Content area
Full text
Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920. By Clifford Putney. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2001. Pp. x, 300. $39.95 cloth; $17.95 paper.)
Clifford Putney's study of "muscular Christianity" joins a growing body of literature analyzing the history of masculinity in the United States. Drawing primarily on Gail Bederman's Manliness and Civilization (1995), Mark Carnes's Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (1989), Jackson Lears's No Place of Grace (1981), and Ann Douglas's The Feminization of American Culture (1977), as well as extensive research in the history of religious organizations such as the YMCA, Putney has written an important, if somewhat limited, study of a significant element of American intellectual and cultural history.
Practitioners and proponents of muscular Christianity, an evangelical movement that sought to add an element of physical invigoration to Christianity, were primarily members of the churches that made up what Putney terms "mainline American Protestantism" (p. 41). These individuals were for the most part urban or suburban, middle-class or wealthy, white Protestants with a moderately evangelical sensibility; muscular Christianity did not take root in the more fundamentalist sects of rural areas, particularly in the South. Putney maintains that the popularity of muscular Christianity can be explained in large part by the "manhood crisis" of late-nineteenth-century Protestant America.
Putney is at his...