The Death of Christian Britain

— Men in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —
in the 1840s to under 30 per cent in the 1870s, and the emergence of maleled
uniformed youth movements with a military aura was a change in
evangelisation strategy for boys over the age of ten or twelve years. 50
As Norman Vance has observed, muscular Christianity tends to draw
historians’ attention more to muscularity than to Christianity. 51 Moreover,
its influence was slower to spread from the public schools in the 1850s to
a wider acceptance in organised religion than is often thought. The YMCA
is a case in point. It was founded in the 1840s and 1850s on a curriculum
of Bible study and earnest discussion, but in the 1870s changed towards a
revivalist outlook informed by the Moody and Sankey revival of 1873–4.
It was not until the early 1880s that it admitted sport as a significant part
of its curriculum. 52 In addition, if evangelicals were increasingly speaking
to men in a masculine ‘voice’ by the 1880s, this did not automatically mean
that men were being urged to be ‘manly’ in the sense we understand of
muscular Christianity. Tracts were written against games, in part because
they were associated with ‘Sabbath dissipation’, and in part because they
were regarded by many as unspiritual, diverting attention from the care of
the soul. ‘One particular characteristic of the ancient heathen, particularly
the Greeks,’ one tract of 1853 said, ‘was an enthusiastic love of games and
races’, whilst the chosen tribe of Israel played no games. Modern games
were ‘most cruel and demoralizing’, with boys as young as ten entering
races for ‘sordid’ prizes; to cap it all, tales were told of men who died
whilst running. 53 Two decades later, American Dwight Moody was
very significant, as he focused evangelical attention on the nature of
Christian manhood, especially amongst young men, by targeting them in
his evangelisation. 54 Tracts on manhood, such as C.H. Spurgeon’s sermon
on work among young men, were distributed by his helpers (25,000 in one
month in Glasgow alone). When women started attending his services in
higher numbers than men, most of his meetings became ticket-only affairs
for specific males: clergy, fathers, businessmen and students. Moody’s
preaching was taken by one evangelical paper as defining a new male
Christianity: ‘The Christian life he commends is manly and genial, intense,
and yet not strained or twisted.’ 55 Moody had a dramatic impact on male
recruitment to both the mainstream churches and to home and foreign
missions. His three visits to Britain between 1873 and the early 1890s
became progressively less successful, but he spawned a generation of men
who were drawn to be ministers or evangelists – most notably in industrial,
fishing and mining communities where they were influential in the
Brethren and independent evangelistic organisations. In these and many
other evangelical organisations between the 1880s and 1920s, there was little
room given to sport. When sport threatened to become a male passion
which overrode respect for the Sabbath, the British Messenger opined in
1922: ‘The passion for sport will tend to overpower the already far too
weak sense of obligation to the public worship of God. It may be a trial
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