Sports Are the Last Public Ritual

Sixty Thousand People Feeling the Same Thing

When was the last time you were in a room with strangers and felt something together? Not performed feeling. Not performed outrage on social media or performed enthusiasm at a corporate event. Actually felt something, in your body, at the same moment as the people around you.

If you're like most Americans, the answer is probably a sporting event.

This should tell us something. Not about sports, but about everything else.

The Collective Effervescence Problem

Emile Durkheim, writing in 1912, coined the term collective effervescence to describe what happens when people gather and move and feel in unison. He was studying Aboriginal Australian ceremonies, but the concept applies universally. When human beings synchronize (chanting, singing, moving together), something happens neurologically and psychologically that can't be replicated alone. Individual identity temporarily dissolves into group identity. People report feelings of transcendence, belonging, meaning.

Durkheim argued this was the actual basis of religious experience. Not theology. Not doctrine. The physical act of gathering and synchronizing with others.

For most of human history, rituals providing this experience were abundant. Religious services. Harvest festivals. Civic ceremonies. Union meetings. Political rallies. Town dances. The calendar was thick with occasions for collective feeling.

Now look around. Church attendance in the US has dropped below 50% for the first time in Gallup's tracking history. Civic organizations are hollowed out. Union membership is at historic lows. Political gatherings have become polarized spectacles most people avoid. Town dances don't exist.

What's left? What large-scale gathering still produces genuine collective effervescence for millions of people on a regular basis?

Sports. Pretty much just sports.

More Than a Game

The standard intellectual posture toward sports fandom is mild contempt. Grown adults screaming about a ball. Tribal loyalties over laundry, as Jerry Seinfeld put it. A distraction from real problems. Bread and circuses.

This contempt is lazy and it's wrong.

Daniel Wann, a psychologist at Murray State University, has spent decades studying sports fandom through his Team Identification-Social Psychological Health Model. His findings are consistent: strong team identification correlates with lower rates of depression and loneliness, higher self-esteem, and greater feelings of social connectedness. These aren't small effects. For highly identified fans, their team provides a genuine source of belonging and meaning.

And it's not just passive consumption. Think about what a committed sports fan actually does. They learn the history and arcana of their team. They develop shared language and inside references with other fans. They participate in rituals: wearing specific clothing, sitting in specific seats, performing specific chants. They experience collective joy and collective grief. They belong to something that transcends their individual life.

Strip away the specific content and what you're describing is a religious community. Complete with sacred spaces (stadiums), holy days (game days), saints (legendary players), heresies (supporting a rival), and the central experience of losing yourself in something larger.

The Tailgate as Secular Communion

Consider the tailgate. People gather hours before the event in a parking lot. They cook food and share it, often with strangers. They drink together. They tell stories. They wear identifying markers. They build temporary community in an asphalt desert, then process together into the cathedral.

This is communion. It's a shared meal followed by a shared ritual experience. The theological content has been replaced by athletic content, but the social function is identical. You enter as an isolated individual and leave feeling connected to something.

And people do this voluntarily. Every weekend. Across the entire country. Without anyone telling them they should. Without guilt or obligation. They do it because it feels good, because it meets a need that nothing else in their life meets.

When was the last time church felt that alive? For most Americans, the honest answer is never, or not in decades. The churches that do still generate this energy (Pentecostal congregations, Black church traditions, megachurches with rock-concert production values) tend to be the ones growing. They figured out what Durkheim figured out a century ago: the feeling is the point.

The Dark Side Is Real

I'm not going to pretend this is all wholesome.

Sports fandom's shadow side is serious. The tribalism that produces belonging also produces hostility toward the outgroup. Soccer hooliganism. Fan violence. The ugly fusion of sports and nationalism that powered fascist spectacle and still shows up whenever international competition becomes a proxy for ethnic or national supremacy.

Corporate capture has hollowed out the communal aspect. Stadium naming rights. Luxury boxes that literally segregate fans by wealth. Ticket prices that exclude working-class people from the spaces they built their identities around. The Dallas Cowboys' AT&T Stadium has suites that cost $500,000 per season. That's not collective experience. That's a class barrier with a jumbotron.

And the parasocial dimension cuts both ways. Feeling connected to a team can supplement real relationships, but it can also substitute for them. A person whose entire social identity is mediated through a team they watch on television is still, fundamentally, sitting alone in their living room.

The sports-industrial complex has also become extraordinarily efficient at extracting money from the communal impulse. Publicly funded stadiums that enrich billionaire owners. Gambling apps designed to monetize every moment of engagement. Merchandise cycles engineered to make last year's jersey obsolete. The authentic need for belonging gets harvested for profit.

What We Lost

The point isn't that sports fandom is good or bad. The point is that its intensity reveals a vacuum.

If people had abundant sources of collective effervescence, if they regularly gathered with others in ways that produced transcendence and belonging, sports wouldn't carry the emotional weight it does. It would be entertainment. Enjoyable but not existentially important.

But for millions of people, game day is the only day they feel part of something. The stadium is the only place they lose themselves in a crowd. The team is the only institution they trust and love without reservation.

That's not a commentary on sports fans. That's an indictment of a society that offers so few alternatives.

We dismantled most of the institutions that used to provide collective experience. We didn't replace them with anything. And then we act surprised when people pour religious intensity into the few gathering rituals that remain.

The Question Nobody Asks

We spend enormous energy debating whether sports are good or bad for society. Whether athletes are role models. Whether fandom is healthy. Whether stadiums should get public funding.

The better question is: why is this the only thing left?

Why is a stadium the last place in American life where a hedge fund manager and a janitor sit next to each other and scream the same words at the same time? Why is Sunday football the only remaining weekly ritual for millions of households? Why do we mock people for caring about something that gives them exactly what every sociologist says humans need: regular, ritualized, collective emotional experience?

Sports aren't the problem. The absence of everything else is the problem.

We don't need fewer stadiums. We need more reasons to gather.