Forging Elite Fitness, Forging the Nation: Fitness and Christian Nationalism

Scholars of white Christian nationalism most frequently train their analytical lens on elections, voter blocs, culture war stances, and the words and actions of famous conservative religious leaders. Yet in doing so they miss how the values, aesthetics, and practices of white Christian nationalism become embodied. As a corrective, we draw on our fieldwork in CrossFit and with combatives (i.e. Mixed Martial Arts fighters) as a way to bring bodies back into conversations about processes of political formation. Beyond commonplace theoretical metaphors of a “body politic,” our analysis more aptly addresses what we call a “political physiology” of the body and the role that fitness and physical cultural practices play in forging right wing political identities and imaginaries. We argue that beyond the pews and pulpits, white Christian nationalism is formed and circulated through seemingly mundane spaces like the gym.