Sports and religion are powerful forces in America.
For example, in the 1960s, Muhammad Ali used his fame as a boxer to speak about his faith, his civil rights, and his refusal to be drafted during the Vietnam War.
“I must either obey the laws of the land or the laws of Allah,” said Ali, who was a member of the Nation of Islam. “I have nothing to lose by defending my beliefs. We have been in prison for four hundred years.
In “The Politics of Play and Protest: Religion and Sports in America,” WashU students use religion and sports to examine American life, including social protests like Ali’s.
“Sport is where a lot of conversations about what we value as a society are brought to the forefront,” says Cody Musselmancourse creator and associated postdoctoral researcher in the field John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. “This is an opportunity for us to talk about broader social issues through the connection between religion and sport.”
In today’s United States, sports and religion share many similarities. “They both have a ritual,” Musselman says. “They both have institutions that they follow. They both have fans or crowds and followers. There are sacred places and people make pilgrimages.
However, Americans have not always revered the sport. Early in U.S. history, Musselman says, sports were seen as a deviant activity that led people away from productivity and godly living.
This belief evolved in the 19th century, as frontier battlefields disappeared and the Industrial Revolution expanded leisure activities. Musselman says religious leaders began to view sports as a way to build a physically and morally fit citizenry. Musselman uses football as an example.
“Football was seen as a way to strengthen the nation,” she says. “There was the idea that you could help create the new American through football. This new and robust form of muscular Christianity reflected ideas about the formation of national identity as well as settler colonialism.
To illustrate this point, Musselman talks to his students about the football team at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a Pennsylvania boarding school for Native Americans founded in 1879. In the early 1900s, the team of shorter-than-average players the school created new sleights and defeated Ivy League powers such as Harvard and Penn.
“But in doing so, they upended narratives of civilizational progress,” Musselman says, “and their success on the field gave rise to new rules that favored white American soccer players. Sports were (and still are) used to both justify and demonstrate a racial and class hierarchy in which white Protestant men represent the pinnacle of civilization.
Marginalized groups have long used sports to assimilate, she says, citing Catholics at the University of Notre Dame who embrace football or, in a lesser-known example, Jews playing baseball and managing baseball teams.
“We can think of sports as a place where people – athletes and fans – negotiate their national belonging, as a way to show their Americanness,” says Musselman.
This search for belonging encompasses race and gender.
“The example of Serena Williams (who was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness) highlights the difficulties of being a black athlete – even if you are by far one of the greatest athletes in your sport of all time. Given her marginalized social position, she was still struggling for recognition and belonging,” says Musselman. “We also bring up Colin Kaepernick’s (NFL kneeling) protest, the success of transgender athlete Lia Thomas, and Tim Tebow’s evangelism in our classroom as examples to evaluate how athletes negotiate commercial, political, and religious with their platforms.”
Additionally, the course covers unexpected topics such as CrossFit, reality TV, sports marketing, pre-Columbian indigenous sports and much more.
“My goal is for students to understand how important religion is in their daily lives,” Musselman says. “And that doesn’t necessarily mean practicing their own personal religion, but just that religious influence is everywhere.”
