Plague of Strength

Having reread the previous installment of this series, I realize it was somewhat disjointed. My apologies, but this is frankly like trying to tell a story about a 200-year-old ball of yarn that’s half rotten and hopelessly tangled, and it took that entire entry to even figure out the reasoning behind the movement since it’s pretty antithetical to the religion from which it is purportedly derived. I’ll do my level best to tell the story in a less Tarentino-ish manner, but I make no promises- this subject is a bitch to parse.

PART ONE IS HERE IF YOU MISSED IT

“All we do on this stage is bait. People won’t go to church, but they’ll come see us do crazy things”

As I mentioned previously,the entire concept of Muscular Christianity arose in the Protestant church, whose male members believed that the secular world does little more than sit around mocking Christian men for being bitches so effeminate that they lack the wrist strength to turn a doorknob, and who almost certainly would rather suck start the doorknob to open a door than they would start a fistfight or fuck a woman. Taking into account the breathtaking amount of paranoia and misogyny that fueled that bout of insanity, it’s rather hard to believe that anyone would buy into it, but as a general rule Christians are nothing if not consistent in their desire to be the worst people imaginable at all times. As such, they snatched up that ideal with the enthusiasm one would think only a tweaker could muster when they’ve found some meth in the carpet, and turned it into one of the longest-lasting and pervasive belief systems in modern Christianity.

So while the British engaged in obviously less insane Christianity on their side of the pond, Americans (and Australians, though I don’t have time to cover their special brand of zealotry) went all-out to show the world exactly how crazy a human being could be if grouped with like-minded mentally ill people. While I don’t want to turn this into a lecture on the bizarre Christian sects that proliferated in the British colonies, it bears mentioning that America and Australia both boast violently ignorant, supremely stupid, and wildly aggressive strains of Christianity not found in other parts of the world.

These movements began in Britain as the Brits got ripshit pissed for Jesus and began angry little movements like the Puritans, who the Brits quickly kicked the fuck overseas in an effort to dump their biological waste onto our shores. Known as the Evangelical Revival, this movement preached individual involvement in Christianity, so rather than just be a rote participant and virtual spectator to church proceedings, people were encouraged to share their individual thoughts and feelings regarding their faith, which might seem like a great idea until you consider the fact that most people are petty, selfish, self-obsessed dickheads who have to be forced at gunpoint to help the indigent and the crippled, and even then they bitch about how the unfortunate are undeserving of help… which is essentially the exact opposite of the teachings of their Christ man.

Arising out of the differences between the old school method of worship and the new, and then between differing sects of the new school Protestants, sectarianism became a central part of American Christianity. Having apparently omitted the “judge not lest ye be judged” bit and every possible mention of mutual respect and forgiveness from their Bibles, American Christians established as their principle tenet of their worship hate for everyone who isn’t in their little club. Sectarianism is defined as ” is a form of prejudice, discrimination, or hatred arising from attaching relations of inferiority and superiority to differences between subdivisions within a group,” and owing to the increasingly fractured nature of their religion and Protestantism in particular, Evangelicals turned their backs on the entire history of their religion and the rest of Christendom and became a hate-filled mouthpiece for the least-well-educated rural shitbirds our nation could offer up.

Assholes travelled the countryside holding what became known as “tent revivals,” screeching vitriol and hellfire at the townspeople who’d assembled because it was a spectacle and the television hadn’t yet been invented. The more soft-headed of them would be roped in by the carefully crafted performances, and using a combination of slight-of-hand, terrible marketing, and various simple brainwashing techniques, these slobbering fuckwits managed to assemble a veritable army of ill-bred and ill-educated maniacs to propagate their violent idiocy by means of vituperative language. They found, however, that endless threats, screaming, and the light-headedness resulting from the noisome cloud of body odor from closely-packed and sweaty unwashed humans wasn’t always enough to rope in more money and more bodies- they needed a new angle.

“Evangelical preaching has always been a highly visible form of performance in American culture, but never moreso than since the advent of cable television.  The tradition it follows is rooted in the revival tents and medicine shows of 19th-century America.  Today’s evangelical ministers are pragmatists who extend their evangelical range with secular performance practices and electronic media” (Mazer).

For all intents and purposes, these tent revivals were travelling carnivals, with the preachers as barkers. Preachers today freely admit that they “bait” people into becoming congregants, treating them like nothing so much as carnival marks. Thus, when muscular Christianity popped up in the mid-19th Century, the preachers saw a golden opportunity. They’d seen the inroads that traditional religious movements had made with the introduction of football in the Americas, which began in 1869 and became American football under muscular Christianity proponent and avid exerciser Walter Camp, so they decided to combine the art of spectacle from the carnival with the theological and philosophical underpinnings of Muscular Christianity to spread their brand of Pentacostal psychosis.

At this time, strongmen primarily displayed their strength in the circus, sideshow, traveling medicine show, so strongmen were quite used to grifting their audience and promoting a product in which no rational person could reasonably believe. Their performances required an audience for them to receive payment, however, so they attached their show to whomever they could that would result in a payday- grift became a part of the performance as much as lifting did, whether it be to peddle snake oil, sell tickets to see an obviously fake merman. And because they went together like peanut butter and ladies, strongman exhibitions and travelling bands of foaming-at-the-mouth religious zealots who would rather scream about the apocalypse their read their own books of worship became inextricably entwined.

“Parachurch preachers offer themselves “for hire” to churches around the country as well as broadcast their “services” via satellite from churches, tents, auditoriums, and television studios.  As such, their performances of exhortation conflate the quest for Christian salvation with a more secular brand of show- and salesmanship” (Mazer).

So, while football and the newly invented Muscular Christian sport of basketball (invented by avowed muscular Christian James Naismith) converted the city-dwelling schlubs into paragons of wild-eyed, church-going-and-tithing men sporting men, itinerant hired-gun preachers scoured the countryside with their mentally ill fuckery, preying on the disaffected and the hopeless in an effort to fill their pockets with cash. Though their aim was clearly and indisputably filling their coffers with cash (that rarely sees the light of day as actual charity and goodwill, as the industry currently tops $50B and those churches donate little, if anything to the surrounding community, because mission and outreach is a tiny line item, and can also be called “marketing”), their stated aim was something much, much different. Depending on the source, the aim of the movement was anything from imperialism to stamping out the evils of feminine influence on Christianity, but helping people and effecting a positive change the world never entered the picture. To Muscular Christians, “Jesus was no skinny little man.  Jesus was a man’s man” (Mazer), and the spectacle of their religious services was designed to help “revitalize an effete population physically and
mentally unprepared to defend themselves or take their place on the world stage” (Perelman); while all of the ideas spawning the movement were fabrications of Christians’ diseased minds.

As scholar Sharon Mazer put it,

“The… equation of masculinity with spiritual and physical power would be unremarkable but for the degree to which [muscular Christians] are explicit in their repudiation of what they consider to be the “feminization of Christianity.  They repeatedly attribute to the dominant (i.e. non-Christian culture) culture the idea that Christian men are somehow less “manly” than non-Christian men and then dare nonbelievers to question their masculinity.”

In short, the entire fucking thing was driven by greed and extremely low self-esteem, seemingly coupled with no small amount of repressed pan- bi- or homosexuality. As one might think, a movement with nefarious goals would likely achieve them by nefarious means, and the Evangelicals’ Muscular Christianity efforts were exactly that. Take, for instance, the example of “Superstar” Billy Graham, otherwise known as Wayne Coleman. Superstar was a standout athlete at a wildly athletic Arizona high school, driven to success by the need for approval from his coaches, because his home life was abusive enough to land him a TV movie on Oxygen. After appearing in a bodybuilding magazine for winning Mr. Teenage America, Pastor James Welch and his evil shrew of a wife, Beverly Swink Welch, literally hunted the high schooler down by calling every single Coleman in the greater Phoenix area. They claimed to have been ordained by their god to hunt and convert him, though the fact that the Welches were part of a traveling Christian freakshow called the Full Gospel Businessman makes it much more likely that they simply wanted to add the incredibly jacked, tan, blond-haired and blue-eyed Superstar to a stable of “talent” that already included “faith healers,” every manner of prepper-style apocalyptic catastrophist you could find, and even a “prophet.”

And rope him in, they did- with Coleman’s shitty home life and utter lack of direction, a bunch of people who fervently believed in doing something other than beating their kids appealed to a young reprobate covered in bruises. Coleman was also starstruck with his rock star preacher, Jerry Russell, a 6’5″ former felon who rocked a black pompadour and drove a Cadillac, was exactly the kind of psychopath to which Coleman could aspire to be- he might have swung wildly between between moods, but he was charismatic as hell and a born performer, which is exactly what Coleman wanted to be.

Russell also gave Coleman people to be against, which was basically everyone on the fucking planet.

“‘This is what you have to watch out for. you have to watch out for the Jehovah’s Witnesses. You’ve got to get a book and learn their doctrine, so you can go against them. You have to learn about the Christian Scientists. You have to learn about the Mormons…. It’s going to be spiritual warfare.’

I also had to be wary of ‘lukewarm’ churches, he argued. Lutheran, Episcopal, Presbyterian, even some Pentecostal churches, might be lukewarm if they were lax in their intensity for God. ‘You can’t be on the fence,’ Jerry insisted. ‘There is no middle ground. Because God will spew all the lukewarm Christians out of his mouth.’” (Graham 29).

After Coleman completely ostracized his family with incessant bullshittery about lakes of fire and whatnot, he left home and went on the road with Jerry Russell, performing feats of strength onstage as the spectacle to “prove” the power of their magic and that of their smelly desert wizard, Jesus. Coleman would preach that “you didn’t have to be a bookworm or a wimp to serve God,” and would then rip (pre-cut) phone books in half and bend steel bars behind his neck (Graham 34). At that point, Coleman was so fucking brainwashed that legitimately believed he had a healing touch, and that he had performed exorcisms that he now admits was basically just the abuse of the mentally ill. Though he now freely admits the entire thing was bullshit, he bought into it hook, line, and sinker at the time, even after Jerry Russell fully made out with his new bride at Superstar’s own wedding.

“These exhibitions are deliberately designed to manipulate a highly programmatic spectator response.  That is, everything that happens on the stage is calculated to induce large numbers of people to come forward, leave their seats, and dedicate (or rededicate) themselves to Christ at the end of the evening” (Mazer). 

As this isn’t the Superstar Billy Graham biopic, I’m not going to outline the man’s entire fucking life. Sufficed to say, he used the Evangelicals to teach him to be a showman, and they used him to put asses in seats… which meant money. That sort of thing was common for decades, and even survived until the early oughts- the biggest spectacle on TV in the 80s was “The Power Team,” a bunch of allegedly natty lifters, who performed in churches and on TV to spread the word of their purportedly magical Jew. Their leader, John Jacobs, was a jacked-as-fuck convicted felon who realized that doing strength feats drew a larger crowd to pass the hat at the end of the service. After a local sheriff showed him how to break handcuffs, (“all you need is force, torque, and knowing where the structural weaknesses are”), he did that feat while yammering on about “breaking the chains of the devil,” which immediately resonated with the criminals to whom he was ministering. Frankly, demonstrating that Christian magic is strong enough to snap handcuffs should draw the interest of anyone who habitually commits crime, because that’s a useful superpower to have. From there, Jacobs parleyed that experience into one with a wider audience.

“John Jacobs and his Power Team explicitly acknowledge their calculation in conflating popular performance practices with evangelical proseletyzing.  In Jacobs’ own words, he is a “soul-winner,” a “fisher of men” who performs feats of strength in order to attract non-Christian audiences to the evangelical message.  In People Magaine, Jacobs explains the Power Team’s “melding of circus and religion” as “bait”.  Team members reiterate this theme in their own interviews.  Mike Hughes tells a rep[orter for the Repository, a Canton, Ohio, community paper: “God doesn’t care about us breaking rocks.  This is just a tool.  He told us to be ‘fishers of men.’ This is only the bait.  In another interview, Craig Lemley echoes: ‘It’s a bait to hook the people who would have never gone to normal church service.”

“In buying tickets, spectators agree to listen to the Team’s testimonials, to its pleas for money and its prayers for redemption.  In return, they are offered the spectacle of muscular young men ripping phone books, bending steel, lifting logs, exploding hot water bottles, and breaking all sorts of off objects including blocks of ice, burning cinder blocks, and handcuffs.  These ‘muscular Christians’- the phrase first coined in this county by baseball-player-turned-preacher Billy Sunday (1862-1935)- display their bodies as a sign of spiritual power, poised against the imprecations of vice, itself defined as society at large” (Mazer).

A common practice in the second half of the 20th Century by these maniacs was called “flirty fishing,” which was basically using hot chicks to lure dudes into churches. Sometimes the chicks would fuck for their Christ man, but oftentimes it was just a lot of flirting and feigned interest to draw in more bodies. Strongman exhibitions, then, were like flirty fishing for little boys and lifters. This practice expanded into professional wrestling as well, as travelling shows like UCW (Ultimate Christian Wrestling) get oily and sweaty to part Southern rubes from their hard-earned SSD and welfare dollars, preaching that their god’s magic protected them from injury in the ring and allegedly allows them to take harder bumps and more violence than secular wrestlers (although I imagine Japanese hardcore wrestlers would strongly dispute that assertion.

“Actually, we’re more violent than secular wrestlers because we don’t seem to feel it like they do. The bumps and bruises that we take in the ring – I think God takes them and puts them on His own back.” (Miller)

These days, Muscular Christianity comes in a variety of forms, from athletes who purportedly are all about Christ yet donate zero money to charity to wrestling shows to offshoots of the now-defunct Power Team (Jacobs ended up snorting up all of their $10M in yearly profits and giving a bunch of Christian housewives VD). Whatever your sporting taste, there are a variety of evangelical athletic spectacles that are carefully designed to part the audience from their money with the promise of salvation on the sweaty backs of people who genuinely don’t give a fuck about anything but the almighty dollar. There are also a variety of bizarre workout programs ranging from author Mike Brown’s absurd Strength of Samson, which purportedly reveals biblical secrets for super strength in combination with nutrition advice from perhaps the most picky eaters in the history of the culinary arts (the rules regarding food in the Old Testament are byzantine, contradictory, and butt-fucking retarded). Given that the book contains one chapter on how women can get bigger tits for their desert wizard’s pleasure and the fact his other books involve get-rich-quick schemes straight out of the Bible as well as advice on fucking, you would probably do well to avoid it. You might be better off getting your literal Muscular Christianity certificate here.

“The male body [emphasis mine], as it is recognized and defined by its muscularity, literally enacts a promise to Christian men that their bodies can be likewise powerful at the same time that it acts as a manifestation of the Spirit which would otherwise remain invisible” (Mazer)

Should you be interested in getting a lobotomy and tottering into one of their facilities, you can try Lord’s Gym, which is the spiritual successor to Zuver’s Gym (Part 1 and Part 2, if you missed them). There are also Christian powerlifting teams (wild-eyed racist and born-again dickhead Jesse Kellum and his little dogs enjoyed barking at me while I broke world records in stark opposition to their expectations and Christian magic), so that’s a whole bunch of fun as well. Just don’t be a woman trying that shit, because according to the evangelicals, Jesus hates anyone with a vagina and firmly believes your ass should be in the kitchen baking a pie and praying fervently for immaculate conceptions so you can bear your husband godly children without all the icky sex. Your penance for talking to snakes and stealing ribs and eating apples and such, because if there is one thing Christians love, it’s endless punishment for a single fuckup, because that’s super fair and they are a just and noble people and Jesus is a super cool dude.

I’m not in the habit of telling people what they should and shouldn’t do with their lives, but the world would honestly be better off if you just killed yourself rather than signing on with the muscular Christianity crew. So either follow Budd Dwyer into the great beyond or just avoid those money-grubbing, insecure, misogynistic hypocrites if you possibly can, because the best case scenario is you end up penniless and brainwashed, while the worst case is your local pastor fucks your kids like this guy and this guy (caught within a month of one another), or gets you to help fund his baby mill like this guy (alright, he’s LDS, but they’re fucking crazy as well).

Up next, I’m going to take an entertainingly weird position on Fritos, Oreos, and Diet Mountain Dew. There are also more Killer Workouts entries in the works, as well as one on rowing, one on pullups, one on the Mexican “protein bar,” and one on the evils of high fructose corn syrup, which should be obvious, but I’m going to cover it anyway.

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Sources:

Blackwell, Brain.  Four evangelistic campaigns in state ‘bring in the sheaves’.  Baptist Message.  11 Dec 2017.  Web.  15 Nov 2019.  https://baptistmessage.com/four-evangelistic-campaigns-state-bring-sheaves/

Graham, Superstar Bill and Keith Elliot Greenberg. Tangled Ropes. New York: Pocket Books, 2006.

Mazer S.  The Power Team: muscular Christianity and the spectacle of conversion.  TDR 1994 Winter; 38(4): 162-188.

Miller, Karyn.  Christian wrestlers fight for Bible Belt.  The Telegraph.  29 Jan 2006.  Web.  30 Apr 2019.  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1509153/Christian-wrestlers-fight-for-Bible-Belt.html

Paulas, Rick.  The Power Team was the bloody, evangelical freakshow that ruled the 80s.  Vice.  4 Feb 2015.  Web.  15 Nov 2019.  https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5gkvjn/evangelical-freak-show-the-power-team-were-christian-superstars-of-the-80s-456

Perelman, Michael and Vincent Portillo.  The brutal legacy of the Muscular Christianity movement.  Counterpunch.  9 Aug 2013.  Web.  1 Oct 2019.  https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/09/the-brutal-legacy-of-the-muscular-christian-movement/

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