Historical Facts

Art Remillard

When I think of “muscular Christianity,” I don’t immediately imagine the “body as temple” theologians, as Clifford Putney has called them. Yes, the Luther Gulicks gave the movement intellectual heft. And yes, it was Gulick who encouraged the Presbyterian minister James Naismith to invent basketball—or as I like to call it, “That Sport Lebron James Plays.” All good stuff, really. But when I think of muscular Christianity, my first image is Billy Sunday.

Theology meant little to the revivalist. Instead, Sunday was more concerned with putting some muscle on to Jesus. “Lord save us,” he prayed, “from off-handed, flabby-cheeked, brittle-boned, weak-kneed, thin-skinned, pliable, plastic, spineless, effeminate, sissified, three-carat Christianity.” In Sunday’s eyes, Jesus “was the greatest scrapper that ever lived.”

Sunday represented a side of muscular Christianity that was thoroughly fretting the so-called “feminization” of Christianity. With each call to fling a “fastball at the devil,” Sunday sought to pull the faithful into his manly zone of influence.

While baseball was a national obsession in Sunday's time, it's a cure for insomnia now. Indeed, for many young men walking in to my classroom, ultimate fighting has become the sport of choice. I don’t watch mixed-martial-arts (MMA), nor do I understand its appeal. But it is popular. And as you might expect, MMA is developing an evangelical edge.

Jason David Frank is a rising star in MMA circles who first gained fame starring in—wait for it—the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Frank, a sixth-degree black, is also co-owner of Jesus Didn’t Tap, a MMA merchandising company. In ultimate fighting, “tapping out” is lingo for forfeiting a fight. “Jesus is the only one that truly didn't tap,” Frank says while describing the company's name. “They say, ‘Oh, he was nailed to the cross so he couldn’t tap.’ Well, you can verbally tap, you can verbally cry, ‘I quit! I give up!’ That's not what he did. He got crucified for all our sins.”

So this incarnation of Billy Sunday might not swing a bat, but he does beat the snot out of people—in the name of Jesus. “When I'm in the cage, I'm full of rage, I'll ground, pound, kick you in the face, but it's all good ‘cause I’m in the right place. The power I get is driven from God, so don’t be mad, it’s just my job.”

Frank isn’t making money from this venture yet, and he might not. But the message seems to Christianize America’s “neo-macho” discourse. Journalist Richard Goldstein coined the term “neo-macho” to describe the sustained rebellion against feminism that only amplified after 9/11. Then, the eloquent Toby Keith united a nation, singing, “Justice will be served/And the battle will rage/This big dog will fight/When you rattle his cage/And you'll be sorry that you messed with The U.S. of A./‘Cause we'll put a boot in your ass/It’s the American way.”

Neo-macho man is certainly still with us. He tells us that our pickup truck isn't complete without a RAMBOX to “carry your tools” in. And for the evangelical version, he's amused when a preacher says something about Jesus being a “scrapper.” But he really likes it when that preacher punches someone in the face (instead of turning the other cheek).

Paul Harvey

The new issue of Reviews in American History -- to me, the single most helpful professional periodical that I read -- brings focus to a number of titles of interest -- some we’ve blogged about here before, others not.

In “The Cult of Domesticity, Southern Style,” our friend Charles Irons reviews Scott Stephan’s Redeeming the Southern Family: Evangelical Women and Domestic Devotion in the Antebellum South, a book that has quite unaccountably escaped our notice here. This work focuses intensively on domestic piety among a fairly elite class of white southern women. The home was the site of “many of their most significant religious experiences,” and the women Stephan studies put their suitors through a gauntlet of domestic devotion trials, remaining reserved while their courters strutted their evangelical bona fides. In the end, Irons concludes, Stephan shows that “white evangelical women found the process of reforming their own households to be extremely fulfilling,” while “more work is required to evaluate whether and why these domestic reformers were so wary of shining their light outside of their homes.”

Since we've missed discussing this work before, here's just a bit more about it, from the book's website:

In the years leading up to the Civil War, southern evangelical denominations moved from the fringes to the mainstream of the American South. Scott Stephan argues that female Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians played a crucial role in this transformation. While other scholars have pursued studies of southern evangelicalism in the context of churches, meetinghouses, and revivals, Stephan looks at the domestic rituals over which southern women had increasing authority-from consecrating newborns to God's care to ushering dying kin through life's final stages. Laymen and clergymen alike celebrated the contributions of these pious women to the experience and expansion of evangelicalism across the South. This acknowledged domestic authority allowed some women to take on more public roles in the conversion and education of southern youth within churches and academies, although always in the name of family and always cloaked in the language of Christian self-abnegation. At the same time, however, women's work in the name of domestic devotion often put them at odds with slaves, children, or husbands in their households who failed to meet their religious expectations and thereby jeopardized evangelical hopes of heavenly reunification of the family. Stephan uses the journals and correspondence of evangelical women from across the South to understand the interconnectedness of women's personal, family, and public piety. Rather than seeing evangelical women as entirely oppressed or resigned to the limits of their position in a patriarchal slave society, Stephan seeks to capture a sense of what agency was available to women through their moral authority.

Sara Dwyer-NcNulty reviews our blog contributor Kathleen Sprows Cummings’ New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era (the link takes you to our previous post on Kathy's book). The review gives a thorough summary of the volume, and concludes with this reflection on Catholicism and gender: “The Catholic women under examination [the major figures studied by Cummings] did not seek to form an association of work together unless they had to. Gender was subordinate to religious identity. It appears, however, that rejecting gender was only required of women. For men, gender was (and is) paramount, and it was gender that guaranteed men’s access to power.”

Briefly, and off-topic, but interesting in conjunction with this: I can't help but compare those thoughts above with the interview with Sinead O'Connor on NPR today, who reflects on her famous television appearance in 1992 which was controversial then (ripping up a picture of the Pope, and all, you remember), but now appears prescient in terms of highlighting the issue of abuse. In the interview, she says,

To go on: Matthew Grow provides an assessment of a book we’ve discussed at length here before: Jared Farmer’s ON Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape. Farmer's interview about his book, at Religion Dispatches, can be found here.

Finally, Julian Zelizer of Princeton University provides a long, thorough, and synthetic set of reflections on the various historiographical "waves" of the study of American conservatism. While focused mostly on policy debates and not religious history, Zelizer has a section dealing with conflicts and divisions within contemporary conservatism, including the disappointment felt by religious conservatives in recent years in the public policy arena; well worth checking out.

Kelly Baker