How the Edmonton Oilers fandom became a kind of religion

CBC

a day ago

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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.
WATCH | Today's episode on YouTube:
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.