Several years ago, I attended the funeral of one of my skateboarding friends. Along with other middle-aged skateboarders we would gather on weekends at a local skatepark. There he would chat about newly released skateboard videos, music, and very often shoes. He enjoyed documenting his tricks on video and was comically self-deprecating about his ability on his board. Like me he was originally from the UK, but he had also lived in Japan for many years where he met his wife and worked as a teacher before coming to Hong Kong. He was in his forties and his death was sudden and unexpected. His funeral was a Daoist ceremony where I sat with fellow skateboarders and we sombrely paid our respects while monks chanted for more than two hours. As we arrived, we lit incense and approached an altar where a photo of our departed friend was on display. Alongside his picture were two of his skateboards and some cans of his favourite Japanese beer. Many local skateboarders came to pay their respects along with his school pupils and friends of both him and his wife. Some days later I learned from his wife that after the cremation she had scattered his ashes in the garden area overlooking the local skatepark. Skateboarding was an important part of his life and this was signified in the ritualised way his death was commemorated.
With hardly anyone noticing, skateboarding has become one of the most religious sports in the world. In this book I present skateboarding as a religion, as a central and meaningful motif in the lives of countless individuals who have committed years and sometimes decades to this demanding, difficult, and sometimes dangerous pastime. Skateboarding often contributes to the well-being, health, creativity, sociality, and even livelihood of its practitioners. In recent years the phrase ‘skateboard culture’ has emerged largely without contestation and is seen to denote the lifeworld of the activity. Skateboarding is recognised as having its own lifestyle, practices, and history that unite millions across the globe. Skateboarding is now a distinct element of our broader global popular culture, influential in street fashion, and debuting as an Olympic sport in 2020. Skateboarding is also in flux, celebrated and contested by both those inside and outside the subculture. This book, like other recent tomes (Atencio, Beal, Wright, & ZáNean, 2018; Borden, 2019; Butz & Peters, 2018; Snyder, 2017), is an attempt to make sense of the impact of these changes and to understand skateboarding as a meaningful part of people’s lives. This is a timely sociological task because skateboarding, despite its increasingly mainstream and commercial success, has long been a heterodox activity drawing in and including a host of disparate practices and individuals.
It is also significant that skateboarding has a preoccupation with religion. A cursory survey of skateboard magazines reveals board art (termed graphics) with religious imagery both holy and satanic. The same magazines interview professional skateboarders who at times use evocative spiritual language to talk about their exploits. These professionals are often regarded as legends by devoted fans who study and recall their tricks like scripture. Skateboard photographs and videos capture banal urban spaces and elevate some locations to the status of hallowed ground where history has unfolded, and myth can be sought. These sites are visited by both local and globetrotting pilgrims sometimes purely to gaze at a marble ledge or handrail in an office plaza, and on other occasions to perform their own acts of skateboarding worship, devotion, or penance through arcane physical feats that they find meaningful.
Beyond these elements skateboarding has developed distinct connections to organised religion, either in the confessional religious status of some famous skateboarders or in the union between religious organisations and skateboarding facilities. Churches, youth clubs, and even the famous non-governmental organisation (NGO) Skateistan, fuse a combination of skateboarding and organised religion. Less obvious are the various philanthropic endeavours that seek to enrich lives through skateboarding, such as the A-Skate Foundation, Board Rescue, Skate for Change, and the Tony Hawk Foundation. Devout Muslim skateboarders in Malaysia skate before they break their fast during the holy month of Ramadan, observe modesty laws by covering their arms in the heat, and adopt a militant attitude that fuses the discipline of skateboarding with the orthopraxy of their faith.
Some religious elements are incontestable, from professional skateboarder Paul Rodriguez saying prayers before performing tricks in the globetrotting Street League Skateboarding competitions to the religious iconography associated with the skateboards of professional, or pro, skater Jamie Thomas. However, there is little discussion on how skateboarding is actually part of the spiritual lives of skateboarders. Skateboarding is often connected to organised religion, but like other sports, it can be a religious activity in itself including holy people, sacred places, and ritual processes. Some skateboarders have as a result sought to create skateboard cults or religions that can be likened to the consciously fictive new religious movements of the Church of All Worlds, Discordianism, and Jediism (Cusack, 2010). This text addresses such movements and frames them in the broader topic of skateboarding and religion. I argue that nascent forms of religious identification can and do act as a form of resistance to the increasing institutional control being exerted over skateboarding. I also see skateboarding as a kin to religion in that it is plural, sui generis, and difficult to define (Glenney & Mull, 2018).
Yet to many the association between religion and skateboarding is not just unpopular but also controversial. One of my informants told me he ardently believes in the separation of ‘Church and Skate.’ Within the culture of skateboarding many are suspicious of religion as a force seeking to co-opt or control the activity. Others are hostile because they see religion as representing forms of institutionalisation and regulation that drove them away from mainstream sport and attracted them to skateboarding in the first place. For those outside of the culture looking in, the notion of skateboarding and religion may equally seem absurd, knowing little more of the activity than a rebellious and sometimes illegal youth culture. Skateboarding is loud, dirty, and physically demanding; arguing that it is religious is, perhaps, a futile endeavour.
In the introduction to Tait Colberg’s book The Skateboarding Art, he confesses that he has little patience with those who describe skateboarding as transcendental or mystical. He justifies this by claiming that the embodied process of skateboarding is too brutal, concrete, and painful to equate with ‘delusions of disembodied spiritual soaring’ (Colberg, 2012, p. 15). To an extent I agree, and to many people skateboarding is anything but religious, philosophical, and spiritual. But this point trivialises the embodied experiences that people engage in for transcendental purposes. Take religious flagellation as an example, a recognised rite of affliction. The Magdarame in the Philippines perform voluntary crucifixions to commemorate Christ, and the practice of Tatbir, hitting oneself with a knife, is performed by some Shia Muslims to remember Husayn’s martyrdom on the Day of Ashura. More contemporary practices of piercing and tattooing, and even forms of cosmetic surgery have been associated with embodied forms of transcendence and modern primitivism. Skateboarding involves pain and all skateboarders fall. Yet some skateboarders find an attraction to the pain they encounter describing it as ‘life-affirming’ and ‘addictive’ (The Nine Club, 2017). A point also sustained in the realm of sports is that pain and violence can be understood as a catharsis and part of a broader spiritual struggle (Bain-Selbo, 2012). Of even greater consequence to the study of religion and sport is the way that skateboarding destabilises the binaries of the sacred and the profane, frequently recasting them in hybrid and dynamic ways.
There are countless instances where the relevance of religion in skateboarding can be both refuted and asserted. The aim of this book is not simply to provide examples of religious relevance in skateboard culture; these are numerous. The task of this text is threefold: to highlight how religion is observable in skateboarding, how it is performed, and how it is organised. In the process I offer the reader an alternative insight to skateboard culture at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. I also provide an additional narrative to complement discussions of both religion and popular culture, and religion and sport. Skateboarding as both a communal and ritual activity need not be recognised as a religion in order for it to function as religion. This is not a simple and prosaic point; it connects to the more central question of the role and identity of religion in the modern world. I recognise skateboarding as religion in the lives of many of my participants even while they do not acknowledge it themselves. This does not discredit my thesis though; as Bourdieu notes, ‘it is because subjects do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what they do has more meaning than they know’ (1977, p. 79). At the same time, I address conscious and distinct examples in which religion is invoked and used by skateboarders with intention and purpose.
Religion: A Working Definition
Before religion is explored in more depth, it is of chief importance to provide a brief working definition. For the purpose of this study I adopt a polythetic approach to religion, meaning that I recognise a number of salient features to be indicative of religion, but none to be essential. While belief in a god may be a key tenet of Christianity, it is absent in Buddhism. Similarly, most religions are characterised by a founder or prophet, yet this is untrue of Hinduism. Contingent in my polythetic approach is the understanding that religion is a cultural system, in itself a subset of culture. Influential in this understanding is the cultural definition of religion applied by Clifford Geertz (1973, p. 90) which I adopt as a framework. I believe that religion cannot and does not exist outside of culture, that it is a human way to process, understand, and communicate spirit, transcendence, and community. This does not exclude spirituality, but instead underscores that some choose to express a spiritual understanding through the cultural field of skateboarding. This discussion builds on work related to religion and popular culture. I propose that skateboarding can be understood as a lifestyle religion, borrowing from both Belinda Wheaton’s (2004, 2013) notion of ‘lifestyle sports’ and Conrad Ostwalt’s (2012, p. 212) identification of ‘lifestyle Christianity.’ This recognises the powerful sense of communitas derived from and facilitated by the heterodox activity. Communitas is a sense of communal joy where the individual is ‘gifted with an immediate and genuine sense of the other, the plural of beings’ (Turner, 2012, p. 6). I turn to the topic of religion in more depth in the following chapter; I must proceed here by foregrounding an understanding of skateboarding and what it has become in recent years.