In 1858, Thomas Wentworth Higginson said “the saints have been ‘ashamed of their bodies.’" For Higginson, Christians had failed to realize the interconnectedness between body and spirit. Christians needed something more physically robust. And as it so happened, America’s bourgeoning physical culture movement was ideal. Noting the development of a certain social trend in the early Victorian period, one scholar described the movement as “a tradition which celebrated the Christian gentleman as vigorous, athletic, and manly.” With the “cult of sport and games” in the late-19th and early 20th centuries, this scholar wrote, such “Muscular Christianity” was seen “as a needed corrective to the feminine influence in religion." Simply put, there were too many women and not enough men in the church. Christianity needed a more masculine appeal, and physical culture provided. The point? Christians popularized physical culture and sports in America, and they did so by critiquing the fragility of women and the pervasive problem of womanly ways. Sports provided a medium for the inculcation of manly Christian values.
As evangelist, physician, founding superintendent of the Physical Education Department of the YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts, head of physical training in NYC public schools, and President of the American Physical Education Association, Luther Halsey Gulick, Jr. put it: “athletics are primarily” “moral in their nature.” Furthermore, “a boy does not have until he does the thing that is honest of his own volition until this has become a part of his organic nature.” honesty become a part of his character until it has worked out in action
Sports simultaneously forged strong Christian bodies and souls. This combination of Christianity, masculinity, and physical culture made room for a reimagining of Jesus. In the words of YMCA employee and baseball-player-turned-evangelist, Billy Sunday, “the manliest man is the man who will acknowledge Jesus Christ”; in fact, Jesus “was the greatest scrapper that ever lived.” Individuals like Bruce Barton, author of the best-selling book, The Man Nobody Knows, spoke similarly. Barton decried the loss of Jesus’ true masculine identity to be the result of the aforementioned “feminization” of Christianity. Even on painted canvas, according to these theological interlocutors, Jesus had become tantamount to a bearded lady. Thus, more masculine images of Jesus (as represented by James Tissot’s studies of Christ and, even more so, Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ) and their popular acceptance was indicative of the “assimilation of Christ to the cult of virility,”. ‘Muscular Christianity’; a term encapsulating spiritual, moral and physical purity alongside notions of Christian manliness.
In reality, muscular Christianity had it's rooted in a whole range of ethical and moral concerns which were prevalent in the mid-1880s: the protection of the weak, the plight of the poor, and the promotion of moral virtue. The incorporation of these (and other) concerns into a framework of physical endeavor and spiritual cleanliness resulted in the establishment of a series of core values which, in time, came to underpin the relationship between sport and religion: fair play, respect (both for oneself and others), physical and emotional strength, perseverance, deference, subordination, obedience, discipline, loyalty, cooperation, self-control, self-sacrifice, and endurance.
