Super Bowl, Civil Religion and Our Dirty Little Secret

Last updated on: January 30, 2014 at 5:13 pm

January 30, 2014 by Guest Contributor

I suppose I can be accused of being biased on the Super Bowl. I live in Seattle. I’m rooting for the Seattle Seahawks to win the Super Bowl. So be it. I have, however, tried to think about this grand national pastime and wonder, on occasion, should I participate in it? Shouldn’t the violence, so typical of an NFL game, be a kind of rebuke to my enjoyment of this game? More to the point, why is an NFL football game so central, so absolutely necessary to so many Americans? What is the draw? Is this our national civil religion?

I think a lot about American religion, politics and culture. My coming book, now being written, is called High on God: How the Megachurch Conquered America. It will come out with Oxford University Press in 2015. I’m beginning see some real similarities between NFL football games and megachurches.

Here’s why. I use Randall Collins work on Interaction Ritual Chains to compare the two. Collins argues that human beings are Emotional Energy seekers. We are hungry for emotional experience, so every human activity involving social life and energy is always an interactive ritual chain. These chains are pretty simple. They involve feelings of belonging, a sense of co-presence, a moral feeling, membership symbols, and barriers to outsiders.

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