SPORTS AND RELIGION. Throughout human history, sports and religion have been closely linked. Like religion, sports convey important lessons about values and culturally appropriate behavior. The lessons they teach are similar, and both religion and sports use symbols as their primary means of communication. In most of the contemporary world, however, religion and sports occupy separate but complementary conceptual realms. Religion focuses on the idea that, as one anthropologist put it, "there is something more to the world than meets the eye" (Bowen, p. 4). In religion, that "something" is the domain of the divine or of spirit beings; in sport, that "something" is the triumph of the human spirit.

Scholars from a variety of disciplines typically describe religion as operating in the realm of the sacred and as addressing the relationship of human beings to the supernatural or the transcendent. In modern terms, sport...