Is Sports Becoming A Religion?

In 2017 the acclaimed docuseries Religion of Sports aired on Netflix. The series explored the dramatic interplay between religion and sports and made a bold statement: Given the decline of religion and the penetrating popularity of sports in society, rather than sports being like religion, sports have become a religion. Because sports have obtained a religion-like aura about it, the sports-religion topic deserves a deep dive to assess if sports and religion are competing against one another or if they are in mutual appreciation of each other.

A cursory view of this topic demonstrates that America is a sports craved nation. A recent report shows that 154 million Americans watch live sports every month. The activity of sports was listed in the top 5 hobbies Americans enjoy. Whether watching sports or doing sports, sports fascinate and resonate in the lives of people. 

Sports intersects with religion by acting as a heightened metaphor to draw people into living out the Christian faith. Given the timeless draw of sports, it's no wonder St. Paul used sports as an analogy to describe being a committed follower of Christ. Writing to his spiritual protege, Timothy, Paul encouraged him with the following phrase,

“Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life which you were called  when you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.” (1 Tim 6:12). 

Today, when we say he “fought the good fight” we generally mean he battled for some principle for justice - that he did what was right in the face of wrong. Yet, this is not what St. Paul is referring to. He is actually inverting this phrase to take earthly images to describe spiritual combat realities. The word for “fight” that St. Paul uses is the Greek word “agona.” Agona is better translated as a competition or contest. Interestingly, agona is the English root word for athletic competition. Here, we begin to see that Paul is invoking athletic imagery in how we should approach the spiritual battle set before us. Elsewhere St. Paul utilizes athletic imagery in the Greco-Roman world to describe spiritual combat. The best example is in 1 Cor. 9:24-27. 

“Do you not know that in a race all the runners compete, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. Well, I do not run aimlessly, I do not box as one beating the air;  but I pommel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.”

St. Paul uses the same root word for agona to compare spiritual exercise in preparing for battle for athletic competitions in racing and boxing. He declares that only one person in the race receives the prize. Imagine that, in the ancient world, they didn’t give out participation awards in athletics. Paul goes on to articulate an obvious concept - run as to win; aim to be the best. With the sports analogy, Paul is saying I’m not boxing randomly at the air, rather I pummel my body to mentally subdue my passions, which, in turn, gives me the virtue of self-control. Here, Paul is illustrating that similar to sports one needs to control his disordered passions in the spiritual life through a strenuous act of the will.  

If we take the same athletic imagery and transport it back to 1 Timothy, when Paul says, “fight the good fight,” the good fight that he is referring to is the spiritual battle for cultivating the good habits that will make one a saint. He wants Timothy to acquire the virtue of righteousness, piety, gentleness, patience, faith, and love. But, to achieve these virtues he needs to train similarly to an athlete. As anyone familiar with sports knows success does not come easy and requires a taxing physical and emotional effort. The same formula holds true to become a saint. Timothy has likely realized once you get baptized, you don’t acquire all the virtues and immediately become a saint. God isn’t a magician that gives us sainthood after baptism much like an official won’t give an athlete the championship after one practice. St. Paul’s whole point is that “the race” to sainthood is a grinding process full of highs and lows - much like in the “agony of sports.”  In the spiritual realm, baptism infuses God’s grace in you, but the devil empties your grace tank by tricking you to sin repetitively. 

Timothy who has been baptized and has been ordained as a minister still has to “fight” to acquire the virtues. Just like an elite athlete has to continue to subject his body to discipline to acquire physical strength, so too the spiritual athlete has to excerpt self-mastery in the soul to attain greatness. 

The reason sports acts as an analogy in living out the faith is because sports offers a plethora of lessons that are mutually compatible in the faith. In sports, people learn the concepts of hard work, discipline, sacrifice, perseverance, teamwork, and sportsmanship. All these attributes in sports are shared in the spiritual life. Both work to define your intelligence, grit, and self-control so you can learn to handle the trials of life with relative ease and achieve excellence. 

Sports also provide a natural balance people need given the chemistry between winning and losing. Whereas winning is good because it gives people confidence, too much winning can lead to pridefulness (i.e. arrogance). To combat excessive winning, sports provide instances of losing. Losing teaches us humility and stresses the importance of overcoming challenges through hard work. As with winning, the benefits must be balanced and not pushed to the extreme. While losing has its advantages, too much losing for an athlete can lead to insecurities and perhaps despair. But, the key is that sports generally present people with both highs and lows, and these experiences act as a helpful tool in crafting a well-framed character.  

While your average Catholic may not pick up on the intricacies of battling for the perfection of the soul in the spiritual life, comparing this journey as an athlete in training helps bring clarity to the faith. Therefore, sports serve as a healthy analogy in transmuting the actions and teachings embedded in the faith. In this, sports acts as one of many conveyor belts that guide people to become the person God created them to be.    

To be sure, the series “Religion of Sports” highlights how faith and sports share commonalities in building character and engaging in rewarding experiences. But, the series started to derail when it viewed sports not as a bridge to the faith, but as its own unique destination. It’s one thing to appreciate the bridge for where it takes you, but it's another thing to stop at it and start obsessing about the bridge to the point of worshiping it. In this setting, one refuses to move to their true destination (i.e., the faith) and will concoct a counterfeit destination that alters their divine trajectory. Rather than sports leading people to the faith, sports itself has become a religion. Therefore, the crucial hinge on the sports-religion connection is to realize the sports phenomenon bleeds-over to affect one’s spiritual pursuit - whether positive or negative. 

The starting point where the “Religion of Sports” series made its glaring error in erecting sports into a religion was in youth sports. There has been a steady uptick in youth sports as teams and participation has increased by 5% the last ten years (despite the covid shutdown). Parents tend to view sports as a healthy alternative to the heightened politically correct and sexually confused atmosphere that can encircle kids. While this move to youth sports might be strategic to avoid the weird world we live in, it also might be out of sheer habit for parents as sports is seen as a necessary outlet for kids to avoid negative behaviors, lifestyles, and cultivate healthy habits. After all, the active nature of sports uproots a lazy and idle demeanor in kids. Recall that the Bible asserted, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop” (Proverbs 16:27, cf. 13:4). So, it is no wonder parents have been flocking to sports as an advantageous means for their kids. But, the dangerous trap of youth sports is that it can pull parents and children into a crazed world full of stress and emotional drama that ultimately sucks their joy away. 

Youth sports are a different game than what many adults experienced as children. The movie “The Sandlot” depicts how things worked decades back; no clinics, professional coaches, referees, or spectators. It was just a bunch of kids playing ball on a sandlot until they needed to get home for dinner. Today, youth sports is a $15 billion industry that consumes enormous  time, energy, and financial commitment. And if the family can't navigate this rugged terrain prudently the experience can be draining.

This extreme aspect of youth sports is most prominently displayed in club sports. Club sports are more competitive, more elite than the casual recreational leagues. The allure of club sports is that they can grab parents and children into believing that they’ve entered a privileged athletic status that stands at the precipice of the professional level. While there is nothing wrong with becoming an elite athlete, the pressure to perform and intensity level in this setting can take a tense turn and catch a child and parent off guard if they are unprepared. 

In club sports setting, parents can easily get sucked up in the hype of their child’s success being a manifestation of their self-worth as a parent. Sports Psychologist Catherine Sanders observes, “Kids have become a reflection of their parents’ identity . . Their success, in academics or sports, is a tangible way for parents to measure their own success: If my kid is a ‘winner,’ then I must be a winner too.” Recently, psychiatrists have dubbed the condition Achievement by Proxy Syndrome because they’ve witnessed parents living vicariously through the exploits of their children in youth sports.

As the time commitment intensifies in sports it has bleed-over effects into other areas. With time focused laser-sharp on sports, the faith will be moved further into the background. As one gets attached to elite sports, other events that bump up against the sports schedule get viewed as an annoyance. This can easily divert parents off their God-given mission to get their child to heaven and now be viewed as getting their child into an elite athletic career. In this setting, a church that schedules an important Sacrament on a weekend sports tournament will likely receive a flurry of emails letting them know that their "religious ritual" has ruptured the all-encompassing sports calendar. Given our secular society, no longer is Sunday set a part as holy day for worshiping God and being with your family. Therefore, sports governing bodies view Sunday as a prime day to schedule practices and games.

With sports squarely flush in the parents' faces all the time, parents can get swept up in the elite athlete hysteria and invariably lose sight of their mission as a parent. The Sacrament of Matrimony firmly gives parents their preeminent mission to get their family to heaven. Caught up living vicariously through their kids sports, parents have traded their mission to get their kids to heaven for the cheaper mission to get them to become elite athletes. 

At the point of death, every parent will face Jesus at their particular judgment, where He will give a summary of the state of their soul, which will include an assessment of how well they did getting their kids to Him. So, parents will have a 100% chance of encountering Jesus at their particular judgment, while the chance of getting their kids an athletic scholarship is roughly 2%. Therefore, why would you put so much into something you only have a 2% chance of getting while potentially jeopardizing your 100% meeting with Christ? In short, it behooves us to put sports into a wider context so we have a grounded perspective that our main purpose in life is centered on God.  

Not only does the obsessive nature of sports take parents off their God-given mission, but the emotional environment in sports can provoke the parent into a hectic meltdown. In psychology, a rupture surfaces in one’s mental framework when a person's attachment gets broken. Therefore, if parents are attached to their kids athletic success, they will become unhinged when this success is not achieved. Here, one can witness the recent trend of parents becoming hysterical at kids sporting events. Typically, it is common place for tensions to flare up in competition, but some of the instances in youth sports are getting extreme. One organizer of a youth soccer tournament in Eden Prairie, Minn., banned parents from watching from the sidelines because of chronic bad behavior. In Laurel, MS, an umpire of a 12-year-olds’ softball game was assaulted by a mom in the parking lot. Out-of-control parents are nothing new. In a 2017 survey by the National Assn. of Sports Officials, some 87% of officials said they had suffered verbal abuse, 13% had been assaulted, and 47% had felt unsafe because of spectators' behavior.

Author Rick Wolf  commented, “There has been a huge drop off in the number of available referees and officials in youth sports due to the obnoxious behavior of parents.” A recent study by the National Federation of State High School Associations shows around 80 percent of new officials give up their vocation after two years.

These crazed outburts by parents diminish their dignity and reputation. With time, no one remembers the score of a youth game. But everyone remembers the parent who went berserk on the referee.

A person who becomes intoxicated with passion in youth sports is undermining the concept of sportsmanship. Sportsmanship keeps tempers in check and allows kids to see their opponent not as an enemy to take down but as a challenger to respect and learn from in their quest to compete. Sportsmanship coupled with discipline parallels the Catholic faith in that it is designed to curtail the passions while allowing the intellect to govern a person's actions with dignity. St. Thomas Aquinas often wrote how a well-adjusted soul would be displayed when the intellect correctly ordered the whims of the passions. As with other examples, sports can either bring this theological concept into fruition with self-control or revert it to the opposite when a person becomes governed by his crazed emotions.

The reason the series Religion of Sports escalated sports to the level of religion is because the penetrating interest in sports has boomed while attention on religion has dropped off. The series highlighted further grounds why they think sports have ascended to the level of religion. In summary their points include: 1.) Sports bring together the community more so than any other. Despite people’s differences in politics or religion, we’ve often witnessed major cities rally behind a sports team. 2.) The draw of sports is universal, much like in religion. 3.) Sports displays an intense passion for its fans. 4.) Sports portrays a saint-like persona of its iconic athletes. 5.) With the chants and cheers, sports display a ritual-type encounter for players and fans. 6.) Sports is layered with storytelling power that provides people with dynamic human drama. 7.) Sports give people a profound sense of meaning in their life.

In all these crucial areas, it appears that sports have overtaken the faith in providing people their deepest needs. However, it acts as a false substitute for the true answer to the above statements is entrenched in the faith. While the meaning of sports has a religious edge, it does not comport that sports should replace the faith. The sheer popularity and longevity of a particular phenomenon generally speaks to an interior craving that God ultimately satisfies. Therefore, when channeled in the right direction, the passion that drives people in sports speaks to the yearning for God and living out the faith.

It should become apparent that the analogy in sports in the faith segues into a dilemma when sports has replaced the faith as the dominant driver. As Bishop Sheen said, "If you do not worship God, you will worship something. . . You have a duty to worship God, not because He will be imperfect and unhappy if you do not, but because you will be imperfect and unhappy."

God uses sports, academics, and the arts as an avenue in which we can explore the faith and achieve greatness. While they aren't something to be worshiped, they act as a pointing finger to God. When people realize this, they will begin to flourish in their spiritual journey.