Muscular Christianity Research Articles

Professional Team Sports and the Urbanisation of Desire

Beginning with passions invoked by songs ‘You and Me’ and ‘Ode to the Motherland’, in the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, this paper examines sports institutions via their structures of feeling, passions connected to their reasons. War and peace and nation and state tend to dominate study of politics of sport. But here we find cities in longstanding, elective public–private partnership with professional team sports because the teams provide spectators quest for excitement, safe intensity they pursue enthusiastically. Contrast with the management motives romanticised in Moneyball enables us to see this remarkable form of desire in Katie Casey, the fictional heroine of the vaudeville classic, ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’. While the elective anthem of the English, ‘Jerusalem’, reveals distinct passions – connected more closely to muscular Christianity and its moral imperialism – ‘Take Me Out’ suggests, as do close studies of spectators in Japan, China and elsewhere in East Asia, that a quiet politics of safe intensities vies with official efforts in China and elsewhere to enlist sport into patriotic triumphalisms. The virtual contest between Olympism and professional team sports is thus another tension line along which the future of China and East Asia is being fashioned.

Muscular Christianity and value-centred sport: the legacy of Tom Brown in Canada†

This article was written for a conference organized by John MacAloon at the University of Chicago in 2005 in anticipation of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes. In reflecting upon the Hughes' tradition in Canada, I argue that there was a left tradition in ‘muscular Christianity’, that it was middle-class reformers and socialists as well as upper-class conservatives who took the ideals romanticized by Tom Brown's Schooldays and ran with them in municipal playgrounds, the amateur sport movement, the Young Men's Christian Associations (YMCAs), church sports associations and university sport clubs. With the disappearance of the socialist sports tradition in the 1950s, the followers of Hughes and the tradition of ‘sport for good’ have become the most progressive voice in the pan-Canadian debates about the purpose of sport and the nature and extent of state funding, championing educational sport and sport for development and peace in disadvantaged communities in Canada and abroad while cringing at the ugliness and instrumental violence of the spectacles staged by the capitalist cartels and the uncritical pursuit of the podium by the leadership of the Canadian sport system.

Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War by Jonathan H. Ebel (review)

Reviewed by: Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War by Jonathan H. Ebel Bradley Carter Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War. By Jonathan H. Ebel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2010. The paucity of scholarship addressing the role of U.S. religion in the First World War underscores that conflict’s secondary status in the American imagination, both popular and academic. As the centennial of the start of what was the twentieth century’s defining (and at the time humanity’s deadliest) conflict approaches, “the Great War” is garnering renewed attention. Jonathan Ebel’s Faith in the Fight is an important and welcome addition to a subject too long neglected. Faith in the Fight examines how various groups of Americans used religious “ideas, images, and beliefs” to make sense of the war, their involvement in it, and its inevitable life-changing and life-ending consequences (3). Noting that traditional studies “of America’s wars tend to ignore religion” and those of “religion tend to ignore war,” Ebel proposes to study the “religious thoughts and lives of soldiers and war workers” (both men and women) in order to “make more intelligible both . . . the appeal of war and memories of war, and the more specific religious and political events and movements in twentieth-century America” (3). This interdisciplinary approach, taking seriously the role of vernacular religion in wartime meaning-making, [End Page 73] is the work’s greatest strength. In eschewing an older “history of theology” approach, and an excessive focus on official, institutional religion in favor of a close reading of the “letters, diaries, and memoirs” of combatants and non-combatants alike—alongside popular wartime publications and other “public literature” such as “The Stars and Stripes”—and coupled with post war surveys, most notably one of “14,000 former soldiers, 2,400 of whom were African American,” Ebel demonstrates how religion “provided a vocabulary to help render the war experiences meaningful” (12, 16). Indeed, he illustrates how the “war provided an arena in which faith could be lived out” with religion simultaneously doing “a great deal of the work needed to romanticize war,” allowing “many soldiers to ignore or glorify war’s horrors” (16). Ebel’s work is at its best when limning the cultural contexts and constraints of sense-making. When exploring how notions of Progressive-era “muscular Christianity” informed notions of the Great War’s moral goodness, or how wartime ideas of redemptive violence were more problematic (and complex) for African Americans in Jim Crow America, Faith in the Fight excels. Ebel’s attention to racial differences in appropriating and applying a shared religious vocabulary within a DuBoisian “double consciousness” is illuminating. He notes how the “Christ imagined by black soldiers and war workers offered salvation in the midst of struggle, suffering and sorrow, but unlike the Christ proclaimed by many white soldiers did not require sanctification of the Pharaoh nation” (126). Indeed, the ability of vernacular religion to simultaneously enable wartime disappointment, disillusionment, and re-illusionment within and across differing racial and cultural-historical contexts represents the book’s greatest achievements. So too is Ebel’s chapter on the “Soldierly heaven,” “There Are No Dead” (145). Religion—institutional, as well as the popular, “lived” expressions at the heart of Ebel’s book—are understandably central to both contemporary and ex post facto endeavors to render sensible “the industrialized depersonalized violence” of the Great War (54). While Ebel is to be commended for going beyond the basic theological questions of theodicy (“why does God permit suffering?”) to show how “soldiers and war workers” made “sense of death and survival” (56), his appropriation of Rudolf Otto’s theology of the “Numinous” in the second chapter is perhaps the book’s weak point. That war’s horrific realities are often simultaneously “awful” and “awe-full” while (seemingly) resistant to ordinary sense-making—better suited to the deployment of religious vocabularies of transcendence and mysterium—should be obvious enough. Ebel’s otherwise thoughtful and provocative discussion is only slightly bogged down by this theological contextualization amidst an otherwise informative historical and cultural framework. Nevertheless, Faith in the Fight is a...

Enduring Problem of Dualism

Arguments on how religion interfaces with sports are not new, and in particular, sports activity itself has been characterized as religion, namely, “cultural,” “natural,” “civil,” and “folk.” In this article, I want to consider a recent proposal by Shirl Hoffman in Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports. Hoffman attempts to reimagine how the Christian religion and sports should relate (on account of the problems of modern muscular Christianity), by justifying the sacredness of sports, in order to heal or put it back together; he appeals to sports intrinsic religious or hierarchical spiritual value. I will argue that, in his effort to redress the problems of modern muscular Christianity, Hoffman in the end falls prey to the same problem of dualism that has beset modern muscular Christianity. Specifically, dualism for Hoffman is both metaphysical and eschatological, both of which affect how he construes the human player and play itself.
 
 Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports by Shirl James Hoffman. 2010. Baylor University Press. 356pp., Pb. $29.95. ISBN-13: 9781932792102.

The Enduring Problem of Dualism: Christianity and Sports

Arguments on how religion interfaces with sports are not new, and in particular, sports activity itself has been characterized as religion, namely, “cultural,” “natural,” “civil,” and “folk.” In this article, I want to consider a recent proposal by Shirl Hoffman in Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports. Hoffman attempts to reimagine how the Christian religion and sports should relate (on account of the problems of modern muscular Christianity), by justifying the sacredness of sports, in order to heal or put it back together; he appeals to sports intrinsic religious or hierarchical spiritual value. I will argue that, in his effort to redress the problems of modern muscular Christianity, Hoffman in the end falls prey to the same problem of dualism that has beset modern muscular Christianity. Specifically, dualism for Hoffman is both metaphysical and eschatological, both of which affect how he construes the human player and play itself. Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports by Shirl James Hoffman. 2010. Baylor University Press. 356pp., Pb. $29.95. ISBN-13: 9781932792102.

Religion and Sports in America

AbstractThis article provides an overview of major scholarly contributions to the field of religion and sport. The article begins with scholarship that addresses the question: is sport a religion? Recognizing that Christianity and sports have a particularly strong relationship within the United States, the article turns to scholarship on muscular Christianity, theological and anthropological critiques of sports ministry, and how the relationship between Christianity and sports has affected Jewish and Catholic interactions with sport in the United States. As a model for future scholarship, the article briefly turns to investigations beyond the bounds of the United States that address the intersection of religion, embodiment, gender, and politics.

“A Nasty Thumping at the Top of Your Head”: Muscularity, Masculinity, and Physical Reading in The Moonstone

“A Nasty Thumping at the Top of Your Head”:Muscularity, Masculinity, and Physical Reading in The Moonstone Lara Karpenko (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Cecioni, Adriano. “Mr. Wilkie Collins, The Novelist Who Invented Sensation.” Illustration. Vanity Fair. 3 February 1872: 38. Photo Courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago, IL. Call number FA 51.925 (January-June 1872.) [End Page 132] In 1872, as part of its famed “Men of the Day” series, Vanity Fair featured a caricature of Wilkie Collins (fig. 1). Shortly after introducing the series as a regular feature of Vanity Fair, owner and editor Thomas Gibson Bowles promised that the featured caricatures would seize “the essential point” of the subject (qtd. in Matthews and Mellini 24) and Collins’s depiction seems no exception. Portraying the celebrated novelist as prominently bespectacled and weakly slumped in a chair, the cartoon suggests that Collins’s “essential point” is that his body exemplifies a non-normative masculinity. While the cartoon focuses on Collins’s body, the accompanying caption shifts that focus to the readerly body. Appearing after both The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868) had entranced the Victorian public, the caption deems Collins “The Novelist Who Invented Sensation.”1 Though any Victorian reader would have connected Collins to the category of sensation fiction, the Vanity Fair caption cheekily associates him with the larger category of “sensation,” a term that was explicitly physiological.2 By crediting Collins with not only perpetuating but also inventing the heightened sense of physicality commonly associated with the word “sensation,” the cartoon suggests that Collins and his novels remade the collective body of the Victorian reading public. Within the cartoon, then, Wilkie Collins, exaggerated embodiment, abnormal masculinity, and the genre of the novel become inseparably intertwined. To some extent, this paper proceeds from the assumption that the Vanity Fair caricature is correct. While I will not argue that Collins invented the biological category of sensation, I will suggest that he had a physiological conception of the novel and consciously attempted to remake the readerly body via the genre of the novel. More specifically, I situate The Moonstone against the backdrop of the muscular Christian movement and suggest that Collins deployed the popular sensation novel in order to invent a form of masculinity that opposed the muscular ideal in its uncontrolled physicality but also rivalled it in terms of its extensive popularity.3 Muscular Christianity represented a popular, if not inescapable, ideal of masculinity at mid-century. As James Eli Adams points out, Charles Kingsley, [End Page 133] Thomas Hughes, and a group of public-school men were primarily responsible for “the remarkably rapid diffusion of muscular Christianity” (108). Unlike Collins’s pathologized heroes, muscular Christian men represented a specific model of excessively athletic, emotionally stoic, and piously spiritual masculinity—a model that was itself originally located in and disseminated by the popular novel.4 Ultimately, the muscular Christian was a contradictory figure: one whose heightened state of healthy embodiment was a necessary and somewhat paradoxical precursor to the moment where he could become, in Kingsley’s phrase, “unconscious of [his] body” (Letters 2:18). As muscular Christianity and male athleticism were becoming increasingly associated with ideal masculinity and with encouraging men to control and forget their bodies, Collins published The Moonstone in tantalizing weekly installments in All the Year Round. Heralded by T.S. Eliot as “the first and greatest of English detective novels” (410), The Moonstone features a slew of unathletic men (among them only one professional detective)5 who attempt to uncover the crimes of the novel’s resident muscular Christian, Godfrey Ablewhite. By consistently associating admirable men with crime detection, Collins saturates his novel with alternate models of ideal masculinity and relocates masculine morality from the muscular Christian body to the detective’s logical mind and nervous body. Though Collins’s construction of masculine identity has attracted sustained scholarly attention, few critics have noted his interest in the muscular Christian movement. Further, when critics like Norman Page, Richard L. Newby, Deirdre David, and Tamara S. Wagner do explicitly consider Collins’s representation of muscular Christianity, they all focus almost exclusively on the novel that followed The...

The Lord's opening partnership: church and cricket in Calderdale, 1860 to c. 1920

During the second half of the nineteenth century, religion and cricket came together in the industrial area of West Yorkshire now known as Calderdale. Such an eventuality seemed remote during the first half of that century with clergymen opposed to – even fearful of – popular sports. This article examines why clerical attitudes changed, allowing churches, chapels and Sunday schools to form cricket clubs. It argues, however, that the factors which drove the creation of church cricket and moulded its nature were more a consequence of industrial society and the situation of working men within that society than of clerical influence and even less of Muscular Christianity. It further holds that it was the adaptation of church cricket to this working-class culture, rather than a reaction against a clerical agenda of what Peter Bailey has termed ‘play discipline’, that the marriage sooner or later ended in separation or divorce.

‘Soldiers may Fall but Athletes Never!’: Sport as an Antidote to Nervous Diseases and National Decline in America, 1865–1905

During the second half of the nineteenth century concerns about hysteria and other nervous diseases in males became extensive in some countries. One presumed cause of such afflictions were military conflicts such as the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. The Anglo-Saxon, at least according to many British and American commentators, had more sand, pluck, and courage than did men of other nations. In the United States, concerns about ‘Soldier's Heart’, a condition brought forth by the Civil War (1861–1865), were soon replaced by ‘neurasthenia’, a term used by American physician George Miller Beard in 1869. In an 1872 article entitled ‘Are Americans Less Healthy Than Europeans’, author C. S. Young hoped that the types of ‘games of competition’ that were infused with the values of Muscular Christianity’ would become part of ‘every educational establishment in the land’ so that the youth of America would acquire not only muscular vigor but ‘the manly virtues of truth, honor, and fair play’. Some attention would be given to such values; however, attention turned increasingly to ‘gridiron football’, a game likely to be infused with rampant commercialism that rapidly became the predominating sport in American institutions of higher learning. In 1898, American physician Morton H. Prince asked whether football might cause ‘traumatic neurasthenia and hysteria’ in males in the way that these conditions sometimes occurred among men engaged in a battle, and answered his own question by replying ‘no’! Football players were so well-prepared physically and mentally that there would be ‘no shock or terror’ attendant upon their injuries as might occur in a military conflict. By the time the 1903 edition of Roosevelt’s The Rough Riders: A History of the First United States Volunteer Cavalry was published debates about intercollegiate athletics that continue today were reaching a fever pitch.

Does Sport Build Character? A Progress Report on a Victorian Idea

This paper discusses the Victorian idea that sport builds character, which was one of the inspirations for the modern Olympic movement and remains central to policy debates on sport. The argument is that sport, even in the highly moralised context of ‘muscular Christianity’, failed in this character-forming role, and should not be seen as a source of moral regeneration. The paper argues that the tendency to over-moralise sport, like the commercialisation of sport, has the effect of diminishing the ‘play element’. Recovering sport as play, it is argued, is essential to unlocking its potential to lift the spirit—if not to build character, as the muscular Christians believed.

Case Studies of Collegiate Sport Chaplains

The appointment of sport chaplains in public colleges or universities can be controversial and contested as in a recent case at Iowa State University. Some scholarly attention has been paid to the relationship between sport and religion, but studies on sport chaplains are just recently emerging. Through textual analysis of media coverage and promotional materials, this study examines how collegiate sport chaplains, their ministry organizations, and public universities navigate the competing interests of evangelical chaplains and state-funded institutions. The study explores the roles and responsibilities of collegiate sport chaplains at two public universities (University of Tennessee and Auburn University). It also provides a brief review of the historical context of muscular Christianity for the discussion of collegiate sport chaplaincy.

Tom Brown's Schooldays: 'Sportsex' in Victorian Britain

Thomas Hughes's idealised vision of life at Rugby public school is one of the best-known novels in the English language. It was regarded from the outset as a founding text of 'muscular Christianity'. Contrary to the intentions of its author, it helped to inaugurate the cult of 'manly' athleticism that swept through the English public schools in the second half of the nineteenth-century. I argue that the novel reveals tensions around gender and sexuality that were in play among public schoolboys during the second half of the nineteenth century. These tensions exploded into full public view in the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895 and were instrumental in helping to establish a structure of homophobia within homosocial settings that has lasted through to the present day.

“That’s Not How We Do Things Here”: American Men’s Ministries in an Australasian Context

C hristian organizations that focus on men are nothing new. For example, the Holy Name Society, founded at the Council of Lyons in 1274, and the Knights of Columbus, founded in 1882, both continue to this day (Kauffman 1982). More broadly, Christian movements that focus on men are also nothing new: Muscular Christianity as well as the Men and Religion Forward Movement gained momentum in the late 1800s and early 1900s (Allen 2002, Bederman 1989, Putney 2003). A second wave of Muscular Christianity took hold after the Second World War, with special reference to Christian sporting activities (Ladd and Mathisen 1999). A third wave of Muscular Christianity can be identified in the late 1970s, starting with the establishment by Ed Cole of the Christian Men’s Network (CMN), which saw the creation of what we now know as ‘‘men’s ministries’’ (Gelfer 2009). Some men’s ministries, such as the well-known Promise Keepers (PK), are non-denominational, while others are affiliated with specific denominations, the most numerous of which are Catholic (Gelfer 2008). Some men’s ministries have no further focus than men, while others have a tighter agenda, such as fatherhood (Gelfer 2010a). The uniting reason for men’s ministry is an anxiety about the fading of men within the church: either an anxiety about men losing power in the Church as a result of increasing feminine influence or a missiological anxiety that fewer men are being brought to Christ. The goal of men’s ministries is therefore to attract men back into churches. This is largely achieved by appealing to stereotypical masculinities based on sporting, military, and

“That’s Not How We Do Things Here”: American Men’s Ministries in an Australasian Context

“That’s Not How We Do Things Here”: American Men’s Ministries in an Australasian Context Joseph Gelfer Christian organizations that focus on men are nothing new. For example, the Holy Name Society, founded at the Council of Lyons in 1274, and the Knights of Columbus, founded in 1882, both continue to this day (Kauffman 1982). More broadly, Christian movements that focus on men are also nothing new: Muscular Christianity as well as the Men and Religion Forward Movement gained momentum in the late 1800s and early 1900s (Allen 2002, Bederman 1989, Putney 2003). A second wave of Muscular Christianity took hold after the Second World War, with special reference to Christian sporting activities (Ladd and Mathisen 1999). A third wave of Muscular Christianity can be identified in the late 1970s, starting with the establishment by Ed Cole of the Christian Men’s Network (CMN), which saw the creation of what we now know as “men’s ministries” (Gelfer 2009). Some men’s ministries, such as the well‐known Promise Keepers (PK), are non‐denominational, while others are affiliated with specific denominations, the most numerous of which are Catholic (Gelfer 2008). Some men’s ministries have no further focus than men, while others have a tighter agenda, such as fatherhood (Gelfer 2010a). The uniting reason for men’s ministry is an anxiety about the fading of men within the church: either an anxiety about men losing power in the Church as a result of increasing feminine influence or a missiological anxiety that fewer men are being brought to Christ. The goal of men’s ministries is therefore to attract men back into churches. This is largely achieved by appealing to stereotypical masculinities based on sporting, military, and mythopoetic images (Gelfer 2009) as well as a conservative understanding of servant leadership within the home or what has worryingly been described as “soft patriarchy” (Wilcox 2004). Most men’s ministries are based in America. In recent years, when talking about men’s ministries in Australia and New Zealand, I have met a common complaint from both theologians and clergy, “that’s not how we do things here.” Their argument is twofold: First, these critics argue, I present a caricature of evangelicalism that does not bear witness to its diversity; second, I do not acknowledge that evangelicalism (and therefore evangelical men’s ministries) looks different in Australasia compared to America. Australasian men’s ministries, these critics claim, are more subtle. They are less prone to soft patriarchy, less prone to appealing to sport and military images to entice men, and consequently less prone to the problematic masculinity they promote.1 Part of this criticism is reasonable (at least according to research sympathetic to evangelical diversity). It is true that American evangelicalism—due to the assumed creep of modernity and its values—is not the conservative monolith once identified by progressive critics. There is a spectrum of positions on this issue ranging from the paradox that evangelical rhetoric remains conservative while its practice is increasingly liberal/progressive (Bartkowski 1999, Gallagher and Smith 1999, Wilcox and Bartkowski 1999) through to there being a “megashift” in the evangelical worldview (Brow 1990). It is also true that Australasian evangelicalism has its own particular flavor. For example, Brian Dickey (1994) argues that by the 1990s, the Australian evangelical domain can be seen as a “self‐contained, self‐directing phenomena whose linkages are tenuous and various, whose driving forces are largely endogamous, whose endeavors are largely independent” (240).2 However, the claim of “that’s not how we do things here” requires further unpacking. First, it must be recognized that while there may be diversity to evangelicalism in America, this does not necessarily mean that evangelical men’s ministries are similarly diverse. Indeed, the evangelical caricature is largely justified when the masculine performances in American men’s ministries are examined (Gelfer 2009). Second, it cannot be assumed that because evangelicalism in Australasia has its own particularities, men’s ministries in Australasia will also have their own particularities (especially in light of the American caricature). Canvassing men’s ministry Web sites,3 this article looks specifically at Australasian men’s ministries to see whether the claim of “that’s not...

Lot's Wife in the Novels of Mary Anne Sadlier

The biblical figure of Lot’s wife in the novels of Mary Anne Sadlier functions typologically, assigning the role of Lot’s wife to both men and women. This essay explores how such an interpretative move functioned to reverse the charges leveled against Catholic men by muscular Christianity and Catholic women by the Protestant Cult of True Womanhood. Sadlier’s audience was the burgeoning Irish American immigrant community, but the ethnically porous character of Sadlier’s sources of inspiration for that community might be attested by her family’s Catholic catechetical publishing company’s reprint of Cardinal Wiseman’s Fabiola in the United States a mere two years after its initial publication in Britain and by her numerous translations from the French. The choice of a typological figure with a widely acknowledged perceived historical basis helped Sadlier to navigate between progressive and conservative Catholic biblical interpretation contemporary to her writing. Typology also facilitated Sadlier’s participation in the Catholic polemics against anti-Catholic, nativist literature by assimilating a negative biblical exemplar to biblically devoted Protestants.

The Lives and Modernist Death of Captain Scott

This paper considers three representations of the life and death of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his last expedition to the South Pole: his Journals (1913), D. H. Lawrence's rewriting in his novel Women in Love (1920), and the film Scott of the Antarctic (1948). The edited Journals preserved a military image of Scott befitting the Edwardian ideal of the gentleman-adventurer, facilitating a Christianised image of heroic self-sacrifice transfiguring death. Against this masochistic code of English masculinity, Lawrence models the death of Gerald Crich in the Alps on Scott's Antarctic death to expose the emotional failure of stoical manhood invested in muscular Christianity. Scott of the Antarctic realises ambivalently both the Edwardian and the Modernist versions of Captain Scott's life and death, reflecting the changing views on Scott's moral status. Ealing studios intended to convey parallels to the Dunkirk spirit of collective endurance. However, the film script, reflecting on post-war bereavement, also gives voice to the relational cost. Furthermore, through Ralph Vaughan Williams' score, the film continues Lawrence's critical response to Scott's quest for individual transcendence, by conveying the ‘death-force’ at the heart of the Antarctic sublime.

Religion, Literature and the Imagination. Edited by Mark Knight and Louise Lee.

This excellent collection of essays is the product of a conference on religion and literature, and the diversity of the collection reflects this origin. Each contributor brings his or her perspective not only on how religion, literature, and the imagination intersect, but what is meant by each of the three terms, yielding a rich engagement with the subject(s). The essays in the collection are engaging, and the editors have organised them well, to create interesting, often counterintuitive resonances between them. For me, the most surprisingly resonant grouping consists of Arthur Bradley's ‘The Deconstruction of Christianity: From the Hand of God to the Hand of Man’, Louise Lee's ‘Deity in Dispatches: The Crimean Beginnings of Muscular Christianity’, and Jo Carruthers’ ‘Israel Zangwill, Jewish Identity and Visceral Religion’. Although these essays address very different topics, all three are concerned, in some way, with the relation between doing and being. Bradley engages with Derrida's On Touching to suggest that Christianity might be deconstructed by attending to an alternate history of the human hand, one in which the hand is not that which guarantees a human being's ‘privileged status as free, spontaneous, self-moving, affecting and auto-affecting ego’ (p. 53), but, rather, as argued by palaeontologist André Leroi-Gourhan, a tool-wielding appendage which itself creates the human. That is, ‘the brain was not the cause of tool use, language, and so on, but the effect … This means that what makes human beings “human” in the first place is not consciousness, intelligence and so on, but precisely our relation to the (allegedly) nonhuman world of technicity’ (p. 53).

War, Sports, and the Construction of Masculinity in American Christianity

AbstractSince at least the late 19th century, American Christians have focused attention on the ways faith promotes (or inhibits) masculinity. ‘Muscular Christians’ in the late 19th century imagined Jesus as a robust, manly figure and encouraged the development of a vigorous, masculine faith on playing fields and battlefields. Subsequent generations of mainline Protestants and evangelicals also promoted American war efforts and latched on to amateur and professional athletics, even though critics pointed out how Christians ignored the violence, corruption, and scandal associated with the army and big‐time sports. The alliance of evangelical Christians and masculine institutions like the military and professional football has solidified in recent decades.

In the beginning God created Everton…

The roots of the original Everton FC are to be found in the evangelizing muscular Christian movement of the latter part of the nineteenth century. Among the Anglican and Nonconformist ministry – and more especially in urban areas – there was great concern to provide leisure activities for their congregations. The move by the clergy towards the provision of sport was stimulated by the struggle by workers to shorten the working day through organizations such as the Nine Hours Movement. While advocating this shortening of the working day, churchmen were concerned with the type of activities workers might pursue in their extended free time away from work.

Don't Be Gay, Dude! How the Institution of Sport Reinforces Homophobeia

Kelsey Lucyk analyzes how the media and the institution of sport have entrenched certain ideals about masculinity meanwhile reinforcing homophobic attitudes towards gender roles in sports. This article focusses primarily on analyzing Canadian sports and makes use of the concept of muscular Christianity to explain hegemonic masculinity as found in the Canadian institution of sport.