College Football Isn't a Religion

But sometimes it feels that way

Every year on the Sunday before Labor Day our church hosts “Kickoff Sunday,” a fun way to recognize the start of the college football season. Many people wear their team colors and indulge in good-natured ribbing around the breakfast spread we provide before the worship service. The picture at top is of me and one of our lay leaders. I’m wearing a shirt from my alma mater, the University of Georgia. His outfit speaks for itself.

College football in the South isn’t a religion, but sometimes it feels that way. While there are schools in other parts of the country whose fans also take their football seriously—Ohio State, Oklahoma, the University of Southern California and Penn State are a few that come to mind—no other area goes to the extremes that we do here. Friendships, mental health, marriages, careers and futures can be made or lost according to which team wins the next game. Brandon Meeks describes our situation in an article on college football in the South called, “Where Football Coaches Walk on Water”:

On the East Coast, football is a cultural experience. In the Midwest, it’s a form of cannibalism. On the West Coast, it’s a tourist attraction. And in the South, football is a religion, and Saturday is the holy day.

The only word that describes how we feel about the sport is “religious.” Not in the way that Christiainty is a religion with a specific belief system but in the religious ways fans behave. They identify one another by sacred emblems on their clothes and cars. They’re evangelistic in how they promote their particular school. They have saints who led their respective teams to heights of glory in days gone by. Many sing a hymn at the end of each game called the alma mater.

I don’t think it’s an accident that this level of zeal takes place in the Bible Belt. Even though the same secular forces are at work here as they are everywhere else, there remains in our region a vocabulary that overlaps religion and sport and provides common ground between them. When we talk about football we naturally default to religious language.

Prayer, for example, is respected here to a degree that it’s not in other regions of the country. A football player kneeling in the endzone after a touchdown isn’t frowned on by fans, say, at the University of Alabama as he might be at the University of Southern California. And when one fan here turns to another and says, “We don’t have a prayer of winning this game," she doesn’t mean it as a cliche but for real. As in “I’m praying right now for a divine intervention—but I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

To “be saved” is still an experience that people in the South understand, and an announcer at the University of Tennessee using the phrase to describe a player who suddenly finds a new passion for the game would be understood by most of those in attendance. But not so much in a school like the University of Michigan where the religious environment is different.

“Faith,” a central word in relgion, is especially important for those long-suffering fans whose teams never move beyond mediocrity. ‘I really believe that this year will be our year” is how they start every conversation, at least before the season begins.

And of course there’s our favorite word, “Blessed.” We use it to describe everything from an emotional experience we had in church on Sunday to a miraculous play that occured on the footall field the day before.

Christian counselor and writer Gary Chapman coined the phrase “love language” to describe the unique ways each person in a marriage expresses and receives love. There are five such love languages, ranging from physical touch to words of affirmation to receiving gifts. The key to a successful marriage, according to Chapman, is to intentionally communicate love to your spouse in a language they understand.

Maybe the best way to explain our religious zeal for college football is to call religion our “love languge.” For us, nothing else is able to capture the experience of sitting in the stands with friends and cheering our team on a golden Saturday afternoon in the fall. Or glued to the television at home while watching a game. That doesn’t mean that we’re idolaters, heretics or shallow Christians. It just means we’re using our natural love language to describe something we love.

In a dispute with Jewish leaders over paying taxes, Jesus used a Roman coin to make an essential point. Pointing to the image of Caesar stamped on one side of the coin, he asked, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” When they answered “Caesar’s,” he replied, “Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” (Matthew 22:21)

Jesus’ critics were trying to trap him. They felt that Caesar’s image on the coin violated the Second Commandment and therefore any faithful Jew who paid taxes with the coin was being unfaithful to God. Jesus turns the tables on them with a simple but challenging principle. Some things belong to Caesar, he says, and some things belong to God. The critical thing in life is to know the difference and walk the fine line between them.

Here in the South, we use religious words to communicate our love of football because no other vocabulary so captures our need for passion, our hunger for pupose and our search for transcendence. But just because the language of faith is often the vehicle for expressing our passion for college football doesn’t mean that we worship the game in the same way that we worship God. That’s a line that we won’t cross. We know the difference between worshiping college football and worshiping God.

While there’s some dispute on the accuracy of the reports, it’s generally accepted that John Calvin, the Reformation leader in 16th Century Geneva, Switzerland and one of the most brilliant and influential church leaders in history, would on Sunday afternoons visit the communal lawns in his city and participate in the game called ten-pins. We would call it bowling today.

I don’t know if ten-pins is the exact equivalent of modern college football but when men are involved in a competitive game, I’m sure there were similarities. Anytime there’s a ball and competition, men will be men. They probably wore loud shirts and talked trash to each other. They cheered their team’s victories while booing the other team’s losses. Maybe they named their respective teams something like the Geneva Grimlins or the Swiss Surprise. Somewhere there was bound to be chips and dip.

Reformed theology in general doesn’t have a reputation for tolerating most kinds of entertainment—life is far too serious for for that. But the great Calvin hanging out with medeival sports fans on Sunday afternoons sends a deeper and more balanced message, one less serious but more life-giving. A message that links the worship of God with the enjoyment of life and endorses our games as an expression of our faith. A message that our love of college football in the South would echo.

Yes, we often love our college football with a religious passion. But that’s not a bad thing. It’s the acknowlegement that the things we love best about football point to the the greater things of the Kingdom.