Muscular Christianity
Muscular Christianity is a religious movement that originated in England in the mid-19th century, characterized by a belief in patriotic duty, discipline, self-sacrifice, masculinity, and the moral and physical beauty of athleticism.
It is most often associated with English author Thomas Hughes and his 1857 novel Tom Brown's School Days, as well as writers Charles Kingsley and Ralph Connor.
[1] American President Theodore Roosevelt was raised in a household that practised Muscular Christianity and was a prominent adherent to the movement.
[2] Roosevelt, Kingsley, and Hughes promoted physical strength and health as well as an active pursuit of Christian ideals in personal life and politics.
[6] Asceticism, and the denial of bodily needs and beauty, was of interest to laity and clergy alike in Antiquity and the medieval period.
[9] However, the explicit advocacy of sport and exercise in Christianity did not appear until 1762, when Rousseau's Emile described physical education as important for the formation of moral character.
[15] An article on a popular 19th-century Briton summed it up thus: "John MacGregor is perhaps the finest specimen of Muscular Christianity that this or any other age has produced.
"[19] Kingsley's contemporary Thomas Hughes is credited with helping to establish the main tenets of Muscular Christianity in Tom Brown at Oxford, which were physical manliness, chivalry and masculinity of character.
"[21] The notion of protecting the weak was related to contemporary English concerns over the plight of the poor, and Christian responsibility to one's neighbour.
[1] Richard Andrew Meyer, a professor of Baylor University, explains Thomas Hughes's six definitions of Muscular Christianity through six criteria.
Meyer wrote a dissertation about Thomas Hughes's notion of Muscular Christianity by analyzing the career of Lance Armstrong.
Similar boxing outreach programs were established in the late-19th and early-20th centuries by Christian churches of various denominations in poor or working class areas of Britain and America.
[27] Scholar Iren Annus linked the growth of Muscular Christianity in the United States to broader societal changes which were occurring throughout the country, including the emancipation of women and the influx of immigrants who worked blue-collar jobs while white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men became increasingly white-collar.
[28] Parodied by Sinclair Lewis in Elmer Gantry (though he had praised Oberlin College YMCA for its "positive earnest muscular Christianity") and out of step with theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr, its influence declined in American mainline Protestantism.
"[29] An early pioneer of Muscular Christianity in the US was Amos Alonzo Stagg, a Yale-educated football coach, who in the 1880s sought to promote "Christian ideals" anchored in US middle class values such as "cooperation, belief in God, initiative, self-discipline, loyalty, respect for authority, courage, honesty.
It appeared to be "mindless strenuosity tied not to social reform but to what cereal king J. H. Kellogg called the new religion 'of being good to yourself'", that is, "such newly accessible leisure-time pursuits as automobiling and listening to the radio.
[35][36] Elwood Brown, physical director of the Manila chapter of the YMCA, heavily promoted Muscular Christianity in the Philippines, and co-founded the Far Eastern Championship Games which ran from 1914 to 1934.
[43] The purpose behind these soccer clubs was not just to bring idealized traits to the young boys, but to make them into strong soldiers and advocates for the Western world.
[45] In the 21st century, there has been a resurgence in the popularity of Muscular Christianity, driven by the disproportionately high number of men becoming atheist or agnostic, and by a perceived "crisis of masculinity".
"[50] Michael Kimmel argues in his book Manhood in America,[51] that University of Notre Dame showcases Muscular Christianity because the school practices Catholicism.
