Muscular Christianity and American Sport

A few fragments from another project.

On October 16, 1869, Charles W. Eliot gave his inaugural address as he took over the post of President of Harvard. It was "one of the greatest addresses in modern educational history, delivered with precise diction and in a deep mellow voice that lent weight, and even beauty, to the speaker’s simple, muscular English. The delivery lasted an hour and three quarters, during which one 'might have heard a pin drop,' save when the Old Arches sang with thunders of applause" (Samuel Eliot Morrison).

During that nearly two hour address, Eliot pledged that the founding spirit of Harvard College would continue during his tenure, and he highlighted a number of specific "old-fashioned virtues" that he intended to promote: "excellence, aristocracy, duty and service, and of course 'manliness'" (from Robert Higgs, God in the Stadium).

Eliot gave his speech only a few weeks before the first football game between Princeton and Rutgers, and in his speech Eliot endorsed college athletics as a means for teaching the virtues that made Harvard great. In a subsequent work, he invoked Ralph Waldo Emerson as the inspiration for his interest in manly athletic competition: "I find in Emerson," he wrote, "the true reason for the athletic cult, given a generation before it existed among us. Your boy 'hates the grammar and grades, and loves guns, fishingrods, horses, and boats. Well, the boy is right, and you are not fit to direct his bringing up, if your theory leaves out his gymnastic training. . . . Football, cricket, archery, swimming, skating, climbing, fencing, riding are lessons in the art of power, which it is his main business to learn'" (Quoted in Higgs).

The speech explicitly linked Harvard with masculinity, and masculinity trained on the playing fields of the college and expressed on the battlefields of the Civil War. To be a Harvard man was to be a man, and manliness was evident in war and competition.
Eliot was justifying the inclusion of athletics in college education as a way of making education appealing to boys who would rather be fly-fishing than studying. That same justification was at the root of a nearly contemporaneous movement within British and American Christianity, the movement most commonly known by the name assigned by English novelist Charles Kingsley: "muscular Christianity."

The movement had a significant impact on American culture. American Puritans had been suspicious of sports, and the earliest American colleges had no sports teams. During the 19th century, sports had an increasingly substantial presence on campuses.

Like Eliot's justification for college athletics, the justification for preaching a muscular Christ was its appeal to boys, and the boy inside every adult man. Bruce Barton's book on Jesus begins with a fictional Sunday School, where a boy muses on the stark difference between the exciting heroes of the Old Testament and the boring sissy of the New, and comes to the conclusion that the sentimentalized Christ of Sunday School is not the real Jesus.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, June 01, 2007 at 01:01 PM

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