Today the YMCA is so closely associated with that catchy tune by the Village People that few realize it was actually founded on Christian principles, and grew out of Williams’s conviction that having a healthy body is just as important as having a healthy spirit for a thriving Christian life.
Whether you share that conviction or not, its notable how quickly Williams’s idea caught on. It was part of a growing cultural trend that started in the mid-1850s known today as “Muscular Christianity.” Muscular Christianity marked a move away from the asceticism that characterized the traditional Christian view of the body, the idea that the flesh was a distraction from the things of God and ought to be denied or suppressed. Proponents of muscular Christianity argued instead that a physically fit body could be an expression of one’s faith in God.
Thomas Hughes, one of the early advocates of muscular Christianity, argued that:
The Muscular Christians have hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief, that a man's body is given to him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men.
There’s a lot in there to make a woke Christian of the 21st Century cringe, I suppose. The idea of “subduing the earth,” though biblical, needs a lot more nuance than Thomas gives it there; and the sentence simply smacks of machoism and sexism though out. That said, the core tenet—that our bodies are not shameful “prison-houses” for the soul, but are in fact gifts of God which we need in order to serve him—has at least a glimmer of truth to it. Perhaps even a full ray of light.
Whatever the case, the idea grew pretty rapidly through the early decades of the 20th Century. Other clergy men started following Williams’s lead and built gymnasiums and boxing rings in the basements of their churches. Meanwhile the YMCA itself started planting chapters all over the world.
In America, Muscular Christianity would find its way into the preaching of evangelists like D. L. Moody (ca. 1850-90) and others. President Roosevelt (ca. 1909)—who held that “there is only a very circumscribed sphere of usefulness for the timid good man”—was also a strong proponent of the concept. Even today we see the vestiges of the movement in the work of organizations like Athletes in Action (founded 1966) and the Promise Keepers (founded 1990).
I suppose any “theology of exercise,” like the one I’ve been trying to assemble in this blog series, will have to wrestle with the tenets of the “muscular Christianity movement,” at one point or another. Though it's over 150 years old now, its influence still lingers in the church, both for the good and the bad. It’s there whenever a well-meaning but misinformed preacher decries the so-called “feminization of the church” (which, to be clear, I find to be a deeply offensive term). It’s there in the worst of “men’s ministries,” that make “being a Christian guy” all about a narrowly-defined set of supposedly “masculine” interests, tastes, roles and abilities (which, again to be clear, I often find offensive). It’s there in the worst of the theology coming out of neo-conservative organizations like “The Counsel of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood” (which I also find offensive, on the whole).
Because here’s the thing: men come in all shapes and sizes, with all kinds of interests, predilections, aptitudes and body-types. When I was growing up, I often felt like I did not fit in among the other “Christian guys” in church, because I had so little interest in the traditional “guy things” that advocates for muscular Christianity seem to want to use as their litmus test. I was artistic, not athletic, into books not body-building, played music not hockey.
Any version of Christianity, muscular or otherwise, that makes its definition of “a Christian man” so narrow that only a handful of guys really fit the bill and the rest are left wondering where they belong, is not Christianity at all, in my view.
That said, in the ten years since I first started going to the Y—an organization, remember, that began as an expression of one man’s Christian faith—I have found that my spirit has grown healthier, on the whole, along with my body.
I have learned how to push myself spiritually to do things I’m not naturally inclined to do, by pushing myself physically to do exercises I'm not inclined to do. I’ve discovered that the limits of what my physical body is capable of are often far higher than I ever assumed before I started pushing them. This, in turn, has inspired me to explore the spiritual limits of what I might attempt for God in other areas of my life, too.
These things are also part of the legacy of the muscular Christianity movement, I think, and it's one of the reasons why, even though as a young man and growing up, athleticism was the last thing I ever felt any interest in, these days I very much look forward to my trip to the gym, or my hour on the squash court, or my 20 minute exercise routine in the basement of our home (which is all I can manage in these days of pandemic).
Because when I put my body to work like that, I find, among other things, my spirit is being stretched and grown in ways I never could have imagined.
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