We Will Not Shut Up and Dribble: LeBron James and the Tripartite Human Being

Abstract

On 15 February 2018, Fox News host Laura Ingraham ended her broadcast by responding to sharply critical comments that basketball stars LeBron James and Kevin Durant made about President Trump on the issue of race. Ingraham demanded that they “shut up and dribble,” to which James responded by creating a Twitter hashtag, #wewillnotshutupanddribble that adorned t-shirts worn during his next pregame warmup. In this essay, I contend that religion and sport come together throughout the “shut up and dribble” episode by way of a tripartite Christian anthropology of body, soul, and spirit that Ingraham is unwittingly conveying and James is adopting in his own way. This anthropology, as laid out in I Thessalonians and elsewhere, not only enables the reduction of Black human beings down to their body by silencing their souls, but also provides a framework for an athlete like LeBron James to counter these attacks.