Worshippers become fans become voters.
Historically, Americans have been the most religious of the affluent societies, regularly attending places of worship in the largest numbers. That has been changing over the last decades, with a big drop during Covid that has not rebounded. In 2023 about 30% of Americans attended church.
Religion provides community, shared experiences, belonging to something larger than oneself, and a strong identity. Identity communities provide us with life scripts—how to behave, feel, how we think and what we expect of others. Script or Schema theory, that our brains organize, store and recall information according to our learned scripts, has been a central tenet of cognitive psychology for decades.
At the same time, sports viewership is steadily growing. More than seventy percent of Americans identify themselves as fans of sports, a number that has been growing steadily. Seventy-five percent of Americans watch the Superbowl live, making it the one time in the year when the vast majority of Americans are doing the same thing at the exact same time.
Since sports provide many of the same social and individual benefits as worship communities, the two counter-trends may not be a coincidence.
When humans change behaviors, they often replace them with something that serves the same functions. Americans are particularly prone to a “pick your own” style of spirituality, selecting from a mix of beliefs and practices, often mixing in secular aspects. The overlap between religion and sports may obscure the growing roles of sports and the diminishing roles of organized religion.
Sports are woven into the daily lives of their fans. Being a fan means that sports meet some of the same social and individual needs—for identity, community, something larger than yourself, helping to decide which clothes to wear, foods to eat, and rituals to perform–as religion. Superbowl Sunday is a national feast day, with its own Tex Mex food (which began when the Dallas Cowboys were “Americas Team.” Avocado sales spike. The majority of Americans support the Monday after becoming a national day off
Education starts early. School children are encouraged to don team colors on the Friday before gameday. A marriage between opposing fans is considered a mixed marriage, and with many mixed marriages, how to raise the kids can be a challenge. Which team onesie will the baby wear?
Emotions run high. “Fan” is short for “fanatic,” with otherwise over the top behavior the norm. Religious spaces are formal spaces with rules for formal behavior. When Ryan King White studied the culture of the Boston Red Sox in 2008, he found that otherwise responsible people had raucous, tribal like behaviors that they only did at the stadium. Both athletes and spectators have heightened levels of adrenalin; adrenalin is the “fight or flight hormone.” A loss leads to increase in cortisol, another stress hormone. Spectators don’t not have the same opportunity for extreme physical exertion and fatigue that provide an outlet. They also have neither the physical or cognitive training of athletes to channel the hormonal surges, hence the rise in violence and heart attacks during major matches. Fantasy sports and betting lead to watching more games, for longer periods of time and being even more engaged. Long term elevated levels of stress hormones are not great for long term cognitive clarity.
One particularly relevant trait of sports fanship found by researchers is that of loyalty. Fans love their teams with a loyalty that looks very much like religiosity in its zeal. When I took a more suitable job at a conference opponent, my college friends demanded to know why. You love your team– win or lose, right or wrong. It is often suggested that true fans need to love losing teams more, for years, even decades. When the Baltimore Colts left the city in the middle of the night in 1984, the level of despair and betrayal shook the city. Forty years later, and with a new and successful team, many are still not over it.
While religion and morals play roles in sports, there are some important differences. The major tenets of all the dominant religions include being kind to one’s neighbor. Sports, however, have a significantly lower bar. Religious communities have formal cultures. Sports do not. Sports encourage animosity. Drinking, cursing, insulting, threatening, and gesturing are all encouraged. The other team is the enemy, and some sports are stylized war. Morals, and the judgements of your peers common in religion are not as strong in sports culture. Studies show that fans are more likely to perform irrational acts after their team loses. At the 2024 World’s Series, a Yankees baseball fan grabbed the glove of the opposing Dodges catcher with both hands and pried the ball away as other fans stood by, smiling. They were clearly not suffering the immediate shunning by fellow fans. The fan was ejected but the punishment only lasted through the series. Cheating to win is more tolerated. Helping an opponent to score is treason. Winning is the point.
Violence is not uncommon. It’s not new: As young high school band members at away games, we learned the hard way to run fast to the bus as soon as our team won. But violence appears to be increasing. In 2023, 39.2 percent of fans surveyed said they had seen a crime, including fighting and public drunkenness, in or around a football stadium. Forty-five percent of women were uncomfortable attending alone and 77% of parents would not let their children attend without a chaperone. The same year, a New England Patriots fan died after being punched in the head at a game against the Miami Dolphins. Psychologists have found that fans are more accepting of violence and often practice a sort of moral juggling to excuse it.
Sports, Nationalism and Election Behavior
Sports also overlap with nationalism. International observers have noticed the strong role of nationalism in US sports, with the singing of the national anthem, flyovers and flags. Remember the outrage and repercussions when Black players chose to kneel rather than stand for the anthem?
Thomas Jefferson saw participation in a democracy as rational, informed and considered activity. But during the same period that sports overtook religion as a life script, political behavior began to look more like sports. Rallies looked more like game-time behavior. The often-mentioned divided nature of the American electorate looks much like that of opposing teams and much of the electorate follows the same types of scripts as sports—winning is everything, community, identification, clothes, signs, rituals, loving your team so much that you cannot imagine rooting for the other team. Journalists have long covered the national elections as horse races and the media often take shortcuts to “fairness” with exciting stories of only two opposing sides, like a game. And much of the electorate acts more like football fans—loyal to the end, raucous, and violent. The behaviors of the stadium have spilled out into the town square.
I thank mental and physical sports professionals Kelsey Parks Smith and Anne, Jonathan and Matt at True Sports for their contributions to this blog.
