HardKnocks.”13 The mention of Fisher, the coach of the Los Angeles Rams, alluded to an HBO program, Hard Knocks, a fiveepisode documentary series that follows a different NFL team each year through training camp.14 In episode 2, which had aired ten days earlier, on August 16, Fisher provided detailed instructions to his players on their expected posture during the national anthem: defense left, offense right, helmets under left arm, all lined up on the white sideline marker.15 He showed a video clip of the formation and framed the expectation in terms of respect: respect for self, teammates, the game, and the country. In her initial tweet, an attempt at humor, Lee Chan did not realize that Kaepernick was seated, barely visible between the Gatorade coolers. By the game’s end, Lee Chan tweeted the photo again with the claim: “Colin Kaepernick did not stand during the National Anthem—my picture provides proof.”16 She surmised that this was possibly his statement on recent racial justice events in light of his postings on social media.17 Lee Chan acknowledged that until Kaepernick or his representation makes a statement, we cannot be sure of the true reason for him not standing for the National Anthem. What we do know is that the NFL is a conservative organization down to its patriotic logo and it’s an organization that is heavily intertwined with the military.18

Genuflect Offense as Strategy for Moving Forward Kaepernick did speak. First, in a postgame interview, he explained, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.”19 He reiterated sentiments already evident on his social media: “There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”20 On the Monday following the game, and later that week after Thursday night’s preseason finale, Kaepernick granted extensive press inter­ views, each slightly under twenty minutes.21 Kaepernick had been contemplating increased activism after being troubled by civil unrest, particularly in response to racial injustice, police-brutality incidents, and the lack of accountability. He sought to become more educated on the issues and realized that his controversial stance could have repercussions. He clarified his

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evolving position, dispelled accusations of being anti-military, and insisted, “I’m not anti-American. I love America. I love people. That’s why I’m doing this. I want to help make America better.”22 The justice issues cited by Kaepernick ranged from the care of veterans to the disproportionate use of force by some police, particularly with regard to people from minoritized communities, and race-based oppression and inequalities affecting Black lives.23 His protest was motivated not by police in general, as some were among his kin, but against the actions of rogues. I have uncles, I have friends who are cops and I have great respect for them, because they are doing it for the right reason and they genuinely want to protect and help people. That’s not the case with all cops, and cops that are murdering people and are racist are putting other cops in danger, like my family, like my friends.24 He called for higher accountability standards and criticized inadequate training, noting that a cosmetologist “holding a curling iron has more education and more training than people that have a gun and are going out on the street to protect us.”25 His hope was to inspire a national conversion because “the dream result would be equality, justice for everybody. This is really something about human rights, it’s about the people.”26 When asked explicitly about how he viewed the flag as a “symbol of the mili­ tary,” Kaepernick affirmed his respect for those who have fought for the country, including members of his own family and friends. He decried the incongruity of those who fight for freedom for all yet die “in vain because this country isn’t holding their end of the bargain up, as far as giving freedom and justice, liberty to everybody.”27 He remarked that some, upon their return from military service, are “treated unjustly by the country they have fought for, and have been murdered by the country they fought for, on our land.”28 In the second interview, Kaepernick cited concern for the rate of suicide among veterans and the willingness of the country to “let those vets go and fight the war for them, but when they come back, they won’t do anything to try to help them.”29 In conversation with veteran Army Green Beret Nate Boyer, a former college football player with a brief NFL career, Kaepernick shifted from sitting in protest to taking a knee during the anthem.30 The change was fostered by a desire to “get the message back on track and not take away from the military, not take away from pride in our country, but keep the focus on what the issues really are.”31 Kaepernick placed his money behind his commitment to change and to encou­ rage a national conversation. Through the mission of his foundation, he has vowed “to fight oppression of all kinds globally, through education and social activism.”32 Among the foundation’s initiatives is the Know Your Rights Camp, “a free cam­ paign for youth fully funded by Colin Kaepernick to raise awareness on higher education, self-empowerment, and instruction to properly interact with law enforcement in various scenarios.”33 The first gatherings of the camp occurred in Oakland during the 49ers’ bye week in October 2016, with subsequent camps held

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in January 2017 in New York, and in May in Chicago.34 Through the foundation and the camps, Kaepernick continues to seek transformation by empowering minoritized youth in particular. These are fruits from a protest initially prompted by the intersection of racism and police brutality. He framed his personal invest­ ment and risk within a context of blessing rooted in privilege: I’ve been blessed to be able to get this far and have the privilege of being able to be in the NFL, making the kind of money I make and enjoy luxuries like that. I can’t look in the mirror and see people dying on the street that should have the same opportunities that I’ve had. And say “You know what? I can live with myself.” Because I can’t if I just watch.35

Genuflect Offense as Unforgivable Sin Throughout his media interviews, Kaepernick articulated the reasoning behind his protest, clarifying its objectives. These efforts did not stop detractors who insisted that his action was disrespectful to the US flag and, by extension, to the military. The national conversation shifted away from Kaepernick’s initial concern at the intersection of race and police brutality and toward competing interpretations of patriotism. Those who saw Kaepernick’s actions as unpatriotic appealed to the memory of the men and women who had died “for the flag” and in effect for the freedoms and opportunities that Kaepernick enjoyed. Others disagreed with Kaepernick’s method but acknowledged his right to freedom of expression.36 Kaepernick formulated his own actions in terms of patriotism: I don’t understand what’s more American than fighting for liberty and justice for everybody, for the equality this country says it stands for. To me I see it as very patriotic and American to uphold the United States to the standards it says it lives by.37 Even the hashtag activism of #VeteransForKaepernick, created in late August to voice support from active military and veterans, did little to stem vitriolic messages and commentary asserting offense against the flag, nation, and military.38 As the protest spread to other athletes at all levels of sports, so did the discourse about disrespecting the flag. In his op-ed column in the New York Times, David Brooks situated the anthem within the context of US civil religion, as one of the “shared moments of reverence” that strengthens and transmits the nation’s “foun­ dational creed” and “evangelizes patriotism.”39 To dissuade high-school players from participating in such protest, he argued, “If these common rituals are insulted, other people won’t be motivated to right your injustices because they’ll be less likely to feel that you are part of their story.”40 For Brooks, singing the anthem in unison was an act of solidarity, a hedge against “Donald Trump’s ethnic nationalism.”41

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In March 2017, Kaepernick became a free agent and, allegedly, through sources, had indicated a cessation of his protest for the following season. Reportedly, he was seeking to avoid diverting attention from the positive outcomes achieved as a result of his protest, namely, the ongoing work of his foundation, the support of other athletes, and the contribution the protest made to the national conversation on race and equality.42 As of 2021, he remains unsigned by any NFL team, including some who would benefit from the presence of a veteran even as a reserve quarterback. Through his genuflect offense, Kaepernick violated no enforceable rule of the NFL code of conduct or stipulation of the collective bargaining agreement. In a league where owners and fans have forgiven countless abuses in order to secure players who will help them win, alleged flag abuse appears to be the unpardonable sin, possibly with career-ending consequences exceeding those for domestic, sexual, animal, and substance abuses. The question remains: What is the connection between professional sports and the evangelization of patriotism in the US?

Traditioning Patriotism through Baseball In the late nineteenth century, the USA moved from a nation divided by civil war to a neocolonial power, and baseball was part of the construction of a new national identity. From Chicago, sporting goods entrepreneur, team owner, and former ball player Albert Goodwill Spalding attempted to establish baseball as the “American National Game.”43 He created a mythology that remains prevalent in the popular imagination to this day, though its historical accuracy has been discredited.44 He connected the sport’s real and imaginary roots to a Union general in the Civil War and made the military connection key to its promotion. Spalding claimed: While the game did not originate in the Army or Navy, these important departments of our government were the media through which the sport, during the Civil War, was taken out of its local environments—New York and Brooklyn—and started upon its national career. The returning veterans, “when the cruel war” was “over,” disseminated Base Ball throughout the country and then established it as the national game of America.45 As the USA expanded its military and commercial reach globally, at the turn of the twentieth century, so did baseball. Spalding audaciously proclaimed: Ever since its establishment in the hearts of the people … Base Ball has “fol­ lowed the flag.” Base Ball has followed the flag … to Alaska … to the Hawaiian Islands … to the Philippines, to Porto Rico and to Cuba, and wherever a ship floating the Stars and Stripes finds anchorage today, somewhere on a nearby shore the American National Game is in progress.46 With such patriotic grounding, it should come as no surprise that sports, primarily professional baseball, “served as the prime incubator for flag and national anthem

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rituals.”47 By the 1890s, “The Star-Spangled Banner” was associated with baseball’s opening day.48 Its appearance on a regular basis started with the 1918 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs. An article in the New York Times on the Red Sox victory at Comiskey Park during that series began not with the shutout pitched by Babe Ruth but with the reporting of a startling occurrence at the seventh-inning stretch. This extraordinary event, “far different from any incident that has ever occurred in the history of baseball,” was the band striking up of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”49 Players, following the example of teammates in military service, turned to face the flag, the war-weary crowd joined in singing, and the assembly concluded in patriotic gusto with “thunderous applause” that marked the crowd’s most enthusiastic response of the entire game.50 Boston continued the practice when the series moved to Fenway but shifted the anthem to pregame fes­ tivities and brought in “another delegation of wounded soldiers and sailors invalided home … and their entrance on crutches supported by their comrades … evoked louder cheers than anything the athletes did on the diamond.”51 During World War I, organized displays of patriotism at the ballpark were viewed by some as publicity stunts to counter charges that owners and athletes were shirking responsibilities while others went off to war.52 This criticism, and the daily playing of the national anthem, reappeared during World War II.53 This time the US president requested that baseball continue as part of the war effort, though athletes were not spared from the draft. The connections among a nation at war, the anthem, and baseball continued through the Vietnam conflict. After World War II, teams ceased the constant use of the anthem, relegating it to special occasions and opening day. Cubs’ owner Philip Wrigley opined that the “anthem shouldn’t be cheapened by routine ren­ ditions in athletic arenas before a game was started.”54 By 1967, however, even Wrigley returned to the game-day practice in light of the escalation of US military involvement in Vietnam. Teams experimented with other songs like “God Bless America” or “America the Beautiful” because they were easier for fans to sing, but eventually the national anthem became a staple at most professional sports—a ritual particularized by local flourishes. In light of well over a century of traditioning patriotism in ballparks, with a narrowly focused connection to military service and war, is it any wonder that Kaepernick’s protest is repeatedly accused of being antimilitary and therefore anti-American?

¿Dios Bless Whose América? In the days following the tragedy of September 11, 2001, MLB recommended that, upon the resumption of play, teams sing “God Bless America” at the seventhinning stretch, replacing, in some cases, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”55 The seventh inning was proposed because there was concern that the attention span of fans would not sustain the placement of another song immediately after the national anthem: “We don’t need people to stand for six minutes at a time.”56 At the direction of the league, the guidelines for the 2002 season continued the

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practice on opening day, Sundays, the 9/11 anniversary, and certain holidays.57 The New York Yankees were among the few teams that retained the practice on a daily basis at all home games. At Yankee Stadium, this Irving Berlin composition acquired a status equal to the national anthem as fans were, and still are, instructed to rise and remove their caps. In March 2003, following the US invasion of Iraq, an MLB directive ordered the playing “God Bless America” in the seventh-inning break at all home openers “in tribute to America and those serving in the US Armed Forces.”58 This ritual practiced across teams suggests the power of an MLB policy that includes specific instructions for visiting players to “assume their fielding positions” and directs that “all other field personnel should be on the field with caps removed.”59 In 2005, however, a reporter noted that MLB “does not have any firm rules regarding players’ presence for ‘God Bless America’ and a spokesman for the league said there weren’t any firm rules requiring each player to stand for the pregame anthem.”60

Anatomy of a Protest In 2004, Puerto Rican ball player Carlos Delgado of the Toronto Blue Jays pro­ tested Operation Iraqi Freedom by refusing to stand during seventh-inning rendi­ tions of “God Bless America”; he typically remained in the dugout. His personal protest became public knowledge halfway through the season, when Delgado freely shared his stance in an interview with the Toronto Star published a day before the US Independence Day.61 As with Kaepernick, his reveal was unexpected. Years earlier, reporter Geoff Baker had covered Delgado’s activism regarding the use of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques as a live-fire testing range. Baker recalled that in 2004, the US was fighting in Iraq, having used munitions in their “Shock and Awe” campaign that had been tested in Vieques. I suspected Delgado would have feelings about this. He knew I was going to visit Vieques and talk to the activists he’d been tied to. But when I interviewed him, a couple of days before flying to Vieques, I wasn’t prepared for what he told me. He didn’t hold back.62 At the time, Delgado’s Blue Jays were visiting Puerto Rico to play the Montreal Expos.63 The article framed Delgado’s action and antiwar sentiment within the larger context of his activism, which centered on the liberation and the ongoing development of Vieques. Expropriated by the US Navy before World War II, Vieques was for six decades used as a munitions depot and site for live training exercises and bombardments. During a training mission in 1999, a civilian employee was killed when a half ton of ordnance was dropped too close to his security post. The incident galvanized years of protest and anger into a larger movement that eventually resulted in the cessation of military activity in May 2003 and a return of the island to civilian use.

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Among the first professional athletes to argue for the restoration of the island, Delgado affirmed his ongoing commitment to the cause by placing his celebrity status and finances in support of activists as well as of local youth and educational programs. He noted: If someone was using your backyard as a practice range, dropping bombs, how would you feel … Vieques has no economy and the highest cancer rate in Puerto Rico. It is wrong. In the States, people think it’s not a big deal … you’re bombing a small island. I will be vocal about that.64 In 2004, the promised clean-up by the Navy was slow and therefore insufficient to address the toll of accumulated damage. As Delgado explained, “You’re deal­ ing with health, with poverty, with the roots of an entire community, both economically and environmentally.”65 The ongoing frustration over Vieques coupled with Delgado’s opposition to US military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq found expression in his demonstration against the imposition of “God Bless America” league-wide on select occasions, and, by some teams such as the New York Yankees, on a daily basis. In 2005, as a free agent, Delgado indicated that if the teams courting him had a policy that forced his participation in the seventhinning tribute, he would comply.66 He signed with the Florida Marlins, which had no such policy. But, a year later, he signed with the New York Mets, whose ownership insisted upon compliance, and he did not wish the protest to be a distraction.67 A few years later, Delgado clarified that he was no longer repre­ senting a minority position through his protest against the war in Iraq. “People got the point. The most important thing is that a lot of people kind of realized that I was right.”68

Bless Who? As a native-born and resident Puerto Rican playing with the Canada-based Tor­ onto Blue Jays, Delgado had a broader perspective than many on what constitutes “America.” From his viewpoint, “God Bless America” and its performative context at ball games, with explicit references to deployed US military forces, was more accurately translated as, “Dios bendiga a Estados Unidos.” While he claimed to have no problems with President Bush or the people of the USA, he subtly alluded to the colonized status of the island of Puerto Rico by informing reporters that he did not even vote in the USA.69 He criticized those in the USA who considered the nation to be “la madre de la democracia.” Yet when Americans were confronted with dissent, he noted, chaos ensued, as summed up by the phrase, “el fanatismo cultural es mucho.”70 He called for respect for his stance, noting that his protest had been respectful. After all, he was not standing on first base waving an antiwar banner.71 Playing in Canada provided some protection, but Delgado was not immune from particularly virulent fan responses on the Internet, in chatrooms, on sports radio, and in person, especially at Yankee Stadium.72

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Delgado considered the war to be stupid and lacking any justification. We have more people dead now, after the [official] war, than during the war. You’ve been looking for weapons of mass destruction. Where are they at? You’ve been looking for over a year. Can’t find them. I don’t support that.73 Delgado who self-identified as being antiwar and for peace, empathized with those who had lost loved ones to the war on all sides and realized the risk asso­ ciated with his now public stance: “it takes a man to stand up for what he believes … Especially in a society where everything is supposed to be politically correct.”74 Through its ritual use of “God Bless America,” MLB had established that such pacifism was politically incorrect. In the public imagination, Ángel G. FloresRodríguez writes that, “Delgado’s antiwar protest was also an attack against the victims of September 11. To protest ‘God Bless America’ during a baseball game was not antiwar, but anti-American.”75 Delgado didn’t stand because he was opposed to the way that MLB “tied God Bless America and 9/11 to the war in Iraq in baseball. I say God bless America, God bless Miami, God bless Puerto Rico and all countries until there is peace in the world.”76

Employee Number 21 Upon joining the New York Mets for the 2006 season, Delgado ended his protest. He told reporters that he “would follow orders” since the Mets have a policy that players should stand for “God Bless America.”77 Curiously, a year earlier, a New York sportswriter noted that the Mets “do not have such a policy and several players frequently missed the playing of the song last season because they ran into the clubhouse for one reason or another—like changing into a fresh jersey.”78 Ambiguity remained because no one in the Mets organization claimed responsi­ bility for the unwritten policy.79 Delgado self-identified himself in terms of his new uniform: “Just call me Employee Number 21”;80 the number he had been longing for years to wear again—the sacred number of his hero Roberto Clemente.81 He knew the significance of the number. “You say No. 21, people, they kind of put two and two together and they know that this is a great player, and he was a better human being.”82 Delgado’s juxtaposition of Clemente and “following orders” was paradoxical. During Clemente’s career, the stellar Puerto Rican ball player had a reputation as a vocal advocate who agitated for racial and social justice, especially for Black and Latino players within baseball. Clemente died on a mission of mercy to earth­ quake-stricken Nicaragua on New Year’s Eve 1972, three months after reaching the 3,000-hit career milestone. Shortly after his death, Clemente was quickly voted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the first Latin American inducted in the history of the sport. In 2006, Delgado received the Roberto Clemente Award, given annually by MLB to a “player who combines outstanding play on the field with devoted work

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in the community.”83 In the award citation and press releases, Delgado’s many chari­ table and community-oriented works, particularly with youth, were recognized, yet no mention was made of his social activism or pacifism with regards to Vieques or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.84 In a certain sense, his resistance had been domesticated with an award that had itself, to a certain degree, domesticated his hero Clemente posthumously by focusing on charitable works instead of activism. In 2015, his first year of eligibility on the ballot for the Hall of Fame, Delgado fell beneath the 5 percent minimum of votes required to remain on the list for future consideration, which effectively shut him out of the Hall.85 Some attributed this exclusion to a career spent primarily with a small market team in Canada; others compared his career statistics and accomplishments in relation to other players and found them lacking or even collateral damage of an era tainted by the use of performance-enhancing drugs.86 A few alluded to Delgado’s political stances, suggesting that “conscience and good numbers won’t get you much closer to Cooperstown than good numbers alone will.”87 In Puerto Rico, the Senate introduced and passed resolutions expressing their outrage at the vote by the Association of Baseball Writers of America that in effect disqualified Delgado from the Hall of Fame.88 Describing Delgado as “un hombre de principios, consistente con sus ideales, humanitario, promotor de la paz y del bien social,” they explicitly referenced his protests against the use of Vieques for naval bombardment and against the singing of “God Bless America” in connection with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.89 These actions were recognized as bearing witness to his commitments to peace.90 On behalf of the commonwealth and the people of Puerto Rico, the resolutions offered support to and solidarity with Delgado. They acknowledged that an injustice had been committed in the vote of the Baseball Writers Association of America and expressed gratitude for his contributions in both sporting and civic spheres of life.91 Delgado acknowledged his disappointment and observed that it is impossible to say if the protest impacted the results—“es bien difícil de probar.”92

Theologizing Nation Evangelization with Bats and Balls: Theological Claims In a 2016 interview, Kaepernick denied that there were religious overtones to his taking a knee.93 Implicit in the question was a reference to “Tebowing,” the neologism created to describe the conspicuous display of religious faith adopted by college and NFL quarterback Tim Tebow. For Tebow, former Heisman Trophy winner, NFL quarterback, and minor league baseball player with the New York Mets, the practice of taking a knee, whether in victory or loss, “turned the atten­ tion off of me and pointed toward God.”94 From late 2016 on, Tebow’s response to Kaepernick was both guarded and ambiguous: “When people have belief in something … or conviction in something, trying to stand for that is a good thing, and it’s all about standing for it the right way.”95

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Missed in most of the commentaries surrounding the protest actions of Kae­ pernick and Delgado are the theological assumptions embedded in the practices of singing both the national anthem and “God Bless America” in public communal settings as part of professional sports. Both songs are theistic hymns with verses that assume the existence of God. This is ironic within a nation that prides itself on the separation of church and state, an ever nebulous and contentious distinction. Yet while the sacred dimension is easier to identify in “God Bless America,” it is less obvious in “The Star-Spangled Banner.” From the perspective of Irving Berlin, the composer and performer of “God Bless America,” the song was a hymn, a prayer for peace in troubling times as introduced in the opening verse: “While the storm clouds gather far across the sea / Let us swear allegiance to a land that’s free / Let us all be grateful for a land so fair / As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer.”96 The use of the “hymn” by MLB in the context of 9/11 functioned and was perceived as prayer. In Yankee Stadium, the ritual playing of the hymn was explicitly connected to an act of prayer when fans were instructed at home games to rise for “God Bless America,” remove their caps, and were asked to, “Please stand for a moment of silent prayer for men and women serving our country at home and around the world.”97 Until a lawsuit ended the practice at Yankee Stadium, police, security, and ushers restricted fan motion during the silent prayer and hymn. The federal suit, filed in 2009 by a fan who was prevented from going to the restroom during “God Bless America,” requested relief from the court that resulted in the NYPD and the Yankees from enforcing any policy that “compels spectators to parti­ cipate in religious or political activities while attending games.”98 The complaint affirmed that the seventh-inning ritual was experienced as religious by the fan: “Though he respects the religious activities of others, Mr. Campeau-Laurion does not participate in religious services and objects to being required to do so.”99 Religious connotations are evident at the league level as well. In a com­ memorative video produced by MLB on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, “God Bless America” plays as images of players and teams are portrayed in reverent postures, some with hands or caps over their hearts. One of the early moments in the video captures Robinson Cano of the New York Yankees making the sign of the cross.100 The practice of playing “God Bless America” every Sunday conveys a sense of the sacred, especially when coupled with a call for a posture reserved for public prayer on this day for Christians, but not ordinarily for a pop tune born in Tin Pan Alley. Through what can appear to be compulsory prayer, are our ballparks parti­ cipating in acts of outing and othering, acts that visually and aurally establish who is patriotic and who is not? Are critical questions discouraged by patriotic peer pressure? Are fans and players being proselytized by baseball to “follow the flag” idolatrously every Sunday by order of MLB?101 Both hymns and their performances elicit further questions: What are we praying for, and how do these prayers and rituals interpret the divine? What are the salvific implications of non-innocent evangelizations with bats and balls? Do moments of resistance constitute alternate sites of liberation?

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In Praise of a Warrior God The Francis Scott Key poem “The Defence of Fort McHenry” put to the melody of a British drinking song and now known as “The Star-Spangled Banner,” has four verses, though typically only one is sung. The invocation of the divine in the forgotten fourth verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner” situates the USA as “the heav’n-rescued land,” that, having been “blest with vict’ry and peace,” must in turn “Praise the Pow’r that hath made and preserv’d us a nation!”102 The anthem urges the nation on: “Then conquer we must, when our cause is just, And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust’.” Is professional sport making a theological claim in the traditioning of the anthem through a narrow understanding of patriotism? Through coerced public rituals, is MLB and the NFL imaging God as a martial deity and grounding US exceptionalism in a divine mandate of conquest? Berlin’s “God Bless America” was composed in the midst of World War I but not released until 1938, as Europe moved to the verge of war again. It has a complicated history of use and interpretation. The popularized recorded version of the song, most often used at ballparks, was the performance by vocalist Kate Smith.103 Berlin saw “God Bless America” not as “a patriotic song, but rather an expression of gratitude for what this country has done for its citizens, of what home really means.”104 Initially intended by both Berlin and Smith as a peace song, the connections of “God Bless America” with wartime yielded performative interpretations that reshaped it into a martial hymn whose lyrics sustained US exceptionalism while urging inter­ vention.105 This pattern of usage returned after September 11, 2001. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the song became a prayer of mourning and an expression of unity born of tragedy. A mournful wail beseeching a God of comfort to stand by a stunned nation mutated quickly into a hymn to an avenging deity in support of the war on terrorism. Ten years later, as news that Osama bin Laden had been killed reached a game in progress, Mets manager Terry Collins proclaimed, “You almost want to just stop the game and have that girl come and sing another beautiful ren­ dition of ‘God Bless America’.”106 A god that sustains a consistent foreign policy of aggression is affirmed daily in rituals feting veterans and active-duty military across MLB. Fans in Yankee Sta­ dium and at home, via the YES network, are traditioned in patriotism through ritual exposure to a litany of US wars. For every one of their eighty-one home games, the Yankees honor a veteran prior to the seventh-inning hymn, identifying each by branch of service and military operation.107 In Detroit, at select Tigers’ home games, military currently serving a tour of duty or recently returned from deployment deliver the game ball to the pitcher’s mound.108 In Minnesota, veter­ ans or active-duty military receive recognition at all home games “for their accomplishments and sacrifices” through the opportunity “to raise the American Flag to the top of the flagpole during the singing of the National Anthem.”109 The Los Angeles Dodgers and the Houston Astros salute military heroes at every home game. The expectation in Los Angeles is that the military honorees will be in uniform,110 and in Houston that they will be greeted by “a crowd ready to show

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its appreciation with a standing ovation.”111 In San Diego, the Padres wear a military-inspired camouflage uniform on special days and every Sunday—a tradi­ tion begun the year before the events of 9/11. The Padres, whose name and earliest logo recalled the Franciscan friars who founded the California missions, as of 1995 consider themselves “the Team for the Military,” an identity embraced with mis­ sionary zeal.112 In this sampling are initiatives that exceed the already excessive patriotic and military oriented programs and tributes established by MLB for par­ ticipation by all teams. The accretion of rituals that honor military service anoint the profession most directly tied to war and conquest. The protests by Kaepernick and Delgado played out as resistance in these hypermilitarized contexts. However, only Delgado’s protest directly challenged the theological assumptions of the warrior God. In 2001, Delgado participated in an open letter to President George W. Bush that was signed and paid for by eleven prominent Puerto Rican performers and athletes. Urging cessation of the bombing of Vieques, the letter, mindful of the sacrifices Puerto Ricans had made in military service, called the ongoing assault on the health of the people of Vieques too much. They hoped that a shared “history of mutual respect and cooperation” between the USA and Puerto Rico “with the help of God, will continue to be the guiding light in this quest for peace and justice.”113 In his 2004 protest, Delgado reframed the blessing of God in service to peace for all: “¿Por qué ‘God Bless America’? Sí, que ‘God Bless America’ (Dios bendiga a Estados Unidos), pero que también lo haga con Puerto Rico, Canadá, África, Sudamérica, con todos los países.”114 The redirection of the hymn from a 9/11 memorial, initially intended for a primarily civilian workforce, to an endorsement of a war that made no sense was contrary to Delgado’s hope for God to bless “all countries until there is peace in the world.”115 Delgado’s pacifism was also rooted in his family. His father, a selfavowed socialist and pro-independence Puerto Rican, was jailed “for his beliefs during the Vietnam War, protesting what he calls the US occupation of Puerto Rico and demonstrating on behalf of friends who were conscripted to serve in the US military.”116 Through his refusal to participate in the seventh-inning ritual, Delgado symbolically raised the question of whether the God invoked to bless the USA was the same one who blessed the peacetime bombing of his colonized people in order to practice for war.

“Conquer We Must, When Our Cause Is Just” In the late nineteenth century, baseball, too, became entwined in the moves to national exceptionalism and imperial power fueled by an eschatological vision that perceived expansion as a civilizing mission ordained by divine providence. In an 1899 speech justifying US repossession of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, President McKinley proclaimed that these lands “have come to us in the provi­ dence of God, and we must carry the burden … in the interest of civilization, humanity, and liberty.”117 Through baseball there was a traditioning into indivi­ dualism, the Protestant work ethic, and US-style racism. Those brought under the

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flag, from Guam to the Philippines, to Hawai‘i and Puerto Rico, were lands con­ sidered “backward,” with peoples designated as too “dark” or too mixed for US citi­ zenship and too heathen or too Catholic to be Christian. In these so-called exotic places, baseball was instrumental in controlling the population and acculturating it into a civilized Christian way of life culminating in the “American Dream.”118 Color of skin, nation of origin, language, religion, and ethnicity, however, limited access to promised freedoms and impaired the quality of one’s belonging. In the ambitious process of global Americanization, the baseball diamond brought the illusion of an egalitarianism grounded in meritocracy, governed by skill and fair play. Yet for colo­ nial subjects the playing field was never level. Subaltern agency was only made man­ ifest through resistance; sometimes as subtle as teams of colonized others defeating allegedly superior US white players, especially military teams. Carlos Delgado, as a citizen of Puerto Rico, is a colonized citizen of a US pos­ session. Criticisms of his protest against “God Bless America” often revealed ignorance of the status of Puerto Ricans vis-à-vis the USA as this representative Internet comment illustrates: “I may be wrong, but Delgado isn’t an American citizen. I think he’s from Puerto Rico. Don’t you just love these people that come here to take our money and then treat the country with such disrespect?”119 Unlike Kaepernick, Delgado would be hard-pressed to concede that his “freedom to take a seat or take a knee” exists because of military sacrifice.120 Scholars and commentators also demonstrated naivete with respect to Delgado’s actions. The impact of centuries of colonization that exploited the land, people, and resources of Puerto Rico failed to register in their critical assessments of the impact of Delgado’s protest and his decision to cease the protest in 2006. “Timid,” “silent,” “passive,” and “invisible” were some of the adjectives used to describe Delgado’s two-season protest, thus suggesting that it was “incapable of challenging the dominant narrative offered by the game.”121 Overlooked was the lack of attention paid to an athlete marginalized because he played for a Canadian team, spoke Spanish, and made his home in Puerto Rico. His protest only became news when the Blue Jays were about to play the Yankees; unnoticed was the over­ whelming support demonstrated by the major Puerto Rican newspapers, which published “editoriales en apoyo a Delgado, una de las figuras deportivas más respetadas en su isla natal.”122 In Delgado’s capitulation to the Mets policy, scholar Michael Butterworth found in him a representative metaphor for how citizens were expected to behave during the “war on terror.” In short, Americans were allowed to celebrate their rights to freedom of speech and expression; yet they were also expected to exercise those rights privately, thus eroding the legitimacy of and eliminating the need for public deliberation or dissent.123 What Butterworth failed to comprehend was that for Puerto Ricans residing on the island, this was the expectation and daily lived experience that defined the relationship of their territory with the USA. As American citizens, they could not

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vote in a presidential election or send voting representatives to Congress. This muted their dissent and eliminated their agency. From this perspective, God was blessing for the USA and not América. The message communicated to island-residing Puerto Ricans and to international play­ ers constituting over 25 percent of MLB was one of divine exclusion. A majority of the international players hailed from the American hemisphere, and many hailed from nations that had experienced the USA as an imperial power and even as an occupying military force in Latin America and the Caribbean. These ballplayers were essentially seasonal migrant workers, dependent on visas, and often reminded in the workplace of the power of their host.

Salvation and Sacrifice At the turn of the twentieth century, baseball was a component of a larger “civi­ lizing” project that functioned to refashion the colonized other into an American­ ized Christian image. Yet without the power, privilege, access, and even citizenship integral to such an image. The rhetoric of the white man’s burden fueled expan­ sion in the name of Manifest Destiny. Implicit in these burdens and guiding visions was a soteriological claim, which was a perversion of the patristic tenet “what is not assumed is not saved.” The burden fell not on the savior but on the colonized other to assume alien ways of being, imposed through the instruments of con­ quest—in other words, capitalism, Protestant Christianity, the English language, and baseball. Christopher Evans suggests that baseball “symbolized an American faith that the world could be subjugated by the superior values of the United States,” reinforcing both the conquerors’ uniqueness and “the message that God was on our side.”124 Salvation was brought about through the ministry of military forces, whose sacrifice ensured the liberties enjoyed at home and the promise of an enlightened future for the liberated others. Within such a formative context, colonized others, including Puerto Ricans, “only become visibly legible for a mainstream audience when they can affirm narratives of US exceptionalism as former colonial subjects or when they affirm narratives of US multiculturalism as ethnic Americans.”125 The resistance by Kaepernick and Delgado complicate and challenge these nar­ ratives. By presenting alternative narratives from the complex perspectives of Black Americans and colonized citizens, they push against the story the USA tells about itself, “a story of a reluctant, benevolent, global power and of a progressive, egali­ tarian, democratic society.”126 Kaepernick’s protest also inadvertently draws atten­ tion to the forgotten third verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner” which gleefully proclaims, “No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.” This reference celebrated the destruction of those African Americans who sided with the British in hopes of gaining freedom and a better life.127 The racist roots of the anthem and its slaveholding author raise con­ cerns about unwitting complicity in a seemingly endless cycle of oppression that has disenfranchised people on the basis of race from “the land of the free and the

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home of the brave.” Delgado’s protest was situated within a matrix of resistance by Puerto Ricans, beginning with his own family. Vieques, Afghanistan, Iraq—all were symptoms of a greater exploitation of a colony whose citizens are subject to military conscription, occupation, and economic dependence yet were denied meaningful voice and vote in the affairs of federal government, much less their own national destiny. Mirrored in the words of John Kasich, governor of Ohio and Republican presidential hopeful in 2016, is a persistent national ignorance regard­ ing Puerto Rico vis-à-vis the USA: “Regrettably, Delgado’s position ran somewhat counter to his other claim, that he has no real stake in American affairs, and I think people responded to the hypocrisy.”128 Lost on Kasich was the uneven power dynamic between the center and its marginalized territory of disenfranchised US citizens. Intimately tied to these constructs of salvation are multivalent interpretations and rituals of sacrifice. These patriotic rituals and subsequent performances of resistance epitomized contested notions of sacrifice played out on geographies made sacred by embedded theologies of nationalism.

Thank You for Your Service and Sacrifice Since at least the 1918 World Series, the use of veterans, especially those who were wounded, has equated sacrifice with the military. Honoring them on the field of play in conjunction with a patriotic hymn further reinforced the notion that those who play the game and those who enjoy it as spectators are direct beneficiaries of the sacrifice of those in military service, whether conscripted or voluntary. While several scholars have illuminated these actions as functional endorsements of US foreign policy, the intrinsic connection of the sacrificial to religious ritual suggests theologically significant underpinnings as well. For example, after the lawsuit, Yankee Stadium continued the practice of singing “God Bless America.” However, it shifted the content of the announcement. Fans are still directed to stand and remove their caps, but now the object of reverence is a veteran, and the veteran’s family conveniently located on the field. Following the introduction, which includes the veteran’s branch of service, theater of military operation, and appre­ ciation for their service and sacrifice, all are asked to join in the singing of the hymn.129 On the one hand, it appears as if the religious dimension of the songturned-hymn has been minimized or even removed, per the relief provided by the court. Closer examination reveals a far more subtle dynamic. It becomes increas­ ingly problematic for the assembled to resist the request to sing given the focus on a veteran framed in the context of their sacrifice, situated in the midst of their family. Any resistance is measured against possible peer-initiated consequences for an action perceived as disrespect for the individual celebrated on the field, espe­ cially a wounded veteran. The worship shifts from the warrior God to the one who bears the image of that God in the accomplishment of military duty, and the hymn becomes a responsorial psalm commemorating the sacrifice that keeps “home sweet home” free.

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Sacrifice, by order of the league and in some ballparks more than others, is narrowly confined to military sacrifice. This singling out of one profession is chal­ lenged by small acts of resistance that occur in other stadiums, thus expanding the parameters of honorable service and sacrifice. The Baltimore Orioles celebrate “Birdland Americana Weekends” at Camden Yards by singing a different patriotic song in the seventh inning: “This Land Is Your Land” on Fridays, “America the Beautiful” on Saturdays, and, in accordance with MLB policy, “God Bless Amer­ ica” on Sundays.130 The choice of “This Land Is Your Land” reflects a historic note of sonic resistance to “God Bless America.” In 1940, Woody Guthrie penned “This Land” as a “Marxist response” to the ubiquitous Berlin song in opposition to “another one of those songs that told people not to worry, that God was in the driver’s seat.”131 This progressivist streak, as evident in the song’s lesser-known protest verses,132 apparently resonated with John Angelos, chief operating officer of the Orioles and son of the team owner.133 In the seventh inning, at Camden Yards, Angelos said in a 2016 interview, the Orioles recognize the heroism of members of our extended Orioles community from all walks of life, occupations, and diverse backgrounds living in our region, our country, and abroad, who have distinguished themselves by selflessly working or volunteering in fields that care for, serve, teach, protect, and improve the lives of others, around the corner or around the globe, who are most in need.134 Angelos noted in the same interview, “We can honor a veteran, but we can also honor a veteran who is against a particular war.”135 In California, the Los Angeles Angels celebrate monthly a Halo Hero, explaining that Heroes come in many forms, and the Angels are excited to honor local indi­ viduals who have demonstrated a commitment to serving youth, performing acts of selflessness, and exhibiting exceptional character. All stories will be welcomed; no act of heroism is too big or too small.136 The Tampa Bay Rays designate teachers, along with first responders and the military, as eligible for complimentary tickets for select games throughout the season.137

Salvation through the Sacrifice of the Victimized Even resistance is evaluated in terms of sacrifice. Detractors, especially on social media, criticized both Kaepernick and Delgado, inferring that the privilege affor­ ded them by their salaries negated their freedom of political expression and implied that the players knew little of sacrifice in comparison to those in the military. Among the more high-profile responses from politicians, Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate, shouted at Kaepernick on Facebook:138 “Enjoying your $114 million contract … sucking up a life of luxury … GOD AND COUNTRY GAVE YOU THIS OPPORTUNITY … Then on

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behalf of every Vet I’m privileged to know: GET THE HELL OUT.”139 John Kasich, reflecting on Delgado as an example of “churlish behavior” by overpaid athletes, identified him as someone “I want to run out of town.”140 Among those more sympathetic to the athletes, political sportswriter Dave Zirin and Jeremy Schaap of ESPN intimated that the level of sacrifice has an impact on broader perception of the protest.141 From this perspective, Kaepernick would be seen as sacrificing more, especially because he remains unsigned, and Delgado less because, as Schaap claimed: “He didn’t lose millions of dollars and wasn’t banished from his sport.”142 Schaap and Zirin did not foresee the loss of endorsements and the possible impact on Delgado’s election into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Zirin asserted that Delgado “caved” and “allowed himself to be silenced.”143 He hyperbolized that “Delgado could have been an important voice in the effort to end it once and for all.”144 With these assessments, Zirin simultaneously blamed the colonized victim and overestimated a single Puerto Rican ballplayer’s influence in shaping US foreign and domestic policies. Delgado was not joined in his protest as was the case when others joined with Kaepernick. During the last weeks of their 2016 season, baseball players were not among the athletes who took a knee in soli­ darity, even though there appeared to be no MLB rules dictating proper pos­ ture through the national anthem. The Orioles’ Adam Jones and the Yankees’ CC Sabathia pointed to the low percentage of African Americans in their sport, barely 8 percent, as a factor inhibiting protest in what Jones contended is “a white man’s sport.”145 While Sabathia would not participate because his brother-in-law had served in Iraq, he admitted Kaepernick’s response was “a good, non-violent way to try to get some change.”146 Delgado’s failure to make the Hall of Fame ballot in 2015 was not mentioned as a possible deter­ rent signaling the potential of long-term consequences. In his commentary on the suspension of the protest, Zirin implied that Delgado had somehow betrayed “those of us who amplified his views and used his stance to speak not only about the war but also the plight of Vieques; his silence is bursting our eardrums.”147 Zirin lamented, “Delgado could have been our Clemente. Instead, to use his own words, he is just Employee Number 21.”148 To whom exactly is Zirin referring by “our”? Imperial citizens with white privilege? While Roberto Clemente certainly took on baseball’s racist practices, he also served as a US Marine Corps reservist from 1958 to 1964149 and took no public stance on issues of resistance during the Vietnam War, a military conflict that marked his career and sacrificed the lives of many a Puerto Rican. Zirin missed the pushback in Delgado’s reference to “employee number 21.” Delgado may have terminated this means of protest, but his commitments to Puerto Rico remained strong, as did those of his idol Clemente. Delgado identified himself as “un puertorriqueño de ‘clavo pasao’,” an idiom affirming his Puerto Ricanness as an ingrained part of his identity.150 This was the larger movement to which Delgado, like Clemente, was long committed—alleviating suffering at home and contributing to the present and future of Puerto Rico.

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Liturgy Interrupted For well over a century, professional baseball, with its quotidian rhythms, helped to cultivate particular ritual expressions of nationalism. The NFL reinforced the ties between patriotism and sport and added a level of spectacle through memorable Super Bowl performances. In the twenty-first century, the tragedy of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent global war on terrorism resulted in further accretions to rituals that, once codified, function as liturgical moments. In the simplest of terms, liturgy is what happens when ritual is prescribed, and, in the case of the NFL and MLB, made official and traditioned through a century of practices and policies. In his brief exploration of liturgies of church and state, William Cava­ naugh noted that, “We are accustomed to speaking of an American ‘civil religion,’ but less accustomed to speaking of a national ‘liturgy’.”151 These moments of sanctioned ritual at ballparks compel participation from players and fans with var­ ious means of structuring compliance. Through hyper-militarized ceremonies, with specific instructions for embodied responses, professional sport narrates a particular story of national belonging with a soteriology grounded in military sacrifice that demands constant affirmation. This is consistent with Cavanaugh’s observation, Here liturgical gesture is central, because gesture allows the flag to be treated as a sacred object, while language denies that such is the case. Everyone acknowledges verbally that the nation or the flag are not really gods, but the crucial test is what people do with their bodies, both in liturgy and in war.152 The national anthem focuses on the flag, which increasingly is so large that it appears to consume the field of play, reinforcing the notion that the game and livelihood of the athletes are dependent on the martial sacrifice it represents. “God Bless America,” particularly when connected to the feting of veterans and active military, uncritically raises up and ordains one profession in the image of the agonistic God and, at times, extends that privilege to other uniformed personnel, especially police. Through the examples of Kaepernick and Delgado, I hope to have demonstrated that Cavanaugh does not go far enough. A crucial test is evident as well in what people do with their bodies in resistance, in responding not with assent but with embodied dissent.

Conclusion Both Kaepernick and Delgado disrupted national liturgies. Kaepernick interrupted the status quo by introducing an alternate embodied response that gained traction and spread within and beyond the NFL. His message, calling the nation to accountability, primarily on matters of racial justice, was hijacked by detractors, and even by some supporters, who reframed it and then responded to their own reformulation. The reaction to the protest by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell exemplified this reinterpretation. Goodell acknowledged support for players seek­ ing change in society. “On the other hand,” he added,

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we believe very strongly in patriotism in the NFL. I personally believe very strongly in that. I think it’s important to have respect for our country, for our flag, for the people who make our country better; for law enforcement, and for our military who are out fighting for our freedoms and our ideals.153 Kaepernick was not the first or only professional athlete to publicly align with the Black Lives Matter movement.154 He probably could have professionally survived his protest had he chosen another form of resistance, one that did not focus on the national anthem. He accepted the underlying theological significance of the flag as symbol of military sacrifice, and his action sought to refocus attention on that sacred symbol in order to redress broken promises. His disruption challenged the prevailing assumption that the anthem provided a liturgy of national unity and that all had equal rights protected under the law. It also threatened the long-standing profitability of performed patriotism, cultivated for over half a century by the NFL, and that made him expendable as a lesson to others.155 Delgado disrupted a national liturgy by choosing to absent himself. As a citizen from the margin of empire, he was considered alien yet bound by imposed obli­ gations. The colonized subject, from whom gratitude was expected, instead spoke back through his activism in Paz para Vieques and by exercising his pacifism through his intentional and visible absence. His refusal to participate in the blessing of a war fraught with ambiguity and sustained on dubious grounds, needs to be situated in the context of another questionable US aggression. In 1898, the Spanish-American war brought Puerto Rico not the liberation for which it hoped but instead another colonial overlord. Failure to grasp the broader historical context of Delgado’s resistance makes it easier to dismiss his protest as isolated and with little impact, a move that ignores the hemispheric reality of América. Baseball’s patriotism was also dictated by the demands of the market and the commercial interests of team owners. Displays of patriotism were part of a business plan to ensure the sport’s survival through times of war when national priorities conflicted with investments and profits. The global outreach of baseball was made possible by war, initially the Spanish-American War of 1898 that secured the sport in lands brought under the imperial banner of the Stars and Stripes. In part, baseball spread because of the presence of military and commercial occupation. Today, MLB profits from its merchandising of military-inspired gear, conflating acts of patriotic appreciation with revenue opportunities. Delgado’s resistance strikes at the heart of theologies deployed in service to conquest. The actions of Kaepernick and Delgado have been measured against the icons of resistance and sacrifice in professional sports, namely, Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente. Yet neither of these latter athletes used the field of play as a space to take what could be perceived as a blatant political stand. They fought in uniform to tackle injustices within their profession and out of uniform to address the greater societal problems of their times. Kaepernick and Delgado enacted their resistance at their respective workplaces in uniform and on the field, pointing outward to address issues of social and national import. Whether intentionally or not, each

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exposed the complicity of professional sports in less than liberative behavior. By choosing to perform acts of resistance at moments of national liturgical sig­ nificance permeated with theological assumptions, Delgado and Kaepernick faced criticism that their protests were not expressed in “the right way” or in a “respectful” manner. As one observer tweeted in the midst of Kaepernick’s protest, “The liturgies of nationalism and its cathedrals [stadiums] tolerate no heretics.”156 The expectation that Black, brown, and colonized bodies must sacrifice to pay for prophetic stances calling a nation to abide by its creed places an unreasonable burden on those most victimized by the objects of their resistance.

Acknowledgments An earlier version of this chapter was first published as: Carmen M. Nanko-Fer­ nández, “¿Dios Bendiga Whose América? Resisting the Ritual Theologizing of Nation,” Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology, 22 (1) (2020): 27, https://repository. usfca.edu/jhlt/vol22/iss1/5. Thanks to my research assistant Alyssa Nanko, an undergraduate at the Savannah College of Art and Design, for checking the hyperlinks. All were accessed on March 25, 2020.

Notes 1 I am intentional in my use of the term “traditioning” throughout this chapter, I build upon the scholarship of Latino theologian Orlando Espín who uses this verb to focus on popular religion, specifically popular Christianity, as processes and processing of cultural transmission in and through daily living. The expression is part of what can best be described as Latin@́ theological vernacular. See Orlando O. Espín, “Tradi­ tioning: Culture, Daily Life and Popular Religion, and Their Impact on Christian Tradition,” in Orlando O. Espín and Gary Macy (eds), Futuring Our Past: Explorations in the Theology of Tradition (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2006), 1–22. 2 See, for example, Joseph L. Price, Rounding the Bases: Baseball and Religion in America (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2006). 3 Carmen M. Nanko-Fernández, “Lo Cotidiano as Locus Theologicus,” in Orlando O. Espín (ed.), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Latino/a Theology (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 15–33. I identify as Hispan@́ or Latin@́ and created @́ , the “at” symbol (el arroba) with an acute accent. I borrow the use of @ as a gender-inclusive suffix, which at the same time I see as destabilizing gender polarities. I add the acute accent to signify the fluidity of language, culture, and identity, and to emphasize the role of location and situatedness in theology done latinamente. 4 See Ron Briley, “‘God Bless America’: An Anthem for American Exceptionalism and Empire,” in Michael L. Butterworth (ed.), Sport and Militarism: Contemporary Global Perspectives (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017), 115–128; Michael L. Butterworth, Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity: The National Pastime and American Identity during the War on Terror (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 2010); and Tricia Jenkins, “The Militarization of American Professional Sports: How the Sports–War Intertext Influences Athletic Ritual and Sports Media,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 37 (3) (2013): 1–16. 5 Mark Sandritter, “A Timeline of Colin Kaepernick’s National Anthem Protest and the Athletes who Joined Him,” SBNation, November 6, 2016.

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6 Colin Kaepernick (@kaepernick7), Twitter, July 6, 2016, 9:19 a.m., https://twitter. com/Kaepernick7/status/750695632009134080 7 Colin Kaepernick (@kaepernick7), Instagram post, www.instagram.com/p/BHhetl8g_EE 8 Colin Kaepernick (@kaepernick7), Instagram post. 9 Colin Kaepernick (@kaepernick7), Twitter, July 7, 2016, 11:11 a.m., https://twitter. com/Kaepernick7/status/751086182814117888 10 Colin Kaepernick (@kaepernick7), Twitter, July 27, 2016, 10:16 p.m., https://twitter. com/Kaepernick7/status/758497849915170816; and Colin Kaepernick (@kae­ pernick7), Instagram post, www.instagram.com/p/BHkQULXAvZu 11 For examples, see Marcus Gilmer, “Colin Kaepernick’s Protest Is the Latest from Athletes in the Era of Black Lives Matter,” Mashable, August 31, 2016; and Jonathan Crowl, “As Athletes Find Their Political Voice, Sports World Flirts with Its Own Revolution,” The PostGame, July 29, 2016. 12 Jennifer Lee Chan, “The Original Photo of Colin Kaepernick Sitting during the National Anthem and Subsequent Usage,” 2016 stadium visits, Gallery-football, jen­ niferleechan.com website, www.jenniferleechan.com/gallery—-football.html 13 Jennifer Lee Chan (@jenniferleechan), Twitter, August 26, 2017, 9:02 p.m., https:// twitter.com/jenniferleechan/status/769354272735531009 14 “Hard Knocks: About the Show,” HBO, www.hbo.com/hard-knocks/about/index. html 15 See the video clip of Fisher’s instruction to the team at “Brought Back the Los Angeles Rams” Facebook page, August 27, 2016, www.facebook.com/losangelesrams/ videos/10153647947030981; and “Hard Knocks: Episode 2,” August 16, 2016, www. hbo.com/hard-knocks/episodes/los-angeles-rams/2-episode/index.html 16 Jennifer Lee Chan (@jenniferleechan), Twitter, August 27, 2016, 3:10 a.m., https:// twitter.com/jenniferleechan/status/769446898176495616 17 Lee Chan, Twitter, August 27, 2016, 3:10 a.m. 18 Jennifer Lee Chan, “Colin Kaepernick did not stand during the National Anthem,” photo, Niners Nation (blog), SBNation, August 27, 2016, 1:10 a.m., https://tinyurl. com/2p8e38ne 19 Steve Wyche, “Colin Kaepernick Explains Why He Sat During National Anthem,” NFL.com, August 27, 2016, 10:04 a.m., www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap 3000000691077/article/colin-kaepernick-explains-protest-of-national-anthem. In a series of tweets, Wyche, a reporter for NFL.com, broke the story of his postgame interview with Kaepernick, which included questions about Kaepernick’s sitting through the anthem. The first tweet, “I spoke w/ Kaepernick about his refusal to stand for the Anthem. His unforgiving reasoning why coming soon on,” includes a link to NFL.com, the platform for the upcoming story. Steve Wyche (@wyche89), Twitter, August 27, 2016, 8:54 a.m., https://twitter.com/wyche89/status/ 769533470817132545. The next tweet includes a link to the story: Steve Wyche (@wyche89), “Colin Kaepernick Takes a Stand Knowing He Has Himself Immersed in Controversy,” Twitter, August 27, 2016, 9:09 a.m., https://twitter.com/wyche89/ status/769537421394358272. Wyche followed with another tweet linked to the story: Steve Wyche (@wyche89), “Kaepernick told me that he is fully aware that there will be backlash. He is willing to deal with it,” Twitter, August 27, 2016, 9:17 a.m., https:// twitter.com/wyche89/status/769539379551285248 20 Wyche, “Colin Kaepernick Explains.” 21 Chris Biderman, “Transcript: Colin Kaepernick Addresses Sitting during National Anthem,” Niners Wire, USA Today Sports Network, August 28, 2016, http://ninerswire. usatoday.com/2016/08/28/transcript-colin-kaepernick-addresses-sitting-during-national­ anthem; Nick Wagoner, “Transcript of Colin Kaepernick’s Comments after Preseason Finale,” ESPN, September 2, 2016, www.espn.com/blog/san-francisco-49ers/post/_/ id/19126/transcript-of-colin-kaepernicks-comments-after-preseason-finale; and “Colin Kaepernick Post-Game Interview in San Diego, California,” September 1, 2016, https:// youtu.be/lIIWa1Q8M94

¿Dios Bendiga Whose América? 269

22 Wagoner, “Transcript of Colin Kaepernick’s Comments after Preseason Finale.” 23 Biderman, “Transcript: Colin Kaepernick Addresses Sitting”; Nick Wagoner, “Transcript of Colin Kaepernick’s Comments after Preseason Finale.” 24 Wagoner, “Transcript of Colin Kaepernick’s Comments after Preseason Finale.” 25 Biderman, “Transcript: Colin Kaepernick Addresses Sitting.” 26 Wagoner, “Transcript of Colin Kaepernick’s Comments after Preseason Finale.” 27 Biderman, “Transcript: Colin Kaepernick Addresses Sitting.” 28 Biderman, “Transcript: Colin Kaepernick Addresses Sitting.” 29 Wagoner, “Transcript of Colin Kaepernick’s Comments after Preseason Finale.” 30 Wagoner, “Transcript of Colin Kaepernick’s Comments after Preseason Finale.” Kae­ pernick invited Boyer to a conversation after reading his open letter. Nate Boyer, “An Open Letter to Colin Kaepernick, from a Green Beret-turned-long Snapper,” Army Times, August 30, 2016. 31 Wagoner, “Transcript of Colin Kaepernick’s Comments after Preseason Finale.” 32 “The Mission,” kaepernick7.com, official website for Colin Kaepernick, http://kaep ernick7.com/pages/mission 33 “Know Your Rights Camp,” kaepernick7.com, official website for Colin Kaepernick, https://kaepernick7.com/pages/know-your-rights-camp 34 See “Know Your Rights Camp,” http://knowyourrightscamp.com/ and Colin Kae­ pernick (@kaepernick7), Instagram post, First Know Your Rights Camp, www.insta gram.com/p/BMRZfzzDUYf 35 Biderman, “Transcript: Colin Kaepernick Addresses Sitting.” 36 See, for example, Amy Tennery, “Most Americans Disagree with Kaepernick, but Respect His Right to Protest,” Reuters, September 14, 2016; Stanley Kay, “Here Is What Politicians Have Said about Colin Kaepernick’s Protest,” Sports Illustrated, October 4, 2016. 37 Cam Inman, “Colin Kaepernick Postgame Transcript: ‘Having the Opportunity Meant a Lot’,” Mercury News, October 16, 2016. 38 #VeteransForKaepernick, https://twitter.com/hashtag/veteransforkaepernick 39 David Brooks, “The Uses of Patriotism,” New York Times, September 16, 2016. 40 Brooks, “Patriotism.” 41 Brooks, “Patriotism.” 42 Adam Schefter, “Colin Kaepernick to Stand during National Anthem Next Season,” ESPN, March 3, 2017. 43 Albert Goodwill Spalding, America’s National Game: Historic Facts Concerning the Begin­ ning, Evolution, Development and Popularity of Base Ball, with Personal Reminiscences of Its Vicissitudes, Its Victories and Its Votaries (New York: American Sports Pub. Co., 1911), 18. In the course of his career, Spalding was a pitcher (1876–1878), manager (1876– 1877), executive, and part owner of the Chicago White Stockings. In 1888–1889, he took a group of US National League players on a barnstorming tour of the world, visiting Hawai‘i, New Zealand, Australia, Ceylon, Egypt, Italy, France, Great Britain, and several cities in the USA before returning to Chicago. The point of the tour, during which over fifty games were played, was to promote baseball and Spalding’s sporting goods company. For a schedule of games and outcomes, see “Appendix II: Game Results of the Tour,” in Mark Lamster, Spalding’s World Tour: The Epic Adven­ ture that Took Baseball around the Globe—and Made It America’s Game (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), 287–292. 44 Spalding’s creation narrative for baseball was discredited in particular in 1947 by Robert W. Henderson, Ball, Bat and Bishop: The Origin of Ball Games (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2001). 45 Spalding, America’s National Game, 366.

46 Spalding, America’s National Game, 14, 371–375.

47 Marc Ferris, Star-Spangled Banner: The Unlikely Story of America’s National Anthem

(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 77. 48 Ferris, Star-Spangled Banner, 77–78.

270 Carmen M. Nanko-Fernández

49 “Red Sox Beat Cubs in Initial Battle of World’s Series,” New York Times, September 6, 1918, 14. 50 “Red Sox Beat Cubs,” New York Times. 51 “George Whiteman’s Great Catch Is Feature of Windup Struggle,” Indianapolis News, September 12, 1918, 12. 52 Ferris, Star-Spangled Banner, 175. 53 During World War II, the NFL picked up the playing of the national anthem as part of its pregame ceremonies. The practice was institutionalized at the war’s end in 1945 by Commissioner Elmer Layden who declared “The National Anthem should be as much a part of every game as the kick-off. We must not drop it simply because the war is over. We should never forget what it stands for.” Robert W. Petersen, Pigskin: The Early Years of Pro Football (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 146. 54 Ferris, Star-Spangled Banner, 223. 55 Bill Ladson, “After 9/11, ‘God Bless America’ a Mainstay,” MLB News, September 10, 2011. I initially explored baseball, 9/11, and the Carlos Delgado protest in “Ordinary Theologies, Extraordinary Circumstances: Baseball at the Intersections of Faith and Popular Culture,” in Robert Fanuzzi and Michael Wolfe (eds), Recovering 9/11 in New York (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2014), 68–87. Some of the material in the following sections reflects and builds upon my insights from that chapter. 56 Ladson, “After 9/11.” 57 Sheryl Kaskowitz, God Bless America: The Surprising History of an Iconic Song (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 117, 180n5. The author attributes the information to a memorandum from MLB president dated April 15, 2002. 58 “MLB Announces On-field Initiatives to Celebrate Opening Day,” MLB press release, March 28, 2003, http://mlb.mlb.com/news/press_releases/press_release.jsp?ymd= 20030328&content_id=246306&vkey=pr_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb. For a critical discussion of baseball and “God Bless America,” see Kaskowitz, God Bless America, 116–149. 59 Cited in Kaskowitz, God Bless America, 117; see also 180 n. 6. Kaskowitz states in the text that a “slightly revised policy laid out in 2004” remains in place and inserts the instruction in a block quote with endnote 6. The citation references transcripts of MLB memoranda the author received from MLB corporate office in email corre­ spondence. The memorandum cited, however, is dated April 6, 2002, not 2004. The rest of the citation discusses the policy in effect since 2006 for the postseason. Delga­ do’s action beginning in 2004 and not earlier suggests that a 2004 policy may well have been articulated. 60 Sam Borden, “A Man of Principle: Delgado Makes Headlines Speaking His Mind,” New York Daily News, January 23, 2005. 61 Geoff Baker, “Citizen Carlos: Jays’ Delgado Fights for Justice for the People of a Small Puerto Rican Island Vieques Ravaged by Six Decades of US Weapons Testing,” Toronto Star, July 3, 2004, www.puertorico-herald.org/issues/2004/vol8n28/Citi zenCarlos.html. In a 2016 article, Baker wrote, “I had written in 2001 about Delga­ do’s work in Vieques and wanted to know his 2004 feelings about the Navy’s pullout. That’s when he told me about his protest silently waged for over a year.” In “Carlos Delgado’s 2004 Protest a Reminder that We Shouldn’t Rush to Judge Colin Kae­ pernick,” Seattle Times, September 9, 2016. 62 Geoff Baker, “Perspective: Seven Years Later,” Seattle Times, September 11, 2008. 63 For two seasons, 2003 and 2004, Hiram Bithorn Stadium in San Juan served as the Expos’ field for select home stands as the team explored relocation options. The fact that the news broke in a Canadian paper during a Puerto Rican home stand featuring two Canadian teams may explain why Delgado’s action went further unnoticed until the Blue Jays played the Yankees in New York on July 21, 2004. Solange Reyner, “Protesting ‘God Bless America’,” Newsday, July 21, 2004; William Rhoden, “Del­ gado Makes a Stand by Taking a Seat,” New York Times, July 21, 2004; Mark Kreidler,

¿Dios Bendiga Whose América? 271

64 65 66

67 68 69

70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83

84

“Delgado’s Protest No Longer Unnoticed,” ESPN, July 23, 2004; Steve Wilstein, “Patriotism, Protest at Yankee Stadium,” Los Angeles Times, July 25, 2004. Bruce Feldman, “How Cool Is Carlos Delgado?” ESPN Magazine, 4 (14) (2001), www.espn.com/magazine/vol4no14delgado.html Baker, “Citizen Carlos.” “First Baseman, Delgado, Fields Questions Regarding War Protest,” Veterans Today, January 28, 2005. According to Delgado’s agent, David Sloane, “During negotiations with the free agent, teams raised the issue of Delgado’s stance regarding the Iraq war … It wasn’t an obstacle to a deal with any club because Delgado was willing to follow team policy regarding God Bless America.” Ben Shpigel, “Delgado, Check. Next for Mets? Wagner, Check,” New York Times, November 29, 2005. Richard Griffin, “Popularity Will Not Extend to Politics,” Toronto Star, February 24, 2008. “Pide Delgado se respete su libre expresión contra la guerra,” Puerto Rico Herald, July 23, 2004. Delgado was interviewed by Primera Hora, one of the local Puerto Rican papers. Other publications, such as the Puerto Rico Herald, picked up the story and provided some of Delgado’s responses. While Puerto Ricans are US citizens, those living on the island are excluded from voting in national presidential elections. “Pide Delgado.” “Pide Delgado.” Jack O’Connell, “Anti-American Claims Unfair,” Hartford Courant, July 25, 2004. For an example of the types of comments aimed at Delgado, see threads at “To All Baseball Fans: Keep Booing Carlos Delgado!” www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic. php?t=1100429 Rhoden, “Delgado Makes a Stand.” Rhoden, “Delgado Makes a Stand.” Ángel G. Flores-Rodríguez, “Baseball, 9/11, and Dissent: The Carlos Delgado Con­ troversy,” OAH Magazine of History, 25 (3) (July 2011): 55. “First Baseman, Delgado, Fields Questions.” Dave Zirin, Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports (Chicago, Ill: Haymarket Books, 2007), 58. The section on Delgado in the book appeared in an earlier form as Dave Zirin, “The Silencing of Carlos Delgado,” The Nation, December 7, 2005. The Mets brought up this issue when they were considering Delgado for the 2005 season: see Adam Rubin, “Delgado Meets the Mets in PR,” New York Daily News, January 14, 2005. Borden, “A Man of Principle.” Ian O’Connor, “Keeping Score,” US Today, November 28, 2005. O’Connor, “Keeping Score”; Shpigel, “Delgado, Check”; Zirin, “The Silencing.” “‘Con ese número no se juega’,” La Prensa, July 1, 2006; and Anthony McCarron, “Carlos Delgado Will Honor Roberto Clemente at the World Baseball Classic,” New York Daily News, January 16, 2009. Carlos Delgado, acceptance remarks, Roberto Clemente Award 2006, transcript, “World Series: Cardinals v. Tigers,” ASAP Sports, October 24, 2006, www.asapsports. com/show_interview.php?id=39774 “Delgado Named Recipient of the Roberto Clemente Award,” press release, New York Mets, October 24, 2006, http://newyork.mets.mlb.com/news/press_releases/ press_release.jsp?ymd=20061024&content_id=1722353&vkey=pr_nym&fext=.jsp& c_id=nym. See the foundation established by Delgado in 2001, Extra Bases Inc., website, www.extrabases.org/en/index.php “2006 Winner: Carlos Delgado, New York Mets,” Roberto Clemente Award, http://m. mlb.com/awards/history-winners/?award_id=MLBRC&year=2015. This site also contains a link to the official MLB press release.

272 Carmen M. Nanko-Fernández

85 Brendan Kennedy, “Carlos Delgado Shut Out of the Baseball Hall of Fame,” Toronto Star, January 6, 2015. 86 See, for example, Jay Jaffe, “JAWS and the 2015 Hall of Fame Ballot: Carlos Del­ gado,” Sports Illustrated, December 15, 2014; Ian Harrison, “How Carlos Delgado Fell Short of Cooperstown,” Vice, June 12, 2015. 87 Jaffe, “JAWS and the 2015 Hall of Fame Ballot.” 88 Carlos Narváez Rosario, “Senado PR ‘incomodo’ por exclusión de Carlos Delgado para el HOF,” El Motín, February 3, 2015. For the proceedings and debate in the Puerto Rican Senate, see Senado de Puerto Rico Diario de Sesiones Procedimientos y Debates de la Decimoseptima Asamblea Legislativa Quinta Sesion Ordinaria Año 2015, February 2, 2015, www.senado.pr.gov/Sessionsdiary/020215.pdf. The resolu­ tions under consideration were Concurrent Resolution no. 37 with the legislative assembly and no. 1063 from the Senate. 89 Senado de Puerto Rico, 24829.

90 Senado de Puerto Rico, 24831–24832.

91 Senado de Puerto Rico, 24842–24843.

92 Carlos Rosa, “No debe ser usual que en pleno año 2016 exista la segregación,” El

Nuevo Día, September 25, 2016. 93 Wagoner, “Transcript of Colin Kaepernick’s Comments after Preseason Finale.” 94 Tim Tebow, Shaken (Colorado Springs, Colo.: WaterBrook, 2016), 158. 95 Bob Nightengale, “Tim Tebow on Colin Kaepernick: ‘It’s About Standing for It the Right Way’,” USA Today, September 21, 2016. 96 Irving Berlin, “God Bless America,” 1938, www.scoutsongs.com/lyrics/godblessamerica. html. At Yankee Stadium, this little-known opening verse was used frequently in live performances of the hymn by tenor Ronan Tynan. 97 The understanding by fans of “God Bless America” as prayer or as religious is evident in the surveys taken by Kaskowitz on the companion website to God Bless America, available on the Oxford University Press website, http://global.oup.com/us/compa nion.websites/9780199919772/survey. See links for survey respondents’ opinions of the song itself and of the song’s inclusion in baseball games. 98 Campeau-Laurion v. Raymond Kelly, the City of New York, the New York Yankees Part­ nership, et al., “Complaint,” United States District Court, Southern District of New York, April 15, 2009, 15, no. 3, www.nyclu.org/en/cases/campeau-laurion-v-raymond­ kelly-new-york-yankees-partnership-et-al. The links to PDFs of the court filings are at that site. 99 Campeau-Laurion v. Yankees, “Complaint,” 5, no. 19. 100 MLB and the Players Association, “A Message from Major League Baseball and Its Players” [music video], September 10, 2011, http://mediadownloads.mlb.com/mlbam/ 2011/09/10/mlbtv_19057371_1200K.mp4. “Major League Baseball and the Players Association remember September 11, 2001 and present God Bless America in honor of our nation.” The sign of the cross by Robinson Cano occurs from the 20-second mark to the 23-second mark, and again in the background from 1:39 to 1:41. 101 Spalding, America’s National Game, 14. 102 Francis Scott Key, “The Star-Spangled Banner” (1814), www.scoutsongs.com/lyrics/ starspangledbanner.html 103 In April 2019, the Yankees ceased using the Smith rendition because they became aware of other recordings by the singer from the early 1930s that contained racist content. See Anastasia Tsioulcas, “Kate Smith’s ‘God Bless America’ Dropped by Two Major Sports Teams,” National Public Radio, April 22, 2019. 104 S. J. Woolf, “What Makes a Song: A Talk with Irving Berlin,” New York Times, July 28, 1940, 9. 105 Kaskowitz, God Bless America, 33–49. 106 Terry Collins, cited in Todd Zolecki, “Philadelphia Freedom: Game Takes Backseat,” MLB News, May 2, 2011.

¿Dios Bendiga Whose América? 273

107 Unlike other broadcasts, the YES network does not break to commercial for the seventh-inning stretch. 108 “A Salute to Our Heroes,” Detroit Tigers website, http://mlb.mlb.com/det/comm unity/saluteheroes.jsp 109 “Military Support,” Minnesota Twins website, http://mlb.mlb.com/min/comm unity/military-support 110 “Military Hero of the Game,” Los Angeles Dodgers website, https://secure.mlb.com/ la/fan_forum/veteranofthegame_form.jsp 111 “Thank You Military,” Houston Astros website, http://mlb.mlb.com/hou/comm unity/military_appreciation.jsp 112 “Military Outreach,” San Diego Padres website, http://sandiego.padres.mlb.com/ sd/military/outreach.jsp. The Padres were the first team in professional sports to establish to establish a military affairs department in 1995. The team name refers to Junipero Serra and the religious order of Spanish Franciscan friars who founded the mission at San Diego in 1769. From 1969 to 1984, the team logo was a cartoon friar with a bat. In 2010, the Padres introduced a “military logo based on the US military aircraft national identification roundel insignia.” Their camouflage uniforms for Sun­ days, special occasions, and the home opener are based on designs used by the US Marine Corps and the US Navy. 113 Marc Anthony, Benicio del Toro, Ricky Martin, José Feliciano, Roberto Alomar, Carlos Delgado, Juan González, Iván Rodríguez, John Ruiz, Tito Trinidad, and Chichi Rodríguez, “President Bush: We Ask You to Stop the Bombing of Vieques Now,” New York Times, April 26, 2001, A11. 114 “Pide Delgado.” 115 “First Baseman, Delgado, Fields Questions.” 116 Karl Taro Greenfeld, “More than a Big Stick,” Sports Illustrated, February 12, 2007. 117 William McKinley, Speeches and Addresses of William McKinley: From March 1, 1897 to May 30, 1900 (New York: Doubleday & McClure Co., 1900), 317. 118 Baseball as part of the US imperial project is a subject particularly of twenty-first­ century scholarship on the sport. See, for example, Adrian Burgos Jr., Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2007); Robert Elias, The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold US Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad (New York: New Press, 2010); Gerald R. Gems, The Athletic Crusade: Sport and American Cultural Imperialism (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); Rob Ruck, Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Games (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2011); and Thomas W. Zeiler, Ambassadors in Pinstripes: The Spalding World Baseball Tour and the Birth of the American Empire (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). 119 cricket24, comment on Free Republic Forum, January 27, 2005, http://freerepublic. com/focus/f-news/1330245/replies?c=17 120 Wagoner, “Transcript of Colin Kaepernick’s Comments after Preseason Finale.” 121 Briley, “God Bless America,” 126; Butterworth, Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity, 37–38. 122 “Delgado reclama respeto a fanáticos norteamericanos,” Diario Libre, July 24, 2004. 123 Butterworth, Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity, 38. 124 Christopher H. Evans, “Baseball as Civil Religion: The Genesis of an American Creation Story,” in Christopher H. Evans and William R. Herzog II (eds), The Faith of Fifty Million: Baseball, Religion and American Culture (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 30–31. 125 Faye Caronan, Legitimizing Empire: Filipino American and US Puerto Rican Cultural Cri­ tique (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 143. 126 Caronan, Legitimizing Empire, 144. 127 Alan Taylor, “American Blacks in the War of 1812,” in Donald R. Hickey and Connie D. Clark (eds), The Routledge Handbook of the War of 1812 (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016), 193–207. See also Jason Johnson, “Star-Spangled Bigotry: The Hidden Racist History of the National Anthem,” The Root, July 4, 2016.

274 Carmen M. Nanko-Fernández

128 John Kasich, Stand for Something: The Battle for America’s Soul (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2006). 129 For an example, see the video from Yankee Stadium, “‘God Bless America’ in the 7th,” New York Yankees website, April 15, 2017, https://mediadownloads.mlb. com/mlbam/mp4/2017/04/15/1288702683/1492288760745/asset_1800K.mp4 130 “Birdland Community Heroes,” Baltimore Orioles website, http://mlb.mlb.com/bal/ community/birdland-heroes 131 Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life (New York: Delta, 1980), 140–141, 144–145, 454. Guthrie recorded the song in 1944. 132 Woody Guthrie, This Land Is Your Land, http://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/This_Land. htm. See verses 5, 6, and 7. 133 Ben Strauss, “Orioles Deliver a Seventh-Inning Message: This Song Is Their Song,” New York Times, September 30, 2016, D3. 134 “Birdland Community Heroes.” 135 Strauss, “Orioles Deliver.” 136 “Halo Heroes,” Los Angeles Angels website, https://msecurea.mlb.com/ana/bam-forms/ halo-heroes 137 “Salute to Service Monday,” Tampa Bay Rays website, http://m.mlb.com/rays/tickets/ info/tickets-for-teachers 138 In online “netiquette,” upper-case words indicate shouting. 139 Sarah Palin, Facebook post, August 29, 2016, www.facebook.com/sarahpalin/posts/ 10154493287563588 140 Kasich, Stand for Something. Kasich compared Delgado’s actions with the club house rules of manager Ozzie Guillen, namely that players be present for the national anthem. While Kasich explains Guillen’s perspective as a manifestation of respect for the country, he neglects to mention its role as a minimal expectation of timeliness in relation to the start of the game, let alone Guillen’s expletive-laced words. 141 Michael Edison Hayden, “Ali, Smith and Carlos Protests Left Lasting Impressions. Will Kaepernick’s?” ABC News, August 30, 2016. 142 Clark, “Ali, Smith and Carlos.” 143 Zirin, Welcome, 58, 60. 144 Zirin, Welcome, 60. 145 Bob Nightengale, “Adam Jones on MLB’s Lack of Kaepernick Protest: ‘Baseball is a White Man’s Sport’,” USA Today, September 13, 2016. 146 Mark Feinstand, “CC Sabathia Says It’s ‘Tough’ for Black MLB Players to Take a Stand,” New York Daily News, September 14, 2016. 147 Zirin, “The Silencing.” 148 Zirin, “The Silencing.” Italics are mine. 149 As a male US citizen, Clemente was subject to conscription by virtue of the Reserve Forces Act. He fulfilled his obligation by enlisting in the US Marine Corps for six years, serving the first six months on active-duty training. He entered on September 12, 1958 and was honorably discharged on September 11, 1964. He served on active duty during the off-season of 1958–1959, returning to the Pirates in time for spring training. 150 Rosa, “No debe.” The Puerto Rican idiom clavo pasao is not easily translated into English. 151 William T. Cavanaugh, “The Liturgies of Church and State,” Liturgy, 20 (1) (2005): 25. 152 Cavanaugh, “The Liturgies,” 27. 153 “Roger Goodell on Colin Kaepernick: ‘We Believe Very Strongly in Patriotism in the NFL’,” US Today, September 7, 2016. 154 Responses to Black Lives Matter by professional athletes prior to Kaepernick’s resis­ tance included the 2014 “Hands up, don’t shoot” gesture by five NFL players on the St. Louis Rams in support of the Ferguson protests; sustained resistant actions in July 2016 by WNBA [Women’s National Basketball Association] players, individually and collectively.

¿Dios Bendiga Whose América? 275

155 The scandal of “paid patriotism,” disclosed in a report by senators John McCain and Jeff Flake, revealed that the Department of Defense spent millions of tax dollars on marketing contracts with professional sports franchises. According to the report, “these paid tributes included on-field color guard, enlistment and reenlistment ceremonies, performances of the national anthem, full-field flag details, ceremonial first pitches, puck drops,” hometown hero celebrations, surprise welcome home promotions, and recognition of wounded warriors. Sen. John McCain and Sen. Jeff Flake, Tackling Paid Patriotism: A Joint Oversight Report (Washington, DC: 2015), https://archive.org/ stream/TacklingPaidPatriotismOversightReport/Tackling%20Paid%20Patriotism%20 Oversight%20Report_djvu.txt 156 James K. A. Smith, @james_ka_smith, Twitter post, August 30, 2016, https://twitter. com/james_ka_smith/status/770812204933406720. The tweet is attributed to a page no longer available. Smith identifies as a philosophy professor at Calvin College in Michigan.

POSTSCRIPT White Hauntings, Black Hoops: The Ghosts of Kyrie Irving Onaje X. O. Woodbine

At the start of the 2020–2021 NBA season, Kyrie Irving of the Brooklyn Nets walked around the famed parquet basketball court of the Boston Celtics at TD Garden waving burning sage in his hands, orchestrating the smoking plant like a magical wand in order to cleanse the arena. Later in the season, Irving, who iden­ tifies as Black and Lakota, chose to sit out several NBA games, partly for personal reasons. His two-week absence began only a day after violent white supremacists stormed Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on January 6, and he later indicated that systemic racism figured into his decision. “I’d be lying sitting here and saying I don’t feel what’s going on in the world,” Irving said of his absence in a press conference.1 “I just have a huge responsibility, I feel, to continue to serve my community and the underserved, and when I’m out here playing, it’s continuing to leave knowledge with these guys and commit to something … bigger than ourselves.”2 For the casual observer, Irving’s pregame ritual and later decision not to play may have seemed weird or even pretentious for an NBA millionaire. But within the larger context of white supremacy, athletes of color have been transforming themselves into choreographers of the basketball court for decades, playing the game in order to express grief, to generate hope, and to resist the harmful effects of racism in American sports and American society. Take Irving’s sage ritual at the start of the season. Known as smudging, it’s a spiritual technology of the Lakota people of the Great Plains, designed to mark off and protect sacred space from harmful elements. Irving’s late mother was a member of the Standing Rock Sioux, and Irving and his sister were initiated into that community in 2018. By walking around the basketball court, where he played for the Celtics for two seasons ending in 2019, Irving signaled that it’s a threshold, beyond which stereotypical misrepresentations of Black male bodies lose their power and significance. DOI: 10.4324/9781003014621-19

White Hauntings, Black Hoops 277

Black people in the USA often know intuitively that white supremacy is a spiritual worldview for its adherents: one that finds exaltation through Black death, symbolic or otherwise. The Capitol riot on January 6, for instance, happened with the intent to overturn the will of millions of Black voters in a fair election. There were numerous religious dimensions to this act of violence.3 As the insurrectionists fought their way through the people’s house, they also prayed to God and carried with them symbols of the Confederacy, the Third Reich, and Christianity. The insurrection as a performative ritual to placate the divinity of whiteness conjures up memories of other routine forms of violence against Black life—the auction block, lynching, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and police brutality—no doubt symbolized by the crucifixion-style gallows and noose erected outside of the Capitol. “Thank you, heavenly father for this opportunity to stand up for our God-given inalienable rights,” prayed Jack Angeli, the self-proclaimed QAnon shaman, as fellow insurrectionists removed their MAGA hats, bowed their solemn heads, and raised their hands to the Lord throughout the Senate chambers, just minutes after forcing elected officials to run for their lives. “Thank you, heavenly father for giving inspiration needed to these police officers to allow us in this building … Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you, that love Christ.”4 For these insurrectionists, mixing Christian love and white violence to protect the citadel of American democracy did not engender cognitive dissonance because such logic rests on the claim that Blacks are nonhuman and therefore exist outside of the realm of ethics, relegated to what Frantz Fanon referred to as “a zone of non-being.”5 We are now engaged in a difficult conversation about race and racism in the USA. It is increasingly and abundantly clear that negative cultural perceptions of Black bodies are a hazard to the health of the Black community. But what needs more attention are the religious dimensions of this insidious form of cultural violence. What does it mean for Black people to experience racism not simply as form of social control but as repeated acts of spiritual brutality? What is it like to experience the storming of the Capitol not simply with a sense of terror but with a feeling of demonic dread? What does it feel like for Black people to live in a world that presupposes a white God who signifies their ultimate status as chattel property and values the sale, spectacle, and scarring of Black flesh, both on and off the playing field? The negative impact of the degradation of Black bodies as an ultimate concern of white supremacy is only beginning to be understood by researchers. We know, for example, that being Black in an anti-Black world can shorten the caps at the ends of DNA that make for longer life, which may therefore be passed down intergenerationally by our ancestors.6 We are also aware that the continuous trauma of being Black can make finding the appropriate time and space to properly grieve those ancestors psychologically difficult. But what about the spirit? What does white supremacy do to Black souls as well as Black bodies? Does racism, by chance, follow our ancestors to the grave, where a warped sense of being remains, thereby haunting the living? By their very nature, empirical answers elude such questions, which is precisely why Irving’s Lakota ritual to his ancestors through hoops carries so much

278 Onaje X. O. Woodbine

significance. Unlike the decision of Colin Kaepernick and other athletes to kneel during the national anthem, Irving’s smudging ritual was overtly an act of spiritual resistance, a counter-ritual of sorts. By thwarting the hidden harms that swirl around that basketball court, in a league in which Black bodies play not only for themselves but also for a predominantly white ownership, audience, and media, Irving opened up a subversive playing field of meaning and invited his Black and Lakota ancestors in. “It’s just more or less for us to stay connected, and for us to feel great about going to work and feeling safe and provided for from our ancestors,” he explained of his smudging ritual, which he has done before other games.7 Notice the mutual dependency between the living and the dead implied in Irving’s words, grounded as they are within a Lakota alternative to Christian metaphysics. Irving feels safe, but his ancestors are also cared for by his intention to “stay connected” on the hardwood. Here Kyrie defines sacred space markedly different from the white Christians who took siege of the Capitol. He sees the sacred from the bottom up, not as an altar of exclusion, wrested away through a politics of violence and his­ torical erasure but as a place made holy through acts of remembrance, an invitation for past silences to speak, in order to give voice to new and more democratic possibilities in the future. Given the long history of symbolic and physical violence against Black Americans, which stretches back through lynching and slavery, we should not be surprised that ancestors find their way onto the basketball courts of a majority Black league. Less than three years ago, Isaiah Thomas, the guard whom Irving replaced in Boston, sat on the same Boston sidelines mourning his beloved sister’s tragic death in a car accident, with the words “RIP Lil Sis,” “I love you,” and “Chyna” written on his sneakers. He would go on to score 53 points on Chyna’s birthday during the Eastern Conference semifinals. “It’s my sister,” he said after the game. “Happy birthday. She would have been 23 today. Everything I do is for her. And she’s watching over me. So that’s all her.”8 Last year, after a helicopter accident took the life of the Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant, LeBron James spontaneously performed the same dunk on the same hoop as Kobe, saying to a reporter after the game: “Ever see the movie ‘The 6th Man’? Kobe came down, put himself in my body and gave me that dunk on that break.”9 And, recently, a resilient young streetball player at West 4th Street, the hallowed playground basketball court of New York City, shared with me: “For me this place, it would always have a special memory in my head because the day my mom passed away, I had a game here.”10 He continued, “I had to take a deep breath. I had to really cherish the moment, because I think my mother would have wanted me to play the game.” He went on to explain that with only a few seconds remaining, he found himself on the free-throw line, his team down by a single point. He thought, I gotta make these free-throws for my mother. And I sunk the first one to tie the game. I was excited, but you know when you’re in a zone you don’t say

White Hauntings, Black Hoops 279

“what’s-up” to nobody, you don’t give pound [fist bumps] to nobody. You block it all out … So, it was hard for me, but that moment became sacred on this court in West 4th, “The Cage,” because I made the free throw. I wondered what it was like for him to let go of the world outside of the basketball court. “I felt like my body was here,” he said. “But my soul and my mind wasn’t, because I wanted to be with my mother.” Just like the practice of this young streetballer, placing the harsh realities of death and dying in abeyance—blocking it all out—is a central element of Black hoops in America, especially in a nation of white-supremacist hauntings. Black athletes may be overdetermined by their subhuman social status, but they also push beyond it creatively, through basketball as a spiritual practice of reclamation. Far more surprising than Irving’s smudging ceremony is our collective ability as Americans to forget our repeated failures to protect and defend Black lives, our ongoing inability to create spaces to remember the countless young Black boys and girls, men and women who have died too young. Until we reckon with this tragic history through acts of collective mourning, we will continue to misjudge Black athletes such as Kyrie Irving. And our arenas, from Boston to Los Angeles, will remain haunted by the ghosts of our learned ignorance.

Notes 1 Colby Green, “Nets’ Kyrie Irving Addresses Absence: ‘I’d Be Lying Sitting Here and Saying I Don’t Feel What’s Going on in the World’,” January 19, 2021, Yahoo News, https://news.yahoo.com/nets-kyrie-irving-addresses-absence-192413937.html 2 Green, “Nets’ Kyrie Irving Addresses Absence.” 3 The Editors, “Scholars of Religion and Politics Respond to the Capitol Insurrection,” Religion and Politics, January 12, 2021, https://religionandpolitics.org/2021/01/12/scholars­ of-religion-and-politics-respond-to-the-capitol-insurrection 4 Luke Mogelson, “A Reporter’s Video from Inside the Capitol Siege,” New Yorker, Jan­ uary 17, 2021, www.newyorker.com/video/watch/a-reporters-footage-from-inside-the­ capitol-siege 5 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 8. Fanon writes: At the risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man. There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born. Philosopher Lewis Gordon defines Fanon’s use of the phrase “a zone of nonbeing” in reference to the experience of “the black” in an anti-Black world this way: So blacks find themselves, Fanon announces at the outset, not structurally regarded as human beings. They are problematic beings, beings locked in what he calls “a zone of non-being.” What blacks want is not to be problematic beings, to escape from that zone. They want to be human in the face of a structure that denies their humanity. In effect, this “zone” can be read in two ways. It could be limbo, which would place blacks below whites but above creatures whose lots are worse; or it

280 Onaje X. O. Woodbine

could simply mean the point of total absence, the place most far from the light that, in a theistic system, radiates reality, which would be hell. Lewis Gordon, “Through the Zone of Nonbeing: A Reading of Black Skin, White Masks in Celebration of Fanon’s Eightieth Birthday,” The C. L. R. James Journal, 11 (2) (January 2005): 3 6 David H. Chae, Amani M. Nuru-Jeter, Nancy E. Adler, Gene H. Brody, Jue Lin, Eli­ zabeth H. Blackburn, and Elissa S. Epel, “Discrimination, Racial Bias, and Telomere Length in African-American Men,” American Journal of Preventative Medicine, 46 (2) (2014): 103–111. 7 Tim Bontemps, “Kyrie Irving Cleanses Court with Sage Burning, then Helps Nets Beat Celtics in Boston Return,” ESPN, December 19, 2020, www.espn.com/nba/story/_/ id/30550263/kyrie-irving-cleanses-court-helps-nets-beat-celtics-return-boston 8 Andrew Bucholtz, “Isaiah Thomas Scored 53 Points on Sister’s Birthday, Said She’s Watching Over Him,” The Comeback, May 3, 2017, https://thecomeback.com/nba/ isaiah-thomas-scores-53-points-sisters-birthday-says-shes-watching.html 9 Rob Goldberg, “LeBron James Explains Unintended Dunk Tribute to Kobe Bryant, Comparison Video,” Bleacher Report, February 9, 2020, https://bleacherreport.com/ articles/2875487-lebron-james-explains-unintended-dunk-tribute-to-kobe-bryant-compa rison-video 10 I met streetball player and former St. Peters College point guard Nick Leon in the summer of 2019 while doing ethnographic fieldwork on playground basketball in New York City. Nick shared his story of grief and transcendence in hoops while we sat on the basketball court known as The Cage, at West 4th Street. It is with admiration for his indomitable spirit that I share it here. For further background on Nick’s life, see Benja­ min Simon, “The Show: NYC Streetball Legend Nick Leon Stays True to His Roots,” Slam Magazine, September 19, 2019, www.slamonline.com/streetball/nyc-streetball­ nick-leon-interview

INDEX

Abdul-Rauf, Mahmoud 8, 236, 238–240

AFL 2

Alcindor, Lew 17, 21

Ali, Muhammad 13, 23

Alliant Energy Center 162

Amateur Sport 151

American Athletic Union (AAU) 206

American evangelicalism 7, 56, 63

American Indian Movement 224–225

American Islamic communities 7

American Muslim life 82

American National Game 251

American social institutions 242

American sports leagues 242

America’s culture wars 228

Anástasis Center 60

Ancient Greece 37

Anderson, Joel 69

Apocalypto 38

Arbery, Ahmaud 70

Arizona Cardinal fans 127

athlete activists 237

Athletes in Action (AIA) 14–15, 21, 25, 27

Autobiography of Malcolm X, The 239

Awesome Power of the Listening Ear, The 21

Bacon Jr., Perry 56

Bain-Selbo, Eric 128, 137; evaluation of

sport as a diversion 124–125; Game Day

and God 123; Understanding Sport as a

Religious Phenomenon 123

Baker, William 57, 164

Baltimore Ravens football fans 127–128

baseball games 1–2 basketball court 81–82, 85–88 basketball program 237

Bauer, Susan Wise 63

Bauman, Zygmunt 103

Bell, David 43

Belousek, Darrin W. Snyder 60

Big3 league 241

Black, Jason 228

Black athletes 13, 16–20, 23, 243–244, 246; listening and learning approach 20–22; reactionary responses 16–20; revolt of 1960s 16–20 Black Christians in sports ministry 22–25 Black coaches 18–19, 24, 70

Black distance runners 203

Black Gods of the Asphalt 123

Black-led athlete activism, 2010s 29

Black Lives Matter: movement 29, 70, 230,

266; protests 230

Black Muslim athletes 240

Black Muslim movement 239

Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam:

1960–1975 239

Black Muslims in America 239

Black Triathletes Association 212

Blazer, Annie 123; Playing for God 123

Bootwala, Salim 81, 85

“Borneo Cannibal Giants” 223

The Boy Problem 221

Bradley, Bill 26

Braveheart 38

Brees, Drew 125

282 Index

Brigham Young University 18

British Columbia Christian Soccer League

(BCCSL) 105, 108

Brower, Jonathan Jacob 28

Brown, Jim 13, 23

Bryant, Howard 128

Buffalo Bill 222

Bunche, Ralph 23

Burdsey, Daniel 83

Butterworth, Frank 151

Butterworth, Michael 58

Cadavid, Juan 45

California Racial Mascots Act 216

Camp, Walter 149–150 Cardinals’ racial turmoil 17

Carlos, John 13, 20, 27

“Caveman Coffee” 162

celebration penalty 154

Chakrabarty, Dipesh 82

“Change the Mascot” campaign 216

Chicago Tribune 228

Chidester, David 203

Christian and Missionary Alliance 108

Christian Athlete 20–21, 24

Christian athlete movement 14–15, 17, 19,

23, 25–27

Christianity 17, 115, 127; connection

between democracy and 39; relationship

between masculinity, violence, and

40–42; sports and 55, 58

Christianized heroes 40

Christian love 71

Christian manliness 152

Christian masculinity 45

Christian mixed martial arts (CMMA) 7,

35–37, 40–41, 44, 46; white evangelical

masculinity in 36

Christian mode of economic life 117

Christian soccer league 109–110 Christus victor 41

church soccer team 7

Civilization and Savagery 217–221 Civil War 251

Clark, Kei’Trel 69

Colas, Yago 128

college football 7; Foucauldian approach to 138, 147–154 collegiate athletics 123, 138–139, 148–149 competitive athletic activity 3

Conn, Jordan Ritter 62

Connolly, William 58

consumer-oriented companies 164

Contesting Constructed Indian-ness 224

conversion 187–188

convivial practices in ISCC 95–97; see also Islamic Society of Chester County (ISCC) Core 300 40

Cottrell, Robert 204

country club 112–113 Courage to Conquer and Sports Alive! 16

COVID-19 pandemic 84, 121–123, 125,

127, 129; cancelation of major sporting

events 122; relationship between sports

and 122–124

CrossFit Inc. 8, 166, 169; coaches 176;

community 166–168; culture 169;

founder and CEO 177; games 162–163,

168–170, 176, 179; gym 170, 175; level 1

Training Guide 167

CrossFit Journal 166

Cruz, Ted 54

cultural grievance, linkages between sport

and 59

culture war 44–45, 55, 62

Curry, Bill 26

Curry, Jones 26

Curry, Stephen 29

Daugherty, Duffy 17 Davis, Laurel 225

deep community 104; see also soccer; exclusions and excesses of 116–117; soccer field as venue for 113–116 Deford, Frank 4

DeMoss, Nancy Leigh 64

Denver Broncos 25

Dickey, Doug 21

Dietzel, Paul 15, 18–20 disciplinary normalization 138

discursive space 82, 88, 91, 101n43

doctrine of penal substitutionary

atonement 60

Driscoll, Mark 40

D’Souza, Dinesh 54

Du Bois, W. E. B. 37

Dudrah, Rajinder 83

Du Mez, Kristin Kobes 56

Durkheim, Émile 193

Edwards, Harry 13–14, 20, 23, 236

Eliade, Mircea 126–127

Elisha, Omri 115

elite interviews 36–37

“enchantment” 185–187

Erickson, John 27

Eshleman, Ira Lee “Doc” 15

The Eternal Present of Sport 6

“Ethiopian Clowns” 223

European interaction 217

Index 283

Evangelical Christianity 55–58, 62, 108,

113–116; agreements between

evangelicalism and sport 55

evangelical church in British Columbia

7, 103–104, 107–108, 111, 115,

118–119

evangelical economics 117

evangelical masculinity 7

evangelical relations 115

evangelical sports ministries 14, 17, 21–23,

25–26, 28–29

Evans Sr., Louis 15

Exercises: age group Pavilion 162; ring

muscle-ups 162; rope climbs 162

Falwell, Jerry 7

Falwell, Jerry, Jr. 53–55, 57, 61–62, 65, 68;

constructions of forgiveness 55–56

Fanaticism 188–189 Fantasy Sports and Gaming Association 184

Fasching-Varner, Kenneth 241

FedEx 229–230 Fellowship of Christian Athletes 14–16,

25–28, 63; aim of 14; housing assignments

16; institutional and cultural spaces 15;

interracial cooperation 15–16; model of

image-conscious inclusion 15–16; origin 14;

promotional pamphlets 15; reactionary

responses to Black athlete revolt 16–20;

summer camps 16, 18

Fight Club 38

Finley, Stephen C. 238

Floyd, George 6, 70

Football: neoliberal construct 189–192; neoliberal religion 192–195 Forbush, William 221

forgiveness 55–56, 59–61, 68; white

evangelical thinking on 61

Foucault, Michel 137–138; approach to

college football 138, 147–154; on

Christian pastorate 144–147; conception

of power 138–143; Discipline and

Punish147; on governmentality 144; On

the Government of the Living 144; Security,

Territory, Population 144

fracture 104

Frank, Jason “Fearless” David 42

Franklin, Benjamin 223

Freeze, Hugh 7, 61; allegations against 53;

authenticity of 64, 66; languages of

confession and “brokenness” 61–67; as a

sanctimonious character 53

Freeze, Jill 62, 66–67 From Ritual to Record 4

From Season to Season 5

Gaither, Jake 19–20

Gamecock 18

Gautt, Prentice 2, 16–17, 24–26

GhaneaBassiri, Kambiz 82

GI Bill 206

Gilbert, Daniel 191

Giulianotti, Richard 124

Glass, Bill 15, 21

Glassman, Greg 165–166

GOAT (Greatest Of All Time) statement 35

God, Games, and Globalization (Alpert and

Arthur Remillard) 6

God concept 103–104, 107, 109–111, 114

God in the Stadium 5

Goetz, Rebecca 218–219

Good Game 5

Google 189

Graham, Billy 7, 16, 19

Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin

Prognosticator’s League (GOPPPL)

183

Green, Eric 58

Gundy, Mike 70

Haley, Alex 239

Haley, Nikki 54

Hall, Stuart 68

Hamilton, James 220

Hard Knocks 248

Hartsook, Hannah 58

Harvey, Lincoln 115

Hawkins, Billy 69

HBO program 248

Henderson, Chip 67

Henderson, Joe 208

“hereditary heathenism,” 219

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth 40

High-profile Athletes 236–237

HIV-AIDS pandemic of 1980s 122

Holliday, Ruth 43

Homo sapiens 121–122

Hooper, Clint 21

“Human Score” 172–173; test 174

hyper-capitalized sport 5

hyper-commercialization of sport 3

imago dei 20

International Trade Marathon 206

Iron John 43

Islamic Society of Chester County (ISCC)

81–84; convivial practices 95–97;

justification of sports 87; local

surroundings 88–91; members 88; in

nostalgic terms 91–95; prospect of a

basketball court 85–88, 91–92

284 Index

Jackson, Mitchell S. 202

James, Pastor 103, 105–107; description of soccer 110–111; evangelical church 108; on fractured nature of individualism 107; sermon series on Ten Commandments 105–107 James, William 131

Jeffries, Jim 37, 40

Jogging 202

Johnson, Chris 188

Johnson, Rafer 23, 26, 28

Jones, Calvin 25

Jordan, Michael 6, 27, 130

Joy of Sports, The 4

Juschka, Darlene 37

Kaepernick, Colin 70, 249

Kennedy, John F. 1

King, Dewey 20, 25

King, Martin Luther, Jr. 26–27

Krattenmaker, Tom 58

Land, Tayvion 69

Landry, Tom 15

Law of Servants and Slaves 220

League, The 182

Leonard, Kawhi 129–130 Letterman, David 1

Liberty University (LU) 53–55; convocation

54, 61; Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS)

status 57, 59; football program at 56–59,

68–71; online 57; theological/political

approach to forgiveness 56, 60–61

Lincoln, Bruce 203

Lincoln, C. Eric 239

Lipsyte, Robert 208

liquid modernity 103

liturgies 138–139 Lofton, Kathryn 164

Lore of Running, The 208

Louisiana State University (LSU) 18

Lydiard, Arthur 202

Martin, Lori Latrice 8

Marx, Karl 124

Mascot Nation: The Controversy over Native

American Representations in Sports 228

masculine Christian identity 38–40; see also Spartan masculinity Masuzawa, Tomoko 83

McCain, John 40, 54

McCartney, Bill 28

McCaw, Ian 54, 58

McCollough, Brady 54

McCracken, Brett 64

McLendon, John 16

Meyer, Birgit 105

military masculinity 42–44

Miller, Steven 15

MLB rules 264

MMA 8

Moore, Maya 29

Moral Majority 53–54

More, Thomas 38

Morgan, William John 124

Moses, L. G. 222

Mughees, Abdul 85, 93–95

Munich Olympic Games 202

Munn, Clarence “Biggie” 17–20, 25

Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants

and the Development of American Sport

(Tony Ladd and James A. Mathisen) 5

Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in

Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Clifford

Putney) 5

Muslim athlete 5

Muslim attitudes: sports 86–87; toward “freedom” and “modernity” 82–83 Muslim Interscholastic Tournament

(MIST) 81

Muslim participation in sports 82, 98; see also

Islamic Society of Chester County

(ISCC)

Nagasawa, Mako 60

Nasser, David 62, 67

National Black Marathoners Association 212

National Collegiate Athletic Association

(NCAA) 19, 53, 130, 153

National Football League 242

Native American sports mascots 8

Nazi Germany 37

NBA 1–2, 121, 126; players association 240;

policy 240

NCAA: championships 226; reforms 216

Negro American League 223

Negro athletes 24

neoliberal capitalism 3

“neoliberalism” 190

Neoliberal model 194

New York City Marathon 209

New York Mets 1

New York Pioneers Club 206

New York Runner 207

New York Times 208, 250, 252

New York Yankees 1

NFL fandom 190

NFL Redzone 187

NFL reporter 230

NFL’s Super Bowl 127

Index 285

NFL team 191, 251

Nike Corporation 202

Norris, Chuck 40

Northam, Ralph 68

North Shore Alliance 104, 112–113, 116; as a Protestant evangelical church 107; sermon series on Ten Commandments 105–107 nostalgic masculinism 59

Nutt, Houston 53

Odendahl, Teresa 36

Olsen, Jack 17

Olympic Project for Human Rights 13

One America News Network 70, 153

Oneida Indian Nation 216

O’Neill, Kevin Lewis 110

Operation Varsity Blues 2

Otto, Rudolph 130–131

Out of Left Field (Rebecca Alpert) 6

Owens, Jesse 23

Owens, Jim 25

Ownby, Ted 66

Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect,

Sensation (Brian Massumi) 109

Penn, William 223

Pequot War of 1636–1637 218

Pioneer Club 206; members 207

Playing for God 6

Plimpton, George 26

pluralism 83

Popular Science Monthly 221

power: Foucauldian conception of 138–143 Power Rangers 42

Price, Joseph 126

Pro Athletes Outreach (PAO) 15

Putney, Clifford 221

Putz, Paul Emory 7

Qureshi, Bushra 81

racial inclusion among sports ministry 15, 17

racial prejudice 24

racism in American society 13, 16

Rauf, Mahmoud Abdul; see Abdul-Rauf, Mahmoud Reagan, Ronald 54

Reebok 169–170, 175–179; fitness center’s

177; training center 176

Reebok’s “Be More Human” campaign 8

Reed, Ralph 54, 61

Reid, Eric 29

Religion and Sports 123

religion and sport scholarship 4–8; racism 6; relationship 4–7; rise of modern, commercialized sport 4; significance of religiously 5–6 religion as mediation 105

Republican Party agenda 237

retributive justice 61

Rice, Grantland 205

Richardson, Bobby 15

Rickey, Branch 26

Road Runners Club of America 207

Roberto Clemente Award 255

Roberts, Jude 35–38; Christian identity 40–42; genealogy of militant American Christian masculinity 42; mythopoetic masculinity 43; practice of MMA 43–44 Robinson, Jackie 26–27, 205

Romney, Mitt 54

Roosevelt, Theodore 205, 207

Rozelle, Pete 1–2 Runner’s World 202, 208, 212

Russell, Bill 13, 23

Ryan, Joan 129

Saban, Nick 70

sacred space 8

Saddam Hussein’s trial 39

Said, Edward 82

Sandel, Michael 190

San Jose State athletic program 20

Sapp, Gregory: evaluation of sport as a

diversion 124–125; Understanding Sport as

a Religious Phenomenon 123

Sassower, Raphael 84

Saturday Evening Post 207

Savage symbols 216

Schmieg, Joel 58

Scholes, Jeffrey 63, 84

Scott, Charlie 21

Scott, Keyvon 68

Second Baptist Church (Los Angeles) 13

Seven Years’ War 220

Shaw, Aileen 36

Sherman, Richard 182

Simpson, O. J. 27

Skinner, Tom 21, 25, 28

Smith, Dean 25, 27

Smith, John 219

Smith, Tommie 13, 20

Smith, Zachary 7

Snyder, Daniel 216, 227

soccer: affect of soccer field 110–111; Christian-like manner on field 108–109; emotional responses and states of players 110–111; field 112–113; John’s theology

286 Index

of 104, 110, 113–114, 116–117; raw

emotions 110–112; understanding of

heart 111–112; yellow-card rule 109

Social-media platforms 230

Spartan manhood 38

Spartan masculinity 35–36, 42; as Christian

Democratic masculinity 38–40; depictions

of Leonidas and Xerxes 39; myth of

37–38, 44; qua society 38; white

Eurocentric narratives 38

Spartan repertoire 41–42, 45–46 Spartan warrior masculinity 35, 37–39,

43–44, 46

Sport and Religion (Shirl Hoffman) 5

Sportianity 15

sports 1–4; Christianity and 55, 58; as a

distraction 124–125; forgiveness and

59–60; as identity preserver 127–129;

replays and rebroadcasts 129–131; time

structuring 126–127

Sports Illustrated 4, 13, 17, 230

sports leagues: NFL 186

sports ministry: Black Christians in 22–25; paths not taken 25–27 Stanton, Roger 18

Stovall, Jerry 16–17 Strawberry, Daryl 54

Summer Olympics, 1944 122

Sunday-school programs 90, 93–94, 101n48 Super Bowl 225

Swinney, Dabo 70–71 “symbol of the military” 249

Taylor, Breonna 70

Ten Commandments 105–106

Thangaraj, Stanley 83

Thermopylae 37, 39

Thomson-DeVeaux, Amelia 56

Toomey, Tia-Clair 162

Toronto Star 253

Towler, “Deacon” Dan 14, 22–23, 26, 28

Trump, Donald 54, 56, 61, 67

Turano, John 45

Ultimate Fighting Championship

(UFC) 40

United Nations Open Door Policy 206

University of Mississippi (UM) 53, 63, 65;

football program 63

University of Washington 25

US Protestant sport culture 40

vacuum domicilium 218

Vick, Michael 54

Vietnam War 259

Von Gammon, Richard 151–152

Wallace, William 40

Waller, Steven 36

Warner, Gary 21

“Washington Football Team” 216, 225,

227–230

Wayne, John 40

Westbrook, John 24–25 West Coast culture 106

Western Christianity 83

White, Derrick 19

white masculine formation 45

Whitney, Caspar 151

Wieman, Tad 15

Wilson, Ken 61

Winning the Race 123

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 137

WOD exercises 166

Wooden, John 21

Woods, Tiger 6

“Woodstock of fitness” 168

World Series 225

World War I 252, 258

World War II 205–206, 252

X Factor 127

Yancy, Joe 206

Yankee Stadium 254, 257, 262

YMCA (Young Men’s Christian

Association) 86, 92