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Now famous mostly as a song by a band with questionable sexual orientation, the YMCA was founded as a Christian outreach that early absorbed the tenets of muscular Christianity: physical and moral health allied, in the Lord's service. George Williams, the British brain behind the YMCA, was influenced by American revivalist Charles G. Finney. Luther Gulick, the American YMCA's leading theorist, was a Missionary Kid with a Finneyite background. Both Williams and Gulick were strong proponents of muscular Christianity, and both added to its ideals a commitment to personal conversion.

One of America's most notable "muscular Christians" was the Victorian-era evangelist D. L. Moody. Bear-like and unflaggingly energetic, Moody cut his evangelistic teeth in a Civil War era Chicago whose YMCA was formed two years after Moody arrived. In 1865 he was elected president of the Chicago branch. The national association tried to elect him president in 1879, but Moody declined. In his speech, he lauded the organization's "gymnasium, classes, medical lectures, and social receptions" as effective arms in "the work of reaching young men."

Though he moved away from YMCA work later in his ministry, Moody's very personality was an advertisement for muscular Christianity. Appreciative students described him as "manly, genuine, and whole-souled." Even a less-than-appreciative Walt Whitman, in a Sunday Times article, hurled "muscular Christian" at the evangelist as an epithet.

Basketball itself had YMCA origins. The game was invented in 1891 by James Naismith, a gym teacher at the International Training School of the YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts. Naismith came up with basketball as a way, between the football and baseball seasons, to keep young men involved in healthy activity—and to inculcate in them the Christian values for which the YMCA stood.

Speaking to a convention of the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 1914, Naismith echoed the manly faithfulness of Tom Brown. In his speech, he insisted that college basketball, as well as every other sport, should be put "on such a basis that it will be a factor in the molding of character, as well as … a recreative and competitive sport."

To be sure, even the apple-pie message of muscular Christianity had its darker side. At the ideal's pinnacle, and its depth, stood the figure of the British Victorian missionary C. T. Studd.

When Studd was a young man, his millionaire horse-racing father was converted at a Moody crusade. As C.T. later remembered, "Everyone in the house had a dog's life of it until they were converted" (Studd had two talented young athlete brothers). Studd was known as England's greatest cricket-player—at both Eton and Cambridge he had outshone even his brothers. For the kind of stardom such prowess earned in the British prep school or university—and even the country as a whole—think of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Quidditch cup.

The sports hero soon caused a sensation when, along with six other brilliant, manly students, dubbed the "Cambridge Seven," he left for China and a lifetime of missionary service. His missions career, during which he gave away nearly half a million dollars of inheritance money, led him from China to India to the deeps of the African Congo.

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August (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47