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eBook details
- Title: Instilling the "Manly" Faith: Protestant Masculinity and the German Junglingsvereine at the Fin De Siecle.
- Author : Masculinities and Spirituality Journal of Men
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 226 KB
Description
"Is Christianity unmanly?" This question appeared in February 1916 as the title of the front-page article of the Monthly Newsletter of the CVJM-Nuremberg, a branch of the German YMCA. Directed at the young men of the Protestant Church's youth group movement, the article was a polemic against the prevalent notion that Christianity inherently lacked manliness. The author asked rhetorically if Reformation-hero Martin Luther was not manly when he "looked death in the eye" and declared, "Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me." The author also recounted the valor of the Salzburgers who, in the winter of 1732, gave up house and home and trudged through the snow for the sake of their Evangelical faith. In setting up one manly hero after another--culminating with Christ as the ultimate man--the author made explicit the manly characteristics of true Christian men. (2) The Church's response to this question--"Is Christianity unmanly?"--offers a glimpse into the masculine ideal of both these youth groups--called Junglingsvereine--and, by extension, that of the late nineteenth-century German Protestant Church. In this essay, I locate the Junglingsvereine in their historical context and examine both the structure of the groups and the discourse of their literature in order to access the masculine ideal that the leaders of these Protestant clubs advocated for their predominately working-class male members. I argue that the Junglingsvereine, in their program of religious edification and continued education, and their carefully fostered atmosphere of sociability, advanced a religiously defined, middle-class notion of masculinity aimed at producing cultured, assertive, strong, chaste, and--above all--Christian men. Moreover, I suggest that when considered in the context of the "feminization of religion" of the nineteenth century, these groups are best understood as vehicles by which an older generation of beleaguered Church leaders defended themselves and the Church from increasing cultural irrelevance and sought to restore the Church's unraveling sense of manliness. Responses to the feminization of religion were not limited to the Catholic Church or to attacks on Catholicism's manliness by Protestants, though these are the major themes in much of the relevant historiography (Hastings, 2008; Gross, 2001, 2004). Rather, as this study suggests, Protestants also feared becoming "feminized" themselves and took action to combat the emasculation of their public image. As such, the Junglingsvereine provide a unique glimpse into the internal and external (or inter-confessional) "masculinity dynamics" of the Protestant Church at the fin de siecle.