In 1929, a Kansas preacher named Charles Sheldon had to get something off his chest.
Best known as the author of In His Steps (1896)—a novel that encouraged Christians to ask, “What would Jesus do?”—Sheldon reflected on a recent experience during a stormy winter night in Topeka. Most of the town was shut down that evening. But there was one exception: the local college’s basketball arena. There, the scheduled game took place, and fans packed the gymnasium to the rafters.
“I couldn’t help wondering,” Sheldon mused in an article for Christian Herald, “how many church members would be in the fifty different churches at a prayer meeting on a night like that, and paying a dollar apiece for the privilege of going.”
Sheldon’s question was less a rallying cry for change than a sigh of resignation. This was simply the way it was. Sure, plenty of Americans still attended their local congregations on Sundays. But given a choice, Americans were more interested in the thrill and excitement of sporting spectacles than the weekly activities of church life.
Historian Frank Guridy makes no mention of Sheldon in his remarkable new book, The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play. Still, he fills in the contours of the new reality that Sheldon seemed to recognize: In the 20th century, sporting spaces were increasingly central to Americans’ shared life together, emerging as sanctuaries where people could form bonds of community, express their identities, and experience something close to the feeling of transcendence.
They were, in other words, the sort of places where people would brave blizzard conditions on a wintry December night, just to enter the door and be witnesses.
‘Palaces of pleasure’ and ‘arenas of protest’
A professor of history at Columbia University and director of the Eric H. Holder Jr. Initiative for Civil and Political Rights, Guridy did not begin his career as a sports historian. His first book, the award-winning Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (2010), established him as a leading scholar of the Black Freedom Movement in the United States and the Caribbean.
With his second book, he turned his attention to sports, producing The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (2021). His background and expertise gave him a vantage point to see and understand sports as a cultural phenomenon, with an eye toward the broader social and political meanings bound up in the games we play.
In The Stadium, Guridy continues this line of inquiry, weaving sports history with economics and politics, culture and geography, race and class, gender and sexuality. “Stadiums,” he writes, “make possible the spectacular staging of a society’s ideologies and self-perceptions.”
Guridy sweeps through American history as he explores those “ideologies and self-perceptions” from the late 19th century to the present. Throughout, he emphasizes a core tension at the heart of the stadium’s presence in American culture. “Elites have constructed stadiums as monuments to affluence, technological wonder, and exclusivity,” he writes. “Yet, America’s marginalized groups have transformed them into venues to express their desires and discontents, and to proclaim a more inclusive vision of American society.”
While Guridy’s narrative is soaring in scope, he also shows a careful eye for granular detail. He describes the physical landscape and the shifting architecture, aesthetics, and design of stadiums. He explores the human experience of the stadium too, including the sights, sounds, and smells that Americans would have encountered when they clicked through the turnstiles. And he identifies particular places in specific cities as anchor points for his narrative—symbols of the broader themes he tries to illustrate.
He begins with New York City, where he describes the evolution of stadiums and arenas from temporary wooden structures to permanent buildings like Madison Square Garden, made of concrete and steel and designed for mass spectacles. Although often created to be “palaces of pleasure” owned by the rich and wealthy, by the 1920s these sites drew fans across classes and from immigrant populations, serving as “arenas of protest” where people could articulate competing visions of American identity.
From there he moves to New Orleans, where Tulane Stadium, host of college football’s Sugar Bowl from the 1930s to the 1970s, served as a “monument to white supremacy.” Guridy shows how the annual Sugar Bowl spectacle helped to project and protect the South’s system of segregation and racial hierarchy until the civil rights activism of the 1960s finally brought it down.
Next, Guridy goes west to California, focusing on Los Angeles Coliseum. Guridy’s attention turns to the ways stadiums helped to nurture Black identity and expression, with African Americans helping to “make the stadium into a semipublic square where they could voice their aspirations for justice and equality.” The chapter culminates with a vivid description of the Wattstax concert held at Los Angeles Coliseum in 1972—an “unapologetic expression of black politics and black pleasure.”
Guridy’s chapter on Los Angeles marks a turning point in his narrative. While the first two chapters tend to highlight exclusion and hierarchy, chapters 3 through 6 generally portray mid-century stadiums as more democratic spaces that promoted greater inclusion. To Guridy, this change occurred, in part, because of a gradual shift in stadium and arena ownership from private to public hands. As a result, he argues, stadiums became more responsive to the demands of activists and people on the margins seeking to claim a place of belonging.
Of course, the stadium remained contested terrain for competing visions of society. Inclusion for some did not necessarily translate to inclusion for others. Guridy emphasizes this point in a chapter on Washington, DC, where the construction of DC Stadium in the 1960s—publicly financed and governed—cultivated a more diverse fanbase while also forcing Washington Redskins owner George Marshall to end his practice of segregation. Yet, as Guridy shows, this did not eliminate the team’s use of racist Native American stereotypes and tropes in its name, mascot, and rituals.
Even while giving attention to these ongoing examples of exclusion, Guridy still sees the mid-century stadium as a place of surprising democratic possibility, including for gender and sexuality. One particularly fascinating chapter explores the “gendered geography” of the stadium, with a focus on the locker room and press box as sites of male dominance. Guridy traces and analyzes the efforts of female sportswriters to claim a space within the stadium for carrying out their work and having a voice in the story of sports in America.
He also spends a chapter on LGBTQ inclusion, using the Gay Games, held in San Francisco in 1982 and 1986, to highlight the efforts of gay and lesbian communities to make their presence felt and voice heard in American society.
The good vibes of the mid-century stadium, in Guridy’s telling, did not last. With chapter 7, his narrative takes another turn, with stadiums transformed from an “institution that largely accommodated America’s marginalized peoples between the 1960s and the 1980s” into a “corporate temple of exclusion.”
Guridy sees Oriole Park at Camden Yards, completed in 1992 as the home for the Baltimore Orioles, as emblematic of the new era. Unlike multipurpose stadiums designed for both baseball and football and managed by the public, the ballpark at Camden was designed for a single sport and placed in Baltimore’s downtown area. It was supposed to have a “retro” look and feel, evoking feelings of nostalgia while helping to revitalize neighborhoods and communities near the stadium.
Instead, the new craze for stadiums patterned after Oriole Park led to greater social stratification and further gentrified inner-city neighborhoods. The best seats and luxury experiences were set aside for corporate partners and affluent fans, who could drive in from wealthy enclaves, while working-class people who lived near the stadium were priced out of actually enjoying the game day experience.
“Commerce and consumption,” Guridy laments, “displaced the stadium’s historic role as a venue of public recreation and civic engagement.”
An additional final chapter highlights another worry for Guridy: the rise of militarized patriotism at the ballpark. Guridy charts the response after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when the stadium quickly moved from serving as a space for collective mourning to hosting a proliferation of patriotic rituals (some paid for by the US government) that glorified the military and law enforcement. As part of this trend, the national anthem became more entrenched as an essential part of the spectacle and experience of sporting events.
Yet Guridy notes that the potential for contested meanings remained. Protests for racial justice during the national anthem, represented most dramatically by NFL player Colin Kaepernick, challenged the enforced conformity expected during the patriotic stadium rituals. Guridy sees the rise of athlete-activists like Kaepernick, as well as the use of stadiums as voting sites in 2020, as signs that the “historic civic function” of the stadium is still in play today.
A surprising omission
As a work of history, Guridy’s book is truly impressive. The breadth and depth of his research and analysis shines through, and his writing is compelling—and also full of surprises shaped by his curiosity. Guridy writes not as a detached academic, but as a sports fan too, someone who truly understands the religious-like allure of the stadium. He gives his attention not just to splashy moments and events but also to small, behind-the-scenes details, like the history of the ballpark organist. In this book, the stadium comes alive, sparkling with fascinating details and soaring ideas about its meaning and significance in American life and culture.
At the same time, readers of Christianity Today will rightly wonder where they fit in the story Guridy tells. For as much care as he takes looking at the meaning of the stadium from a variety of angles, his narrative can at times fit too easily into a simple binary: Those on the side of progressive politics are the good guys, and those with conservative politics are the bad guys.
The biggest gap, however, is the lack of attention to religion. Other than scattered references here and there to religious figures (like Jesse Jackson) or movements (like the Christian Right), there is no sustained analysis about how religious groups have made use of the stadium.
This strikes me as a surprising omission, given how central religion has been as a source of identity for Americans and how important the stadium has been to religious movements and groups throughout American history—including Catholics, Jews, Latter-day Saints, and, yes, evangelical Protestants.
For evangelicals, the stadium is an especially important place. For Charles Sheldon, it may have been a competitor for time and attention. But from Billy Sunday to Billy Graham, it has also served as a site for revival, where Americans have been urged to receive new life in Christ—not just for their sake, evangelists have claimed, but for the sake of the nation itself.
It has also provided a backdrop to prove the cultural relevance of the evangelical faith. The spread of stadium revivals across the United States in the 1940s and 1950s—often featuring sports stars offering their testimonials—helped to “mainstream” a movement that saw itself on the margins of cultural respectability. In the decades since, stadiums have helped to nurture and cultivate an evangelical movement within sports that has turned the playing field into one of the most evangelical-friendly spaces in American popular culture today.
Stadiums have also been a space where evangelicals have sought to promote particular visions of gender and race. In the 1990s, the Promise Keepers movement, founded by a football coach, swept through stadiums across the country, urging men to embrace leadership roles in their homes while also encouraging racial reconciliation.
No doubt Guridy encountered examples like this throughout his research, and every author has to leave important themes on the cutting room floor. But it’s precisely because of Guridy’s skill as a historian that I would have loved to see him explore the religious side of the stadium experience in more depth.
Even so, The Stadium remains an essential read and a book of lasting importance for anyone interested in exploring the deeper social meanings of American sports. Guridy shows with clarity and insight that stadiums are “inextricable parts of American social, political, and cultural life”—and that they will continue to mirror and reflect the debates, tensions, and developments in American society in the years ahead.
Paul Putz is director of Truett Seminary’s Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor University. He is the author of The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports.
The post Take Me Out to Something Bigger Than a Ballgame appeared first on Christianity Today.
