When sent me the above image, I had the urge to write about it immediately. But then *The Atlantic *published White Christian Nationalist propaganda about sex at the same time we found out 57 young men were party to a woman’s gang-rape. I put the Muscular Christianity conference aside to follow those threads.
I’ll get into who some of the men in the above slide are tomorrow, but today let’s do a deep dive into the history of Muscular Christianity. Because I had no idea how much it influenced my own WCN indoctrination, my Southern upbringing, and US society in general.
What is Muscular Christianity?
According to Britannica, Muscular Christianity is an ideology that promotes engagement in athletics as an expression of Christian ethical values and masculinity.
It first appeared in England during the Victorian era and was the impetus for the formation of the YMCA, the modern Olympics, the Boy Scouts, and college sports programs, among other things. It was a direct reaction to the perceived feminization of Christian churches and public spaces and sought to build strong men through physical exertion, competition, and male bonding.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve called football another US religion, missed connection to people due to March Madness, or repeated myself because my husband was using one ear bud to listen to baseball playoff games. This US obsession with sports isn’t only about out-of-control capitalism; it has roots in Muscular Christianity.
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How today’s Muscular Christianity is different from the Victorian era
The evangelist Billy Graham could be credited for the US’s current religious obsession with sports. He often held crusades in sports arenas and invited prominent sports figures to share his spaces.
One might say that led to the requirement to declare one’s allegiance to Clemson or Carolina within the first minutes of meeting a new person in my former state of South Carolina. This system sorted every new connection: Is this person on my team? Are they one of us? Or are they the enemy?
Which led to grown-ass adults who’d been out of college for decades telling me I couldn’t schedule public service events on football weekends when I was Rotary president. And tables where the different teams congregated. And arguments about why it was okay for my husband to work without a raise as a professor for over two decades while football coaches were the highest-paid public positions in our state.
(And before someone knocks me for being critical of sports fans, I was once the biggest sports fanatic I knew. I wrote about it last year:)
With such craven, cult-like devotion to a game among adults, how hard would it be to make the competition a fight-to-the-death? The enemy evil to be slain in a spiritual war?
It weaponizes our slavish devotion to team sports and forces us to choose the ultimate side: Right versus wrong. Good versus evil. White versus any-and-all-color. Sacred versus secular. God versus Satan. Angels versus demons.
Imagine how many Americans might be susceptible when asking them to give up their ESPN subscription is akin to demanding they amputate their own head?
This is what Muscular Spiritual Warfare Christianity looks like in the wild:
It happens in an athletic stadium.
It dresses to work out.
It references sports and includes physical exertion, competition, and bonding.
It wears a t-shirt that says This is war, meaning SPIRITUAL WAR*. *(To my readers who still don’t get it, this t-shirt has nothing to do with Iran and everything to do with WCN Muscular Christianity-driven spiritual warfare. It should terrify every American to see the head of the US military wearing such a t-shirt and slogan in public. Or anywhere. It’s also behind pretty much everything Hegseth announced for the military yesterday. GO HERE to read more at The Guardian.)
We’ll look at the Who’s Who placard from the recent Muscular Christianity conference tomorrow to understand how embedded these people already are, and we’ll close the week with things we can do to disrupt them.
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