Randall Balmer

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Clemente Lisi off to World Cup: Soccer, faith and memories of Maradona's 'hand of God'

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Clemente Lisi off to World Cup: Soccer, faith and memories of Maradona's 'hand of God'

Long, long ago, I told the managing editor of The Rocky Mountain News (#RIP) that I should be part of the newsroom team sent to cover the Super Bowl.

My logic was simple: If the Denver Broncos were not a religious organization for a majority of people in the Rocky Mountain Time Zone, there was no such thing as a cultural definition of religion.

With that in mind, it makes all kinds of sense that our own Clemente Lisi is about to get on an airplane and head to Qatar to cover the final rounds of World Cup 2022. In addition to being our Catholic-news specialist here at GetReligion, he is also the author of the new book “The FIFA World Cup: A History of the Planet's Biggest Sporting Event.”

You know that there will be religion angles all over the place, in part because of the location. And, once again, if soccer isn’t — for most of the world — a near-religion, then I don’t know what is. After all, one of my all-time favorite book titles is this: “How Soccer Explains the World.”

Yes, the favored samba-style evangelicals of Brazil lost in a heartbreaker yesterday — to a Croatia team with a coach with a rosary in his hands, on the sideline. I’ll keep my eyes open for GetReligion-friendly copy from Lisi, once he arrives in Qatar.

Meanwhile, we ran a piece by Lisi that ran with this headline: “Sports, passion, faith — The ties that bind are always there, even if journalists miss them.” Here is the highly relevant overture:

Sports, in so many ways, are almost like a religion for many people. Like religion, sports can convey important lessons about culture and values. From the times of the Ancient Greeks, athletes were sometimes accorded the status of gods.

Not much has changed since ancient times. Modern society has given god-like status to many athletes. Lebron James, Tiger Woods and Lionel Messi are just three athletes who garner such adulation on a global scale.

The question here at GetReligion is how this relationship shows up in news stories about sports, especially stories in which religious faith is — according to the athletes themselves — a key element in their lives and their success.


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Sports, passion, faith: The ties that bind are always there, even if journalists miss them

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Sports, passion, faith: The ties that bind are always there, even if journalists miss them

Sports, in so many ways, are almost like a religion for many people. Like religion, sports can convey important lessons about culture and values. From the times of the Ancient Greeks, athletes were sometimes accorded the status of gods.

Not much has changed since ancient times. Modern society has given god-like status to many athletes. Lebron James, Tiger Woods and Lionel Messi are just three athletes who garner such adulation on a global scale.

The question here at GetReligion is how this relationship shows up in news stories about sports, especially stories in which religious faith is — according to the athletes themselves — a key element in their lives and their success.

A new book by Randall Balmer, a historian who holds the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth University, called “Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America” (University of North Carolina Press) explores the relationship between sports and religion. It will be available starting Sept. 20. For journalists and news readers, this book can be a door into some important topics in the news.

Balmer is an academic, not a journalist. Yet, he is on to something here -- something most sports writers miss altogether when they cover games or write player features. This is a book about subjects that religion-beat pros need to consider, since so few sports pros appear willing to do so.

GetReligion hasn't shied away from sports in the past and how it often intersects with faith and religion, as seen in this Google search for “GetReligion,” “sports” and “ghosts.”

For years, GetReligion has noted God-sized gaps in sports stories. We refer to these holes as "holy ghosts." Consider the titles of these posts: “Tragic death of NBA coach's wife Ingrid Williams and a missing element in the news,” “God credited with shrinking figure skater's brain tumor, but otherwise terrific story haunted by ghost” and “Haunted house Olympics: How many of the faith-driven stories did you see in Rio coverage?”

Balmer writes in the introduction that the book “examines how the history of religion across North America connects in fascinating ways to the emergence of modern team sports.” He also argues, very persuasively, that modern sports have “evolved into a phenomenon that generates at least as much passion as traditional religion.”

I can relate to Balmer’s general argument.


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Thinking about evangelicals, abortion and race: David French covers some complex history

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History is a complex subject and often not for the faint of heart.

With that in mind, allow me to ask a history question to evangelicals who want to know more about their own past. I would also like to ask this question to religion-beat professionals under the age of 60, or thereabouts.

In 1971, a major American religious group passed a resolution on a topic that was becoming more controversial — abortion. Of course, the Roe v. Wade decision issued on January 22 in 1973 would create a political, cultural and moral earthquake that continues to this day.

So here is my question: What religious body passed the 1971 resolution that urged its members to “work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”

What was the name this giant religious group? This resolution was passed during the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. The same body reaffirmed that resolution in 1974 and in 1976 — after Roe.

Were these actions shocking, at the time? As historian Randall Balmer noted in a paper entitled “The Historian’s Pickaxe” (.pdf here):

Although a few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly criticized the ruling, the overwhelming response was silence, even approval. Baptists, in particular, applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” wrote W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press.

This was the era in which I came of age as a Southern Baptist preacher’s son in Texas — finishing high school and then heading to Baylor to study journalism and the history of religion in America. I bring this subject up because this slice of SBC history plays a crucial role in this weekend’s think piece, which is written by David French of The Dispatch, a cultural conservative who is an experienced legal mind on religious liberty issues. The title of his essay: “Fact and Fiction About Racism and the Rise of the Religious Right.”

The big issue for French is whether the X factor in the birth of the Religious Right was abortion or, as some now claim, racism.


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Ah, those mysterious Protestant Evangelicals, as pondered by our cultural elites

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Ah, those mysterious Protestant Evangelicals, as pondered by our cultural elites

Just when you thought you’d seen enough analysis of those U.S. Protestant Evangelicals to last a lifetime or two, a major April release is commanding yet more ink: “The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America” by Frances FitzGerald (Simon & Schuster).

Any book from FitzGerald, a boldface author who won the Pulitzer Prize for her Vietnam lament “Fire in the Lake” (1972), gets guaranteed media attention. Her latest, hailed as “masterful” by Time magazine, will surely be mandatory reading for religion writers. This blockbuster has already gained major reviews from highbrow analysts Randall Balmer, Alan Wolfe and Garry Wills (also a Pulitzer medalist).

The Religion Guy has yet to read this 740-pager but is wary after learning that FitzGerald pays so much attention to figures like Rousas Rushdoony. His idiosyncratic theocracy scheme frightens the journalism natives, but is hardly representative of mainstream evangelicalism, or even of its most politicized segments.

Otherwise, the reviews provide  significant cultural indicators of how elitists view a movement that’s somehow so mystifying and unnerving to outsiders, and the way adherents are ogled with condescension, particularly after so many voted for Donald J. Trump. Irredeemable deplorables, anyone?    

Balmer, Dartmouth’s religion chair and the author of a somewhat competing 2016 title, “Evangelicalism in America” (Baylor University Press), says having such a “distinguished author” undertake this topic should be “cause for celebration.” But he finds the result “curiously pinched and narrow.”

One of his criticisms, echoed by others, is that FitzGerald’s narrative omits African-American Protestants. That’s an important choice that the Religion Guy finds justifiable because these believers, as well as Latino Protestants, have such  distinct subcultures. Explaining the larger population of “white” evangelicals is more than enough for one book.


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Christian history flashback: What's the legacy of the Jesus Movement 45 years later?

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Christian history flashback: What's the legacy of the Jesus Movement 45 years later?

JOSH’S QUERY:

[Referring to Time magazine's 1971 cover story on the youthful "Jesus Revolution"]  A lot has happened since then -- culturally, religiously, movement-wise -- and I’d be fascinated to see you revisit your journalistic and theological mind.

THE RELIGION GUY’S RESPONSE:

This interests Josh because his parents were members of Love Inn, which typified the youth-driven “Jesus Movement” of those days. It was a combination church, commune, Christian rock venue and traveling troupe, based in a barn near the aptly named Freeville, New York (population 500).

As a “Time” correspondent, the Religion Guy figured this revival, which was hiding in plain sight, was well worth a cover story, managed to convince reluctant editors to proceed, and did much of the field reporting including a visit to Love Inn. Arguably, that article -- by the Guy’s talented predecessor as “Time” religion writer, lay Catholic Mayo Mohs -- put the “Jesus freaks” permanently on the cultural map.

The following can only sketch mere strands of a complex phenomenon and offers as much theorizing as hard fact. For some of the history, the Guy is indebted to the valuable “Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism” by Randall Balmer of Dartmouth College.

Quick summary: The Jesus Movement developed pre-existing phenomena into a youth wing that energized and reshaped U.S. evangelical Protestantism as a whole. This occurred just as evangelicalism was clearly emerging as the largest segment of American religion while beginning in the mid-1960s moderate to liberal “mainline” Protestant groups began inexorable decline.

The Jesus Movement was related to and influenced by the “Charismatic Movement,” which first reached public notice around 1960. This wave took a loosened version of Pentecostal spirituality into “mainline” Protestant and Catholic settings and, especially, newer and wholly independent congregations, along with free-floating gatherings akin to the secular Woodstock (August, 1969).

Early “street Christians” clustered around hot spots such as the Living Room in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, the Christian World Liberation Front adjacent to the University of California at Berkeley, Seattle’s Jesus People Army, and His Place on the Sunset Strip (led by Arthur Blessitt who later evangelized his way across the nation pulling an outsize wheeled cross).


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