One of the most striking social changes in England in the Victorian era (1837-1900) was the way in which the cruel sports like cock-fighting and bear-baiting, which had been such a feature of the previous century,1 were gradually replaced by new mass spectator sports like football (rugby and soccer), cricket, and tennis. As one historian has put it, this together with the widespread establishment of new public parks and sports grounds “contributed to the emancipation of the body and mind of millions. They have altered the spirit and the physique of our people.”2

Christians played a significant role in this development. The evangelical revival of the late 18th and early 19th centuries created a new social and sporting ethic based on the idea that vigorous outdoor recreation was not only vital to the mental and physical health of Britain’s growing urban population (which were increasingly crammed into grim, northern, industrial cities) but that it also provided an opportunity for improving moral and social attitudes by developing an ethos of “team spirit” and “sportsmanship.” Sport, it was argued, could be used as a vehicle for inculcating self-discipline, combating personal selfishness, and transcending class divisions. Influenced by these ideas, Christian organizations and individuals were actively involved in the development of sport both as patrons and players.

This new attitude to sport was part of what came to be known as “muscular Christianity”3—an outlook popularized by and most closely associated with such famous British Christian writers as Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) and Thomas Hughes (1822-1896). Hughes, himself a proficient sportsman,4 believed passionately in the moral and physical value of playing games. In his influential, best-selling,5 and semi-autobiographical novel Tom Brown’s School Days, first published in 1857 and set at Rugby School, Tom’s father, Squire Brown, describes the purpose of a Rugby education as to turn Tom into “a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian.”6 And participation in organized team sports was a vital part of such an education—in the book Tom’s education begins with a rugby match and ends with a cricket match. “[I]n the playing fields,” declared Charles Kingsley, “boys acquire virtues which no books can give them.”7 Later Hughes was to write in Tom Brown at Oxford that “a man’s body is given 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.”8

Inspired and driven by this new “muscular Christian” ethos, soccer, cricket, and rugby football (which originated at Rugby School in 1823)9 spread, from the 1840s onwards, throughout British society via the elite British “public schools” and the university system. In cricket, active evangelists like C. T. Studd and his brothers played a prominent role.10 At the other end of the social scale, during the 1880s and 1890s, professional football took off with the establishment of the great British football clubs like Crystal Palace, Blackburn Rovers, Chelsea, and others. Some of these clubs originated in Sunday schools or church activities—“Aston Villa, for example, was sponsored by a Wesleyan Chapel, Fulham, and Everton grew out of a Sunday school, and Bolton Wanderers began as the Christ Church Football Club.”11 And following Britain’s example, muscular Christianity spread to other countries, appearing in the U.S., for instance, first in the private schools and then in the Young Men’s Christian Association, YMCA,12 where it lead to the invention of basketball and volleyball.13

Few who participate in sport around the world today realize quite how much they owe to a few muscular Victorian Christians.
Footnotes:
1

See Kairos Journal article, “The Cruel Sports of Eighteenth-Century England.”
2

R. J. Cruikshank, Roaring Century: 1846-1946 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1946), 200. Chapter XIII, “The Rise of Sport,” gives a detailed account of the rise and development of cricket, football, tennis, and golf over this period.
3

The term probably first appeared in a review of Kingsley’s novel Two Years Ago in the February 1857 issue of the Saturday Review. See Stuart Weir, “Tom Brown and Sports Ministry,” http://www.christiansinsport.org.uk/living_it/living-it_16-Tom-Brown-and-sports-ministry.htm (accessed July 10, 2008). For a fuller discussion, see Tony Ladd and James Mathisen, Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of American Sport (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999) and William Baker, Playing with God: Religion and Modern Sport (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).
4

At Rugby he was an enthusiastic cricketer, and at Oxford he represented the university both in cricket and the famous boat race against Cambridge.
5

The book sold 11,000 copies in the first year, an astonishing number for the time, and Theodore Roosevelt viewed it as one of the two books every boy should read. See Weir.
6

Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1895), 69.
7

Charles Kingsley, Health and Education (Isbister and Co., 1874).
8

Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford (New York: MacMillan and Co., 1895), 113.
9

Cruikshank, 207.
10

Weir.
11

Cruikshank, 208.
12

The YMCA began in Britain in 1844 and was a direct result of the muscular Christian movement. It sought to form young men into good Christian citizens by offering Bible study sessions, worship services, and prayer groups together with a wide variety of athletic opportunities.
13

Basketball originated at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891. For more details, see Baker.

from the Kairos Journal

Posted by the First Baptist Church of Perryville, Cecil County, Maryland