In many ways, religion is like sports. For example, people almost always become fans of a team not through a rational comparison of its merits compared to those of other teams, but through cultural factors such as what region of the country they live in or what teams their family and friends follow. Similarly, most people acquire their religious preferences through cultural indoctrination and circumstantial factors, such as which religion is dominant in the area of the world where they were born. Religion, like sports, is big business. Both make hundreds of millions of dollars in profit each year, whether from ticket sales and corporate sponsorship or from tithes and pledge drives. Both do a thriving trade in holy relics, be they home-run balls or a saint’s bones; there are frequent legislative proposals to levy taxes on the public for the support of each; and both bestow tremendous, almost unimaginable wealth and luxury on their most prominent and famous figures.

The opulent and lavish lifestyles enjoyed by the most famous professional athletes can hardly be matched unless one turns to the extravagance enjoyed by the world’s most famous preachers. Religion, like sports, feeds people’s apparent need to belong, to be part of a group. There seems to be a strong tendency in human psychology to define oneself by one’s allegiances, to create ways to clearly label and categorize and separate oneself and one’s group from the rest of the world. Both religion and sports provide convenient ways to do this. Of course, the one difference, in this case, is that relatively few people are so devoted to sports as to define their entire identity in terms of their favorite team, whereas this is relatively common in religion. 

And finally, as a testament to the seriousness in which they are both taken, both religion and sports lead to violence on occasion. Usually, with sports, this takes the form of overexcited fans rioting when their team wins or brawls between fans or players of competing teams. But unlike religion, the violence rarely gets serious. Fans of competing sports teams do not go on jihads or launch inquisitions against each other, nor do they issue edicts declaring that supporting other teams is a grave crime, and it is unheard of for a sports fan to sneak into an opposing team’s stadium to blow himself up in a suicidal act of terrorism.