Author and priest Randall Balmer: ‘Sport has eclipsed religion as the US pastime’

Does the penalty box have religious connotations? Randall Balmer leans in that direction. A scholar of religion at Dartmouth College, he’s intrigued by the origins of the so-called sin bin.

Ice hockey emerged in late 19th-century Canada, influenced by the indigenous sport of lacrosse. As the game became popular among Catholics in Canada in the 1930s, it started to incorporate the penalty box, where players received a sort of absolution through separation. Balmer explores this connection in his new book, Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America, which was published late last year.

“It struck me as probably not a coincidence that the penalty box was introduced into hockey about the same time that Irish and French Canadians were beginning to play the game in large numbers,” Balmer says, noting, “I wish I had more direct evidence for this.”

He likens the penalty box to both a Catholic confessional, and to a colonial Puritan practice – the stocks used for public shaming on New England village greens. Balmer put plenty of research into the book as he delved into the connections between religion and sport.

“There are a lot of similarities between the two worlds,” he says. “Other people have talked about them, too – the kind of sense of liturgy, procession, sacred space, these sorts of things. I thought it was interesting and wanted to take it a little bit further – a kind of symbolic world behind all of these major team sports that shapes how we see them.”

The book represented a challenge for its author, who says he is more comfortable writing about his specialty of evangelical Christianity. Raised in an evangelical family, he is now an Episcopal priest who has penned multiple books about evangelicals. These