Spiritual Exercises: Fitness and Religion in Modern America

This dissertation observes how the structuring logics of American Christianity operate in the consumerist landscape of health, wellness, and fitness to understand how religion is enlisted in the politicized work of reforming the body. Anchoring this study in a multi-year ethnography of the CrossFit and SoulCycle brands and the communities formed around them, this ethnography shows how health, wellness, and fitness communities deploy religious language, ritual action, patterns of community making, and religious analogy to advance their social visions of health and the good life for a profit. In its historical register, this project brings to light the longstanding pressures and assumptions of white Protestant Christianity in shaping American body ideals and health standards, revealing an ableist, fat-phobic, and white body as representative of the American body-politic. While scholars of religion and embodiment have observed the overwhelming interest of American Christians in fitness, Spiritual Exercises pushes scholars of American religion to consider how secular fitness culture is a Christian formation that reproduces a social investment in whiteness. In its ethnographic register, this project follows how brand-loyal adherents make sense of the metaphysical claims that suffuse their fitness regimens by acting as on-the-ground religious innovators and theorists in what I call colloquial religion. I argue that instances of colloquial religion, in which adherents openly play with ideas of religion through figurative language, affective cues, parody, embodied practices, and the marketplace, is a form of theorizing that both describes and performs new modes of religious possibility

Training for the “Unknown and Unknowable”: CrossFit and Evangelical Temporality

This article looks at the relationship between the U.S. military and CrossFit, a functional fitness training method and sport, and focuses on how their affinities coalesce around the idea of preparedness. CrossFit makes a sport and spectacle out of preparing for the “unknown and unknowable” challenges of life. This approach to life and fitness is attractive to service members, first responders, and average citizens alike who live in an age of constant anticipation, awaiting unknown threats. This article draws from fieldwork observations, interviews, CrossFit videos and articles, social media posts, and discussion board threads to argue that CrossFit, with its emphasis on preparedness, exhibits an evangelical temporality that is particularly symbiotic with American militarism. This article introduces two new terms, “evangelical temporality” and “generic evangelicalism,” to discuss a disposition towards time marked by a sense of expectation; by the anticipation of rupture and change that necessitates a state of constant preparedness; and by a firm conviction that time is running out. In three acts, this article explores how CrossFit, as a militaristic sport and a lifestyle centered on preparedness, benefits from and adds to the prevailing sense of uncertainty, expectation, and preparation that characterizes evangelical temporality in America