Do
sports and the “games ethic” effect how we view our bodies? Are modern sports a Christian invention? Are they socially constructed, serving
other agendas we have long forgotten? You might like this fascinating story
about the history of sports, basketball, and the YMCA.
One
little-known men’s movement of the late Victorian Era that seriously
contributed to the way sports, English Imperialism, and American Identity were
formed in the world was Charles Kingsley’s and Thomas Hughes’s Muscular
Christianity. This project oversaw how musclemen took back the churches,
developed and implemented modern sports, and directed the contours of
colonialism. Being a child/parent of the Victorian age, it was far from merely
a religious position; its inherent male-centeredness, homophobia, sexism, and
sports ethic are still at work within our American male bodies in particular,
and the post-colonial “body” in general.
The term itself is attributed to T. S. Sanders, who coined it in a
review of Charles Kingsley’s 1857 popular novel Two Years Ago. It was later used to also refer to Thomas Hugh’s
internationally popular Tom Brown’s
Schooldays of 1856. Hughes liked
the term so much he used it himself in the sequel Tom Brown at Oxford of 1860. Soon the press in general was calling
both writers Muscular Christians and applied that label to the literary genre
they inspired: adventure novels filled with high principles and manly Christian
heroes.
These two authors (and their
critics) traced Muscular Christianity’s origins to the New Testament, namely
Mark 11:15 (which sanctions manly exertion with Jesus’s rampage in the temple),
and 1 Cor. 6:19-20, which proclaims our
bodies as temples and to “therefore honor God with your bodies.” To them, this
muscle-man mentality, ethic, and gender behavior was written by God himself,
who was also a muscle man.
It appears
muscular imagery had always been a part of Christianity, but it had not always
been a major part. The Church was more concerned with a salvation not of this
body or of this world, and it preached that men could achieve it without being
healthy and husky. Moreover, popular images of Christ/God showed a skinny,
effeminate, “bearded lady”, with dainty hands, girly hair, and pretty eyes. The church itself was
also feminine insofar as its behavior was submissive. The great symbol of male power and authority in the world was also
the “bride” of Christ. If this wasn’t emasculating enough, by the early 20th
century the majority of participants in both American and English churches were
women. This
feminine (and decidedly “false”) form of Christ Almighty and his inherently
submissive religion, on top of the appearance of an idle and effeminate “dandy” midwifed
by modernity’s office jobs and homosexuality encouraged Hughes and Kingsley to
place the revitalization of muscular manhood at the forefront of their life’s
work.
Charles
Kingsley was incredibly influential during the Late Victorian era. He was
chaplain to the Queen, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, and a
best-selling author. His rise to national prominence in the 1850s coincided
with a series of crises involving Britain’s status as a world power. Kingsley’s view of a “manful” Christ (He often called Christ
the “prince of war” and the “general who is fighting by your side”. ) games ethic (where sports and body-building are “character-building”), and patriotism quickly spread throughout the English world of public
schools and universities, encouraging the imperialist agenda, and acting as an
instrument of colonial rule, so much so that former Consul-General of Serbia,
James George Cotton Minchin, in 1901 remarked, “If asked what our muscular Christianity has
done, we point to the British Empire”. Together with Hughes, Muscular Christianity
would inspire missionaries whose purpose “was to create a universal Tom Brown:
loyal, brave, truthful, a gentleman, and if possible, a Christian.”
Muscular Christianity was premised on the
physical superiority of males: if God made men physically superior to women,
muscular Christians knew that extra advantage must be developed to the maximum
in order to “be faithful stewards of God's gifts-to fight in His service, to
protect the weak, to conquer nature”. According to Kingsley, it was also a
man's duty to develop a healthy form of what he called “animalism”, and to
fulfill his sexual function by the procreation of children in that holy
practice which is the marital state. Sexual denial was in fact a “disease” that
resulted in the dehumanizing of man. Kingsley describes in Westward Ho! how a celibate
Jesuit priest, “being neither man nor women”, is not human but is instead a “thing”
without a soul.
Muscular Christians are undoubtedly
best known for their celebration of bodies. Whether it was Kingsley’s rejection
of celibacy and belief in the inseparability of spirit and flesh (he would even
say that “the soul secretes the body like a snail secretes its shell”), or
Hughes’s formation of Christian Manhood on the Rugby playing fields, the
centrality of the body within the muscular Christian philosophy cannot be
overlooked. This equation of spirit, flesh, and sport is at first glance
“progressive,” rooted curiously in modern evolutionary sciences (Kingsley was a
Darwinian socialist) and ancient religious texts. However, it becomes
problematic considering the inevitable degeneration of the body and resulting
degeneration of the spirit, a spirit which was supposed to be eternal,
transcendent, and unchanging. Also, its reliance on the dual-sex theory of the
body and biological determinism were problematic. Like a dying star after a
supernova, Kingsley and Hughes’s Muscular Christianity can be said to have
eventually sputtered out. However…
Across the ocean, Kingsley was doing
book tours, and the appearance of the idle and effeminate dandy man (with his
mixture of masculine and feminine markers and his rejection of labor power) and
disappearance of men in church, along with the late-nineteenth century
emergence of large corporations (with their plethora of midlevel management
positions with office jobs not provisional for exercise as farm and factory
work) fueled the rise of Muscular Christianity and the proliferation of sports.
By the late 19th century only about one-third of
American men attended church regularly, while nearly one-half of all American
women did, and ministers were afraid that long-term effects of the
“feminization of the church” would be marginalization of the church, depleting
its power. In
order to transform the churches “from havens of
faithful women into strongholds of spiritual men”, Muscular Christianity
developed strategies designed to appeal to men's (supposedly) more aggressive
nature. “Jesus the teacher had become Christ the
competitor...From the pulpit, preachers prayed for a winning season, striking
there sermons with so much athletic symbolism that they sometimes sounded like
color commentators on TV sport broadcasts.” By the end of the Civil War, the
term Muscular Christianity penetrated American Society, and in 1886 one writer
said, “We like this phrase…because it expresses the idea of that robustness and
vigor which ought to characterize those who are strong in the Lord and the
power of His might.” Soon after the Civil War, the first sports leagues and
team sports with managerial structures developed in American cities, and
“Muscular Christians living in an industrialized, urban culture capitalized on
this development and served as catalyst to help make modern sport possible.” Thus, the societal agents significant in the
emergence of muscular Christianity in nineteenth century America were the same
ones that effected the rise in sport. “As the United States was developing into
a world political power, as industry boomed, and as the frontier closed,
Muscular Christians oversaw the development of modern sport”. The core
organization that oversaw and progressed sports and sportsmanship in America
was the YMCA.
The YMCA was a Christian
organization that demanded the “evangelical test” for all voting members; any
male in good standing in any evangelical church could join. A brief look at a
few of its key contributors is telling. Robert J. Roberts (1849-1920) was a
devout Baptist and YMCA member who in 1876 became a gymnastic superintendent
for the Boston Association where he coined the term “body building”. Luther H. Gulick was another great YMCA
philosopher who felt that the gymnasium was “a fundamental and intrinsic part
in the salvation of man.” Henry Ward Beecher (arguably Muscular Christianity’s
first national preacher) claimed “nothing can come more properly in the sphere
of Christian activity than the application of the cause of physical health in
the community. If general health is not religion, if it is not Christ, it is
John the Baptist; it goes before him.” Stanly Hall, first president of the
American Psychological Association, would praise the YMCA for “carrying the
gospel to the body,” and Dwight L. Moody, who founded the Moody Church, was
president of the Chicago branch of the YMCA and is credited as the instigator
of the indigenous, American brand of muscular Christianity.
Presbyterian minister James Naismith
is another important evangelist and Muscular Christian. For Naismith,
basketball was more than a new game; it was a means to evangelize people about
morality and Christian values. Milton Katz describes basketball as a way to
“inculcate the Christian values for which the YMCA stood.” Ladd and Mathisen
see basketball as “the essence of American Muscular Christianity”.
Even though muscular religious
charismatics like Billy Graham are a dying breed, the spirit of Kingsley and
Hughes’s project can be seen in Muscular Christian groups such as the KKK, the
Westburo Baptist Church, the NRA, the Republican Party, as subjects for
ultraviolent bad-boy movies such as Red
State (2011) and Pulp Fiction
(1996), and in the locker rooms of Penn State. Kimmel argues that the Catholic
Church still promotes Muscular Christianity in the athletic programs of schools
such as Notre Dame, as do evangelical Protestant groups such as Promise
Keepers, Athletes in Action, and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes…groups
many people have never heard of, leading Kimmel to conclude that this
particular form of Christianity has sputtered out. However, its remaining
embers burn deep. MacAloon argues that Muscular Christianity has far from
sputtered out. On the contrary, only the self-consciousness about the dominance
of Muscular Christianity in the US public discourse has sputtered out, and this
is because it has become so normalized, and fails to stand out as anything
unusual. MacAloon says, “not only sports departments but the entire moral economy
and discourse of American public schools…remain largely derived from the legacy
of muscular Christianity and the games ethic.” Bruce Kidd sees that in Canada,
for example, youth obesity, drugs, disillusionment and violence still inspires
the YMCA and various other corporate foundations to reinvest in sports and
cultural languages “that echo the muscular Christian intervention.”
Conclusion
Anthropologist A.F.C. Wallace
explains how a culture at the edge of extinction explodes into a
“revitalization movement.” When rugged manliness was dwindling during the mid to late
Victorian era, Muscular Christianity appeared,
recasting Jesus as a muscle man and, using the games ethic, revitalized British
imperialism in the world. Cultural historian William Irwin Thompson calls this phenomenon
“the sunset effect.” In America, the manly Christians,
too, were dealing with a vanishing of not only Christian masculinity but also
men in church. Taking cues for Kingsley and Hughes, they developed body-building
and sports to help evangelize the country and save its churches from
feminization. Therefore, the radiant sunset of masculinity in England became
the growing sunrise of sports in America.
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