Paper short abstract:

In Luxembourg, sporting subjects involved in interfaith athletic events in the public sphere deliberately engage playful creativity and a focus on building spiritual connections to delineate secular from religious physical activity and, in the process, open up space for new sporting socialities.

Paper long abstract:

In recent decades, interfaith initiatives have grown exponentially in number across Europe. A commitment to dialogue and speaking across faith differences lies at the heart of most of these endeavors. However, organizers and other stakeholders in interfaith relations simultaneously worry about the challenges of talking about and across faiths and dialogue’s potential for failure. Perhaps in response to these concerns, interfaith physical activities, especially sporting events, have become increasingly popular in parts of Europe. In Luxembourg, where the government is undertaking a rapid campaign of secularization that involves erasing religion from the public realm, interfaith groups seem to have a particular interest in sporting events. Often, these activities are organized within larger ‘secular’ sporting events, such as the interfaith run that takes place within Luxembourg’s annual marathon. Participants delineate their interfaith sporting efforts from their secular contexts with activities like collective prayer, religious music, a shared drink or meal, and a deliberate focus playful and creative exchange, spiritual experience, and relationship building, rather than winning, profit, or ‘solely’ physical prowess. In the process, many report building lasting interfaith and international relationships and, at the same time, a sense of spiritual growth through bodily achievement. Based on ongoing fieldwork in the interfaith sphere in Luxembourg, this paper explores the ways sporting subjects engage creativity as key means of cultivating spiritual energy in order to 1) differentiate secular from spiritual physical activity, and 2) carve a space for themselves in the secular public sphere, and, in the process, enable alternative sporting socialities.