Introduction: Muscular Christianity after 150 years

Abstract

There are several reasons to judge it timely to review and reanalyse the ethos and tradition of muscular Christianity. The year 2005 marked the 125th anniversary of the foundation of Thomas Hughes’s intentional community at New Rugby, Tennessee, which offered a farming alternative to the military or colonial service for emigrant second sons of England. The year 2007 will mark the 150th anniversary of Hughes taking a break from his Christian socialist work to publish Tom Brown’s Schooldays. [1] Rather more is at stake, however, than dutiful commemoration. Historians and anthropologists of the postcolonial condition are now following the example of C.L.R. James in using the transformations of muscular Christianity around the world to break free of the simplistic binary of colonial hegemony and resistance and into new logics of hybridity and indigenous appropriation. [2] As essays in this issue attest, this effort can be acutely assisted by resurrecting the original Christian socialist version of the muscular Christian ethos to confront explicitly the hyper-masculinist, chauvinistic and self-righteous version that absorbed the energies of late Victorian criticism as well as subsequent twentieth-century scholarship on ‘the games ethic and imperialism’. [3] In their lifetimes, Hughes, Charles Kingsley and F.D. Maurice were well aware how their critics attacked by wilfully lumping the two muscular Christianities together. Tom Brown went through 70 editions in Hughes’s lifetime alone, making it by certain measures the most popular novel of the nineteenth century. But Hughes’s protests against distortions like the idolatry of athletic success seemed in vain. As his biographers put it: