..."You can really see a lot of similarities between the attention paid to holy relics of the saints and spiritual heroes and the way Canadians, in particular, have treated their hockey heroes and the products they've created," said Denis Bekkering, a PhD candidate in the Wilfrid Laurier-University of Waterloo, Ont., joint program in religious studies.
He bases his theory on previous research suggesting Americans rally around the "unifying civic religion" of politics, including sacred places (Washington, D.C.), martyrs (Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy) and objects (the Liberty Bell).
Lacking this larger-than-life political mythology, Canada has built its collective religion around the rink, Bekkering says, and specifically around international competitions such as the Olympics, which turn a Team Canada jersey into a national talisman...
...Like any faith, the "national church" of hockey has its holy relics, or items believed to be imbued with the powers of the heroes connected to them, he said. From Paul Henderson's 1972 Summit Series jersey - which fetched $1.2 million at auction last summer - to the "Lucky Loonie" hidden beneath centre ice at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games, where the Canadian men's hockey team netted the country's first Olympic hockey gold medal in 50 years, Bekkering said these relics are revered just like those in traditional religions...
..."It's a way to connect the state and politics to something transcendent," Bekkering said of this religion on ice.
But lest anyone think this makes National Hockey League commissioner Gary Bettman the Pope, he said NHL hockey doesn't work the same way traditional religions do. Team Canada provides a raucous revival tent where all Canadians can worship during events such as the Olympics, but NHL devotees are otherwise divided by the "tribalism" of the different teams they support, he said.
"When you have the national Canadian men's hockey team, it allows hockey fans and Canadians in general, to go above any tribal allegiances they may have to particular teams," he said, noting that a star such as Crosby literally sheds his usual tribal markers and trades a Pittsburgh Penguins jersey for a Team Canada sweater in international competition.
And while Montreal Canadiens' fans will spend the Stanley Cup finals wishing a hex on the Boston Bruins for eliminating their team in the first round, Bekkering said the factionalism of NHL hockey as a religion means there's no guarantee Canadians will cheer for Vancouver simply because they're the only Canadian team in contention.
"Tribal allegiances may actually keep many Canadians from supporting the Canucks," he said.
Bekkering presented his research this week at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, hosted this year by the University of New Brunswick and St. Thomas University and expected to draw more than 6,000 delegates to Fredericton.
In Edmonton, home of the National Hockey League's Oilers, there is a debate going on as to whether the city needs a new arena and whether it should be built downtown ( in my opinion it shouldn't be built at all, especially downtown). The Oilers' owner, Darryl Katz, is a multibillionaire with no long-term commitment to the city (I have it on good authority that he's moving himself and his family to Victoria, British Columbia, hundreds of miles west of Edmonton), and someone who can well afford to build a new arena himself. Instead, he's trying to get federal, provincial, and local taxpayers--many of whom, including me, who can't afford to go to any events held at Rexall Place, the current facility--to pay for a new arena, to the profit of Mr. Katz. It's a matter of record that Mr. Katz has donated handsomely to the re-election of Mayor Stephen Mandel, and has been rewarded by having the mayor and many of the city councillors as his loyal puppets, while the voices of ordinary Edmontonians--none of whom, that I know, support this--count for nothing.
The corporate media have dutifully fallen in line in support of corporate interests. As evidence of the cult-like nature of hockey worship, check out the columns and blog posts of David Staples of the Edmonton Journal, especially those that deal with the arena issue. It's no coincidence that Mr. Staples' blog is titled The Cult of Hockey. Indeed, the mentality of Mr. Staples and those of his ilk are indeed those of the devotees of a cult--in this case, a cult that has a stranglehold on this city, if not the whole country. With these brainwashed people, the desires and interests of the cult take priority over everything else, and must be satisfied at all costs, including the extortion of financial contributions from non-members.
June 24, 2025 update: Oilerolatry is worse now than it was when I first posted on this subject. A block and a half away from me is a house whose front exterior is transformed into a shrine every year at playoff time; Oiler jersey numbers and names are painted on the right side of the fence, and large photos are displayed on the right side. A mock oil derrick is placed in the front yard, looking very much like a steeple.
As reported by Amelia Eqbal of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, June 11, 2025 (bold, links in original):
For the second year in a row, the Edmonton Oilers are facing off against the Florida Panthers in the Stanley Cup Finals — and the culture of the Oilers fanbase has reached a new kind of fever pitch.
Today on Commotion, CBC Edmonton reporter Min Dhariwal and professor Judith Ellen Brunton discuss how the intensity of Oilers fandom in Edmonton transcends mere hometown boosterism to resemble something more like a religion.
We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.
Elamin: Min, I'll start by maybe offering my condolences over game three. I hope things get a little bit better. But we're not here to talk about what is happening on the ice…. Give me a sense of the vibe, of what happens when the Oilers are in the finals.
Min: Yeah, well, after a game like game three, the vibe kind of gets knocked down a couple of notches. But I mean, this run has been as good if not better than last year's, and the city is just alive, right? It doesn't matter if you go into a store, you jump into a cab, the driver might be wearing an Oilers jersey, or might have a flag on the car. You go downtown, you see flags and Oilers paraphernalia in the windows, up in the towers. On game days, the downtown just becomes a zoo … and people are wearing their jerseys all day long. So it has certainly made spring and summertime in Edmonton the last couple of years very different from how it used to be for many, many years.
Elamin: Judith, the premise of this conversation is, it's not just that a city gets excited when their team is in the finals. It's that there is something different about this fandom. You're a professor of religious studies. Your particular area is Alberta and the way that religious ideology intertwines with the province's culture of oil, oil production, prosperity and also hockey. You recently wrote about this for The Conversation, about how the history kind of amplifies the intensity of this fandom. Can you unpack that idea of where this fandom maybe meets religion?
Judith: For sure. I mean, you said it: when there's something weird going on, that's a good moment for a scholar of religion to appear, so here I am. I think that whenever we talk about shared values or zeal, or identity or commitment, that's a good moment to think about religion, because one way to describe religion is just kind of a technology of shared values, or a way people organize their values together. And scholars of religion and sport, which include my co-author for that piece, Cody Musselman, have studied a lot about how team sports act really religionally…. They have lots of rituals. They have prayers and superstitions. Folks wear special clothing, they have certain ideas of how to preserve purity. So a lot of that is already going on with sports. And then of course we can add oil to this, because Oilers evoke another aspect of Canadian society that I think for some people has almost religious importance, which is resource extraction.
And in Canadian culture, oil has always been kind of entangled with religion — both religion as we would recognize it institutionally, but also kind of this idea that it's a blessing from God, or it's tied up in ideas of what a good life is and how to live it. So for lots of people in resource extraction communities like Alberta, the possibility of success and the good life that that promises really gets valued over and above other possible risks, including environmental. And the Edmonton Oilers showcase this worldview for sure, in which there's this idea of triumph and luck and rugged work pays off. This is a belief that functions on the ice and in the oil field. So luck is really central to both oil worldviews and hockey worldviews. Historically, this is essential for perseverance within fossil fuel extraction. Striking it rich in the oil fields is really entangled with the idea of divine providence. And sports, similarly, is thrilling, right? You can put all this work in, you can have all the great plans, you have all the right players, but it really takes luck to strike it rich. So oil culture is definitely, in the case of the Oilers, pairing this idea of divine favour with an insistence on rough-and-tumble endurance, which is definitely what's happening on the ice.
You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.
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