Theology at the Olympics: St Louis 1904 and London 2012

Abstract

This paper contrasts the London Olympics of 2012 with the St Louis Games of 1904 in the context of their cultural and historical context, especially the World’s Fair (the Louisiana Purchase Exposition). What I suggest is that the 1904 World’s Fair, with its supporting academic congress at which Adolf von Harnack and Ernst Troeltsch lectured, played a modest part in the early phases of the deabsolutization of western culture, together with the Christianity upon which it was constructed. Despite the widespread patronizing and racialist attitudes in St Louis, the sheer variety and breadth of cultures seen by millions demonstrated a cultural relativism that was emerging as a serious approach to anthropology and other branches of knowledge, including theology. The fruits of such a deabsolutization can perhaps be glimpsed in the gradual transformation of the absolutes of western religion through the twentieth century into the new universals of nationhood and sport, both of which clearly coalesce in the contemporary version of the Olympic Games. I conclude by suggesting that sport and national myths may be the only universals that will have the strength to survive into the future. Of the two, the modern Olympic ideal seems better suited to promoting harmony between peoples than most national myths.^[1]