Amos Alonzo Stagg and the Transformation of Muscular Christianity

This essay is adapted from The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports (Oxford University Press).

In its American form, muscular Christianity sought to counter the supposed feminization of the Protestant church by presenting a more masculine image fit for a “strenuous” age of American expansion. Athletics became an important part of the movement, helping attract men to church and mold them into strong and rugged leaders. It was in part through the muscular Christian movement that Protestants overcame their suspicion of games and recreation and came to embrace organized sports like football, baseball, and the newly invented basketball as wholesome— and holy— endeavors.

According to the typical historical narrative, muscular Christianity began to fade after World War I, just when America’s sports obsession was ramping up. In The Spirit of the Game, however, I argue that muscular Christianity did not disappear. Instead, the 1920s are critical for understanding how American Protestants both carried forward and reshaped muscular Christian approaches to sports. It was during this decade, dubbed the “golden age of sports,” that Protestants were forced to confront a crucial reality: They would not be able to shape sports in their own image, as the earlier generation of muscular Christians had hoped to do. If they wanted to maintain a place within the commercialized world of big-time sports while also upholding the moral value of athletics— the “spirit of the game”— they would need to accommodate and adapt.

Few individuals exemplify this shift more effectively than Amos Alonzo Stagg.

The football coach was not only formed by muscular Christianity; he was practically its embodiment. Born in New Jersey in 1864, Stagg was an avid reader of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the mid-nineteenth-century English novel that popularized the links between schoolboy sports and moral formation. He attended the elite private schools of Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University, where he starred on the baseball diamond and football field.

Stagg also participated in YMCA work, joining the organization while at Yale. In contrast to Protestant ministers who viewed sports as a worldly activity full of sin, key YMCA leaders embraced the idea that physical recreation (including competitive sports) was every bit as important as spiritual and intellectual growth in developing well-rounded Christian men.

“It is by means of the physical that men are brought under the influence of the spiritual,” wrote Luther Gulick, superintendent of physical education for the International YMCA Training School, in 1889. “[A]nd it is the spiritual that teaches men that their bodies are sacred to noble ends and that the gymnasium is one of the means to the accomplishment of those ends.”

The rise of modernist theology, which tended to break down divisions between “sacred” and “secular” spheres of life by stressing God’s presence in human society, influenced the YMCA’s shift toward character building through sports. If God, through the efforts of Christian men and women, was present and at work within secular areas of life, then athletic endeavor itself could be a Christian activity and not merely a way to attract people to the “real” Christian message of personal conversion.

Racial paternalism (the “white man’s burden”) and American imperialism also shaped the emerging muscular Christian ideology. Only if “young men became Christians and aggressive ones,” Stagg suggested in an 1888 talk for the YMCA, could America’s “heritage of freedom handed down to the present generation” be preserved from threats posed by immigrants and foreign ideologies.

In 1890, after considering a career in ministry, Stagg enrolled in the YMCA’s International Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts (now Springfield College), where he studied under Luther Gulick. Two years later, he moved to the Midwest, taking a position as football coach and director of the Department of Physical Culture and Athletics at the newly created University of Chicago. Stagg did not think that he was turning away from a life of Christian service in his new role. As he explained in his 1927 autobiography, he believed he “could influence others to Christian ideals more effectively on the field than in the pulpit.”

As Stagg built a football powerhouse at the University of Chicago in the early twentieth century, Protestants’ affinity for athletics expanded. By World War I the question of whether Christians could or should participate in sports had been settled. Now, it was mostly a question of how.

YMCA leader Richard Henry Edwards diagnosed the situation in 1915. “The meaning of loyalty and basic morality enters the very fiber of American youth through well-conducted athletics,” he declared in Christianity and Amusements, adding that “their moral and mental values are now recognized.” Yet, Edwards was worried about “certain tendencies” in sports. Among those problems: the “spirit of commercialism,” an overemphasis on winning, and the tendency toward violence and animosity among players.

The trends Edwards identified at the outbreak of World War I only grew afterward, as the popularity of commercialized sports surged. Fans increasingly flocked to professional baseball, college football, and boxing, while daily newspapers, general interest magazines, newsreels, and radio (a new technology) dramatically expanded their sports coverage.

Like commercialized sports more broadly, Stagg saw his star rise after the war. He developed a national reputation as a defender of the value of athletics and, more importantly, built teams that won games. Among coaches, only Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne had greater renown.

Stagg’s intimate involvement with the commercialized and nationalized spectacle of big-time sports is what made him different in the 1920s from the muscular Christian leaders of the pre–World War I years.

Muscular Christians in the Progressive Era lauded sports for two main reasons: they hoped it would attract young men and boys to Protestant churches, and they believed it developed well-rounded Christian character in the boys who participated. However, this Christian formation could only happen if young people participated as amateurs with pure, idealistic motivations. Playing sports in order to make money or win acclaim corrupted the idealism that made sports an engine of positive moral formation. The class-based assumptions behind the amateur ideal went unstated—those who did not need to earn money for themselves or their family had a much easier time participating in athletics organized around the amateur ideal.

The excessive commercialization of sports in the 1920s led some muscular Christians to raise the alarm. Correspondence in 1921 between Stagg and A. J. “Dad” Elliott, a YMCA leader in Chicago, helps to illustrate this. A former college football star, Elliott believed that athletics could be put to Christian use. But he felt compelled to bring troubling details about college football to Stagg’s attention. The sport, he claimed, was now “built up on the fundamental premise first, of winning games— to win honestly if you can, but if you can’t win honestly, win.”

This obsession with winning led to direct payments to standout football players and a lowering of academic standards to keep football players enrolled. It was “very difficult to grow Christian character in the kind of soil that our present athletic situation is responsible for,” Elliott wrote, and he asked to meet with Stagg about the problem.

Stagg undoubtedly agreed with Elliott’s desire to uphold the principle of amateur sport. Yet, the “fundamental premise” that Elliott identified as the problem— the emphasis on winning— was not as much of a concern for Stagg. “The British play a game for the game’s sake; [Americans] play to win,” Stagg explained in his 1927 autobiography.

To be sure, Stagg believed that football players must be able to accept a loss with dignity, and that they must not cheat to win. Stagg also believed coaches should not be hired or fired because of their win-loss records, and he complained about alumni who took a win-at-all-costs attitude. But Stagg helped to create the incessant demand for winning in the first place, and he remained convinced that the intense will to win was an essential trait in male leaders that needed to be cultivated through athletic competition.

An exchange recorded in a 1931 interview emphasizes this point. “This terrific urge to win,” the author asked, “you don’t agree with some of the reformers who say it’s low and unworthy?” Stagg responded indignantly, “Low and unworthy! Low and unworthy, to want to win? Golly, man, isn’t that what life’s all about?”

Stagg’s obsession with the “will to win” went hand in hand with his staunch support for amateur athletics. He continued to believe that if players received financial compensation, the character- building value of the game would be destroyed. Only if players participated with idealistic motivations— love of their alma mater and duty to their teammates— could football’s man-making potential stay intact.

Yet, Stagg also aided and abetted the commercialization of college football which expanded to dramatic new heights in the 1920s. It was Stagg, after all, who broke Big Ten conference regulations by taking his Chicago Maroons east to play Princeton in an intersectional game in 1921, intensifying the surge of interest in such matchups. It was Stagg, too, who serialized his autobiography in one of the nation’s most popular magazines, the Saturday Evening Post, in 1926, pioneering a trend followed by other football coaches. Thus, Stagg contributed to what scholar Michal Oriard calls “the contradiction at the heart of big-time college football . . . college football players were student amateurs, despite their participation in a multimillion-dollar business.”

This ambivalent stance ultimately served Stagg well. On the one hand, his defense of the amateur ideal and his support for measures to curb the recruitment of players made him stand out as a throwback to an earlier, purer age compared with other major coaches in the 1920s. On the other hand, his continued participation in and defense of big-time football distinguished him from reform-minded critics who sought to greatly diminish football’s cultural power.

It also allowed him to reassure anxious Protestants that the decade’s growing interest in sports need not be a threat to their moral and cultural influence—it could be an ally.

“Instead of going to church to learn how to live, the youngsters nowadays go anywhere they want to,” Stagg said in 1931. “Thank God, they like to go to football games!”

On the gridiron, Stagg believed, young Americans were learning “temperance, self-control, fair play, sportsmanship, courage, and the Golden Rule.”

They were, in other words, carrying muscular Christian ideas into a new era.