We don’t seek out disillusionment, but sooner or later, it finds us.

This unwelcome visitor showed up at my door years ago when a slander storm wreaked havoc on our family and ministry. The slander destroyed godly reputations, severed Christian fellowship, and laid waste to years of fruitful ministry. It felt like a lifetime of serving God had all been for naught, and I sank into despair. Over the next several years, I would pray and hope for good. But as false accusations continued to swirl and devastate, I wondered if it was worth praying since God didn’t seem to answer.

“While God wasn’t changing my circumstances, he was using my circumstances to change me.”

But God was answering my prayers. Even though I didn’t perceive it initially, the good I had been hoping for was happening inside my heart. While God wasn’t changing my circumstances, he was using my circumstances to change me. Through a study of the book of Ecclesiastes, God graciously freed me from my despair and helped me find peace and joy in the middle of our storm.

Busy with an Unhappy Business

Our painful circumstances had blindsided me, yet I shouldn’t have been so surprised. We were not experiencing something unusual or unique. God already said that this is the way life truly is. As Ecclesiastes 1:13 tells us, “It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with.” Perhaps this is not a verse you have underlined in your Bible. But if we carefully consider it, this divinely inspired text will transform our perspective of life’s hardships and heartaches.

Ecclesiastes 1:13 informs us that everyone in this life will “be busy with” “an unhappy business.” Now, we women know busy. Every day we are busy with something: school, friends, family obligations, household tasks, job responsibilities, church commitments, community outreach, and the list goes on. However, many of us don’t count on being busy with an unhappy business. Yet as Ecclesiastes makes clear, “unhappy business” is a regularly scheduled event on life’s calendar. That’s why we should be ready for it.

When we expect an unhappy business, we are not caught off guard or disillusioned when it turns up. However, if we ignore the fact that it is coming, we will resent its arrival every time. And resenting and resisting our unhappy business will only blind us from seeing who gives it to us in the first place.

God, the Giver

If Ecclesiastes 1:13 simply taught that we will be busy with an unhappy business, then we all would despair. But thankfully, this verse also contains these words: “God has given.” God is the giver of every painful and perplexing experience in this life. What sweet, comforting words. Whatever our difficulty — fill in the blank — God has given it to us.

“God is the giver of every painful and perplexing experience in this life.”

I needed to embrace this truth in my difficult circumstances. I was struggling with bitterness toward those who were sinning against my family. But when I began to own that, ultimately, God was the giver of my unhappy business, I was then able to get my eyes off others and repent of my bitterness. The Puritan preacher Thomas Watson wisely said, “Whoever brings an affliction to us, it is God that sends it.”

Knowing that God sends our affliction changes everything. Rather than bitterly begrudging our trouble, we can humbly accept it. That’s because we know the Sender. He is good and does good (Psalm 119:68). He promises never to leave us nor forsake us (Hebrews 13:5). He will not allow us to be tempted beyond our ability to resist (1 Corinthians 10:13). He pledges to help us (Psalm 46:1) and to comfort us in all our troubles (2 Corinthians 1:3–4). And he causes all our unhappy business to work together for our good (Romans 8:28).

Trusting vs. Trying to Understand

While we can be sure that God is up to good in our unhappy business, we don’t always perceive it. Time and again, right when I thought I was finally seeing the good that God was creating in our baffling circumstances, it would all collapse. What is God doing? I asked, wracking my brain. The harder I tried to understand, the more frustrated I became. Once more, I found help in the book of Ecclesiastes. We read in Ecclesiastes 3:11, “[God] has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”

We discover from this verse that God gives us the desire to know what he is doing: “He has put eternity into man’s heart.” Yet he also limits our understanding: “[Man] cannot find out what God has done.” In other words, God has ordained our longing to understand and our inability to do so.

Now, we must not conclude from this that God is being unreasonable and unkind. On the contrary, God is graciously teaching us to trust him. While we may be unable to figure out what God is doing, we can learn to trust him anyway. As Charles Spurgeon once said, “The Christian . . . trusts [God] where he cannot trace him.” And of all the reasons we have for trusting our God, there is none more glorious and guaranteeing than this: “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).

Hope in God Alone

At times, we think we are trusting God when we are not. Such was the case for me. As the slanderous onslaught continued, I realized I wasn’t hoping in God. Instead, I was hoping for a particular outcome. Whenever the desired outcome failed to materialize, I would despair. I needed to set my hope on God, regardless of the result. Much of our misery in trouble is due to misplaced hope — hoping in something or someone other than God himself. But quiet confidence in God alone generates stability and delight amid all the unhappy business of life.

We should trust God like Sarah and the other “holy women who hoped in God” — women whom the apostle Peter commends as examples for us to follow (1 Peter 3:5). We know from reading the Old Testament that disillusionment called upon these women. Yet they were not surprised by the visit. They knew God was the giver of their unhappy business. And they trusted in his sovereign goodness even when life didn’t make sense. They did not place their hope in changed circumstances but fixed their hope on God and him alone. By God’s grace, we can go and do likewise, no matter how busy we are with life’s unhappy business.

Audio Transcript

“Did Bathsheba sin with David? Was she complicit in the sin? Or was she simply taken advantage of? It’s an important Bible question, one that I see pop up on social media every now and again. Of course, it’s also a sensitive question too, so a heads up to those of listening with the kids around.

“The particular question arrived recently in the inbox from a listener named Micah, who lives in Toronto. Micah asks this: “Pastor John, hello! I have a delicate Bible question I have been thinking about for a long time about the misuse of a woman. Back in APJ 234, you came right out and said that Bathsheba was ‘raped’ by King David — a violation that went against her will. Most Bible scholars I read today leave this situation more vague and simply say David ‘committed adultery’ with her, leaving her volition ambiguous, maybe even suggesting that she was a willing participant in the sin. Is there any evidence in the Bible of whether Bathsheba was willing or unwilling? And, from what I hear from feminists on this text, his power as a male king over her, a subject, would immediately classify this as a rape, even if she put up no resistance. Are there any pointers for us in the text itself?”

Yes, I think there are pointers that David exerted a kind of pressure on her to warrant the accusation of rape, and I don’t say that because I think the act couldn’t be consensual given the power dynamics at play. It is possible for a woman to be sinfully complicit in committing adultery with a very powerful man. I don’t see any evidence for that in this text.

‘He Took Her’

On the contrary, I see two indications that David threw his weight around — threw his power, his influence, his position — in such a way as to force her, apart from and against her commitment to her husband, to have sex with him. So, here’s the first pointer that I see in the way the story itself is narrated.

It happened, late one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking on the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful. And David sent and inquired about the woman. And one said, “Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?” So David sent messengers and took her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. (2 Samuel 11:2–4)

“David didn’t invite Bathsheba. He didn’t woo her. He didn’t lure her. He didn’t trick her. He took her.”

He didn’t invite her. He didn’t woo her. He didn’t lure her. He didn’t trick her. He took her. That’s what the text says: he took her. In other words, the description is of a completely one-sided, powerful exertion of his desire, with no reckoning with hers.

Parable of David’s Sin

Now, here’s the other point, and I think it’s even more significant. When the prophet Nathan is sent to rebuke David on behalf of God and confront him with his sin, he did it by telling a parable to suck David in to giving his own self-condemnation, which he did. The picture he creates is telling. Here’s what he said:

And the Lord sent Nathan to David. He came to him and said to him, “There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds, but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. And he brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children. It used to eat of his morsel and drink from his cup and lie in his arms, and it was like a daughter to him.

“Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was unwilling to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the guest who had come to him, but he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him.” Then David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man, and he said to Nathan, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die.” (2 Samuel 12:1–5)

“We are not exaggerating to use the word ‘rape’ for David’s abuse of his power in the way he took Bathsheba.”

Oh, I love that. I love Nathan. Nathan did not have to create a parable in which there was a single, harmless pet lamb who wasn’t just taken, which it was, but was taken and killed and eaten. In other words, he really re-created the adultery in the categories of theft and killing. Not Uriah’s killing — that’s an added evil — but as it were, Bathsheba’s killing represented by the little, little, helpless pet lamb being killed and served up as a meal.

So, I would say, for these two reasons, we are not exaggerating to use the word rape for David’s abuse of his power in the indulgence of his sinful lust in the way he took Bathsheba.

Holy Authority

But the Bible doesn’t just leave us with pointers — and I think this just needs to be said before we stop. It doesn’t just leave us with pointers to the reality, and the danger, and the sinfulness of the misuse of official authority or power in order to exploit, or threaten, or manipulate, or mistreat, or demean, or destroy other people. The New Testament is replete with warnings against a worldly use of authority. It is replete with beautiful descriptions of what Christians who hold positions of influence and governance should be like.

It starts with Jesus, it goes to Paul the apostle, it goes to the elders of the churches, and it goes to husbands — and indeed, it goes to all Christians, because all Christians are influential one way or the other, and they can be influential in harmful ways or influential in helpful ways. So, let’s just take a brief look at each of those stages.

Jesus

Not only did Jesus say that he came into the world “not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom” (Mark 10:45), but he also taught about this issue of power and servanthood. For example, he said,

The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you. Rather, let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. For who is the greater, one who reclines at table or one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at table? But I am among you as the one who serves. (Luke 22:25–27)

Apostles

Jesus commissioned the apostles to have foundational authority, tremendous authority, in the church to teach. If something that other people taught didn’t conform to what the apostles taught, they were not acknowledged (1 Corinthians 14:38). And yet, we get glimpse after glimpse into the way the apostle Paul and Peter and others used their authority by trying to set an example to the churches.

For example,

For we never came with words of flattery, as you know, nor with a pretext for greed — God is witness. Nor did we seek glory from people, whether from you or from others, though we could have made demands as apostles of Christ. But we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children. (1 Thessalonians 2:5–7)

He acted exactly that same way with his authority toward Philemon when he wrote to him in Philemon 8–9, “Accordingly, though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do what is required, yet for love’s sake I prefer to appeal to you.” That’s the apostles picking up on Jesus’s example and teaching.

Elders

Then comes elders. Peter says concerning the elders, the pastors who have rightful governing leadership roles in the church, “So I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ . . . shepherd the flock of God that is among you . . . not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock” (1 Peter 5:1–3).

Husbands

Paul applies the same principle to husbands in Ephesians 5. After teaching that wives are to submit to husbands as their head in marriage, he tells the husbands how to use that headship, that authority, that leadership, and he says this: “Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:24–25).

All Christians

So it starts with Jesus, it goes to the apostles, it goes to the pastors, it goes to the husbands, and now it lands finally on all Christians, because all of us can throw our weight around with somebody in order to exalt our egos and manipulate or abuse them. So, Paul says to every Christian,

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 2:3–5)

And there it is — it all circles back to Christ: “Which is yours in Christ Jesus.” It all circles back to Christ. The only hope that David would ever have that he could be forgiven and be happily in heaven with Uriah and Bathsheba and a holy God is that Jesus Christ lived and served and died in a way radically different from David. All of us depend totally on the upside-down way that Jesus used his infinite power on the cross.

ABSTRACT: In the mid-nineteenth century, a growing number of Christians looked at the church and noticed a distinct lack of both men and masculinity. Women outnumbered the men in seemingly all quarters, and many of the men who remained seemed feminine, emasculated by an industrialized society and a church that catered to the female sex. In response, some Protestant leaders began a movement that would come to be called Muscular Christianity. Muscular Christians sought to reach and reclaim men with a focus on practical religion and physical strength. The movement dwindled in the years after World War I, but its secularized legacy remains today, and the questions it asked still look for answers from churches facing many of the same problems.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors, leaders, and teachers, Greg Morse draws lessons from the history of the Muscular Christianity movement.

This is the story of a time when Christianity wanted more muscle and more men. The ancient and true religion had, in the eyes of more than a few, grown flabby and soft. One prescription in the nineteenth century read, “More discipline, more mission, more muscle.” The Muscular Christianity movement, finding its peak physique in America from 1880 to 1920, concerned masculinity. As proponents saw it, “masculinity” (a term they coined to describe the rugged side of maleness) roamed the church as an increasingly endangered species.

The movement, originating in England, originally among liberal Protestants, gained momentum in America and sought to pump more testosterone into Western Christendom. Proponents attempted to treat with one cure both men’s glaring absence from the church and the thin virility of the few lads who remained.

To understand the XY-mindset of Muscular Christianity, we must first view the state of manhood as they saw it. Then we can explore the movement’s response, analyze its legacy and downfall, and finally glean a few lessons for manhood within the church today.

Feminizing Fertilizer

Before we look at the perceived deficiencies in the Victorian man, consider him first in his context. His detractors cited one major accelerant to his downfall.

Accelerant, because the crisis of masculinity in the Western church, both in its disproportion of women to men and in the quality of men it produced, predates the nineteenth century.1 Yet something significant hastened Western Christianity’s man-problem in the 1800s. “If the seeds of Christianity’s feminization were planted in the Middle Ages,” posit Brett and Kate McKay, “those seeds came to full fruition in the 19th century. The fertilizer? The Industrial Revolution.”2

Several significant shifts occurred as the West mechanized. Men left their homesteads and the untilled fields of an agrarian society for the hustle and bustle of the city. This fractured the home base, introducing the splintered modern household we know as the norm today.

Yet this move also “sapped white-collar virility.” One writer illustrates the shift, contrasting his day in 1889 to just one hundred years prior:

There was more done to make our men and women hale and vigorous than there is today. Over eighty percent of all our men then were farming, hunting, or fishing, rising early, out all day in the pure, bracing air, giving many muscles very active work, eating wholesome food, retiring early, and so laying in a good stock of vitality and health. But now hardly forty percent are farmers, and nearly all the rest are at callings — mercantile, mechanical, or professional — which do almost nothing to make one sturdy and enduring.3

“The race,” one man lamented, “was dying; dying of its own stupidity; dying from in-doorness.”4 The new professional and managerial revolution fluffed the spirit of masculinity in particular and atrophied its body. This shift away from the hard-working farmer’s ethic to urban life — with its factories, specialties, and inert office spaces — corrupted, in many minds, what came to be known as the Victorian gentleman.5

Victorian Gentleman

The common complaint of those top hats glancing down at pocket watches held in gloves covering trimmed nails is summarized nicely in one word: overcivilized.

“Overcivilization,” writes historian Clifford Putney, “meant excessive, body-denying intellectualism, the fruit of which was emasculation — physical and cultural.”6 Overcivilization dried the sweat and smoothed the callouses of men, leaving refined tastes, sensibilities, and decorum in their stead.

Future president, muscular Christian, and author of The Strenuous Life (1901), Teddy Roosevelt (1858–1919), a man “who transformed himself via boxing and barbells from a sickly house-bound teenager into the rough-riding, safari-going, big-stick-wielding Bull Moose of legend,”7 noted a “general tendency among people of culture and education . . . to neglect and even look down on the rougher and manlier virtues, so that an advanced state of intellectual development is too often associated with a certain effeminacy of character.”8

Putney cites Henry James’s critique in his 1886 novel The Bostonians as giving a voice to many detractors:

The whole generation is womanized; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and fake delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don’t look out, will usher in a reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been.9

The Victorian ideal of gentility, from this view, proposed that a man become the finely manicured lawn in front of the well-kept home called society — a cheap substitute for the more rugged and productive field of former times. And over time, this single development toward modernity began to wobble the perception that men belonged within Western Protestantism.

Not Your Father’s Religion

The disproportion of females to males in church has always existed on American shores. Beginning in the seventeenth century, New England church rolls record more female attendance than male — even though men outnumbered women three to two.10 Puritan preacher Cotton Mather (1663–1728) added his testimony to the fact:

There are far more Godly Women in the world than Godly Men. . . . I have seen it without going a mile from home, that in a Church of three or four hundred Communicants, there are but a few more than one hundred Men, all the rest are Women.11

Into the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the trend persisted. During the Second Great Awakening of the 1830s, the revivalist strategy was said to “approach the men through their wives.”12 Editorialists asked pertinent questions: “Why Do Men Not Go to Church?” and “Have We a Religion for Men?” The former claimed to observe that nearly three-fourths of church members were women, while the latter wondered aloud, “Is the genius of Christianity foreign to the masculine make-up?”13 Men for centuries have drawn the conclusion that “the church of God is, to a very great extent, an army of women.”14

The dawn of the industrial world did little to correct the sentiment. Men left the home to work in Babylon, exposed and infected by the dirt and grime of the secular world, while at the same time the home transformed into an Edenic realm of unpolluted mothers and children in comparison. As the public sphere grew more masculine, the home blossomed more feminine. Men left the religious instruction of children to mothers. The business world became the man’s; the Christian world was left to women, children, and soft-sounding clergy.

Effeminate Clergy

“Unhappily for exponents of a virile ministry,” Putney writes, “people’s reigning image of the clergyman was of someone sensitive and refined, someone more comfortable at women’s teas than at men’s sporting competitions.” Historian Ann Douglas concurs in her treatment on the time period, frankly identifying many liberal ministers as “‘mama’s boys’ whose health was fragile and whose friendships were with women.”15 While some of the most influential churches of the day escaped the critique, “the dominant churches of nineteenth-century New England had long been feminized.”16

This, to its critics, was a generational reality. Those destined for ministerial ranks were “weak, sickly boys with indoor tastes who stayed at home with their mothers and came to identify with the feminine world of religion.”17 Unitarian minister Thomas Higginson griped of Protestant churches, “They were filling the ministry with men who lacked ‘a vigorous, manly life,’ and they were encouraging parents to say of their pallid, puny, sedentary, lifeless, joyless little offspring, ‘He was born for a minister,’ while the ruddy, the brave, and the strong are as promptly assigned to a secular career!”18

“Namby-pamby” seemed one of Charles Spurgeon’s favorite criticisms in his sermons. The manly Victorian preacher, whom Andrew Bradstock connects to the Muscular movement,19 balked at the “vicious refinement” of the day.20 He preferred the so-called vulgarities of good old Saxon words, calling things by their right names, to “the namby-pamby style of modern times, in which sacred things are spoken of as if they were only meant to be whispered in drawing-rooms, and not to be uttered where men meet in everyday life.” “A man of God,” Bradstock quotes Spurgeon in his chapter by the name, “is a manly man.”21

Weekly Mother’s Day Service

As career-minded men largely chose business over leadership in churches, leadership fell to less “manly” men and, with the Sunday school movement, to women.22 Sermons bent toward females. Calvinist theology was displaced. Christ’s gentler characteristics became emphasized, along with women’s spiritual leadership in the home and the church.23

“The more feminine services became, the more men stayed away; and the more women outnumbered men in the congregation, the more ministers catered to their needs.”24 Ann Douglas describes this “symbiotic relationship” that developed between these lighter ministers and their mostly female flocks: “The ministers were caught in a vicious paradox. The women were their principal supporters. Accepting feminine help meant in part prolonging their own exile from masculine concerns; refusing it hardly guaranteed new and different adherents.”25

With this relationship intact, Douglas describes that “the Sabbath came to be heralded as a sort of weekly Mother’s Day.”26 One onlooker remarked of this trend, “There will not be men enough in heaven to sing bass, when ‘The Song of Moses and the Lamb’ is rendered by the redeemed before the Great White Throne.”27

Pushups and Practical Religion

Enter the Muscular Christianity movement — a movement focused on the practical, focused on the body, focused on the world, and focused on making boys into men.

Muscular Christianity had two main aims: to increase men’s commitment to their health and to their faith.28 That is, to take men out of a Jane Austen novel and put them into the gym and onto the battlefield for Christ. But what did this entail? The movement emphasized what they considered a brawny Christianity — manlier ministers, punchier sermons, manlier songs, a more masculine Jesus, and an emphasis on doing good in the world through the social gospel.29 “For many in Victorian England muscular Christianity meant macho,”30 writes David Rosen — though the movement had a less-than-macho origin.

Beginning Pages

Muscular Christianity did not have its birthplace in the pews or on the battleground, but rather in the pages of literature. Thomas Hughes and Charles Kingsley, two Englishmen fed up with the effeminacy and physical weakness tolerated in the Anglican church, began writing novels, the likes of which their derogators called “Muscular Christianity.”31

Christian Socialists, critics of a disembodied evangelicalism, and disapprovers of industrialism’s effect on English society and its men, Hughes and Kingsley promoted an athletic, patriotic, and missional manhood32 alongside “a virile, strong-armed Christianity, a man’s religion, so to speak, that melded courage and faith, spirit and body.”33

Hughes’s Tom Brown Schooldays (1857) was arguably the most successful of the novels. Filled with rugby, footraces, positive male role models and nearly an all-male cast, the book promoted an example for schoolboys of “principled strength.”34

In his book Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), Hughes gives an instructive look behind the scenes into the creed he sought to narrate in his books, as well as one key criticism of the movement he aimed to undermine:

The least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief, that a man’s body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men. He does not hold that mere strength or activity are in themselves worthy of any respect or worship, or that one man is a bit better than another because he can knock him down, or carry a bigger sack of potatoes than he.35

Kingsley and Hughes, with many similarities and dissimilarities, took the pen to sketch out what they believed young men needed: faith, goodness, and physical strength.

Primitive Bodies, Civilized Ideals

To modern ears, the last of these three may strike us as odd. What do push-ups have to do with eternal life and faithful Christian living? The McKays helpfully summarize several lines of reasoning built within Muscular Christianity’s framework:

Physical training builds the stamina necessary to perform service for others.
Physical strength leads to moral strength and good character.
Sports provided a platform to evangelize the unchurched.
Physical sports and exercise connect boys and men with masculinity.36

And recall the backdrop of “overcivilization” nagging at the Muscular Christian’s mind. Sitting, typing, and managing did not properly steward the strength given from God to men for worldwide good.

In the best of the movement, power did not serve as an end in itself, as voiced by Hughes. The Muscular Christian did not want to simply travel back in time “to do preindustrial chores such as hunting and farming; [the body] had a higher purpose. Instead of just being a tool for labor, the body was viewed by muscular Christians as a tool for good, an agent to be used on behalf of social progress in world uplift.” The goal was “primitive bodies to further civilized ideals.”37

The creed that upheld this? The social gospel, which emphasized practicing the social ethic of Christianity, but to the minimizing of orthodox belief. “Convinced that the archetypal buttoned-down Victorian gentleman was ill-equipped to handle the challenges posed by modernity, many Progressives proposed a new model for manhood, one that stressed action rather than reflection and aggression rather than gentility.” Given this world uplift, and the chiseled arms of Christian men holding it up, all attainable health became a duty; all avoidable sickness, a sin.38

Legacy

To highlight a few more specifics of the movement, we look to the legacy. What came of this predominantly liberal Protestant movement that peaked in America from the 1880s to the 1920s?

YMCA

David slayed a giant, Jacob wrestled the angel, Jesus and his disciples walked miles, and Muscular Christians prepared their bodies for good works in places still in operation today. The foremost being the YMCA.

Many modern readers will be surprised to realize that the YMCA, the Young Men’s Christian Association, was originally just that: a Christian organization. And many more will be surprised that the first iterations in England and the U.S. did not have what many consider their trademark today: gyms.

At first its purpose was simply the evangelization of young men in the cities through traditional means: tent meetings, street corner preaching, and pamphleteering. But once the New York City “Y” pioneered the use of gymnasia as a means of Christian outreach in 1869, English YMCAs generally followed suit.39

The YMCA used gyms to attract the interest of boys not interested in Bible studies and teas, and sought to give them purpose: committed souls to Christ and fit bodies for social service. Muscular Christianity even aggressively promoted mission work, in conjunction with the acclaimed Student Volunteer Movement, as hard work, heroic work — manly work.

But as we can see from modern-day YMCAs, the focus grew more and more secular, less about souls and more about “character building” and fitness for its own sake.40 Factions deepened between religious instructors and the ex-circus men who typically led the gymnastics instruction. The weaker brother complained about the “physical department being unmanageable and a disgrace to the Association,” and the stronger about the “spider-legged, namby-pamby hypocrites in management who want them to play girls’ games.”41 The latter eventually unseated for former, serving as a parable for the whole movement.

Boy Scouts

The Muscular movement did not just focus on the brawn of its current men, but gave attention to its future men — a future many in the movement considered bleak. The schools they considered too bookish, too sanitized, too domestic under its “army of women teachers” who were unfit to impart a masculine education.42 The church, with its Sunday schools also “manned by women,” could not give the “hero-worshiper” a suitable champion to imitate.43 Therefore, they created youth “gangs” such as the Boys Brigade, Knights of King Arthur, and the most successful, the Boy Scouts.

The Boy Scouts took spirited boys and taught them to hone the inner (and sometimes buried) primitive inclinations on camping trips away from their mothers. It “took ‘sissified’ boys from the suburbs and sent them on rigorous trips into the forest . . . to endow white boys with ‘brute strength’ and basic survival skills.”44 Going the way of the Y, character building and wholesome values eventually outstripped its initial spiritual component, transforming it into the secular-humanist project we know today.

Sport Culture

“By far the biggest impact of Muscular Christianity,” write the McKays, “has to do with the way it shifted societal perceptions of physicality.”45 Our sports and fitness culture today, detached as it is from faith, is Muscular Christianity’s greatest legacy.

Prior to the movement, Protestant America frowned upon sport. Historian Richard Swanson adduces four reasons:

The belief that recreation distracted from spiritual devotion.
The belief that recreation wasted time.
The belief that recreation stood as a gateway to taverns and gambling.
The belief that recreation would prove too addictive for fallen human nature.46

The movement helped breach these assumptions, storming the shores of American culture and making way for the all-too-addictive fitness and sport culture common today — a culture that neo-muscular Christian movements today try to utilize for better purposes.47

Atrophy of a Movement

The peak, at least in its more successful American iteration, came to a close in the 1920s. After 1920, Putney writes, “pacifism, cynicism, church decline, and the devaluation of male friendships combined to undercut muscular Christianity — at least within the mainline Protestant churches.”48

The Great War dealt a mighty blow to muscular rhetoric. The aftermath of WWI

extinguished much of the energetic idealism of the previous decades, and replaced it with disillusionment and cynicism. There wasn’t much societal appetite for talk of keeping one’s body in fighting shape, nor of the celebration of masculine, battle-related virtues like courage or honor. Notions of Christian chivalry got significantly muddied in the trenches.49

The end of WWI dampened the nationalistic zeal and clouded the nation in cynicism concerning the need for fit, soldier-ready bodies.

Along with this cynicism came a devaluation of the church and religion in general. Alternative answers to life’s hard questions arose. A new religion survived, less interested in saving the world as it was “being good to yourself.”50 Radios and cars, a new era of entertainment, and golf on Sundays took hacks at religious commitment. Pastoral authority also waned, giving way to the psychologist.51 The soothing tones of the therapist drowned out the muscular sergeant’s voice calling for fit bodies and world uplift.

O Men, Where Art Thou?

This has been the story of a time when Christianity wanted more muscle and more men. And it is a story relevant for today.

While we may chafe at some of the theology behind Muscular Christianity, many ask the same questions that prompted the movement. In his book Why Men Hate Going to Church, David Murrow cites a Barna study that found women to be

57 percent more likely to participate in adult Sunday school,
54 percent more likely to participate in a small group,
46 percent more likely to disciple others, and
39 percent more likely to have a devotional time or quiet time.52

With all of its flaws (many left unmentioned above), what can we learn from the Muscular Christian movement just beginning to decline one century ago?

Reclaim the Body

God’s design for man is as assaulted today as it is underappreciated. Muscular Christianity is an enigma to modern ears, in part, because we have an anemic theology of the body.

We too fail to celebrate raw masculine strength. Anthony Esolen gives us one example, casting men as world-builders:

Every road you see was laid by men. Every house, church, every school, every factory, every public building was raised by the hands of men. You eat with a stainless-steel fork; the iron was mined and the carbon was quarried by men. . . . The whole of your civilization rests upon the shoulders of men who have done work that most people will not do — and that the physically weaker sex could not have done.53

“Dominion over the world, even in the postindustrial West, still needs the strength of men. Good men. Christ’s men.”

Men, despite what our silence on the topic may suggest, are embodied creatures. Our souls remain framed in strength given to cultivate and construct civilization. Dominion over the world, even in the postindustrial West, still needs the strength of men. Good men. Christ’s men.

So while Paul says bodily training is of some value (1 Timothy 4:8), and Muscular Christianity may have posited too much value, we must not think it is of no value. Though the eternal soul takes precedence over the temporal body, the man is never just his soul. Can we wonder long why the world stands confused as to what a man or a woman even is anymore?

Reclaim the Heroic

How many men, especially within the church, view the Christian life as heroic? How many feel the adrenaline pump, the stiff wind of purpose greeting the face and animating them to the helm of life, steering for the harder way?

It may sound counterintuitive, but men retreat instead of rally when trumpets do not sound alarms of war. They grow bored and listless, and they will not easily forfeit their strength on unworthy pursuits. Is what Josiah Strong observed in 1901 untrue?

There is not enough of effort, of struggle, in the typical church life of today to win young men to the church. A flowery bed of ease does not appeal to a fellow who has any manhood in him. The prevailing religion is too comfortable to attract young men who love the heroic.54

“Jesus looks at young men and promises them discomfort, sacrifice, and death. Minimize this call and you forfeit men.”

Jesus looks at young men and promises them discomfort, sacrifice, and death. Minimize this call and you forfeit men. God made me for this. Muscular Christianity attempted to awaken the daring in men. They knew that if you “promise young men battles instead of feasts, swords instead of prizes, campaigns instead of comforts . . . the heroic which lies deep in every man will leap in response.”55

Without losing the gospel or the focus on Jesus Christ and the immortal soul, the Christian religion must never lose its genre as epic. We live in a greater story than we find in Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or Star Wars or Gladiator. “To those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life” (Romans 2:7).

Reclaim the Hero

Muscular Christianity worked tirelessly to rescue the one-sided image of Christ. The gentle Lamb often brings little resistance, but what of the “lion . . . marked by traits like justice, boldness, power, and self-mastery . . . Jesus the carpenter, the desert camper, the whip-cracker”?56

Many men today have refused to follow Jesus not because they have seen “the man Christ Jesus” himself (1 Timothy 2:5) and turned away from his summons. They have turned from the soft-to-touch, cuddle-up-in-green-pastures, silky-hair-and-whispering parody. True — he does lay his sheep down in green pastures; he does lead them beside still waters. But he can do both because his rod and his staff comfort us (Psalm 23:4). Sheep do not feel safe to lie down where their shepherd cannot defend them from wolves. Jesus is worshiped as Lamb because he ever lives as Lion.

“Men must see the Jesus of the Scriptures, not the sentimentalized substitute.”

Men must see the Jesus of the Scriptures, not the sentimentalized substitute. They must see the Commander of the Lord’s armies, the Lord of lords, the Master, the Ruler of the kings on earth, the Son of Man, the Alpha and Omega, the man of war, the Son of the Most High God. The one who did not have his life taken from him but lays it down of his own accord; the one who wields the scepter and wears the crown; the one to whom all must swear fealty, bowing and kissing his ring; the Hero of the story who commands all men everywhere to repentance and faith, for he has fixed a day to judge the world (Acts 17:30–31).

This is the King of kings, who invites us, even men, to follow him and reign with him, forever.