Muscular Christianity and the Colonial and Post-Colonial World

The ethos of Muscular Christianity has had an enormous impact on modern civil society in English-speaking nations and among the peoples they colonized. First codified by British Christian Socialists in the mid-19th century, explicitly religious forms of the ideology have persistently re-emerged over ensuing decades, for example, in current American domestic politics and foreign policy. However, the doctrines of Christian manliness and the social gospel originally taught by Thomas Hughes, F.D. Maurice, and Charles Kingsley proved perpetually irritating to both the secular left and to mainstream bourgeois Christians in the home countries. As a consequence, secularized, essentialized, and normalized versions of the ethos'¬"the public school spirit, the games ethic, moral masculinity, the strenuous life, rugged individualism, managerial team-play--came to dominate and to spread rapidly across class, status, and gender lines. These developments have been appropriated by the state to support imperial military and colonial projects. Late 19th and early 20th century apologists and critics alike widely understood Muscular Christianity to be a key engine of British colonialism. Around the world, colonial subjects in their turn variously resisted and indigenized the ethos, frequently tuning it back upon the colonizers themselves in order to serve national liberation projects.As this volume demonstrates, the summons to re-evaluate the entire history of Muscular Christianity comes chiefly from contemporary post-colonial studies. In the volume leading scholars from anthropology, history, and education explore these intercultural dynamics through the lens of physical cultural and sport, perhaps Muscular Christianity's most important instruments in remaking the modern world. The papers explore fascinating case materials from Canada, the U.S., India, Japan, Papua, New Guinea, the Spanish Caribbean, and in Britain herself in a joint effort to outline a truly international, post-colonial sport history.This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.MacAloon, John J. is the author of 'Muscular Christianity and the Colonial and Post-Colonial World', published 2007 under ISBN 9780415390743 and ISBN 0415390745.