TORONTO (RNS) May the puck be with you. And also with you.
Hockey as religion? Many Canadians wouldn’t argue that their hard-core fandom borders on religious fervor. Even when they don’t bring home the holy grail of the Stanley Cup, storied teams like the Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens still attract the faithful.
Likening Canada’s national winter sport to a kind of religious faith isn’t as obscure as it might sound, even in academia. Thirty years ago, Tom Faulkner, a professor of church and society at the University of Winnipeg, argued in a widely published essay that Canadians are drawn to hockey because it offers many of the aspects that make religion attractive: a sense of community, belonging and common purpose.
Last January, the University of Montreal inaugurated a 16-week course specifically devoted to examining the link between hockey and religion. Like religion, hockey binds people together and can “affirm that we are Canadian and we can be proud to be Canadian,” said Olivier Bauer, a theology professor who taught the course.
The latest entry in the field finds that a specific ceremony in hockey and other sports — retiring a player’s number and raising it to a stadium’s rafters — resembles a religious ritual.
For Rose Tekel, the similarities were just too stark to ignore. The religious studies professor at Nova Scotia’s St. Francis Xavier University says hockey rituals, such as the retirement of a player’s jersey, are rooted in religious traditions and practices.
Tekel, with her husband, Matthew Robillard, recently presented a paper on the subject at the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences held in Ottawa.
The duo examined one specific ritual in Canadian hockey: The retirement of the number (29) and the raising of the jersey of Ken Dryden, a legendary goalkeeper for the Montreal Canadiens from 1971 to 1978 and winner of six Stanley Cups.
Watching the retirement of Dryden’s jersey in 2007, Tekel remarked, “We thought this looks like a religious experience, (and) the Bell Centre (in Montreal) has become a kind of cathedral.”
The argument the academics wanted to make is that hockey “has its roots in webs of meanings grounded in various religious traditions and practices. Therefore, hockey can be seen as a popular Canadian religion, embodying the post-modern shift to globalization and the ensuing dialogue among religions.”
The game can be seen “as part of the wide terrain of religious experiences,” Tekel told the Toronto Star. “Many people are moving away from institutionalized religion and into `marginalized religion.’ What they’re saying is that they want in some way to be connected with something beyond themselves, but they don’t want … organized religion.”
