In the introduction to Christian Masculinity, the book's editor, Yvonne Maria Werner, explains that the work is the product of a research project that received its funding from the Bank of Sweden (whose willingness to support religious and gender studies certainly differentiates it from banks in America). The project brought together academics from all over Sweden, and it drew in a few scholars from other northern European nations as well. Most of the people who participated in the project conduct gender studies in Sweden, and their essays in Christian Masculinity dwell on that country. Not every piece in the book, however, is about Sweden. Rather than exploring the manliness of Swedes, some essays in Christian Masculinity focus on countries such as England and Denmark, while other essays in the book provide theoretical perspectives that are applicable to every Western nation. All thirteen of the essays in Christian Masculinity, the Swedish and the non-Swedish, are based on painstaking research. They are also skillfully written in the international language of English, making the book in which they appear accessible to readers throughout the world.

The contributors to Christian Masculinity represent several different academic disciplines. Two contributors, Callum Brown and Anna Prestjan, are sociologists; a third, Inger Caisou-Rousseau, is a literary theorist; and a fourth, Gösta Hallonsten, is a theologian (whose piece on modern-day, pro-Vatican feminists seems strangely out of place in a book about manliness in the past). The remaining contributors are historians, or at least they employ the methodology of historians, focusing on the chronological development of ideas, institutions, and individuals. All three of these categories receive coverage in Christian Masculinity, but institutional and abstract intellectual histories (as exemplified by Elin Malmer's essay on Swedish soldiers’ homes and Olaf Blaschke's essay on the “re-masculinization” movement in the churches of fin de siècle Germany) are outnumbered in the book by portraits of missionaries, monks, and other individuals. Among the best of these portraits is David Tjeder's essay on J. A. Eklund, a bishop in Sweden's state church, the Church of Sweden. Using Eklund's life and ideas to elucidate the men's movement among Swedish Lutherans in the early twentieth century, Tjeder cleverly weaves together personal, religious, and gender history. The other biographers in Christian Masculinity endeavor to do the same thing, but unfortunately not all of them are as successful as Tjeder.

Despite their different methodologies, most of the contributors to Christian Masculinity share a desire to shed light through their writings on the men's movement that affected bourgeois Western churches (most of them Protestant) in the fin de siècle period. One aim of the movement was to combat what many men viewed as the “feminization” of their churches. Another movement aim was to reinvigorate Christian men through sports. This second goal does not particularly interest the contributors to Christian Masculinity. They are far more concerned with how participants in the men's movement struggled against the supposed feminization of Christianity, and how they defined optimal types of Christian manhood.

The movement to infuse churches with manliness was widespread, and it promoted a brand of religiosity that I, and others, have called “muscular Christianity.” Neither the movement nor muscular Christianity attracted much scholarly attention, however, until the late twentieth century, when academics in the United States and the United Kingdom began to write about the phenomena. As a result of their work, awareness of the muscular Christian movement has spread beyond the Anglo-American sphere into places such as Scandinavia, where most of the contributors to Christian Masculinity live.

The contributors have clearly been influenced by Anglo-American research on muscular Christianity. But that does not mean that their various approaches to the subject are unoriginal. Rather than merely following in the footsteps of scholars from Britain and America, the contributors to Christian Masculinity cover new ground in their essays, focusing on hitherto unexamined or under-examined aspects of the muscular Christian movement. Among these aspects is the difference between muscular Christianity in northern Europe (where state churches exist) and muscular Christianity in America (where a state church does not exist). The state churches in northern Europe, along with some dissenting churches there, were preoccupied in the fin de siècle period with “confessionalism” (the assertion of a church's doctrinal supremacy), and they were more likely than churches in America to use the rhetoric of muscular Christianity to advance confessionalism.

Muscular Christianity in northern Europe was distinctive, and Christian Masculinity thoroughly underscores that fact. The book also does a good job of comparing Catholic conceptions of manliness to Protestant ones. Both Catholic men and Protestant men objected in the fin de siècle period to the widespread perception that their churches were overly feminine, but the two groups fought against that perception in different ways. The Protestants tried in general to show how manly, practical, and patriotic they were, whereas the Catholics—or at least the Catholic clergy—endeavored to “re-code” traditional Catholic virtues such as chastity, piety, and obedience. These virtues were often described as feminine, but as Alexander Maurits, Tine Van Osselaer, and other contributors to Christian Masculinity demonstrate, Catholic clerics thought that the virtues ought to be viewed as manly, because they were terribly hard to achieve.