Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America

Sociology of Religion, Fall, 2004 by Anthony Synnott

Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920, by CLIFFORD PUTNEY. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003, 300pp., $17.95 (paper).

Christians have tended to have a vexed relationship with the person of Christ, constructing him in various ways as warrior, king, pacifist, worker, proto-feminist, or victim, depending on which selected texts or actions suit their personal or political needs. They have also tended to have a vexed relationship with their bodies: love them or hate them, enjoy them or inflict pain upon them, in imitation of Christ or as penance.

Muscular Christianity speaks to both these issues, and others. Putney describes this movement that emerged in England in the 1850s, primarily within Protestantism, and transferred to the United States in the 1880s, but fell into decline after World War 1. Several interlocking themes weave their ways through this time and this book, and some may still have relevance.

The starting points were the novels of Charles Kingsley, and especially Tom Browne's School Days by Thomas Hughes (1856), a portrait of the development of a strong and virtuous young man: a Protestant role model. Literary critics described these works as muscular Christianity, and the name stuck. The novels emphasized the manly and Victorian virtues of patriotism, bravery, physical strength and fellowship as well as Christianity, but were also based on a critique of contemporary Protestantism. Indeed the label implied that contemporary Christianity was unmuscular, limp, flabby, rich and complacent, and therefore some-what unchristian. (Both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were similarly critical during this time, but seem to have had little impact on muscular Christianity: there is just the one reference to Superman).

A related theme was the concern with the feminization of Protestantism. Different men argued different points, but men were leaving the church in droves for saloons, lodges and golf courses, (first played in the U.S. in 1888). Men were still in the pulpits, but they were dismissed by muscular Christians, in the rather uncharitable words of one, as "book-worms, freaks and geniuses" rather than "all-round men" (p.82). The congregations were mostly female, and the church's voluntary organizations tended to be run by women. The iconography, hymns and prayers were considered too feminine to appeal to men, and inaccurate; I still remember a prayer that began: "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild." One Christian referred bluntly to "the woman peril" (p.5).

To attract men back to Christianity and the church, the muscular Christians reinvented Jesus as a manly man: strong, because a carpenter, and fit (40 days in the wilderness), and aggressive enough to drive the moneylenders out of the temple. Sports were utilized as a "net" to catch young men and draw them into the fold; then camping, and a love of nature and the outdoors were emphasized and institutionalized in different organizations. The YMCA was formed in England (1844) and the U.S. (1851); the Salvation Army in 1879, the Boys Brigade was founded in 1883, and the Boy Scouts, more patriotic and character forming than Christian perhaps, were incorporated in 1910; but note the militarism of the names. Universities were transformed to include sports, and indeed American culture was gradually transformed also to value sports and reject the sports-negative legacy of Puritanism. All this elicited new concerns with the secularization of Protestantism by muscularity, and also the masculinization of Protestantism.

The novels, and the new ideals of masculinity, the critiques of Protestantism, the reconstruction of Christ, the institutionalization and sacralization of sports were all component parts of muscular Christianity. A final theme was the missionary impulse, both secular and religious, at home and abroad. At home muscular Christians addressed themselves to preaching the Social Gospel and to reforms; and abroad, the goal was "The evangelization of the world in this generation" (p.128). This goal was compatible with the doctrine of manifest destiny, and Spencer's Social Darwinism, but was in part to be achieved by sports, and an emphasis on health. Indeed good health and good morals were equated. In an excellent chapter entitled "Muscular Women," Putney notes the increasing involvement of women in sports, and in church hierarchies.

In the end, the movement fell into disfavor after World War 1 due to a number of factors. These included the widespread rejection of Protestant militarism in World War 1, the rise of feminism and the rejection of many masculine values, the rise of science evidenced by the Scopes trial, and the rise of secularism and materialism with concern for health for personal happiness, not Christianity. One woman accused the YMCA of concealing religion in sports "like a pill in strawberry jam" (p. 190). In sum, suggests Portney, the replacement of evangelism by escapism, the clergy by psychologists, and the church by business. The YMCA is the epitome of the shift in under 100 years: neither Y nor M nor C.