Tag Archives: identity

Sociologist ties rooting for the Kansas City Royals to Midwestern values

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The Kansas City Royals have a rich history including a 1985 World Series victory. However, the last two decades have been difficult: the team has had three winning seasons since 1990, no playoff visits during that time, and seven straight losing seasons. So why do fans keep rooting for the team? A sociologist suggests that rooting for the Royals is tied to Midwestern values:

Yet the Royals likely will sell out Kauffman Stadium on opening day, draw more than 2 million fans and continue to have a loyal following on the blogosphere.

“Loyalty in the face of hard times is a long-held Midwestern value, and dealing with hard times is a regular challenge for anyone whose livelihoods depend on agriculture and related businesses,” said Jay Coakley, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. “However, we must go deeper than this value to explain the loyalty of Royals fans over the past decade.”…

“The fans’ connection with a team becomes a part of their identity,” said Coakley, the author of the textbook “Sports in Society.”

“Fans everywhere reaffirm those identities for each other so that they feel special — and they often make a special point of doing this when teams are unsuccessful and they need extra reaffirmation to justify their support in the face of regular losses. Over time, this pattern of identity reaffirmation becomes regularized, and the fan identity serves as an important basis for their sense of self as well as their social lives and everyday conversations with fans and nonfans alike.

“Losses and losing seasons become topics of conversations much like the last hailstorm or dry season that ruined crops. Of course, some people eventually become weary of predictable bad times and leave their farms or fan identities behind.

“But many stick it out year after year because it is who they are, and giving up on yourself is a hard thing to do.”

Coakley is suggesting that an rooting interest in a sports team becomes internalized and the basis for a kind of community. Fans identify with the team and the city (see this recent post on the differences between the Oakland A’s and the San Francisco Giants). I wonder if we could look at the times that fans use the term “we” to refer both to themselves and the team to get an idea of how much these identities have merged.

But it is particularly interesting that Coakley ties fan’s devotion to the Royals to Midwestern values derived from farming and agriculture. Would a sociologist in Boston come up with a different cultural explanation for why Red Sox fans are so devoted? This seems like a fairly convenient explanation that might not hold up in other places.

Baylor opens 25% of board to non-Baptist Christians

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American Christian colleges and universities have different structures in place in order to maintain their Christian distinctiveness. Baylor just made a change in their policy for their board:

While a number of Baptist colleges and universities in recent years have loosened or ended ties to state Baptist conventions, the move by Baylor is notable because it is widely considered the flagship university of Southern Baptists. The move came despite opposition from the Baptist General Convention of Texas, which last year voted down a similar proposal by Houston Baptist University to permit the election of a minority of non-Baptist trustees there, with church leaders arguing at the time that allowing non-Baptist trustees would dilute the university’s religious identity…

Of Baylor’s 14,900 students, the university states that nearly 5,287 identify as Baptists — making them the largest religious group, but by no means a majority. The next largest groups are Roman Catholic (2,128), nondenominational Christians (2,091), and Methodists (1,156). Most of the other students identify with various Christian denominations, but the college also enrolls 125 Hindu students, 122 Muslim students, 84 Buddhist students, 22 Jewish students and 43 atheists.

Samuel Schuman, who studied Baylor for his 2009 book, Seeing the Light: Religious Colleges in 21st Century America (Johns Hopkins University Press), called the vote by the university’s board both “significant and inevitable.” He explained that “there has been tension for quite a while at Baylor about aspirations to be a national research university and their strict Southern Baptist tradition, and I think it was almost inevitable that something would have to give a bit.”

If we can take Schuman at his word, then this sounds like a common struggle for Christian schools: maintaining distinctiveness while also pursuing education and status. Baylor is not the only school to struggle with this; the University of Notre Dame is an example of a Catholic institution that a decision decades ago to become a major research school while also maintaining its Catholic identity. Juggling these two identities, research school plus Christian school, takes a lot of work on the ground on a campus.