Returning to the questions posed at the beginning of the last section, I will begin by looking again at Muscular Christianity. I believe that it does have to be regarded first and foremost as a religious movement and that the Christian motivation of the movement’s pioneers has to be taken seriously. However, their Christianity was obviously of its time and conditioned by a range of contemporary concerns and by their own social background as members of the English gentry. Kingsley and Hughes were also members of the short- lived Christian Socialist movement formed in the wake of the 1848 revolutions, and they had a continuing interest in what was called ‘The Condition of England’, which meant in particular the living and working conditions of the working class and the social conflicts which had reached unparalleled intensity in the 1830s and 1840s. Many middle- and upper- class reformers at the time recognised the lack of time and facilities for recrea-tion as one of the grievances of the working class, and some of them hoped that common participation in sport might be a means to better relations between the classes.
Several other considerations also fed into Muscular Christianity, one being a concern for the nation’s health, especially in the wake of terrible cholera epidemics in 1832 and 1848. A second was patriotism: in the early 1850s and again in the later 1850s fears of war with France were rife, and Kingsley and Hughes believed that physically fit men would be able to defend their country.
A third very important consideration was what historians have called ‘the feminisation of the church’.39 Many people were well aware that the powerful
37 Erdozain 2010, p. 209.
38 Erdozain 2010, pp. 211, 274.
39 Which has been a major theme of Yvonne Maria Werner’s work. See, for example, Yvonne Maria Werner, ‘Religious Feminisation, Confessionalism and
religious revival of the early nineteenth century had appealed more successfully to women than to men and those who were calling for more active involvement by the church in recreation and specifically in sport believed that Evangelical puritanism and condemnation of apparently harmless kinds of recreation had been a major factor in male alienation. Hughes and Kingsley and like- minded contemporaries were therefore concerned to promote a new kind of mascu-linity, but one that was emphatically Christian, and far removed from any mindless celebration of physical strength as something good in itself.40 By the 1880s many of the arguments used in support of men’s sport in the 1850s were beginning to be used in support of women’s sport.41 But in its origins Muscular Christianity was a men’s movement.
As regards the importance or otherwise of religion in the rise of sport, it is clear that many factors contributed to the sports boom, notably rising stand-ards of living and especially from the 1870s the growing practice of closing factories on Saturday afternoons and shops on Wednesday or Thursday after-noons. These became the favoured times for sport in view of the various re-strictions on Sunday sport, which were being slowly relaxed by the 1890s, but which continued until the 1960s or even later. However, it is clear that from at least the 1870s the churches were playing a significant part in the spread of sports to wider sections of the population beyond the upper and upper middle classes, both by providing facilities and forming teams, and by encouraging participation both by Sunday School pupils and by adult members of their con-gregations. Sometimes the initiative came from the clergy, but equally often it came from lay members. A typical example is the formation in 1874 of the Aston Villa club by members of a Young Men’s Bible Class in a Birmingham Methodist church.42 Churches, and especially the organisations within them,
Re- masculinisation in Western European Society, 1800−1960’, in Lene Sjørup &
Hilda Rømer (eds), Pieties and Gender, Leiden 2009, pp. 143−166.
40 Hugh McLeod, ‘The “Sportsman” and the “Muscular Christian”: Rival Ideals in Nineteenth- Century Britain’, in Patrick Pasture et al. (eds), Beyond the Feminization Thesis. Gender and Christianity in Modern Europe, Leuven 2012, pp. 85−105.
41 McLeod 2012, p. 100; Kathleen E. McCrone, ‘Play up! Play up! And Play the Game!
Sport at the late Victorian Girls’ Public Schools’, in J.A. Mangan & Roberta J. Park (eds), From ‘Fair Sex’ to Feminism: Sport and the Socialization of Women in the Industrial and Post- Industrial Eras, London & New York 1987, pp. 97−129.
42 Peter Lupson, Thank God for Football! London 2006 provides detailed accounts of the early history of Aston Villa, as well as other leading teams with church or chapel roots.
such as a Bible Class, provided a nucleus of young men who already knew one another and round whom a sports club could be formed.
In the light of such examples it is hard to accept Barlow’s distinction between church teams and those started by ‘ordinary people’. The founders of Aston Villa were ‘ordinary people’, the two main organisers of the first football team being an electroplater in the jewellery trade and a brewery storekeeper, while the first star was a clerk in a Birmingham factory.43 Barlow’s argument also rests on an over- simplified view both of the working class and of the relationship between church and working class. The importance within working- class com-munities of differences of income, occupation, ethnicity, political and religious affiliation, and of course gender, and the consequent difficulty of speaking about ‘working- class values’ as if these were something easily defined and unproblematic is so obvious that it scarcely needs to be emphasised. The place of churches, chapels and missions and of religious professionals within these communities is more open to dispute.
However, the whole trend of research since about 1980 has been to stress the familiarity of religious institutions to working- class Britons in the city, as much as in the countryside, in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centu-ries, the wide- ranging social role which these institutions played and the com-plex and varied relationships between religious professionals and working- class people.44 My contention here is that from about the 1870s to the 1930s − pos-sibly for longer, but hardly any research has been done on more recent periods – sport played a part in the these relationships. The familiarity of church, chapel or institute as a taken for granted aspect of neighbourhood life arose partly from the club- room, gymnasium or sports teams based there, and the pop-ularity of some clergymen or youth leaders arose partly from their sporting prowess and enthusiasm.
43 Lupson 2006, pp. 5−6.
44 The pioneering studies by E.R. Wickham, Church and People in an Industrial City, London 1957, and K.S. Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England, London 1963, emphasised the gulf between churches and workers. Subsequent research began by nuancing their arguments, but later approaches were more directly critical. The debate up to the 1990s is summarised in Hugh McLeod, Religion and Irreligion in Victorian England, Bangor 1993; for a fuller statement of my own view, see Hugh McLeod, Piety and Poverty: Working Class Religion in Berlin, London &
New York 1996. For more radically ‘revisionist’ views see S.C. Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark, c.1880−1939, Oxford 1999; Brown 2001.
However, so far as sport in England is concerned, the rising importance of professionalism from the later nineteenth century marks the beginning of a new era. Especially in football and rugby there was already in the 1880s and 1890s a concern that the need to win at all costs, urged on by fervent local supporters, was leading to deteriorating standards of play and sometimes vio-lence, both on the field of play and sometimes on the terraces or outside the ground.45 It was clear that although there continued to be outstanding players who regarded themselves as ‘Muscular Christians’, the ideals of ‘fair play’, the
‘gallant loser’, and uncomplaining acceptance of the referee’s decisions were of decreasing relevance.
At the elite level the links of football and rugby teams with the churches where they had begun became increasingly tenuous, and though many boxers had begun their careers in church gyms, success brought them to a world where money was the dominant consideration. In fact Nonconformist influences re-mained for some time significant in the Football League. For example, the leading figure in the founding of the League, Aston Villa’s William McGregor, remained faithful to the club’s Nonconformist tradition, being himself an ac-tive Congregationalist.46
Nonconformists continued for many years to be prominent in the League’s management, their most conspicuous influence being in their fruitless attempts to stop betting on football matches through the highly popular football pools.47 But in so far as religion continued to be a significant part of elite sport it was mainly at the level of the individual athlete, for whom religious motivations or identities might continue in one way or another to be relevant. Religious
45 ‘The Football Slaughter’, The Young Man, April 1889, pp. 74−75; Charles Edwardes,
‘The New Football Mania’, Nineteenth Century, 32 (1892), pp. 622−631; Creston,
‘Football’, Fortnightly Review, New Series 55 (1894), pp. 25−38. There is a sometimes acrimonious debate among sports historians as to the extent of football violence in the years before the First World War. See, for example, R.W. Lewis, ‘Football Hooliganism in England before 1914. A Critique of the Dunning Thesis’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 13 (1996), pp. 310−339. He mentions examples of fights between players and between rival fans, of players of the visiting team being escorted to the dressing room by police, and of attacks on referees, but he suggests that such incidents were relatively infrequent.
46 Lupson 2006, pp. 8−9.
47 Matthew Taylor, The Leaguers: The Making of Professional Football in England, Liverpool 2005, pp. 55−58.
identity was especially conspicuous in boxing, where the fight between two individuals encouraged a stress on their religion or ethnicity.
Many outstanding fighters in the early twentieth century were Jewish, and this played a part both in the promotion of their fights and in their following.48 In individual sports such as athletics the belief that his or her talents were God- given could offer powerful support in the disciplines of training as well as in facing the bitterness of defeat. The best- known example is Scotland’s Eric Liddell, Olympic gold medalist and rugby international, who was one of the heroes of the film Chariots of Fire.49 A more recent example was the world record- holding triple jumper, Jonathan Edwards, a fervent high- profile Evangelical during his brilliant career who ironically renounced his faith after retirement, claiming that it had been the most powerful form of sports psychology.50 Team sports may be conducive to a more low key form of piety, such as that of Jack Hobbs, the outstanding England cricketer of the 1910s and 1920s and one of the most successful batsmen in the history of the game.51
The motives for church involvement in sport clearly varied. Sometimes it was a tactical move intended to retain boys who were drifting away from the church as they entered their teens. Sometimes church- based sport was justified not so much as something good in itself but because of the prevalence of undesir-able leisure pursuits and the need to provide healthier alternatives. However, as Erdozain complains, it is hard to miss the enthusiasm with which many clergy and lay leaders practised sport and the evangelical fervour with which they propagated the new sporting gospel. A typical figure was the Baptist Rev J.A.
Roxburgh. When he entered a new pastorate in Northampton in 1906, a local newspaper reported:
He has all along pleaded for the entire development of manhood and womanhood – body, mind and spirit. He is athletic and a lover of all legitimate sport, an all- round
48 Stan Shipley, ‘Boxing’, in Tony Mason (ed.), Sport in Britain: A Social History, Cambridge 1989, p. 99; John Harding with Jack Kid Berg, Jack Kid Berg, the Whitechapel Windmill, London 1987, pp. 93, 198−199. Berg emphasised his Jewish identity more strongly when he moved to the USA for a time in the later 1920s.
49 Liddell ’s value as a role- model for young Christians has inspired several biographies.
See, for example, John W. Keddie, Running the Race: Eric Liddell – Olympic Champion and Missionary, Darlington 2007.
50 Hugh McLeod, ‘Muscular Christianity, European and American’, in David Hempton
& Hugh McLeod (eds) Secularization and Religious Innovation in the North Atlantic World, Oxford 2017, p. 207.
51 McLeod 2017, p. 202.
cricketer, having captained several clubs, a swimmer and a seasoned cyclist [...] His piety is of the robust order, and will appeal to young men in particular, in whose inter-ests a large part of his active life has been spent.52
By Roxburgh’s day the case for church- based sport was widely accepted and would have caused little controversy. An earlier generation had more of a pio-neering role, not only in the promotion of church- based sport but in the pro-motion of sport in their communities. Reid has shown this for Birmingham.
It is also true for small town and rural areas, where there was often little other sporting provision with which to compete. An example was the small Sussex town of Arundel where the vicar, the Rev George Arbuthnot, seems to have been the first sports fanatic. From 1874 he was forming a cricket team, establishing athletic and swimming championships, and using his parish magazine both to report sporting events and to harangue the many among his parishioners who showed no interest in these opportunities.53 But the most striking example of the proactive role of Muscular Christians in the rise of modern sport lies in the mission field. The key part played by the YMCA in the diffusion of American sports, such as basketball, baseball and volleyball, in Asia and Latin America is well- known.54 But British missionaries and teachers in mission schools also played their part in the diffusion of British sports, sometimes in the face of local resistance. The best known example is C.E. Tyndale- Biscoe of the Church Missionary Society who was headmaster of a school in Kashmir from 1890 to 1947 where cricket, football, rowing and boxing were all important parts of the curriculum, in spite of resistance from many of the boys and their parents who regarded all this sport as a waste of time.55 David Goldblatt, the football histo-rian, notes that missionaries were the first footballers in Uganda, Nigeria, the French Congo and probably the Gold Coast.56
As mentioned earlier, several historians have seen connections between secularisation and the rise of sport, but they have explained the relationship
52 Hugh McLeod, ‘ “Thews and Sinews”: Nonconformity and Sport’, in David Bebbington
& Timothy Larsen (eds) Modern Christianity and Cultural Aspirations, Sheffield 2003, pp. 38−39.
53 McLeod 2017, p. 116.
54 See, for example, Fan Hong et al., Christianity and the Transformation of Physical Education and Sport in China, London 2007.
55 J.A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal, Harmondsworth 1986, pp. 168−192.
56 David Goldblatt, The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football, London 2006, pp. 484−485.
in essentially different ways. Lowerson and Erdozain both make important, if conflicting, points, but both overstate their case. As Erdozain shows, religious and sporting fervour were in no way incompatible. However, the bicycle and, for the better- off, Sunday golf and tennis did provide attractive alternatives for those whose attendance at church had been more a matter of convention than conviction.
Erdozain shows that the British YMCA was a little behind the Americans in embracing sport, but as soon as the Manchester branch gave the lead in 1876 by building a gym, there was an unstoppable momentum for the provision of gyms and of cricket, football, swimming, and later cycling clubs in British Ys.
He draws especially on the example of the Cambridge branch to argue that this embrace of sport went much too far.57 However, on two points I think that the evidence he cites is insufficient to sustain his case. First, it is not clear that the ever- expanding programme of athletic and educational activities was squeezing out more strictly religious activities. At Birmingham in 1904, for example, YMCA members, as well as participating in a Praying Band, a Quiet Hour, a Bible Class and a ‘Conversational Bible Class’ which included ‘straight talking’ on issues ‘of importance to young men’, could bring the gospel to others through a Pleasant Sunday Afternoon, a Lodging House Mission and an Open Air Mission. And since they were required to attend a place of worship they also presumably took part in services and other activities organised by their own church.58 Second, granted that there were many associates of the YMCA who came mainly to use the gym, for the members the relationship between the
‘religious’ and the ‘recreational’ was not either/ or but both/ and.
A contemporary example is provided in the memoirs of William Kent, who was growing up in London in the early 1900s. He did not belong to the YMCA, but he attended various Congregationalist churches and institutes, taking a very active part in the Bible Class and Mutual Improvement Society and making notes on the Sunday evening sermon, while also playing for the cricket team.
Rather than being alternatives as claimed by critics of ‘amusements’ these var-ious activities flowed naturally in and out of one another.59
Where Erdozain is right is in saying that the acceptance of, and indeed the increasing importance attached to, sport by many Evangelical Christians in the
57 Erdozain 2010, pp. 226−229.
58 A Tale of Two Buildings (1904), YMCA Archives, A46, University of Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library.
59 McLeod 2003, p. 33.
later nineteenth century reflected significant religious changes – in particular an overriding emphasis on ‘practical Christianity’, rather than on doctrinal orthodoxy.60 Equally important was the insistence that Christianity was con-cerned with the whole person and with all aspects both of individual life and of society. In 1860 these claims were provocative; by 1900 they had become a cliché. However, I do not agree that these changes are best described as a form of secularisation. The use of this highly loaded term gives a questionable air of objectivity and scientific detachment to what is a value- judgement concerning the merits of one kind of theology over against another.
The relationship between secularisation and the rise of sport may, however, be more indirect. The growing preoccupation with sport in the later nineteenth century, especially on the part of the middle and upper classes, but also among the more prosperous sections of the working class, was part of a widespread reaction against the cult of work, the emphasis on saving, the restraint and the puritanism which had played such a central role in many areas of English life in the early and middle years of the nineteenth century.61 ‘We are living in the midst’, said the letter from the Wesleyan Conference to the Methodist socie-ties in 1890, ‘of a great reaction from puritanism. Sympathy is turning from the spiritual to the natural side of things. Town life has produced a passion for rural nature. Civilisation is creating artificial wants. Art is clothing objects in sensuous garments which are most attractive. Ingenuity is manufacturing new forms of enjoyment. Travel is contributing to the knowledge of the world.’62
Many Christian preachers were anxious to show that the new mood of freedom was good (at least within certain limits). Frances Knight has argued that Christians at the end of the century ‘were becoming increasingly convinced of the redemptive power of the arts’,63 and she shows how Anglo- Catholics in particular were enthusiastically embracing art, music and the theatre. But there were certainly other Christians who opposed the new trends, and there were many people who blamed these restrictions on the churches. The downward
60 Of course, as Erdozain shows (pp. 230−270), there were also many Evangelicals who opposed these trends, most notoriously the well- known London Baptist minister, Archibald Brown, whose The Devil’s Mission of Amusement (1887) provoked a huge controversy.
61 For the changing lifestyles of industrialists, see Stephen Yeo, Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis, London 1976.
62 Minutes of the Wesleyan Conference (1890).
63 Frances Knight, Victorian Christianity at the Fin de Siècle: The Culture of English Religion in a Decadent Age, London 2016, p. 226.