Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920

By Clifford Putney. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2001. x + 300 pp. $39.95 (cloth); L26.50 (cloth).

As Clifford Putney demonstrates in this highly engrossing study, church leaders were once deeply concerned about a culture of femininity that was allegedly sapping the vitality of American Protestantism. Alarmed by statistics indicating that the membership of Protestant denominations was becoming increasingly female, religiously committed men fretted about how to attract other men to their parishes. Some powerful lay figures (for example, Theodore Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller, Jr.) placed the blame on the clergy-"thin, vapid, affected, driveling little doodles" (p. 79) who were happier sipping tea with women than bumping shoulders with men at sporting events. What congregations needed, they said, were far fewer "'ritualists,''parasites,' and "weaklings'" (p. 82) and more "men whose blood coursed strong and hot through their veins, fine specimens of muscular, soldierly Christianity" (p. 81).

Building upon the insights of Ann Douglas in The Femlnization of American Culture (1977), Putney investigates the fears of male religious leaders about the debilitating influences supposedly exerted on them by women. He approaches this subject both chronologically and topically, examining the growth and development of "muscular" organizations such as the YMCA, the Boy Scouts, the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, the Student Volunteer Movement, and the "St. Grottlesex" prep schools of New England. Putney also examines the response of women who objected to this campaign to masculinize American Protestantism. Although a few chose to join new religious movements created and led by women-Christian Science, Theosophy, and the Church of the Higher Life-many others affirmed "the Cult of the Strenuous Life" (p. 33) just as vigorously as their male colleagues. Denying that good health and rugged outdoor experiences ought to be reserved only for boys and young men, these women established the YWCA, the Girl Scouts, the Camp Fire Girls, and similar organizations in order to meet their need for physical activity imbued with high-minded principles. Although muscular Christianity reached its apogee in the American churches during World War I, revulsion at the bloody slaughter of modern warfare, the moral relativism of the "Jazz Age," and the emergence of neo-orthodox theology effectively ended the movements appeal within the mainline denominations after 1920.

Whereas muscular Christianity is now generally linked to theologically conservative groups-the Promise Keepers and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes being two notable examples-the intellectual roots of the phenomenon are in fact grounded within nineteenth-century Anglicanism. According to Putney, the term "muscular Christianity" first appeared in an 1857 review of a novel by Charles Kingsley, and the phrase soon became associated with both Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, broad church Anglican exponents of Christian Socialism. Those two men regarded evangelical Dissenters and Anglo-Catholics with particular disdain, and they accused them of encouraging church people to neglect their responsibilities in society. In the eyes of Kingsley, Hughes, and other Christian Socialists, the male body "existed not to be abused or ignored, but rather to be consecrated in Gods service" (pp. 12-13) through an assortment of virile pursuits: rowing, playing cricket, hunting animals, converting the heathen, and strengthening the British empire.

When these ideas spread from Great Britain to the United States after the Civil War, they were initially adopted by proponents of the social gospel, usually Unitarians, liberal Congregationalists and Baptists, and Episcopalians. What united these nineteenth-century religious progressives was the desire both to rescue the churches from the world-denying implications of orthodox Calvinism and "to halt the . . . decline of the 'Anglo-Saxon race'" (p. 207) in an increasingly pluralistic society. Rejecting any hint of other-worldliness in the gospel, they eagerly transformed Jesus into "the Christian equivalent of the Nietzschean superman" (p. 98)-a robust, martial figure capable of leading old-line American Protestants in a crusade for moral and political uplift.

This is an excellent investigation into the origins of a concept that remains popular in American religion today. It is an especially useful book for Episcopalians to read because it illuminates some of the critical, albeit unappealing, contributions of Anglicanism to modern Christian social thought.

Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr.

Andover Newton Theological School

Newton Centre, Massachusetts

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Winter 2003
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