Gimme That Old-Time Religion

Cheers to Ali Baba for pointing out a fabulous article in the Globe. By a member of the "Ideas" staff, it articulates what the "Sports" staff has been trying to say for years.

Although many of the sociologists who have studied the relation between sport and religion tend to agree that baseball may not be an actual religion, some scholars of religion have argued that the game has enough of the attributes of a religious faith that it can be viewed, at the very least, as a kind of surrogate for religion... Actually, the combination of eternal hope and resigned acceptance has more than a whiff of Calvinism: Supporting the Sox means embracing suffering as the primary fact of life and accepting the team as not among the elect, predestined to fail and therefore forever denied entrance to Heaven... As the years pass, rooting for the Red Sox increasingly embodies faith in a literal way. As 1918 recedes further into the past, there are fewer and fewer people alive who have seen the World Champion Boston Red Sox. For the vast majority of us, believing the Sox can win the World Series requires believing in something that we have never seen -- just as faith in God requires a belief in the unseen... But endlessly deferred redemption provides, paradoxically enough, its own kind of reward. It tests our faith and marks us as spiritually stronger than other fans for whom entrance into heaven is a far cheaper thing.

Being part of Red Sox Nation is like a modern incarnation of Massachusetts Puritanism. We believe in absolute good and evil. We have witch hunts when horrible failure dooms yet another Red Sox season. Grady Little? Burn him! He's a witch! We despise Florida and Arizona for winning it all so quickly; they do not, cannot, could never have a true appreciation for the meaning of that title. We, however, see its value grow year by year as we await the consummation of our hope, and we believe, no less firm than the most godly Puritan, that our hope shall not indeed disappoint us but yet the sun shall rise anew on a New Boston, redeemed from the Curse as much as the New Jerusalem is redeemed from the Fall.