My very first class of grad school was called “Being Human and Religious,” taught by Dr. Chip Callahan. It was a class of about 30 students - a mixture of senior religion majors and first year grad students like myself. Dr. Callahan opened the class by asking a simple question: What is religion?
This felt like a trap.
I had just graduated from a Southern Baptist university with a degree in religious studies. We all knew that religion is believing in God.
But still… this was definitely a trap.
After a minute or so of silence (that, I assure you, felt interminable), one brave sacrificial lamb raised her hand and said, “Uh… it’s… like… believing in God?”
The rest of us nodded assent. That’s what we’d all been thinking. Dr. Callahan wrote, “Belief in God” on the whiteboard, turned and nodded, a gracious smile on his face. “That’s good. Religion is believing in God.”
He paused a beat.
“Most strands of Buddhism are atheistic. So does Buddhism count as a religion?”
Uh oh. Here it was. Of course Buddhism was a religion. Wasn’t it? But if religion wasn’t necessarily believing in God, then what was it, exactly?
Three hours later, the white board was full of possible definitions of religion. Religion is ascribing to a set of beliefs. Religion is a set of rituals. Religion is marking certain times of the day, week, month or year as sacred. Religion is a gathering of community for a particular purpose. Religion is enacting a set of practices. And on and on.
Each time someone threw out an idea, Dr. Callahan wrote it on the board, offered some concrete examples of it, then problematized it.1 The final half hour of the class entailed a vigorous debate about the degree to which Super Bowl Sunday could be considered a religious holiday - with the majority of us realizing if it’s not a religious holiday in the US then what is?
The Super Bowl may be the last great American ritual. Forget Baseball and Apple Pie; we live in the age of the Pigskin and Chicken Wings. Of course the Super Bowl brings the glut of commercials with their attendant outrageous tithes costs. But private parties cost $86 per person on average, and more than 18 million people plan to call off work on Monday (to recover, presumably). That’s a lot - especially considering only 1 in 3 Americans actually watches the Super Bowl, but it’s still more than $6,800 cheaper than attending in person. But our football obsession goes far beyond the Super Bowl. Something like 30 million Americans play fantasy football, and with a median league buy-in of $50 is a $1.5 billion industry.
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