Tenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the question: what does it mean to be an evangelical Christian soccer player? This paper addresses the relationship between community formation and soccer at an evangelical Christian church, North Shore Alliance, in North Vancouver, Canada. Drawing from four months of fieldwork in the summer of 2017, the paper addresses the social forms and relationships that can be produced, and renegotiated through North Shore Alliance’s soccer team’s participation in the British Columbia Christian Soccer League. Drawing from geographer Ben Anderson’s idea of “affective atmospheres” (Anderson 2009), it is the emergence of a particular “affective atmosphere” of intensity and authenticity during the games that allow the possibility of soccer to be a medium to generate a form of evangelical community, composed primarily of men, centering on bonds of mutual care. The atmospheric intensity of the soccer games produces conditions in which the players’ actions can reveal the state of their “heart” and in turn, reveal their alignment with the Holy Spirit. In turn, these projected evangelical communities of mutual care fulfill the Christian conception of creation as rooted in the idea of the collective Body of Christ so as to counteract the fracture, individualism and self-glorification that the church associates with Western secularism. In this way, the paper engages with the projections and mediations of a particular evangelical Christian vision of community as mediated through soccer. This paper allows a discussion on the possibilities of the continued historical entanglements between sport and Christianity.