Sporting the Sacred: Redescribing the Study of Religion in the Sociology of Sport

Nearly 50 years ago, Harry Edwards included “religiosity” as a category in his explication of “the sports creed.” Edwards recognized then that the cultural constellation of discourses and practices commonly labeled “sacred religion” was a “conspicuous element” of the social institution of sport. Reflecting on the failure of sport sociological discourse on religion/sport to acknowledge Edwards’ critical work, I show that beyond topical lacuna, the way that the sport/religion discourse has been constructed reifies these twinned sui generis categories as decidedly uncritical objects of study. The results are approaches to studying religion/sport that, while “tired” and “weary” continue to traffic in liberal modern political taxonomies. “Religion” thus described lacks analytic precision as a scholarly category while additionally abrogating the extent to which, as a scholarly taxonomy, it exists in relation to colonial epistemologies and structures and racial formations.