Religious symbolism in U.S. sports team names and mascots

The following is a list of American sports team names and mascots that are based upon or use religious symbolism. Because of the prevalence of Christian groups and institutions throughout the history of the United States, many of these symbols can be assumed to have come from Christian sources. However, teams deriving their image from symbols belonging to other systems of religious and pseudo-religious beliefs have also been included.

Sports clubs and teams select their image or mascot based on any number of factors, including choosing an image based on a desire to pick a symbol that will attempt to convey the assets the clubs and teams aim to display, such as strength, courage, aggression, and endurance. Scholars have drawn connections between desires such as these and the religious totems found in polytheism, where visual representations of animals serve as symbols to express the physical and spiritual qualities of community. Adoration of a mascot by a school or company can be seen as religiously significant. However, economic factors also come into play, as both schools and sports-franchise owners want to make money. Just as an appealing, marketable symbol can generate vast revenue, so can profits suffer if a potentially offensive symbol alienates some potential fans. This consideration as well can explain why sectarian religious symbols rarely appear in sports-team names and mascots.

Most of the teams listed here belong to schools and not to professional franchises. The reasons for this are subject to debate. In schools administrators, teachers, and parents act as a community to give students education in local values, and in many places these values come from religious institutions like churches and synagogues. So schools often become de facto representatives of a community's religious ideals as well as visual representatives of that community at a state, national, and international level. These conditions combine to make school sports a place for religious symbols, after they get filtered through the secular values both of the nation at large and of sport itself. This filtering produces mixed-value mascots like "Demon Deacons" of Wake Forest University and the "Hustlin' Quakers" (formerly "Fightin' Quakers", subsequently simply "Quakers") of Earlham College.

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