Sports a soul-saving activity> Bangor man’s forthcoming book shows how religion embraces games

BANGOR – The Puritans and Pilgrims who colonized America were not interested in sports – such frivolity did not honor God. But 400 years after the first Europeans sought religious freedom in North America, sports and religion have become entwined.

The way religion adopted sport as a soul-saving activity is the subject of a book being written by University of Maine history professor William J. Baker. Tentatively titled “Playing With God: Have Religious Folks Learned to Embrace Sport?” it will be published next year by the Free Press.

Baker, who lives in Bangor with his wife, State Rep. Christina Baker,made a splash on the publishing scene in 1986 when his biography of Jesse Owens was reviewed by the New York Times. Since, he has become an expert on the African-American athlete who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympic Games, and last year he appeared on an ESPN special on Owens.

Baker’s academic work has focused on the two most important aspects of his youth – religion and sports. He was all-city quarterback in high school and was a Southern Baptist youth evangelist who attended Furman University on a football scholarship.

“My working principle is that all literary scholarship, one way or another, is autobiographical,” Baker said. “You write out of your own wishes and your own dreams. This project has brought the two most important elements of my youth together.”

After earning a bachelor’s degree in history at Furman in Greenville, S.C., Baker earned a second undergraduate degree in divinity from Southeastern Seminary at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, N.C. Today, he attends Episcopal churches in Bangor and on Mount Desert Island.

Although the exact publication date of Baker’s “big book” on sports and religion has not yet been set, he got a chance to touch briefly on the subject on the eve of the Sydney Olympics last year when he delivered a series of lectures at the University of New South Wales. Those speeches have been gathered in what Baker affectionately calls “the little book,” titled “If Christ Came to the Olympics.”

” … in the beginning religions gave birth to competitive athletics,” he says in the chapter, “Gods and Games. Long before the birth of Christ, athletic contests originated to please the gods. “Victorious footraces, boxing bouts and chariot races supposedly insured good crops, healthy births and general good health. Archaeologists are still uncovering ancient athletic arenas and ball courts adjacent to the priests’ quarters.”

Baker explains how Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, “saw athletes as `new adepts,’ disciples of the new `muscular religion.’ He thought of spectators and coaches as `the laity of sport’; quixotically he viewed the International Olympic committee as ‘a college of disinterested priests. Olympic athletes, he insisted should be ‘imbued with a sense of the moral grandeur of the Games ….”‘

The first modern games were held in Athens on April 5, 1896. Because that day was Easter Sunday for both Eastern and Western Christians, the morning began with a Mass for the athletes in the metropolitan cathedral, Baker said. “In constructing the trappings of Olympic festivals, [Coubertin] turned to the rites and ceremonies of his Catholic tradition: purposeful processions, oaths, hymns, invocations, myths, sacred sites, statues, wreaths and crowns.”

In the United States, sport began to merge with religion in 1851 when the first Young Men’s Christian Association opened in Boston. Sport had been viewed by “religious folk as frivolous and worldly,” Baker said. “Organized sporting events often were associated with gambling and boisterousness. Because it was the only nonworkday, sporting events that took place on Sundays violated the Sabbath.”

Some denominations like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints embraced sports. Mormons built churches with gyms and organized basketball and baseball leagues that played throughout Utah. The success of the Notre Dame University football team in the 1920s led Catholics to embrace sports, and cities with large Catholic populations had their own school leagues.

“Sports changed and cleaned up its act by imposing rules and a code of behavior,” said Baker, “about the time religion became more liberal. The conservatives warned that if we build gyms, they will take over the Gospel, and to a certain extent, they were right. … Modern sport is a spectacle and spectacle is by its nature ritualistic.

” … religion and sport interlock because of several common characteristics. The evangelical mind-set is particularly akin to athleticism,” Baker explained. Structurally, evangelical religious and athletic interests mirror each other, one finding reinforcement in the other. For one thing, they share a simple clear-cut vision in reality.

“For the born-again Christian, one either believes in Christ or rejects Christ; people are either `saved’ or ‘lost,’ bound for heaven or doomed to hell, they are either winners or losers. `It is a dramatic, stark, even simple faith,’ says historian Martin Marty. `There is little toleration for ambiguity, just like in sports. You win or you lose … “‘

Finally, Baker concluded in “If Christ Came to the Olympics,” both religion and sports are dependent on an intangible thing called faith.

“Sport turned to religion for time-honored rituals and mythologies, religious faith draws upon the metaphorical richness of athleticism. Inspiration flows from the one to the other and back again … faith, hope and charity are the virtues that make a difference, insisted the early Christians. … Sport as well as religion depends on faith from start to finish.”