SojoMail - The prophets who won’t ‘shut up and dribble’

The Hidden Story of Christians and Racial Justice in U.S. Sports This week’s SojoMail comes from the latest issue of Sojourners magazine — Randall Balmer writes in the cover story about how athletes, at risk to their lives and livelihood, have often been social prophets: The four major team sports in North America — baseball, football, hockey, and basketball — all trace their origins, at least in part, to a 19th-century movement called Muscular Christianity. Amid a general concern about men toiling in factories or sedentary office jobs, clergy in the Church of England, noting that women far outnumbered men in the churches, sought to associate Christianity with sports, drawing on the Pauline metaphors of athleticism and militarism — running the race, finishing the course, putting on the full armor of God. A passel of organizations began promoting the affinities between religion and athleticism. The most familiar group was the YMCA — Young Men’s Christian Association — which began in England and migrated to North America in 1851, first in Montréal and then to Boston later that same year. Christianity and virility took many forms late in the 19th century, including camping and organized team sports. But the best example of Muscular Christianity was James Naismith, a football player at McGill University and a Presbyterian minister who invented the game of basketball while an instructor at the YMCA Training School, now known as Springfield College, where he also played football alongside Amos Alonzo Stagg on a team dubbed Stagg’s “Stubby Christians.” Basketball, invented in 1891 as Americans were flocking to the cities, is the quintessential urban game because it asks players to maneuver in a constricted space without impeding the movements of others — like negotiating Fifth Avenue at noontime, Times Square in the evening, or Michigan Avenue at rush hour. Naismith also saw basketball as a force for moral instruction, social amelioration, and inclusion. In addition to developing “skills and agile movements,” basketball would foster initiative, cooperation, self-sacrifice, and self-control. But basketball, and team sports generally, could also function as an engine for social change. READ THE FULL ARTICLE Forward Share

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From the Magazine Rose Robinson’s Race for Justice (by Kaeley McEvoy) Sixty years before Colin Kaepernick, another athlete refused to stand for the national anthem.

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