It Makes a Difference to the Sheep

FOOTBALL: THE NEW RELIGION? I made the off-hand comment in one of my classes that scholar of the distant future might look back at 20th and 21st century America and assume that a football-based religion was in operation (look at what people did on their Sunday's, how many gathered to worship at designated shrines, how many more worshipped via tv, how many adopted football symbols in what they wore, what they drove, even what they were buried in).

Now some argue that I wasn't so far from the truth:

The 38th Super Bowl is over and the Carolina Panthers should have followed Justin Timberlake's lead and settled for one extra point. As hard as it might be for someone who marked the occasion by punching a hole in his drywall to admit it, winning is actually a small part of the Super Bowl. The event has moved beyond status as a mere American secular holiday and firmly into pagan festival mode. It is both flexible and finite, able to fit into many lives on many different levels.

...

So the pagan festival rolls on with its libations, ritual battles, and damsels in distress. It is somehow fitting that a country so young has raided the classics for it own unique expression of a winter festival, an Up Helly Aa celebration without the burning Viking ship.

Like it or not, American civilization is reflected in the Super Bowl, everything always bigger and louder and better than the year before. It is a bizarre, pointless promise that we buy every year because the hope and optimism that is infused in American culture demands it.

Who knew?