![]() ![]() Yet, the determined Tebow temporarily rebuffed his critics and led his team to a dramatic overtime victory. ![]() While a premier college player, football analysts speculated that Tebow’s skills would not translate to the professional game. In 2011, Tim Tebow made his first start as the quarterback for the Denver Broncos in a game against the Miami Dolphins. And this is where the attraction to sports originates, both in the past and in the present. From here, sports become locations to experiment with, and experience, what it means to be human. Understanding this process requires an unbraiding of the category of “religion” from notions of “God” and “belief.” Instead, we profit from an understanding of religion that starts with embodied movements, and continues into the material production of the sacred. In these instances, bodies in motion have reinforced or disrupted the boundaries that separate “real” Americans from those perceived to threaten social stability.īeyond institutional and civil religions, though, religious themes and ideas continue to attach themselves to sports in new and innovative ways. Sports have also figured into the making of America’s civil religious discourse, as athletic expressions of national identity. From the “muscular Christians” of the Progressive Era to a contemporary Muslim football team observing the Ramadan fast during a playoff run, Americans have habitually turned playing fields into praying fields. Institutional religions have been part of this story. It continues as these bodies become inscribed with sacred meaning, each mark bearing the traces of a given population’s most cherished values. ![]() The story of religion and sports in America, then, starts with bodies in motion. And yet, for devoted participants and observers, physical movements and calculated numbers feed into carefully constructed worlds of mythic stories, potent symbols, and exuberant rituals. So on the surface, the empirical facts of sports are rather mundane. Athletic events occur in discrete locations, played by individuals following a prescribed set of rules, leaving behind metrics like wins and losses, final scores, and overall records. ![]()
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