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To many, Theodore Roosevelt was an exemplar of manliness and “muscular Christianity” and an exceptional public servant who led a crusade for social justice. To others, the sage of Oyster Bay was a jingoist, a nativist, a hot-tempered, unpredictable manic, and an egomaniac who put his own interests above America’s good. Roosevelt highly valued biblical morality and considered it vital to personal and public life, including politics. He downplayed doctrine and theological differences and strongly stressed the importance of good works and character. Many contemporaries called him a preacher of righteousness, and he labeled the presidency a bully pulpit, which he used to trumpet the importance of social justice, civility, and virtue. Three religious issues caused considerable controversy during Roosevelt’s tenure in office: his attempt to remove “In God We Trust” from some coins, the “Dear Maria” affair, and concerns about William Howard Taft’s Unitarianism during the 1908 presidential campaign. Christianity, especially the version espoused by turn-of-the-century Social Gospelers, played a significant role in shaping his philosophy of government. Roosevelt’s role in mediating the 1902 anthracite coal strike, “taking” Panama to build an isthmus canal, and promoting conservation illustrate how his religious commitments helped shape his policies.

Bouck White (chap. 3) is the focus of this chapter dealing with the relationship between the radical historical Jesus, muscular Christianity, and the militaristic Christ of the preparedness movement. White never announced that he was a muscular Christian, but he utilized the doctrine to reach individuals in the mainline denominations. The creed cut both ways, however, and during the run-up to World War I, Jesus became a warrior of democracy to most Americans. White recognized that the internationalism championed by his Church of the Social Revolution was being drowned out by the patriotism preached by Theodore Roosevelt and Lyman Abbott, so he temporarily conceded the field to conventional muscular Christians, abandoning his opposition to the war and urging radicals to follow suit. But when White renewed his campaign against militarism and nationalism, he was a pastor without a flock, an author without an audience, and an easy target for vigilantes.

‘Muscular Christianity’ was a term invented in England in 1857 to describe those Christians who saw moral and religious value in sports, and who argued that churches could and should promote this. Similar ideas developed in the United States about the same time. They emerged later in France, but by the 1890s the Catholic sporting movement was growing. The typical Muscular Christian of the early twentieth century was often a Catholic, who saw himself as a champion of his church and sometimes of his ethnic community. In the later twentieth century, he (or she) was most likely to be an evangelical Protestant, to whom a personal relationship with Jesus mattered more than membership of a specific religious community. This chapter aims to offer a long-term view, showing how these meanings have changed by contrasting the social and political environments of England, France, and the United States.

After ASHA’s incorporation in 1914, it turned its attention to programs to carry out its vision. Chapter 2 examines the emergence of the Young Men’s Christian Association and chaplains as ASHA’s partners in providing sex education to young men within colleges, YMCAs, and the military. This chapter demonstrates how Christian sex educators used the framework of moral education to justify national sex education programs and to bridge religious and scientific interests. Their positioning of sex education as an integral part of moral education was further influenced by two trends within Protestantism: the social gospel and muscular Christianity. Through these interactions, sex education became a liberal Protestant version of muscular Christianity that sought to reform society. For sex educators within the YMCA and chaplaincy, restoration of moral and social order required instruction that could channel uncontrolled male sexual energy into recreational activities, service to the country, and monogamous, heterosexual marriages.

This chapter notes that humans have played bat and ball games for thousands of years. Homer spoke of the princess Nausica playing “at ball” with her maids. Girls and women played baseball in Britain as early as the eighteenth century and American girls and women followed suit in the nineteenth. During the 1850s and 1860s, there was little pushback against female players even as adult men began altering the rules of baseball and crafting a narrative to distinguish their sport from “child’s play.” The muscular Christianity movement enabled male players to link baseball with ideals of manliness, morality, and robust health. Women, like Frances Dana Gage, argued that baseball could help girls and women be more physically fit too.

This chapter includes: 1) a biographical sketch of Bernard Sheil; 2) an examination of the origins and operations of Chicago’s Catholic Youth Organization (CYO), 1930-1954; and 3) an exploration of how prevailing social and political ideologies during the Depression and World War II shaped working-class life in northern cities. Melding Catholic social teaching, Americanization, muscular Christianity, and New Deal ideology, the CYO attracted thousands of young people through citywide athletic programming, particularly boxing. During the 1910s and 1920s, Cardinal Mundelein deemphasized ethnic identity among Catholics and urged assimilation. In the 1930s and 1940s, however, the CYO celebrated American pluralism. Like the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) labor union, the CYO advocated interethnic and interracial cooperation. An alliance with the Roosevelt administration, the arrival of Catholicism to the mainstream of American cultural life, and the use of mass media allowed Bishop Sheil and the CYO to foster an urban Catholic version of Americanism during the Depression and World War II.

H. Rider Haggard’s early adventure novels, such as King Solomon’s Mines, have often been dismissed as jingoistic, and formulaic, albeit popular, genre fiction, designed to stimulate and exploit the emerging mass market for boys’ fiction in the 1880s. However, this essay suggests that the author’s years as a secretary in southern Africa furnished him with an unabated thirst for adventure and a more imaginative perspective on hero-worship masculinities than Henty and his other militarised competitors. It traces how Haggard’s multi-faceted revision of conventional ‘muscular Christianity’ blended realism and fantasy, integrated humour, capitalised on the inter-generational potential of Carlylean hero-worship and adapted to contemporary military conflict in Africa and the discovery of diamonds. This surprisingly sophisticated approach enabled Haggard’s early novels to function as a highly robust form of what Louis Althusser has called ‘ideological state apparatus’, inculcating imperialist military masculinities in the ‘little and big boys’ who were ‘still young enough at heart to love a story of treasure, war, and wild adventure’.

Serving as an introduction to the text and the research, this chapter explores notions of the American West, outlines different conceptions of both cowboys and cowboy Christians, and introduces key themes. The chapter suggests commonalities in the ways people express what western heritage/cowboy culture means to them, and how it connects people who are geographically dispersed. The cowboy church’s focus on connecting with the “authentic” cowboy is studied in conjunction with the construction of the meaning of the term “cowboy.” A discussion of closely related forms of evangelical Christianity provides an initial religious context for understanding the present-day cowboy church and its history. A brief account of the book’s place in the scholarship on religion of the American West, as well as of the book’s methodology concludes the chapter.

Chapter 6 pulls away from the cowboy church specifically to examine aspects of the broader cultural context of cowboy Christians. Topics include media and entertainment that deliberately blend ideas of cowboy values with religion, and how they are packaged for consumption by cowboy Christians. Examples including racetrack chaplaincy, Christian horse whisperers, and television shows demonstrate cowboy Christian alignment with the trends of consumerism found in mainstream evangelicalism. The second half of the chapter revisits and concludes various thematic discussions raised throughout the book, comparing the cowboy church to the Jesus movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the recurring iterations of muscular Christianity, and schematically charting potential developments for the cowboy church on the basis of developmental patterns for other new religious movements.

Chapter 5 examines issues of gender dynamics in the cowboy church movement. Church leaders use simplistic notions of gender, in combination with assumptions about the cowboy culture, and conclude that cowboy church needs to be a “masculine” environment to succeed. This chapter explores how these concepts are perpetuated and what “masculine church” means in practical terms. It also considers some of the more complicated and contradictory views held by pastors on the subject of women in ministry and women’s participation in church more generally. It contrasts the prevailing beliefs held by men about gender relations in the cowboy church with those of women, suggesting that the discrepancy between the two groups’ views may be problematic in the long term.

Ashis Nandy, an Indian psychologist and cultural critic of the post-1945 era, has spent his career largely re-imagining “Indic civilization” as a Gandhi-inspired rejection of Western civilization and especially Western modernity. Very much like Brunner in his rewriting of German civilization, Nandy returns us to pre-nation-state Indian literary and religious texts, the interpretation of which he reconstructs in order to rescue the texts from modern revisionism that has been shaped by the “muscular Christianity” of the Raj. Further, Nandy understands Indic culture, reaching from Afghanistan to Vietnam, as a diversified yet unified entity, comprising a host of territories within one, supra-national civilization. In this sense, Nandy’s work echoes that of Brunner on the authentic, pre-nation-state German Reich, complete with its array of Volksgemeinschaften. But Nandy’s thinking is also reflected in the modern Hindutva movement of present-day India.

Chapter 5 explores the controversy caused by the Palace’s exhibition of nude sculpture. It unpicks Owen Jones’s claims for Greek sculpture’s moral imperative through writings on beauty, morality, and art from Plato and J. J. Winckelmann, to nineteenth-century archaeologists. The chapter examines hostilities to the display of unclothed classical sculpture to the Palace’s new mass audience—especially its polychrome experiments—in the contexts of the artistic and social history of the nude, and Victorian ideas about class, gender, sexuality, and obscenity, to suggest why critics were so preoccupied with the displays of unclothed male bodies rather than the female nude. It offers an analysis of Greek sculpture in mid-century evangelical culture, and as it featured in ‘muscular Christianity’, showing the diversity of Victorian religious responses to ‘heathen’ sculpture.

Age eleven, George enters the Fessenden School near Boston where the 1918 “Spanish flu” interrupts the first semester, yet the Great War’s Armistice is celebrated. By spring, George hopes he and his father can watch the parade of returning troops. The Lynes family moves to Jersey City where Dr. Lynes assumes the rectorship of St. Paul’s Church. Concerned his sons enter the Ivy Leagues, Dr. Lynes has George enrolled in the Berkshire School for Boys near Great Barrington. Its headmaster, Seaver Burton Buck, inculcates the trusted values of “muscular Christianity” into a boarding school where sports competition is as honored as academic excellence. George is an enthusiast of neither but is taken by classmate Lincoln Kirstein for a “poseur” who “fancies he is pretty to look at.” The Lyneses and Seaver Buck are tacitly aware of George’s “kittenish” disposition toward the hardier boys, but never express outright their suspicions of his homosexuality.