Football as Religious Experience
Dabo Swinney, Colin Kaepernick, and the Conflation of God, Politics, and Football
The Anderson campus of NewSpring Church has the largest congregation of any church in South Carolina. More than two thousand people show up for worship each Sunday. With the inclusion of NewSpring’s twelve satellite churches, the network comprises the third largest mega church in the United States, with 31,000 weekly attendees, most of whom watch the Anderson sermon on a giant projector screen from their own campus. In 2015 a NewSpring bulletin reported a year’s tally of 11,130 salvations. Clemson University head football coach Dabo Swinney counts his children as among the thousands saved there.
On Fall Sundays Dabo’s NewSpring attendance marks his second church appearance in a given weekend, the first being before South Carolina’s bona fide largest congregation at Clemson Memorial Stadium in Death Valley. In the center of the basin Dabo stands on Saturdays below 80,000 fans. Millions more watch on TV.
In the South, team flags decorate houses, dogs have names like Colt and Peyton and Herschel, and boys are given footballs the size of their heads and taught to throw Hail Marys like their family’s favorite golden age quarterback. There is no moral dilemma football does not resolve, no life lesson it does not teach, and no ‘real world’ circumstance for which it does not prepare its players. Football is life — football is the world in microcosm. In the South, football is religion, fandom is faith, and God is fine too, as long as He watches football.
Writer Brian Phillips once described his internal crisis in covering sports: “Most of the time, I can convince myself that there’s value in this. Other times, I meet someone who actually cares whether the Cowboys win on Sunday . . . actually cares in the way you care whether your family is fed and the war is postponed till next week.”
On September 13th Dabo was asked in a press conference if he would punish his players for kneeling during the National Anthem, as pro quarterback Colin Kaepernick and others have been doing to protest police violence against unarmed black Americans. Dabo said no, he would not punish any of his players, but he does believe that “there’s a right way to do things,” — he does not agree with this sort of disruption of the game. There is a time and place for such political statements, and football offers neither. Dabo then launched into a ten minute-long press rant on Martin Luther King, Jesus, and the nature of good and evil which left me struggling to remember the original question.
When Dabo walked-on to the University of Alabama’s football team his mom moved into his college dorm room because their family could not afford a house. Out of a job early in his coaching career, he found work as a shopping center leasing agent for two years before miraculously landing another coaching gig. He has since climbed the ladder to the upper echelons of the college football pantheon. Stories like Dabo’s are heartwarming, and true, but tinged with the irony that their power is derived from their scarcity and improbability, and it is these things too which make them such useful anecdotes for pat theories of Southern empowerment.
In Dabo’s coaching tenure the press podium has felt little different from a pulpit. He comes from a long tradition of outspoken Christians in football, and with Dabo, as with many of his predecessors, it is impossible to tell where religion ends and football begins. The pregame prayer, Bible verses written across eye black, a finger pointed heavenward in the back of the end zone, all of these things we have come to expect. These, along with American flags, digital camouflage uniforms, and the ‘Star-Spangled Banner,’ are inextricably linked with football.
But little is said about the origins of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner” in sports, an act of pageantry and brilliant marketing during the 1918 World Series that served as a justification for the frivolity of sports in the midst of American involvement in World War I. Today, football has usurped baseball as America’s favorite pass time, and the patriotism of sports has become more commercial: New York Times Magazine critic Wesley Morris pointed to a report by Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake that “investigated the $6.8 million the Department of Defense had paid sports, mostly to pro football, for recruitment and promotional activities over a four-year period — including full-field displays of the American flag and surprise reunion events between service members and their families.”
Football is athletic spectacle built on religious and political foundations. It is a revenge sport with no gospel of forgiveness. One team strikes, the other strikes back; it is slam or be slammed, embarrass or be embarrassed. Dabo has said that “to be an overachiever you have to be an over believer.” Hints of a prosperity gospel aside, there is something frightening about a 200 pound linebacker moving his lips in silent prayer before the ball is snapped, an invocation of the Holy Spirit’s aid in leveling the quarterback on the other side of the line.
The Old Testament God who led the Israelites in bloody crusades seems to be the same one deciding the outcome of modern wars and football games. Football seemingly assumes life or death stakes that are only slightly raised by the reality that sometimes it actually is life or death. If football does provide a lens into our daily lives then it is hard to deny that it also encapsulates a greater tension in our country: the one between violence and forgiveness, entertainment and faith, hard work and hardship.
In Dabo’s case, football mirrors life because it has been his life. Football is sacred, and a disruption of the game is no less sacrilegious than a disruption of the next morning’s service. In the safety of his Clemson cathedral Dabo can proclaim the Christian gospel in the same breath as he denounces Kaepernick’s politicization of the game, and no one raises an eyebrow. We like to imagine that sports exist in a vacuum, distinct from politics and religion, and to introduce protest is to taint an otherwise pure microcosm of our world. But God and politics have always been there, red, white, blue, and waving in the breeze.
