Bodies in Motion is a wide-ranging work of history and religious studies that describes how people have made religious meanings out of sports. Arthur Remillard wants to show “how people care about sports,” not why, and does so by “shining a bright light on the very intentional decisions people have made about what matters most to them” (191). Remillard, to be clear, is not arguing, as both academics and lay people have, that sports are a religion or that sports have replaced religion. Nor is he tracing how religious people and organizations interacted with sports, as Paul Putz recently did in The Spirit of the Game (Oxford, 2025). Nor is Remillard concerned with sports’ intersections with doctrinal and theological developments, as William Baker did in Playing with God (Harvard, 2007). Instead, Remillard is explaining how people interpret and make sense of bodies in motion—people playing sports—using religious language and ideas. In his approach, Remillard is resisting a distinction between the sacred and the secular.
Remillard uses secondary sources and primary sources like newspapers, books, magazines, and advertisements to craft his narrative. Therefore, while the book is at times synthetic, it also offers new interpretations. Only rarely does he use sources from religious groups that used sports to evangelize or to serve other explicitly religious ends. This decision makes muscular Christianity, a key aspect of the history of sports in America, recede more into the background.
The book begins with contact between Indigenous people and colonizers and continues to the present. Remillard highlights three intersecting themes: the creation of heroes whom their interpreters venerate, debates over the morality of the passions that playing and watching sports arouse, and how people have interpreted sports to create community, complete with both in-groups and out-groups.
First, the making of heroes. The social location of an interpreter shaped whether they ascribed hero-status to an athlete, and part of the strength of Remillard’s account is the transatlantic nature of his sources. For instance, African Americans often saw black boxers as heroes, celebrating the turn of the nineteenth-century Tom Molineaux and early twentieth-century heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, who Booker T. Washington called a “godsend” for showing the fallacies of white superiority (93). For many white Americans, though, sports reinforced racial categories, and they searched for a Great White Hope to beat Jack Johnson in the sport that, perhaps more than most, white people saw as the paragon of white supremacy. But white sports writers in England saw black boxers as heroes, celebrating them as gentlemen who resisted an “America where the White majority refused to acknowledge the full humanity of these athletes” (37).
Most hero-makers were those whose livelihoods depended on sports. Remillard describes how sportswriters in the 1920s used dramatic language to make mundane acts larger than life, ascribing names like “the Bambino” to baseball great Babe Ruth and “Black Moses” to the boxer Joe Louis. Sports reporters scorned some athletic pursuits, such as professional wrestling. But even so, athletes used names to create myths about themselves for their own profit, like Big Chief (Osley Bird Saunooke, Cherokee), a prominent wrestler in the 1930s and 1940s.
With the rise of digital technology, corporations were able to turn heroes into icons, “dynamic images that shape and are shaped by the community that creates them” (172). Remillard discusses Nike in particular, with its trifecta of Michael Jordan, O.J. Simpson, and Tiger Woods. When Tiger, for instance, fell from grace off the golf course, Nike stood by him and recreated an image of him as the overcoming hero.
Second, the disputes over the morality of sports. A perennial theme in United States sports history is a debate whether sports are “a positive moral force,” or if they have a dangerous “power [to] incite the passions that lead us into dark and unproductive places” (191). Remillard shows how that debate has been shaped by class (does gander pulling reveal the bestiality of the lower classes? asked upper class people), regional identity (does gander pulling reveal Southern degeneracy? asked northerners), race, and gender.
Women’s relationship with sports is a key theme related to morality. The corollary to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century muscular Christianity may have been the “new woman,” who was healthy and competitive, pushing against Victorian ideals of womanhood but maintaining a distinction from masculinity. They rode bicycles, swam, played tennis, and celebrated their beauty, but they also played sports by their own rules (think of Senda Berensen’s revisions of James Naismith’s rules for basketball to make it appropriate for women and girls). For them, sports “were a means not only for fitness but for bodily conversion” (104). But for many observers, women’s participation in sports—at least in particular sports or in particular ways—was immoral. Sports writers made Mildred “Babe” Didrickson, one of the best athletes of all time, into a hero but also stoked fears that athletic girls would become “muscle molls,” women who were ugly, ungraceful, and for whom others should feel ashamed.
Third, creating community. People interpreted sports to create a sense of “us” in various ways, from the sense of being caught up in something larger than oneself, to national identity on international stages like the Olympics, to the identification of pioneers who have made the United States live up to its national myth of increasing inclusion of women and minorities in American society. These pioneers range from well-known people like baseball players Jackie Robinson (who (re) integrated Major League Baseball) and Hank Greenberg (who endured slurs about his Jewish identity), to lesser known ones like Catherine Menne (who helped make bowling acceptable for women), Betty Hicks (who helped integrate bowling), black track athletes Tidye Pickett and Louise Stokes, and Roberta “Bobbi” Gibb (who was the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon in 1966 and received the designation of pioneer retroactively).
All three themes are central to understanding larger arcs in US history, and Remillard’s engaging treatment of them through a variety of sports makes this book useful for classes not only on sports history or religious history, but also as a supplement in a US history class.
