Muscular Christianity

Muscular Christianity, ideology that promotes engagement in athletics as an expression of Christian ethical values and masculinity. Muscular Christianity first developed in England during the 19th century as a method to build Christian character integrity in boys. The philosophy was first espoused by writer and clergyman Charles Kingsley and jurist and novelist Thomas Hughes. Muscular Christianity later caught on in the United States, where figures such as Theodore Roosevelt became its most outspoken proponents. Historians understand Muscular Christianity in part as a masculine reaction to Victorian-era societal changes such as the increased presence of women in public and political spaces and the rise of sedentary work. The ideology has had a profound influence on the development of athletics and sport in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the YMCA, the Olympic Games, and collegiate sports.

Early roots in England

Muscular Christianity developed during the mid-19th century as a number of British men held a perception that the Christian church was promoting meek piousness and bodily denial, and they instead embraced bodily vigor, patriotism, and chivalry. The most noted early champion of Muscular Christianity was clergyman and novelist Charles Kingsley, whose historical novels from the 1850s glorify the colonialist enterprise of the British Empire and Anglo-Saxon resistance to the Norman Conquest of England. His works exude a strong element of British nationalism. Kingsley was influenced in his ideas by historian and theologian Thomas Carlyle, whose interest in heroism and Old Testament morality are evident in Kingsley’s work. He was also influenced by Frederick Denison Maurice, who was involved with the Broad Church movement and the Christian Socialism movement, which attempted to adapt Christianity to modern life. In his writing Kingsley’s great British heroes are exemplars of physical dominance, stoicism, and Christian righteousness. The term muscular Christianity was first popularized in T.C. Sanders’s 1857 review of Kingsley’s novel Two Years Ago, in which he wrote of Kingsley: “His ideal is a man who fears God and can walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours.”

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While Kingsley disdained Sanders’s labeling of his philosophy, his contemporary, Thomas Hughes, another early founder of Muscular Christianity, embraced it. Hughes’s major work, Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) and its successor Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), established a more concrete doctrine for the burgeoning movement rooted in a set of nationalist, chivalric, and Protestant values. The first book was based on Hughes’s experience at Rugby School under headmaster and education reformer Thomas Arnold. In Tom Brown at Oxford Hughes stresses the importance of “muscular Christians” having “strong and well-exercised bodies,” noting

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A man’s body is given to him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men.

According to Hughes, bodily development and the values associated with Muscular Christianity had to be inculcated from an early age. Sports were considered one way to train boys in these values. Hughes’s ideas further developed the importance of athletics within the British education system.

Popular spread and influence

The Muscular Christian values espoused by 19th-century British writers quickly gained popularity in both the United Kingdom and the United States, where they were touted as a spiritual salve for what a number of Christians saw as the degenerative influences of rapid industrialization. Many feared that English men were becoming weak and emasculated as they moved into cities and office jobs while immigrants worked in traditionally masculine hard labor. In the 19th and 20th centuries Muscular Christianity had a profound influence on the foundation and development of a number of cultural institutions associated with athletics and masculinity.

YMCA

The first Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) establishments opened in 1844 in London and 1851 in Boston as community gathering spaces for men to develop Christian character and a sense of citizenship. As Muscular Christianity caught on in the late 19th century, YMCAs began to add gymnasiums and focused increasingly on athletics as a part of their programming. The Boston YMCA’s first physical education coordinator, Robert J. Roberts, is said to have invented the term “bodybuilding” to describe the physical fitness aspect of the organization’s greater mandate. As Roberts said of exercise, making of it a religious duty: “Body and mind are both gifts, and ought to be well cared for, and for the proper use of them our Maker will hold us responsible.”

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School sports

At the same time that YMCAs were installing gymnasiums to promote fitness, colleges and universities began fielding sports teams. In the United States pioneering football coach Amos Alonzo Stagg was one of Muscular Christianity’s most vocal proponents, and he also had a profound influence on the development of intercollegiate sports, particularly football but also basketball. He considered athletics to be a path toward spiritual integrity and felt that his players could be champions of Christian virtues through their play. Stagg’s influence spread through college and high school athletics, and the notion that team sports can improve one’s character resonates today.

One of football’s most vocal early supporters was politician and eventual U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote in Harper’s Weekly in 1893 that “the sports especially dear to a vigorous and manly nation are always those in which there is a certain slight element of risk.” Roosevelt and his fellow Muscular Christians viewed football—and rugby in England—as a simulation of the battlefield.

Another sport that quickly became part of the American collegiate world was basketball. It was invented in 1891 by James Naismith, who was teaching at a YMCA at the time. Basketball’s origin was part of Naismith’s initiative to develop a game that inculcated Christian ideals and sportsmanship. (See James Naismith on basketball for his own description of the game.) Both football and basketball would spread from the collegiate level to high schools, to the professional sports industry, and to women’s versions, such as women’s basketball.

Boy Scouts

Another beneficiary of the Muscular Christianity movement was the Boy Scouts. Founded in England in 1908 by Robert Baden-Powell, it initially functioned as an organization for training young boys in ethics and outdoor activities. (Baden-Powell’s sister, Agnes Baden-Powell, founded the Girl Scouts in 1910 for girls interested in similar scouting activities.) In 1911 James E. West, the first chief scout executive of Boy Scouts of America added “A Scout is reverent” to the American Scout Law, which laid the groundwork for partnerships between the Boy Scouts and religious organizations. Protestant churches (and other religious organizations later on) adopted Boy Scouts as a youth organization and supported Boy Scout troops.

Olympics

The modern Olympic Games also emerged out of the ideology of Muscular Christianity. Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days influenced the founder of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, who read the work when he was 12 years old. Concerned about French weakness in the wake of the humiliating Franco-German War (1871), Coubertin was keen to develop an educational model that was informed by athletics and the prospect of strengthening bodies. He was greatly inspired by the developments in athletics and interest in Greek history that in the 19th century were dominant in British schools, which he toured looking for ideas, and which in turn were influenced by the emphasis on strength and morality in Muscular Christianity. While Coubertin gave the Olympics their international character, the themes of individual strength, moral values, and friendly competition were partly forged from his encounter with Muscular Christianity. The intersection of Christianity and the Olympics is perhaps epitomized by the figure of British runner Eric Liddell, a devout Christian and missionary who competed in the Paris 1924 Olympic Games and whose story was told in the film Chariots of Fire (1981).

Decline and revival in the 20th century

Muscular Christianity declined following World War I, as Protestantism’s influence on society began to wane and higher education shifted away from religion. In the United States the departure of prominent baseball player Billy Sunday from sports to the ministry in 1893 had already marked a turning point of sorts, and meanwhile Roosevelt’s promotion of sports in a non-Christian context paved the way for a secularized muscularity. The prominence of the Social Gospel movement, which favored a Christianity tied to social justice and charity, tempered the exuberance of Muscular Christianity. Yet the connection between sports and Christianity continued to be strong over the 20th century, and the revival of religion after World War II combined with a new boom in national sports (aided by television) meant new intersections of Christianity and athletics. Evangelist Billy Graham was particularly active in supporting sports, leading revivals with sports figures such as runner Gil Dodds and reviving a certain form of Muscular Christianity. Many prominent sports stars have been vocal about their Christian religiosity, and religiously affiliated schools promote sports in ways that maintain ideological intersections between bodily strength, teamwork, and Christian morality, along with the role of divine favor in athletic achievement.