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By Bobby Ross Jr. | Religion Unplugged
Easter. Christmas. Super Bowl Sunday.
These are all sacred holidays, right?
Even before Taylor Swift got involved.
Strictly speaking, this weekend’s big game qualifies as a secular phenomenon, not a holy one.
But for the most fervent of the football faithful, the Super Bowl — which last year drew a record 123.7 million U.S. viewers — brings rituals and traditions with a quasi-religious feel.
“Lots of scholars have written about the way that sporting spectacles are like a religion,” said Paul Emory Putz, director of Baylor University’s Faith & Sports Institute. “The Super Bowl certainly brings this out.”
On the other hand, the devotion to the Super Bowl — especially on a day once reserved for rest and worship — alarms at least one Christian scholar.
“What’s curious to me is that many of the things that have been unpalatable to historic Christianity, in various forms, become sort of cleansed of inequity if they’re put in the Super Bowl,” said Matthew Vos, a sociology professor at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia.
This column appears in the online magazine Religion Unplugged.
Shutterstock photo
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