Baseball as a Civil Religion

The important distinction is that baseball is a civil religion and not a "religion". Thus it is not an ecumenical religion like Christianity, Judaism, Islam or Buddhism. In “Civil Religion in America,” Robert Bellah posits the idea that “most Americans share common religious characteristics expressed through civil religious beliefs, symbols, and rituals that provide a religious dimension to the entirety of American life.”[i] Civil religions have neither gods nor sacred texts but they do have institutions which aid and abet their effects. They possess religious overtones as they live deep in peoples’ souls and elicit a visceral emotional connection.

They present qualities that its follower’s value and create a spirited community.
In the same way that religions have institutions, so too does baseball. If institutionalized religion has cathedrals and synagogues, then baseball has stadiums. Walking through the tunnels of a stadium is like walking through the crypt of a church. Stepping out of a tunnel and facing the open field is then analogous to entering the sanctuary. Even baseball jargon is religious in tone and form. In the stands you here cries of “you gotta believe!” and strategies that require “sacrifice.” When the game is close fans are encouraged to have “faith” in such “life and death” scenarios. Larry Merchant, a sports analyst for HBO, once said that the World Series was treated by fans “as though it were a solemn high mass.”[ii]

The emotions felt by athletes and fans work to inspire religious feelings as well. When Robert Novak goes to watch his beloved Dodgers he notices several ways in which baseball creates and inspires a civil religion:

By the asceticism and dedication of preparation; by a sense of respect for the
mysteries of one’s own body and soul, and for powers not in one’s own
control; by a sense of awe for the place and time of competition; by a sense
of fate; by a felt sense of comradeship and destiny; by a sense of
participation in the rhythms and tide of nature itself.[iii]

All of these emotions and effects are present in baseball but could easily be found in religion. The companionship of crowds yields congregational sentiments. The sense of fate breeds respect for what will come and helps us cope with events when things go sour. The rituals of baseball—do not step on the foul line, take exactly two practice swings, lick your fingers before every pitch—are not unlike the rituals found in religion.

A famous sports saying goes “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” What follows from this is that in losing there is a sense or element of death. To lose is to die. But this is symbolic just as baptism and communion in church are symbolic. In each ritual the participant dies, symbolically, and then is reborn, symbolically. The same is true in baseball. A player loses a game or strikes out three time and dies, symbolically. But the next day he is born again with a chance at redemption. As long as the churchgoer or player cedes himself to the symbolism and does not just walk through the motions, the effects of the rituals can be impacting.

Some are cynical and find it aggrandizing to elevate sports to a semi-religious status. They are more humanistic and fail to see—or refuse to see—how a stadium could bear resemblance to a church. But then again, what religion does not have its skeptics, its nonbelievers? “Any religion worthy of the name thrives on irreverence, skepticism and anticlericalism. A religion without skeptics is like a bosom never noticed.”[iv] Indeed, Novak welcomes their challenges as their dispositions validate baseball’s religious nature.

Baseball is also religious in that its followers share common histories and pass shared experiences and memories down through generations. Robert Elias’ A Fit for a Fractured Society, quotes Stephen Riess who said “the national pastime…supplied some of the symbols, myths and legends society needed to bind its members together.”[v] Shared beliefs create communal bonds and also inspire reverence for the subject. A young child listening to his father’s experience seeing Jackie Robinson play or Barry Bonds slug home runs can have a very impressionable effect. That these memories can be passed down through generations shows the sport’s transcendentally religious nature. Sharing memories and stories ensures that the civil religion persists and stays vibrant.

Unlike much of the world, we lack the thousands of years of evolving society that has placed art, and music and opera at the summit of societal importance. We have musical talents but nothing on the order of Beethoven or Mozart. America has some great literature but most rankings put Shakespeare, Milton and others at the top. The reason is that Europe has had thousands of years of societal struggle—we have had just over 250. Alas, sports are our civilizing agents.[vi] They better us by bringing us together and they inform our hearts and souls through the values that they teach. Baseball is America’s universal art form and our civil religion.

It is very easy to gloss over sports. So ubiquitous in our society, they often fade into the background as scores scroll across the bottom of television screens. We are inundated with sports to the point that they may even seem to have a dulling effect. But to rest there would be a serious injustice. As the French author Jacques Barzun once wrote, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”[vii] What began as a simple game played on the Elysian Fields in New Jersey has blossomed into so much more.

[i] Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Winter 1967, Vol. 96, No. 1, 5.
[ii] Larry Merchant, quoted in Will, 24.
[iii] Novak, 18.
[iv] Novak, 23.
[v] Stephen Reis, quoted in Robert Elias, A Fit for a Fractured Society: Baseball and the American Dream,(Armonk, New York: Sharpe, M.e., Inc., 2001), 10.
[vi] Novak, 27.
[vii] Jacques Barzun, God's Country and Mine: A Declaration of Love Spiced with a Few Harsh Words, (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1954) 159.

Why We Have Come To Love Sport & Why That Is A Good Thing

...a continuation of the previous post...

But these lines of thinking fall short of reality and reveal a serious misperception. One refutation has its roots in historical change. The other lies in the nature of the human and American spirit. In terms of the first refutation, simply put, it is no longer 1836 nor is it 1890. We are a vastly different country now due to natural societal changes that have put Puritan and Victorian modes of living on the back burner. Though baseball has its nascent roots in the latter quarter of the nineteenth-century, the sport really did not flourish until the first quarter of the twentieth. By this time, America was more tolerant of sport and had even become an advocate for its benefits.[i] And though baseball is American, the influx of immigrants from Europe in the early 1900s made the country more Catholic and more Jewish and more diverse. These groups brought with them new notions of play that have given the concept various intellectual traditions. They themselves did not create an environment accepting of play—indeed it was a mixture with shifting American trends—but the two blended together and acted together to create a space for sport in the minds of many former unbelievers.

Ultimately, to discount play and sport is to deny a fundamental part of the human condition. After all, the fundamental essence of the human spirit is play. As Michael Novak so appropriately explains:

The basic reality of all human life is play, games, sport; these are the
realities from which the basic metaphors for all that is important in the rest
of life are drawn. Work, politics, and history are the illusionary,
misleading, false world. Being, beauty, truth, excellence, transcendence—these
words, grown in the soil of play, wither in the sand of work…Play belongs to the
Kingdom of Ends, work to the Kingdom of Means. Barbarians play in order to
work; the civilized work in order to play.[ii]

To be sure, work has its utility. The individual learns strong lessons and society reaps the benefits of the individual's work. But in some sense, work is a fabrication; a necessary function that works to impel society forward. The same goes for politics. But play and sport is different. It is hard to defend intellectually and even harder to put in words, but we know that play is in the "Kingdom of Ends" because in all of us burns the desire to play. If given the choice, most (it should be all) would choose play over work. Sport is not a distraction from work; work is a distraction from play.

In separating myth and reality, we find that work goes with the former and play with the latter. Work comes to us out of necessity. We must do work to provide food, to discover better health treatments, and to write laws that create peaceful society. Indeed, work is supported by the age old myth of that the fundamental purpose of humans is too improve the world. But is that all that we are about? Is our sole function to discover new medicines, invent new technology, create complex financial instruments, and improve our ability to build cities and all of its institutions? This is not to say that progress is a bad thing—to be sure, far from it. Of course it should be noted that we have made great strides in becoming more egalitarian as a society, and our work to make the world safer and more just are surely noble pursuits. But despite all of our work, the never-ending toils of life abide. Death persists, murder and crime continues, and the Earth maintains its orbit around the sun.

Thus play deserves greater attention and respect. We engage in too much of it for it to be overlooked and discredited. It necessitates our study because in sport and play we find the values “grown in its soil”: being, beauty, truth, excellence, transcendence. Work, friends, society and history will eventually pass us by. But the aforementioned qualities will never cease. They will forever maintain their value and utility. These qualities are reality. The study of and the participation in sport is imperative because sport works to better ourselves and reveals to us the important qualities of a good and rigorous life. Again, this is not to say that we should abandon work and progress. Instead, we can look to sport for the qualities that aid and inform our work and relationships—but we should not deny that these qualities are illuminated most brightly in sport.

[i] Nemec et al., 87.
[ii]Michael Novak, The Joy of Sports: End Zones, Bases, Baskets, Balls and the Consecration of the American Spirit, (New York: Basic Books Inc., 1976), xxi.

The Roots of American Disdain of Sport

Many people firmly believe that sport does not deserve a moments thought nor any form of dedicated study. Indeed, many share a passionate disdain for sport—and baseball in particular—as a distraction from the important things in life. Surely three hours in the library, plowing the fields, or engaging in civic activism is time better spent than watching a ball game. Surely conversation should be more concerned with politics and fine art than the World Series or the designated hitter. Surely conversation centered on Plato, or Joyce is more rewarding and builds more character than a debate over who will win the NL West or who should be MVP. As a journalist once said, “to love sports is to love the lowest common denominator, to be lower-class, adolescent, patriotic in a corny way.” I dissent, respectfully.

Nevertheless, if we are to assert that baseball does indeed breed national character and that it is inherently American, then we must do our due diligence in exploring why so many pass over sport as being a side-car, a distraction. After all, America's roots in the Puritan work ethic in some ways necessitate an opposition to sports. For the most part, as America was being built and was growing, her citizens did not play—they worked. When Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to America he was somewhat intrigued by American values of work. He noted that Americans did not play, had no real sports, teams or leagues. He found that Americans centered their lives on work not leisure.

Play for play's sake was frowned upon during de Tocqueville's visit and continued throughout the 19th century. The Puritan and Victorian values that were en mode at the time were particularly antithetical to sports and play. These ethics and principles have led us to seriously undervalue sports. Back then sports were not only a distraction from work but led to individual and societal moral degradation.