Muscular Christianity: The strenuous mood in American Protestantism, 1880-1920

This dissertation examines a little known but historically significant movement called "muscular Christianity." Founded in England in the mid-1800's, muscular Christianity soon spread to America, where its adherents sought to reduce women's influence in the Protestant churches. Why they thought this necessary and whether they succeeded are foremost among the questions addressed in this work's seven chapters, all of which illuminate particular aspects of the muscular Christian phenomenon.;The first of these chapters defines muscular Christianity as a movement geared toward reinjecting health and manliness back into Victorian religion. It also recounts the rise of muscular Christianity in England and its importation to America by ecclesiastical devotees of Theodore Roosevelt's "cult of the strenuous life.".;In Chapters Two and Three, the focus remains on health and manliness. Chapter Two concentrates on the first of these qualities, and on efforts by groups such as the YMCA to upgrade religious conceptions of the body. Chapter Three in contrast focusses not on health but on men's efforts to "de-feminize" the pulpit, church hymnals and images of Jesus.;Having dealt with the health and gender dimensions of muscular Christianity, the study moves on to address various evangelical aspects of the movement in Chapters Four and Five. The first of these chapters chronicles muscular Christian missions to boys, while the second concentrates instead on several strenuous missions to the world at large.;Much of the analysis in Chapters One through Five explains the appeal of muscular Christianity for men. But the contents of Chapter Six highlight the attractions of muscular Christianity for such women's groups as the Girl Scouts, the Camp Fire Girls and the YWCA.;As for muscular Christianity's twilight years, these are covered in Chapter Seven and the epilogue. Chapter Seven outlines muscular Christian justifications for the Spanish American and First World Wars. It also notes people's retreat from muscular Christianity following the 1918 Armistice, a retreat examined more thoroughly in a final essay on the 1920's.