The Religion of Wrestling
Displays of Religion in the WWE & Associated Companies
THE BABYFACE vs. THE HEEL
or the battle of Good & Evil
Professional wrestling, though marketed as a sport, is not at all a sport. Saying this alone could generate quite a bit of heat with some wrestling fans. Many wrestling fans take what happens in the ring just as literally as some Protestants take the Bible. To truly understand the art that is pro-wrestling, the fakery has to be understood correctly. Pro-wrestlers are incredibly athletic and display unblievable feats in the ring, all without ever intetionally trying to harm their opponent.
Pro-wrestling is not a sport. It is not a sport because the winner is not decided based on skill and performance in the ring, but by storyline. A win in wrestling is pre-determined, before a match even begins, by deciding which winner will better carry the story of the feud along to the next chapter. Because pro-wrestling is not a sport, there needs to be a reason to have a match. That reason is the feud. Feuds are necesscary to move the story from its beginning to its conflict to its climax and on to its resolution in the ring. Professional wrestling is more of an athletic theatre than it is anything else (MacFarlane 2012, 137).
Participants in the feud are on one side or the other; either a heel or a babyface (often referred to simply as a face).
The heels are the bad guys. They will exhibit this in their dress, interaction with the audience, entrance music, and even nasty emissions from their social media accounts. Heels will try to generate heat; a very angry negative response from the audience. The audience is not supposed to react positively to the heels.
The babyfaces are the heroes. They are the people often seen granting a bazillion wishes to Make-a-Wish kids. They are loved to the excess by their fans. They will exhibit their positive personalities in the same way the heels do, and will often, though not always, prevail at the end of a feud (Ball 1990, 109).
In order to properly interpret the WWE's use of religion it is vital to understand these roles in the feud. Whether a representative of a religion is face or heel says volumes to how American society views that particular religion.