>>Muscular Christians Flex Their Muscles
By S. T. Karnick
Published 12/7/2004 12:07:05 AM
Denver-area churches decided that the official, government-sanctioned secularization of the Christmas holiday had gone too far recently when the city's mayor decided to replace the traditional "Merry Christmas" banner atop the local City and County Building with a "Happy Holidays" greeting and the organizers of the local Christmas parade denied permission for a local church to participate. Christians around the city rose up in protest by descending on the city's annual Christmas parade and sang carols emphasizing the Christian origins of the celebration, as noted in this surprisingly sympathetic account in yesterday's New York Times.
"Like a spark in dry tinder," the Times reported, "the result was a flare-up that caught even some church leaders by surprise. A holiday rite that had drawn thousands of paradegoers annually suddenly became a symbol, for many Christians, of secular society run amok."
A December 4 Denver Post story reported that approximately a thousand people gathered to sing religious Christmas songs before the start of the parade, as a peaceful protest against the decision by the Downtown Denver Partnership, the private, nonprofit group that stages the parade, not to allow a local church, the Arvada, Colorado, Faith Bible Chapel, to have a float in the parade. According to a December 5 Denver Post story, the partnership had "cited a longstanding policy against overtly religious and political themes" in refusing to allow the church to have a float in the parade.
The December 4 Post story noted that local resident "Steve Schweitzberger carried a basket with a tiny baby Jesus doll inside that had a paper teardrop falling from its eye. The baby came with a sign that read, 'It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to.'"
The Faith Bible Chapel, which seems to have had a large part in sparking the reaction, is led by a former Marine who served in Vietnam as a helicopter gunner, as the Times article reported. The article said members of his church described him as "not a man who likes getting pushed around," a description suggesting him as a throwback to the nineteenth-century Anglo-American idea of "muscular Christianity."
The Times article noted that the parade's organizers promised to reevaluate their policies and said the event may never be the same.
An additional December 4 Denver Post story noted that smaller, local parades in Colorado Springs and Boulder were to take place that evening, with Christian groups well-represented, including a gingerbread Nativity scene on display in Boulder. The story quoted the director of the Colorado Springs celebration as saying, "We try to be inclusive and represent the entire community.… But you have to realize what is the vast majority of the community, and they need to be included, as well."
AS THE COLORADO STORIES show, a liberal society certainly has room for reasonably inclusive expressions of its people's religious faith, and it seems clear enough that a local Christmas celebration, with the community allowed, and not required, by the government to acknowledge and commemorate the essential religious nature of the occasion, definitely falls into that category.
Likewise, refusing to acknowledge Christmas in a sign mentioning the "holiday" season in a majority-Christian community naturally strikes Christians as a slight, and when the government is the one putting up the sign, it sends the majority of the public a very unfriendly message. In such cases, it is important to recognize that the maintenance of civil peace requires that a community reflect fundamental realities such as people's religious beliefs, lest citizens come to see the government as an open adversary.
Even the Illinois American Civil Liberties Union agrees, to the point of recently saying that it's all right for public schools to have overtly Christian Christmas carols in school activities, according to an article in yesterday's Chicago Tribune. "Christmas songs about Christ are fine at this time of year, [IACLU] spokesman Ed Yohnka said," the Tribune story noted. That sounds quite different from the position typically staked out by the national American Civil Liberties Union.
BUT NOT ALL THE news is good: a local suburban Chicago school, in a decision representative of policies in many schools across the nation, sponsored last week a very "inclusive" Christmas celebration that entirely excluded any mention of Jesus Christ, as documented in the Tribune story mentioned above.
Some muscular local Christians quickly raised a fuss, led by the Illinois Family Institute working with the national Alliance Defense Fund, and although the school's district superintendent denied any intent behind the omission and "said his teachers did nothing wrong this year," he added that "he would review the holiday programs next year to make sure Christians are not perceived to be slighted," according to the Tribune report.
Obviously, much work remains for "muscular Christians" around the nation in ensuring that local governments don't show disdain, accidentally or otherwise, for the most deeply held beliefs of the majority of their citizens. It's interesting to see that the people we hire to run our public schools are in some cases more radical about excluding religion than even the local ACLU chapter is.
As the Illinois Family Institute and Alliance Defense Fund have observed, it is essential that the public hold these people accountable for their actions and make sure that the public schools' programs and curricula truly reflect the beliefs of the persons who pay for this vital and highly expensive public service. Overall, a more sensible approach to state- and local-level church-state issues must start with the simple recognition that there is a big difference between establishing a coercive state religion and simply acknowledging and recognizing the religious beliefs of the vast majority of a community's population.
S. T. Karnick is an associate fellow of the Sagamore Institute and coeditor of The Reform Club.
spectator.org
FYI >>muscular christianity
The notion of Muscular Christianity was an important feature of some key discourses around work with boys and men in the second half of the nineteenth century. Here Clifford Putney explores the origin and use of the term.
contents: muscular christianity | bibliography | how to cite this article
picture - cover Putney's Muscular ChristianityMuscular Christianity can be defined as a Christian commitment to health and manliness. Its origins can be traced to the New Testament, which sanctions manly exertion (Mark 11:15) and physical health (1 Cor. 6:19-20). But while muscular Christianity has always been an element in Christianity, it has not always been a major element. The early Church sometimes praised health and manliness, but it was much more concerned with achieving salvation, and it preached that men could achieve salvation without being healthy and husky. This doctrine seemingly squared with the Gospels, and it reigned supreme within the Church for centuries. It did inspire criticism, however, and that criticism was especially fierce in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when droves of Protestant ministers in England and America concluded that men were not truly Christians unless they were muscular Christians.
The phrase "muscular Christianity" probably first appeared in an 1857 English review of Charles Kingsley's novel Two Years Ago (1857). One year later, the same phrase was used to describe Tom Brown's School Days, an 1856 novel about life at Rugby by Kingsley's friend, fellow Englishman Thomas Hughes. Soon the press in general was calling both writers muscular Christians and also applying that label to the genre they inspired: adventure novels replete with high principles and manly Christian heroes.
Hughes and Kingsley were not only novelists; they were also social critics. In their view, asceticism and effeminacy had gravely weakened the Anglican Church. To make that church a suitable handmaiden for British imperialism, Hughes and Kingsley sought to equip it with rugged and manly qualities. They also exported their campaign for more health and manliness in religion to antebellum America, where their ideas failed to catch on immediately due to factors such as Protestant opposition to sports and the popularity of feminine iconography within the mainline Protestant churches.
Opposition to muscular Christianity in America never completely disappeared. But it did weaken in the aftermath of the Civil War, when changes in American society placed health and manliness uppermost in the minds of many male white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. These men, who included Social Gospel leaders such as Josiah Strong and politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt, viewed factors such as urbanization, sedentary office jobs, and non-Protestant immigration as threats not only to their health and manhood but also to their privileged social standing. To maintain that standing, they urged "old stock" Americans to revitalize themselves by embracing a "strenuous life" replete with athleticism and aggressive male behavior. They also called loudly upon their churches to abandon the supposedly enervating tenets of "feminized" Protestantism.
As evidence that there existed a "woman peril" in American Protestant churches, critics such as the pioneer psychologist G. Stanley Hall pointed to the imbalance of women to men in the pews. They also contended that women's influence in church had led to an overabundance of sentimental hymns, effeminate clergymen and sickly-sweet images of Jesus. These things were repellant to "real men" and boys, averred critics, who argued that males would avoid church until "feminized" Protestantism gave way to muscular Christianity, a strenuous religion for the strenuous life.
The heyday of muscular Christianity in America lasted roughly from 1880 to 1920. During that time, the YMCA invented basketball and volleyball, the Men and Religion Forward Movement sought to fill Protestant churches with men, and the churches took the lead in the organized camping and public playground movements. These efforts to make muscular Christianity an integral part of the churches lasted throughout World War I. But in the pacifistic 1920s, there emerged widespread discontent with many of the ideals that had flourished during World War I, including muscular Christianity. Protestant leaders such as Harry Emerson Fosdick and Sherwood Eddy blamed muscular Christianity for encouraging militarism. And satirists such as H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis skewered muscular Christianity in their writings.
The postwar devaluation of muscular Christianity was evident not only in literature but also in the mainline Protestant churches. By the 1930s, these churches were gravitating toward the Neo-Orthodoxy of Reinhold Niebuhr, who argued that divinity resided not in men's muscles, but with God. As Neo-Orthodoxy arose in the mainline Protestant churches, muscular Christianity declined there. It did not, however, disappear from the American landscape, since it found some new sponsors. They include the Catholic Church and various rightward leaning Protestant groups. The Catholic Church promotes muscular Christianity in the athletic programs of schools such as Notre Dame, and the evangelical Protestant groups that support muscular Christianity include Promise Keepers, Athletes in Action, and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.
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