MMA, Religion, and Far Right Politics

On July 3rd, 2025, Donald Trump announced that a UFC Event would be held on the South Lawn of the White House as part of celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the USA. The announcement came after multiple key appearances of Donald Trump at UFC Events and the inclusion of key UFC personnel in major Republican moments, such as Dana White’s appearance and speaking on election night 2024. Using current research into the enactment of ritualized violence within sport from within religion and sport studies, this paper will explore the UFC as a site of sportswashing. However, by focusing on the growing participation of women in sport categorised ‘violent’, and specifically women UFC fighters, it will show how women fighters use evangelical-nationalistic sportswashing to buffer against the ongoing project or normalising gender and sexuality that places their identity under threat at the hands of both the state.

Donald Trump and his administration are intimately tied to the sport of mixed martial arts (MMA), with the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s (UFC) “Freedom 250” event on the White House Lawn being the most obvious illustration. With Trump’s presence in the sport, his Christian nationalist supporters have sought to capitalize on this relationship and integrate MMA into their larger socio-religious projects. While previous scholarship has noted how Muscular Christianity appears within MMA, this paper explicitly argues that MMA has become a vital part of the larger Christian nationalist project’s masculine domination, populist rhetoric, and violence. To understand this dynamic, this paper makes the case for seeing the Christian nationalist embrace of MMA within an adaptive methodology on both the national and local levels. To conclude, this paper highlights how MMA requires greater attention thanks to its place within the larger extremist ecosystem.

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.