The Liturgy of Sports: Or How to Celebrate Contingency without Believing That God Loves Tom Brady More Than Everyone Else

In what follows, I want to treat two thinkers who will help us think through two distinct ways in which sport—either participating in sport as a player or following sport as a fan—might be construed as “liturgy.” The first is theorist of religion Jonathan Z. Smith, who will help us to think of sport as a kind of ritual rationalization of a deeply broken world. Indeed, Smith will show how the patterned-behavior that accompanies something like sport as liturgy functions to bring an unendurable world of chaos under control, though it is a feinted and false sense of control that ought not to be the goal of any genuine liturgy. The second thinker will be Lincoln Harvey, who I take to be the most significant among those who attempt to articulate a “theology of sport.” For Harvey, sport is the “liturgical celebration of our contingency.” Sport is absolutely a kind of liturgy, but what it celebrates is not God per se but rather the beautiful contingency of an unnecessary creation. We do not wish the world away or wish it to be anything other than it is. Sport, instead, is our liturgical celebration of our contingent being. I shall find these perspectives on sport as liturgy unsatisfying, but not entirely false. Indeed, I shall recommend ultimately that Christians take up something like Harvey’s position as a corrective to the natural inertia toward escapism that the ritual of sport often imposes upon those of us who follow them. Yet, I will level a significant theological objection against Harvey’s account of sport— namely, that he pushes his account of sport as contingent slightly too far by insisting that sport is unique among human activity as entirely immune from God’s providence. I take that assertion to be false, but I do not find it so fundamental to Harvey’s argument as to scuttle his account of sport as liturgy entirely. Thus, I present in the final section a brief modification of Harvey on the unique sort of liturgy that sport ought to be—a liturgical celebration of all that is not God.