‘Be Strong and Play the Man’: Anglican Masculinities in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

In February 1957, the St James’ branch of the Church of England Men’s Society (CEMS) met in Bolton to discuss what one member described as ‘the great picture by Holman Hunt “THE SHADOW OF DEATH”’.¹ Hunt had depicted Jesus as a muscular craftsman in the early 1870s, and nearly a century later his image was still resonating with this body of provincial Anglican laymen. The history of masculinities and Christian religion might perhaps lead us to think that this is not particularly surprising. Male piety has long been a conundrum; Callum Brown perceived an ‘overarching opposition between the conceptions of piety and masculinity’, which made Christian manliness ‘difficult and perhaps impossible’ to represent and enact.² Where historians have attempted to explore male religiosity, ‘muscular Christianity’ has been the dominant historical optic. Physically robust versions of masculinity, synthesised with Christian values of the defence of the weak, stoicism, fair play and so on, featured in Anglo-American Christian evangelical literature from the 1850s, and slowly spread to influence youth movements, schools, secular fiction and generalised discourses of gender. Revivals in muscular Christianity have been traced at various moments across the twentieth century, and a ‘renewed significance and even a certain hidden dependency on muscular Christian ideology’ has been perceived in twenty-first-century Britain.³