Have you ever heard God’s voice?

Has he spoken words that have strengthened your soul? Or transformed your perspective? Or brought you abiding peace? God’s words are unlike human words. They change us. They bear fruit. They do not — and cannot — return void (Isaiah 55:11). God spoke our whole world into existence. For God, speaking is the same as having it done.

In suffering, perhaps more than at any other time, we need to be attuned to God’s voice. Otherwise, we’ll be persuaded by the voices around us that tempt us to despair in our pain, to believe that God doesn’t care, to conclude that the world’s way to handle suffering is better than God’s way. These competing voices, of Satan and the world (or of our friends or insecurities), can lead us away from the Lord, making us doubt what God has clearly said.

Who Has Your Ear?

Satan came to Jesus at the beginning of his ministry, tempting him to doubt his identity and to test God’s reliability, implying that God was not true to the word he had just spoken (Matthew 3:17). Satan loves to prey on our vulnerability, pouncing when we feel alone and weak.

People we trust can also inadvertently lead us from the truth. We can begin to doubt what God has shown us when others question what he’s said, or when they offer some fresh “revelation” or insight that supersedes what God has clearly said. In 1 Kings 13, the Lord told a man of God to go straight home without stopping, but he was persuaded by an old prophet (who claimed to hear from an angel) to do the opposite of what God had told him. We don’t know why the old prophet lied, but the consequences were disastrous. When God’s word to us is clear, we need to obey him rather than relying on the opinions of others — even of those we respect.

The voices of our fears and insecurities are constantly whispering to us as well. God told the Israelites that if they were disobedient, he would send faintness into their hearts. The sound of a driven leaf would put them to flight, and they would flee as someone fleeing from the sword. They would fall even though no one was pursuing them (Leviticus 26:36). This is what happens when we don’t trust the Lord, when we listen to our fears instead of listening to him. We hear terrifying sounds. We imagine the worst. Our hearts melt, and panic consumes us, even when we have nothing to fear.

All these voices can fill our minds, drowning out the voice of God, redirecting our thoughts, and intensifying our insecurities. This can happen even when the words we hear aren’t inherently evil. Since the voices we listen to will inevitably shape us, we need to be aware of their influence. What books or articles are we reading? What podcasts are we listening to? What friends do we spend the most time with? Whom are we following on social media, and what are we watching on screens? These voices all shape us, in both subtle and overt ways. Some leave us unsettled and fearful, others entitled and angry, but listening to God’s voice will fill us with strength and peace.

I Know His Voice

When I was a little girl, I lived in a large ward in the hospital with other children, and was permitted to see my parents only on weekends. I went through major surgeries alone, constantly afraid of what might happen since my parents couldn’t be with me before surgery. But on Saturday mornings, as soon as visitors were allowed, my parents would come to the hospital. I vividly remember hearing my mother’s voice in the hall. Even before I could discern what she was saying, her voice made me feel safe. I could relax, confident that she and my father would take care of me.

“Hearing God’s voice in my suffering has brought a comfort that has enveloped me.”

Similarly, hearing God’s voice in my suffering has brought a comfort that has enveloped me. I know that I’m not alone. God is near. He will take care of me. Like all Jesus’s sheep, I know his voice (John 10:27). It’s unmistakable. Even though sheep may not understand all the words, they recognize the reassuring voice of their shepherd, and know they are safe.

So, how do we recognize God’s voice?

Often it begins with inviting him to speak to us, perhaps when we wake up, and particularly at the beginning of our time in Scripture. We might say with Samuel, “Speak, Lord, for your servant hears” (1 Samuel 3:9). While Scripture describes God speaking in a variety of ways, the Bible is the primary and most reliable way we hear from him. The words of Scripture are God’s very words, and form the framework for all we know about God.

What Does God Sound Like?

When we read the Bible, we are listening for God’s voice, often reading and rereading until the Spirit gives us ears to hear. Until God opens our ears, the words can seem dry and lifeless. They can seem like academic knowledge, not like life-giving comfort and wisdom.

As we dig for treasure, though, persistently knocking until we hear God’s voice, the same words suddenly come to life. They inspire us, leave us in breathtaking awe of God, and buoy our confidence in him. His voice dispels our darkest fears, revives our weary souls, gives us supernatural wisdom, and reassures us that something much better is coming.

In reading Scripture, we are not only listening to God’s words for us, but we are also becoming familiar with the sound of his voice. We start understanding his ways. God isn’t limited to speaking through Scripture — but Scripture attunes our ears to what his voice sounds like. As we memorize Scripture, his words begin running through our minds. We can discern truth from falsehood, knowing God will never contradict what he’s told us in the Bible.

At the same time, other voices can encourage our faith as well. We know, for instance, that “the heavens declare the glory of God,” and all of nature sings his praise (Psalm 19:1). Faithful preachers proclaim God’s word, which then takes root in our hearts. Friends share nuggets of what God has shown them, and our spirits and faith are strengthened.

“I must choose to open the Bible and read, even when everything in me is fighting against it.”

Sometimes God speaks directly to our inner being without an intermediary. While God speaks predominantly through Scripture, I’ve sensed him speaking to me twice in words that were not directly from the Bible. They were both during times of suffering and uncertainty, and immediately afterward I felt a tangible change. As I considered the words I believed were from God, I tested them against Scripture, and asked him for confirmation. After the encounter, I was left with an inexplicable peace and a deeper wonder and trust in God.

Let His Voice Be First

When I’m anxious, my mind naturally runs in a hundred different directions, looking for answers and solutions I can produce in my own strength. It’s hard to be still before God. Yet that’s when I need stillness most. I need to be quiet enough to hear God’s voice, and know that he is near. I must choose to open the Bible and read, even when everything in me is fighting against it. In turmoil, I want noise and distraction to drown out my pain, so stillness has to be an intentional choice, a deliberate shift to listen to God. It rarely happens when I’m scrolling through my phone, landing on whatever captures my attention.

When you want to hear the voice of God unmistakably, I urge you to read your Bible, and ask him to speak to you through it. Quiet your heart, and submit to his word. Listen for his voice singing over you as his beloved (Zephaniah 3:17). Let the first voice you hear be his, as you declare with David, “Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love, for in you I trust” (Psalm 143:8).

Children absorb. They learn their way around the world not only from what others explicitly teach them, but also from the kind of culture or atmosphere in which they live — especially in their home. The old adage “more is caught than taught” applies. By God’s design, children soak up values without even knowing it.

For example, children don’t pick up their mother tongue because someone stands in front of them with a pronunciation flip chart. They pick up their mother tongue simply from hearing it day after day. They breathe it in without conscious awareness. And as with language, so with values. Children are constantly absorbing. Therefore, what happens within the walls of your home will have a disproportionate impact on who they become.

So, how can Christian parents create a Christlike culture in which their children can swim?

Detecting Indifference

A family’s culture is not established in five minutes. Family culture is the sum total of the parents’ relationship with God, with each other, with the children, and with the world. No aspect of life is irrelevant to this enterprise, right down to what you say and how you say it, what you do and how you do it, what you love and how you love it, what you hate and how you hate it. Family culture includes the major events in life, and it includes the seemingly little things that go almost unnoticed, like what you mutter at the stoplight.

“No family can fake a Christian culture — at least, not for long.”

No family can fake a Christian culture — at least, not for long. If parents aren’t wowed by God’s character, attributes, and wonderful deeds, their indifference won’t kindle awe in the hearts of the children. Indifference is reproducible. If the heavens aren’t declaring God’s glory to me (Psalm 19:1), I’m not likely to help my children see the glory the heavens are declaring to them.

Genuine enthusiasm for God’s glory is not empty hype. Children are wired with keen hypocrisy antennae. Flesh can masquerade as Spirit only for so long before they notice the cosmetics wearing off. So, when it comes to establishing a Christian culture, the first step is to be thoroughly entranced by the superiority of Jesus yourself. Jesus is not a pointer, but the point.

Awe Begets Awe

Beware of trying to argue anyone — including your children — into seeing the surpassing beauty of Christ. Though arguments may be necessary in establishing a culture, they are not sufficient. You can’t argue a blind man into seeing the multicolored clouds of the sunset. Therefore, allow children to witness your unsolicited and uncontrived worship — both in planned moments, like worship services, and in unplanned moments of ordinary life. Give them no doubt that family devotions and church services aren’t the only time you personally ponder the Bible and commune with God.

Has Jesus gripped you? Are you deeply impressed with Jesus? When you read Colossians 1:16–18, does awe arise?

By him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.

The Christian culture we want to foster is more a matter of devotion than devotions. There is a great difference between explaining the importance of something and modeling its importance in your own life, interrupting lesser concerns in order to give front-burner attention to the main priorities.

Creating a Christlike Culture

I don’t know of anyone who has discovered a foolproof checklist for producing Christian kids. Checklists don’t change hearts. But transformed hearts can make good use of checklists as a sort of self-diagnostic or reminder. As you seek to foster a Christian culture in your home, the following suggestions can serve like mirrors to help you see how you’re doing. We’ll consider these suggestions in two groupings: ways and words.

WAYS

The God of means uses habits consistently practiced in a home to elevate and solidify values and identity. “Our family functions this way.” Consider the following.

Model what you expect from your children: Christian courtesy, diligence, punctuality, and scores of Christlike character qualities that blossom in parents who are filled with the Holy Spirit. Avoid giving the impression that you never fail, but own your sins and mistakes. Say out loud, “I was wrong,” and ask forgiveness of each other while keeping short accounts.

In a Christian culture, the parents joyfully sacrifice themselves and do not seek to be put on a pedestal, even while teaching their children obedience. They are able to say, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1).

Gently touch. Soft and playful touches can convey affection and acceptance, and if the children stiffen or pull away, that bristling may signal a relational wound that needs healing.

Get organized. Orderliness can serve everyone in the household, whereas a cluttered dwelling and cluttered calendar can beget chaos. Start by organizing your decisions, and then branch out from there. A well-placed shelf, or some coat hooks, or a reminder list on the fridge can help strengthen teamwork in the family.

Don’t punish children when nature has already punished them. If your son crashed and skinned his knee when he was clowning around on his bike, you don’t have to add your punishment. The natural universe God established has already applied its own form of correction.

“The Christian culture we want to foster is more a matter of devotion than devotions.”

At the same time, do not fear your child. You are the parent. It can be a fearful experience for a child to discover that his parents have left him in charge of the world. Expect that if you use your God-given parental authority, you will sooner or later offend your children’s grasp at self-rule. Understand the difference between offending them (an inevitable result of godly discipline) and wounding them (an excessive or ill-timed use of discipline). Love God more than your family in order to love your family well.

WORDS

What we say is of course important, and how we say it may be even more important. Tone of voice and facial expression can be life-giving or deadly.

Death and life are in the power of the tongue,     and those who love it will eat its fruits. (Proverbs 18:21)

When it comes to speaking around children, then, monitor your tone. Do you sound edgy, cranky, whiny — or cheerful, grateful, honoring? Out of the mouths of babes come things parents shouldn’t have said. Tone is so important to household culture. Don’t reward whining, or you will get lots more of it. Beware of practicing sarcasm, for it can toxify a home and the children within it.

Commend the commendable, especially when you observe it in your children’s attitude. Avoid placing more emphasis on physical looks and abilities than on Christlike character.

Say thank you a lot; say thank you to them as well as to others and to God. Keep promises and don’t break them — to your children or to your spouse.

Pray. It is an unspeakable service to your children to pray for them and with them. Talk to Jesus about them before you talk to them about Jesus, and do both regularly.

Sing. Singing has a wonderful effect on the tone of a home, not to mention the long-term benefits of memorizing godly lyrics. You can sing serendipitously, while doing the dishes or driving, and you can gather round and launch together into a song that supports the kind of culture you’re trying to build.

Could we sum it all up — words and ways — in a vision for a Christlike family culture? In all your practices and speech, live so that someday, when your children are asked if they ever knew a true Christian, they would immediately think of you.

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.