The Unholy Weirdness of Muscular Christianity, Part 1

To preface this article series, I am well aware that my mashup of horror, lifting, metal, and the occult is to many off-putting, and likely to everyone a bit odd. The reasoning behind it is simple- it’s the shit I like. As such, I make the pieces match up where they make sense and then just tack shit on here and there when I decide it’s something about which I want to write. It was not calculated or rational, nor pre-planned, nor methodical- it was simply a natural outgrowth of my personal interested, with which I seem to share with you people. So call me an edgelord if that’s what you want, but recognize that you’re just doing so because you’re a boring little bitch.

Perhaps that explanation seems superfluous to you, but the reasoning behind that explication is this- I want no one to think I had any kind of ulterior motive behind my site, beyond entertainment and education. I loathe the term “edutainment” as with any of those terrible portmanteau words idiots use to feel clever, and it indicates that the information being presented is less important or accurate because it’s presented in an interesting way. So with that out of the way, prepare yourself for some heady “edutainment,” because the wild and woolly world of Muscular Christianity is one of the weirdest, most insidious movements in the history of popular culture (and particularly sports), and though reading this series might lead you to the belief that I’m attempting to push my occult weirdness on the lot of you, mine was really just an effort to provide myself with a creative outlet for my nerdery and the world with a far more interesting source for information about physical culture.

“Tim Tebow is the answer to the prayers of a certain kind of macho Christian, one who recoils at the image of Jesus Christ as a mild, effeminate savior presiding over some nice bread and wine at supper.  Such Christians prefer a tougher king, Mel Gibson’s bloody action hero in the Passion of the Christ to Michelangelo’s lank corpse.  They consider it their faithful obligation to be honest, brave, and humble, yes, but also unafraid of confrontation or competition” (Miller).

If you think you’ve not run across the bizarre muscular Christianity movement, you’re wrong. Everyone on the planet has heard of Tim Tebow, for instance, and we’ve all heard endless athletes thank the baby Jesus for their victory over other, allegedly god-fearing, yet-often-convicted-felon athletes. Beyond that, there is the hilarious Workaholics sendup of Christian strongman exhibitions, Notre Dame’s alleged Christian magic (which doesn’t seem to lend itself to victory on the field), Paul Anderson, and a bunch of other people. To jog your memory, here are a few names:

Some Prominent Advocates of Muscular Christianity

• Jeremy Lin– Harvard-educated American Jeremy Lin had a breakout year in 2012 leading the New York Knicks to the playoffs, leading to what the media dubbed “Linsanity.” Since then, he’s steadily declined and now plays in the Chinese Basketball Association, but continues to be an Evangelical who ministers to underprivileged kids and yell about Jesus at every possible opportunity. Given that the Chinese have a history of getting homicidal for Jesus in very weird ways, Lin’s life could end up taking some interesting left turns.
• Dave Krieg– Three time pro bowler Dave Krieg was a journeyman quarterback in the NFL who managed an unbelievably long career in spite of fairly average performances over 19 years. For $2000-5000, Krieg now appears to extol the virtues of Christianity and how you can parley your love of Jesus into an extended career on the world stage by simply being slightly above average for a very long period of time.
• Manny Pacquiao– pocket-sized, potential GOAT boxer Manny Pacquiao is also a professional basketball player in the Filipino Basketball Association and Filipino senator who converted from Catholicism to Evangelical Protestantism as an adult, after a dream where he saw a pair of angels and heard the voice of God. This could be the first instance of athletics-induced CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) leading to a religious conversion.
• Josh Hamilton– former professional baseball player Josh Hamilton is an occasionally sober Evangelical who credits the baby Jesus with his occasional sobriety, though Jesus’s whereabouts during his relapses remains unknown. Since his retirement, he has become a faith-based public speaker, charging religious zealots to hear him blather on about “killing sin” and other assorted angry Christian tomfoolery when he’s not harassing broads in bars and asking everyone within earshot where he can grab coke.
• Kevin Durant– NBA star Kevin Durant is a member of the ultra-shitty Hillsong Church, along with every other dickless, fuckwit celebrity of whom you can think (like the Kardashians and Justin Bieber). When they’re not raping kids, Hillsong members are rich and probably thinking about raping kids. Also, Jesus. Interestingly, the church purportedly offers counseling and support to trafficked sex workers, but not to the kids they rape.
• Kurt Warner– a rags-to-riches journeyman quarterback-turned-MVP, Warner is an evangelical who started in the NFL’s bush league (NFL Europe) and ended up a Super Bowl MVP after a lot of false starts. Warner’s rise gave a lot of other evangelicals belief that their religious faith can end in a cushy gig on the NFL Network if one only believes hard enough.
• Steph Curry– third all time in the NBA for three pointers, Curry is part owner of a Christian athletic wear company, and donates three entire mosquito nets to a charity for each three pointers he makes, a sizable contribution from his paltry $79.5M yearly income (he’s the second highest paid player in the NBA after endorsements). Curry’s wellspring of charitable goodness is a clear reflection of his love of the baby Jesus, and his understanding of that baby’s admonitions that ” it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

If none of the above people really strike a “muscular” chord with you, you’re not alone. The concept isn’t so much about looking jacked as it is about not being perceived by other Christians as a bitch- the entire movement arises out of Christians’ persistent obsession with the idea that they’re a bunch of effeminate pussies. Bear in mind that this obsession comes not from without, but within- no one from the outside looking in is saying a goddamned thing about the physiques or attitudes of the Christians. From a lay psychology perspective, their preoccupation with this idea likely stems from their belief that they are all inherently flawed and must earn their god’s favor in a variety of ways, and an obsession with bolstering their masculinity allows them to focus on something other than the fact they’re nearly to a person the most judgmental shitbags ever to strut across the planet proclaiming their moral superiority. Focusing on the corporeal over the results of their actions and attitudes is far less difficult and problematic, it seems.

Nor has this ever been a singular event- there is a cycle through which Christianity seems to ebb and flow as they take stock of the damage they’ve done to the world, extorting starving kids with food for their souls and the like, and decide that however much horrible shit they’ve done, they just didn’t do it in the way John Wayne would have. Not surprisingly, this movement seems to preface the same sort of sentiment in the secular world as well, so whether they’re early adopters of this “harden the fuck up” mentality or the progenitors of it, they’re spearheading the move away from perceived effeminacy towards their notion of masculine badassery, which is almost always a completely fabricated dichotomy and problem that exists in their own minds.

Should you care to dispute that, consider the fact that rough and tumble / catch as catch can wrestling was the preeminent style in America when the Muscular Christianity movement popped up. Boxing was, at the time, illegal due to its insanely violent nature. “Pugilism of the 18th and 19th centuries, in contrast to modern boxing, typically included punching, kicking, wrestling, stomps with spiked boots, and the use of weapons such as clubs. Punches were delivered bare knuckle, without the padded gloves required by modern boxing” (Thrasher 34). And extending that to the modern day, people certainly aren’t as religious as they were in the 18th Century, but we’re bigger and stronger (those of us who aren’t disgusting land beasts) than our forebears, and sport fighting likely hasn’t been this popular since the days of ancient Greece. Therefore, the people constantly bemoaning how soft everyone’s gotten, or how mean women are to men, or whatever the fuck it is people whine about all day long, is simply a reflection of their own weakness, not of society’s.

A brief aside to address the anticipated comments and save everyone the pain of reading that weaksauce drivel: Nor am I immune to the foregoing attitude, though I at least acknowledge it- my articles about the devolution of humanity serve as a reminder to be better every day, and to provide examples of how that might be done. For the people who feel targeted in the foregoing paragraph, there is a vast gulf between my writing and your whining- I am working to improve myself and the world around me, while you smell of Cheetos and failure and whine to your “friends” on social media, accomplishing nothing but annoying people like me.

So, though it might seem to be a modern phenomenon, as I can recall no religious zealot athletes dating to the early nineties or eighties, this trend dates almost back to the dinosaurs in which these idiots disbelieve. In the 1970s the trend was called “sportianity,” but the named, codified movement actually dates back to Victorian Era Britain., and a trend among preachers to encourage physical activity dates even further back than that- to early Colonial America. 17th Century English men at the time were fully obsessed with wrestling, shooting, and fencing and condemned “effeminate” shit like dancing and music, which signaled to the Puritans of the time that all of that shit was of the devil. “Preachers railed against recreations that they saw as distractions from religious devotion, tainted with historical connections to pagan festivals and connected to vices of gambling and drunkenness” (Thrasher 27). Taking it a step further, a 16th Century Puritan writer had railed against all athletic activities and had them banned on Sundays, which led the King to overturn those bans, which in turn pissed off the Puritans and made them hate sports more than the Democrats hate running likable candidates for President.

That said, Puritans were hateful motherfuckers and needed an outlet for that hate, so they adopted wrestling as a pastime, since it also allowed them to settle disputes without gunfire (which is a lesson the right might want to learn in the present day). Being the confused bunch of self-hating weirdos that they were, there existed enmity both in the US and England between the two factions of religious zealots, as preachers struggled for control over the hearts and minds of their congregants. That struggle ended, however, in the mid-eighteenth century when in a bizarre conflation of Christianity and English nationalism, two men identified a trend in which they believed the English had gone softer than baby shit in India on a particularly humid day, and sports were the only plausible fix. 

These men, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, believed that British men had become effeminate and weak due to their upbringing by women and soft-bodied, church-going men, and that England was being threatened by foreigners as a result.  Both men were Christian socialists (which makes far more fucking sense than Christian capitalists, but that is another rant for another day) and Kingsley “who believed that good health benefited one both in Christian service and in service to England as a country. Thus, Kingsley took more of an approach that bodily health would benefit his country in a patriotic sense” a preached that constantly to his congregation (Stevens).  Hughes, on the other hand was an athlete first and a scholar second and served as a barrister, during which time he founded a college and wrote the book that would define his career- Tom Brown’s School Days.

“Thomas Hughes ‘prompted educators and clergy to recognize the connection between effective religious education and healthy athletic endeavor’ through his 1857 novel Tom Brown’s School Days. This story chronicled the life of a fictional Tom Brown, a young boy who played rugby for his boarding school team. Stressing the unity of the mind, body, and spirit, it communicated that ‘participation in vigorous sports competition would produce a young man who understood the values of fair play, good sportsmanship, and an appreciation of the Ten Commandments.’ Since Hughes lived in England, it took some time for his ideas to carry over into the United States. His beliefs in sport were initially viewed with skepticism by many Americans, who still had lingering thoughts on sport that carried over from Puritan practices. The Puritans believed that “sport should refresh the participants so that they could better execute their worldly and spiritual callings or duties’ (Rader, 2004, p. 7). Puritans outlawed any sport that did not fulfill this goal. In essence, the Puritans only used sport as an end for more productive work lives” (Stevens).

Frankly, the beginning of this movement should be at least as bizarre as its modern existence, because the whole goddamned thing makes about as much sense as taking a blind man to a silent film. As you can see, the muscular Christian movement didn’t fail to disappoint. In part two I’ll cover the movement as it gains steam and becomes intertwined with football and rugby, and in part 3 I’ll cover the modern movement and its bizarre offshoots in the lifting world.

JUMP TO PART 2

Works Cited:

Mazer, Sharon.  The Power Team: Muscular Christianity and the Spectacle of Conversion.  TDR.  https://www.jstor.org/stable/1146430?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Miller, Lisa.  manliness is next to godliness.  New York Magazine.  31 Aug 2012.  Web.  1 Oct 2019.  http://nymag.com/news/sports/tebow-sanchez/tim-tebow-christianity-2012-9

Perelman, Michael and Vincent Portillo.  The brutal ledgacy 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/

Stevens, Chase.  Muscular Christianity: A Comparison and Analysis of the Historic and Modern
Muscular Christian Movements.  Senior Thesis for Liberty University.  Spring 2016.  Web.  18 Oct 2019.  https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1643&context=honors

Thrasher, Christopher David. Fight Sports and American Masculinity. Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2015.

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