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

Abstract

Clifford Putney's Muscular Christianity offers a useful introductory survey to an important cultural movement. The book describes the early English and American leaders and the reasons they gave for the idea of adding manly muscle to their understandings and expressions of religion and then details the numerous institutional forms muscular Christianity took. The work concentrates on the northeastern liberal Protestants who led the way toward muscular Christianity. Like many studies of manhood, this volume concentrates on how muscular Christianity developed out of fear. Inside the churches, the movement's leaders feared being overwhelmed by a growing majority of churchgoers. Outside the churches, people best represented by Theodore Roosevelt feared the ways urbanization endangered health, strength, and character, especially for professional men. The psychologist G. Stanley Hall offered a theory of degeneracy, arguing that boys who did not progress through the stages from savage to civilized got stuck along the way, and many spokesmen for Anglo-Saxon superiority argued that the economically successful needed to strengthen the race against growing numbers of strapping immigrant newcomers.