Christmas and the Christian Meaning of Basketball

You've heard of basketball's Christian origins. What about its *Christmas* roots?

You probably know about basketball’s Christian origins, especially if you subscribe to this newsletter. It’s a theme I’ve been emphasizing a lot this year: basketball was created by a seminary-trained Presbyterian who enrolled at a Christian college to “win men for the master through the gym.”

But have you thought about its Christmas roots?

I don’t simply mean that it was first played in the Christmas season—although James Naismith did hang his two peach baskets in a Massachusetts gym on December 21, 1891.

No, I mean that the original ethos of the game, the design and intention of its founder, has close connections with the spirit and meaning of the Christmas season.

Photo by KW Falkena on Unsplash

Thinking of basketball as a Christmas game offers a shift in perspective compared with two popular views of basketball’s early relationship with Christianity.

On one side, represented by some of my fellow evangelicals, basketball is seen as an evangelistic game that belongs first and foremost to Christians. The Naismith quote—“to win men for the master through the gym”—is the smoking gun that reveals the original meaning of the sport. The task for Christians is to attempt in some way to reclaim the game, usually by using it as a platform for evangelism.

Meanwhile some of my fellow academics put forward a different interpretation. Their story accepts the Christian influences on basketball’s early years, but sees those influences as regrettable or problematic. Basketball, in this view, was created primarily as a white Christian tool for cultural assimilation and control of the urban masses, but in an ironic twist of fate it was claimed by people on the ground as a means of agency and cultural expression.

There is something to both of these interpretations. Basketball really was shaped and inspired by Naismith’s desire to use sports for evangelical Christian ministry; that vision, in turn, was influenced by a “muscular Christianity” context in which the cultural superiority of white Anglo-American Protestantism was often assumed (although Naismith himself resisted those impulses, and muscular Christianity was not confined to white Protestants).

But against the backdrop of these narratives, thinking about basketball as a Christmas story can be a helpful alternative. For those of us who are Christians, it can provide a broader sense of the sport’s spiritual meaning and significance in at least three ways.

Goodness of Embodiment

First, basketball’s origins remind us of the dignity and worth of our God-given bodies, a value that is affirmed in the story of Christmas, in which “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

Carmen Joy Imes writes about the implications of the incarnation in Being God’s Image. “Our bodies are not a shell to be discarded so that we can experience mystical union with God,” she notes. “Jesus’ incarnation—his ‘enfleshment’—points to the significance of our embodiment. God’s original creative act is vindicated in Jesus, who rescues the human project.”

The muscular Christian movement, for all of its flaws and inconsistencies, offered an important corrective to the church in the nineteenth century by moving towards a more positive view of the human body. At the time, many churches encouraged a dualistic understanding of the world, one that elevated the unseen spiritual realm over the physical and material. Bodies, in this view, were something to escape from, to move beyond.

Muscular Christians like Naismith suggested instead that sports could help fellow believers recognize the sacred value of their bodies. This logic was represented by the triangle logo of the YMCA, first adopted at the training college that Naismith attended: mind, body, and spirit intertwined, a holistic view of the human person.

“Whenever I witness games in a church league,” Naismith wrote later in life, “I feel that my vision, almost half a century ago, of the time when the Christian people would recognize the true value of athletics, has become a reality.”

Intrinsic Value of Sports

Christmas is a story of grace, not achievement; of receiving a gift, not working to earn a reward. “The child is born in the night,” Frederick Buechner writes, “and nothing is ever the same again.”

So too with basketball’s origins—at least in part. While Naismith clearly wanted his game to serve as a tool for Christian formation and moral development, he also wanted people to enjoy the game for its own sake.

Pastor and author Jeremy Treat describes this dynamic as the tension between the “intrinsic” and “instrumental” value of sporting activities. Sports can be used for many good things, including evangelism and building character—in that sense, they have instrumental value. But they also have intrinsic value; as a reflection of God’s creation, they are “made good in and of themselves” and can be delighted in as a good gift.

Naismith’s life, in many ways, was dedicated to advancing the instrumental value of sport. Yet, he also consistently emphasized the spirit of play, the free enjoyment that comes from fully engaging in a game.

This is why he warned against forces that made basketball too serious. “Why should the play of a group of young men be entirely spoiled the further the ambitions of some coach?” he asked.

And this is why he frequently reveled in the beauty of the game.

“No prettier sight can be found in athletic achievement than in a game where the ball, without any preconceived plan, passes from man to man in a series of brilliant movements and lands in the goal, or is clearly intercepted when a goal seems inevitable,” he marveled. “We watch such a game with an increasing admiration for the wonderful capacity of the human frame for accomplishing the seemingly impossible.”

To simply enjoy and delight in the gift of basketball is to catch something of the Christmas spirit.

From Receiving to Giving

If basketball can be received as a good gift to be enjoyed, it can also teach us to be the kind of people who give gifts for the good of others.

While Christmas is viewed as a season of giving, the way we understand the act of giving is strongly influenced by consumerism and commercialization. This is not a new thing—it was the entire point of the critique in “A Charlie Brown’s Christmas” (1965). And the transactional nature of giving has not diminished over the years, but continues to shape how we experience Christmas.

Basketball’s origins suggest a different vision for giving, one that encourages us to offer ourselves through creativity and culture-building, with nothing expected in return.

Naismith modeled this with the way he responded after his sport became popular. He did not attempt to control it, nor did he seek money or some sort of return on investment. He simply gave it away, recognizing that the game was not his.

“My pay has not been in dollars,” he wrote, “but in the satisfaction of giving something to the world that is a benefit to masses of people.”

This meant that basketball was never just a Christian game developed by Naismith. It was always also a game influenced and shaped by a variety of people from different identities and backgrounds: Senda Berenson, the Jewish woman who picked up the game in 1892 and developed rules for women; Edwin Henderson, the “grandfather of Black basketball,” who decided to create a Black basketball league after he was kicked out of a whites-only YMCA gym.

Basketball would not be the game we know and love today if it had not developed in a collaborative way, if it had not been embraced by a multitude of people and faith traditions who made the game their own—and then shared their contributions for others to enjoy.

Of course, the Christmas story does make particular truth claims about who God is and who we are. It is the story of a King and a Kingdom after all, with claims that should not be watered down or ignored.

At the same time, those claims should be forming us as Christians into a people who follow a Kingdom that is not of this world—people who love and serve our neighbors, who share in the building of a common life together, who create spaces for connection, joy, and belonging.

“I am sure,” Naismith wrote near the end of his life, “that no man can derive more pleasure from money or power than I do from seeing a pair of basketball goals in some out of the way place—deep in the Wisconsin woods an old barrel hoop nailed to a tree, or a weather-beaten shed on the Mexican border with a rusty iron hoop nailed to one end.”

The Christmas meaning of basketball, I believe, is found, at least in part, in those words from Naismith.

They encourage us to ask: What gifts for the good of the world can we create and share together?

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For more from me on the Christian history and meaning of basketball, check out these sources:

• “Basketball is a Beautiful Game, but Not a Blueprint for Society” (Christianity Today)

• “The Witness of the Black Church Rings Through NBA History” (Christianity Today)

• “Jesus and James Naismith: The Christian History of Basketball and its Lessons for the Church Today” (Truett Seminary chapel talk)

• “James Naismith’s Basketball Philosophy: 13 Quotes from the Game’s Inventor” (Faith & Sports Blog)