ABSTRACT
African American religious, social, and sports rituals are all interconnected. The Black Church has served as the institutional conduit and transfer point of cultural ways of singing, shouting, preaching, and testifying, and the phrase “make a joyful noise unto the Lord” has been taken quite literally by many black congregations over the centuries. Given the importance of the Black Church to the black community from slavery through the Civil Rights Movement, it should be no surprise to find that African Americans rework religious ritual into cultural ways of ritualizing in everyday society. Desegregated sport, especially since the Civil Rights Movement, has allowed African Americans like current National Basketball Association (NBA) star LeBron James to succeed at the game while they have embodied the AfricanAmerican dream of the freedom of cultural expression. My primary focus in this chapter is on African American behavior pat-
terns and social rituals with deep roots in the Black Church. As such, the bulk of my argument will be to show how ministers, congregants, and choirs forged unique modes of expression in the Black Church that spread into surrounding communities. I elaborate on how “ordinary rituals in everyday behavior” forged in and around urban and rural black churches serve as the framework that informs contemporary athletes, such as James, who ritualize in sport. The new churches of African American expressivity are stadiums and arenas all over America. I will focus on three rituals that flow from everyday life and black religious life into both professional basketball and football-the ring/circle ritual, the call-and-response ritual, and the
individual creative expressivity ritual-in the context of research highlighting nascent ritualizing and creative ritualizing. Though both men and women create and continually rework black
expressive rituals in churches and neighborhoods across America, the bodies most prevalent in popular sport are African American males, and as such they are the focus of this chapter.1 For the sake of space, I will limit my analysis to four examples of these types of expressive ritual that have made their way into popular culture via sport: pre-game circular rituals designed to both harmonize and “fire-up” teams before play begins; LeBron James’s ritual powder-toss; slam-dunking as ritual in basketball; and end-zone dancing as professional football call-and-response ritual.2
