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Jesus Didn't Tap: Masculinity, Theology, and Ideology in Christian Mixed Martial Arts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Justine Greve
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Abstract

This essay analyzes blogs, sermons, videos, and published interviews to examine the religious rhetoric of Christian practitioners of mixed martial arts as well as pastors who promote or reference the sport in their sermons. In the tradition of muscular Christianity (the Bible-based manhood movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries), these fighters and pastors argue that MMA teaches Christian virtues such as discipline and self-control. Linking a healthy physical body with a healthy mind and spirit, they suggest that athletes enact and embody Christian values and ideals of manliness. Some scholars (such as Tony Ladd and James Mathisen) have argued that modern incarnations of muscular Christianity preach a mere “folk theology”—that is, essentially a locker-room pep talk with a touch of Jesus thrown in. Drawing on the field of lived religion, however, I argue that practitioners of Christian MMA experience a close connection between the sport and their religious beliefs. Though the theology may take the language of the “folk,” certain values (discipline and self-sacrifice), theological positions (premillennialism, life as a struggle, Jesus as the focus of religion), and social agendas (addressing masculine aggression and religious and cultural effeminacy) characterize both turn-of-the-century muscular Christianity and Christian MMA today. Athletes strive to imitate Christ and embody Christian values—aided, perhaps, by the bodily practice of their sport. Their focus on Jesus at the expense of doctrine does not indicate a lack of theology. Rather, the image of a manly Christ who will not give up represents a strong, assertive, masculine ideal that fits clearly into an evangelical worldview.

Keywords

muscular Christianitymixed martial artssportsreligionmasculinity
Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , Summer 2014 , pp. 141 - 185
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2014

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References

Notes

1. Joe Boyd, pastor at Aviator Church in Derby, Kansas, “Ultimate Fighter—Week 1,” n.d., http://aviatorchurch.com/derby/ultimatefighter/, accessed September 20, 2012.

2. “Ben Henderson: Warrior of God,” YouTube.com, produced by Spike TV, uploaded by lwalmer, April 25, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼YUkHDBE1jFQ, accessed December 6, 2011.

3. Comment posted by revivalhousemedia on the video “Christian MMA Fighters,” posted by sj2737, March 13, 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼AtVixAPuzck, accessed November 28, 2012.

4. Frank Deford, “Mixed Martial Arts: A Knockout to Boxing?” Morning Edition, April 16, 2008, National Public Radio, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story/php?storyId¼89662907, accessed December 7, 2011.

5. Baker, William J., Playing with God: Religion and Modern Sport (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar The term “folk theology” appears in Tony Ladd and Mathisen, James A., Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of American Sport (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999), 219.Google Scholar

6. Hoffman, Shirl James, Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2010), 15, 20.Google Scholar The term “Sportianity” comes from Frank Deford, “Religion in Sport,” Sports Illustrated, April 19, 1976, 88-102.

7. Hoffman, Good Game, 21.

8. In addition to the aforementioned authors, I am referring here particularly to Krattenmaker, Tom, Onward Christian Athletes: Turning Ballparks into Pulpits and Players into Preachers (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010),Google Scholar and Higgs, Robert J. and Braswell, Michael C., An Unholy Alliance: The Sacred and Modern Sports (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

9. For a discussion of the “seeker” phenomenon, see Roof, Wade Clark, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993),Google Scholar and Sargeant, Kimon Howland, Seeker Churches: Promoting Traditional Religion in a Nontraditional Way (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

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11. Borer, Michael Ian and Schafer, Tyler S., “Culture War Confessionals: Conflicting Accounts of Christianity, Violence, and Mixed Martial Arts,” Journal of Media and Religion 10, no. 4 (2011): 166.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. “Evangelical” is difficult to define precisely, but I use it (like Tanya Luhrmann) to refer to a group of Christians who emphasize biblical inerrancy (or divine inspiration) and born-again experience and seek to spread the gospel to others ( Luhrmann, T. M., When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012], 13)Google Scholar. In this article, I emphasize the evangelical stress on experience and focus on Jesus over doctrine.

13. The idea that there is a singular set of evangelical or muscular Christian ideals for manhood is certainly reductive. When I talk about the gender ideology of evangelicalism, I strive to base it on examples from the literature on evangelicalism or the discourse of evangelical Christians themselves. John Bartkowski's work on the Promise Keepers identifies several models of godly manhood that the evangelical men's organization supports, including “Rational Patriarchy” and the “Tender Warrior” ( Bartkowski, John P., The Promise Keepers: Servants, Soldiers, and Godly Men [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004], 44)Google Scholar. These two models seem to be most applicable to the views of masculinity supported by proponents of MMA. Bartkowski's assertion that, in the home, evangelical men are called to be strong but caring “servant-leaders” and “spiritual leaders” of their families seems to hold true for the modern muscular Christians, who stress both strength and caring among fathers ( Bartkowski, John P., “Connections and Contradictions: Exploring the Complex Linkages between Faith and Family,” in Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives, ed. Ammerman, Nancy T. [New York: Oxford University Press, 2007], 160).Google Scholar Responsible, engaged fatherhood is certainly an important aspect of the religious discourse surrounding Christian MMA.

14. Orsi, Robert A., The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950, 2d ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), xxi Google Scholar.

15. In Faithful to Fenway: Believing in Boston, Baseball, and America’s Most Beloved Ballpark (New York: New York University Press, 2008), Michael Ian Borer looks at the sacred side of Fenway Park—a place full of fans who treat their stadium and their sport with reverence and whose own religious beliefs get intermingled with their devotion to baseball. McDannell, Colleen surveys ways in which commercial culture blends with Christianity in Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

16. Moore, R. Laurence, Touchdown Jesus: The Mixing of Sacred and Secular in American History (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 8 Google Scholar.

17. See Wuthnow, Robert, Creative Spirituality: The Way of the Artist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001);Google Scholar Graybill, Beth and Arthur, Linda B., “The Social Control of Women's Bodies in Two Mennonite Communities,” in Religion, Dress, and the Body, ed. Arthur, Linda B. and Lazaridis, Gabriella (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 9–29;Google Scholar McDannell, Material Christianity; Gerber, Lynne, “My Body is a Testimony: Appearance, Health, and Sin in an Evangelical Weight-Loss Program,” Social Compass 56, no. 3 (2009): 405–18; CrossRefGoogle Scholar Gerber, Lynne, “Fat Christians and Fit Elites: Negotiating Class and Status in Evangelical Christian Weight-Loss Culture,” American Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2012): 61–84;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Griffith, R. Marie, Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Bender, Courtney, Heaven's Kitchen: Living Religion at God's Love We Deliver (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Sexton, John with Oliphant, Tomas and Schwartz, Peter J., Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game (New York: Gotham Books, 2013).Google Scholar For a good introduction to the relationship between material objects and practices and religious belief, see Morgan, David, ed. Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief (New York: Routledge, 2010)Google Scholar.

18. See Wacquant, Loïc, Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar, and Wacquant, Loïc, “The Pugilistic Point of View: How Boxers Think and Feel about Their Trade,” Theory and Society 24 (August, 1995): 489–535.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Stott, Richard Briggs, Jolly Fellows: Male Milieus in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 255;Google Scholar Lamberts, Margaret Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 17 Google Scholar.

20. Kimmel, Michael, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 90;Google Scholar Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 28.Google Scholar

21. Kyla Schuller, “Taxonomies of Feeling: The Epistemology of Sentimentalism in Late-Nineteenth-Century Racial and Sexual Science,” American Quarterly 62 (June 2012): 282.

22. Ibid., 291.

23. Lears, No Place of Grace, 32.

24. Ibid., 60, 32.

25. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 89–91; Lears, No Place of Grace, 28–31.

26. Stott, Jolly Fellows, 257.

27. Putney, Clifford, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 99–100.Google Scholar

28. R. Marie Griffith, Born Again Bodies, 111.

29. On changing ideals of body type, see Nelson, Mariah Burton, The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football: Sexism and the American Culture of Sports (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 20.Google Scholar For more on the shift to a body-based ideal of masculinity and the characteristics associated with it, see Bederman, Gail, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 18–19;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Putney, Muscular Christianity, 5; and Kimmel, Manhood in America, 94.

30. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 89.

31. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 23.

32. Lears, No Place of Grace, 118.

33. Ibid.; Kimmel, Manhood in America, 92; Stott, Jolly Fellows, 259.

34. Prothero, Stephen, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 90.Google Scholar See also Stearns, Peter N., “Men, Boys, and Anger in American Society, 1860– 1940,” in Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, ed. Mangan, James A. and Walvin, James (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 75–91.Google Scholar

35. Lears, No Place of Grace, 102. The desire for real, intense experience (achieved through violence) appears in the book and film Fight Club, which depicts MMA-like no-holds-barred fighting and suggests that (post)modernity and the feminization of culture are behind this need to fight for reality. The desire is also a driving factor behind participation in MMA. Ethnographic studies by Ann-Helen Sund and Jaime Holthuysen indicate that the “genuineness” of their sport is important to MMA practitioners and fans. See Ann-Helen Sund, “The Sport, the Club, the Body: A Study of Ultimate Fighting,” Ethnologia Scandinavica 35 (2005): 87, and Holthuysen, Jaime, “Embattled Identities: Constructions of Contemporary American Masculinity amongst MMA Cagefighters” (Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University, Ann Arbor: ProQuest/UMI, 2011 [Publication No. 3452883]), 192–245.Google Scholar

36. Stott, Jolly Fellows, 259. As Donald Mrozek observes, Victorians believed that “primordial vigor surged through the structure of the rational society” (Sport and American Mentality, 1880–1910 [Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983], 66). Civilization contained (even relied upon) a healthy dose of the primitive.

37. Borer and Schafer found frequent comparisons between MMA and chess in their study of Christianity and MMA through Internet forums (“Culture War Confessionals,” 175). Fighter Sam Sheridan makes the MMA-chess comparison within the first few pages of his memoir, A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey through the World of Fighting (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007). For more on the various reasons fans report enjoying ultimate fighting, see Nancy Cheever, “The Uses and Gratifications of Viewing Mixed Martial Arts,” Journal of Sports Media 4 (Spring 2009): 36. Cheever reports that nearly all fans watch MMA for “the skill of the fighters (90 percent). They also enjoy the range of talent and abilities (81 percent), the fighting styles (82 percent), the techniques and moves (82 percent), and the competition of it (73 percent).” Far fewer fans enjoyed the purely violent aspects of MMA, such as “seeing someone get hurt (15 percent), the blood (13 percent), the violence (17 percent), or watching the men beat each other up (19 percent).”

38. Putney, Muscular Christianity, 2.

39. See Lindman, Janet Moore, “Acting the Manly Christian: White Evangelical Masculinity in Revolutionary Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 57 (April 2000): 393–416.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40. Prothero, American Jesus, 57.

41. Ibid., 61.

42. Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture, 124; Stephen Prothero, American Jesus, (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1988) 52.Google Scholar

43. Prothero, American Jesus, 59–67.

44. Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture, 18.

45. Ibid., 137.

46. Ibid., 141, 169, 161.

47. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 128.

48. Ladd and Mathisen, Muscular Christianity, 13; Green, Harvey, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 215.Google Scholar

49. Putney, Muscular Christianity, 59.

50. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 132. The gains in male church attendance were probably fairly modest; a reasonable national estimate might be 2.5 percent. See Gail Bederman, “‘The Women Have Had Charge of the Church Work Long Enough’: The Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911–1912 and the Masculinization of Middle-Class Protestantism,” American Quarterly 41 (September 1989): 454.

51. Ladd and Mathisen, Muscular Christianity, 36. For YMCA physical education director Luther Gulick, the gym was not a secondary or tertiary project but played a “fundamental and intrinsic part in the salvation of man.” Gulick designed the YMCA's logo—a triangle with points representing body, mind, and spirit—to reflect this belief and promoted the symbol until the YMCA adopted it in 1895. Quoted in Putney, Clifford, “Character Building in the YMCA, 1880–1930,” Mid-America: An Historical Review 73 (January 1991): 53–54.Google Scholar See also Putney, Clifford, “Luther Gulick: His Contributions to Springfield College, the YMCA, and ‘Muscular Christianty,”’ Historical Journal of Massachusetts 39, nos. 1-2 (Summer 2011): 159.Google Scholar

52. Haley, Bruce, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

53. Hughes, Thomas, The Manliness of Christ (Philadelphia: Henry Altemus, 1896), 27.Google Scholar

54. MacAloon, John J., ed., Muscular Christianity in Colonial and Post-Colonial Worlds (London: Routledge, 2008), xi.Google Scholar

55. Ladd and Mathisen, Muscular Christianity, 20.

56. This did not exclude women from being Christians. As Norman Vance writes in The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought, “‘manliness’ in this context generously embraced all that was best and most vigorous in man, which might include woman as well” ([Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], 1). Even if women were not wholly excluded, however, identifying the male sex with Christian virtues nonetheless left women out of the picture—and intentionally so. Furthermore, identifying the male sex with certain “manly” traits marginalized men who did not fit that image. While muscular Christianity may have made Christ more accessible to some groups, it likely made identifying with him more difficult for others.

57. Putney, Muscular Christianity, 11.

58. Baker, Playing with God, 37.

59. Quoted in ibid., 37–38.

60. Ibid., 37. The link between body, mind, and spiritwas certainly not a new development. In the thirteenth century, Thomas, Saint Aquinas wrote that “whatever appears in the parts of the body is all contained originally and, in a way, implicitly in the soul” (quoted in Bynum, Caroline Walker, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1995], 243).Google Scholar Bynum writes that the papal bull Benedictus Deus of 1336 helped cement this view of self: “a self of which body is the expression” (278). Christians have expressed this sentiment in different ways over the course of Christian history; in the late nineteenth century, the idea became “muscular.”

61. See Glucklich, Ariel, Sacred Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 24–25 Google Scholar, for a discussion of athletic-based asceticism. For more on asceticism in Christian history, see Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, and Bynum, Carolyn Walker, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).Google Scholar

62. Bynum argues in Holy Feast and Holy Fast that “medieval efforts to discipline and manipulate the body should be interpreted more as elaborate changes rung upon the possibilities provided by fleshliness than as flights from physicality” (6). The simultaneous subjugation and celebration of the flesh seems to be a repeated theme in the history of Christianity. For a discussion of the turn-of-the-century interest in the Middle Ages, see Lears, No Place of Grace.

63. Griffith, Born Again Bodies, 131. Mrozek suggests that this “sometimes narcissistic pursuit of the perfect body as the badge of the perfect personality and soul was, ironically, a reconciliation of materialism with moral perfectionism.” Only through the creation of such a discourse, he says, could sports and religion be aligned. Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality, 230.

64. Green, Fit for America, 182.

65. Ibid.

66. Ladd and Mathisen, Muscular Christianity, 55.

67. Putney, Muscular Christianity, 40.

68. Rotundo, E. Anthony, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 232.Google Scholar

69. Reynolds, David S., “The Feminization Controversy: Sexual Stereotypes and the Paradoxes of Piety in Nineteenth-Century America,” New England Quarterly 53 (March 1980): 106.Google Scholar

70. Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 23.

71. Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality, 202.

72. Barton, Bruce, The Man Nobody Knows (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925)Google Scholar, available online, The Grow Foundation, http://thegrowfoundation.com/The_Man_Nobody_Know.pdf, accessed September 13, 2012.

73. Barton, Bruce, A Young Man's Jesus (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1914),Google Scholar available online, New York Public Library Internet Archive,http://archive.org/stream/youngmansjesus00bart#page/n9/mode2up, accessed September 13, 2012.

74. Quoted in Prothero, American Jesus, 96; Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 24.

75. Quoted in Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 24; Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture, 327.

76. Prothero, American Jesus, 101.

77. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 143.

78. Rotundo, American Manhood, 224.

79. Prothero, American Jesus, 14.

80. Ladd and Mathisen, Muscular Christianity, 81.

81. Quoted in ibid., 80.

82. Ibid., 82.

83. Prebish, Charles S., “Religion and Sport: Convergence or Identity?” in Religion and Sport: The Meeting of Sacred and Profane, ed. Prebish, Charles (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993), 49.Google Scholar

84. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 242.

85. Quoted in Johnson, Jessica, “The Citizen-Soldier: Masculinity, War, and Sacrifice at an Emerging Church in Seattle, Washington,” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 33 (November 2010): 333.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

86. Quote from Gunnery Sergeant Pauline Franklin in the Marine Corps Times Online, cited in Holthuysen, “Embattled Identities,” 242.

87. R. M. Schneiderman, “Flock Is Now a Fight Team in Some Ministries,” New York Times, February 1, 2010, http://www.nytimes/com/2010/02/02/us/2fight.html, accessed August 13, 2011.

88. Andrew Gladstone, “Recapping with Xtreme Ministries Pastor John Renken—Bringing Grace to a Lost World,” MMA Recap, http://mmarecap.com,accessed August 13, 2011.

89. Schneiderman, “Flock Is Now a Fight Team in Some Ministries.”

90. Fight Pastor (Brandon Beals), “About,” FightPastor.com, http://www.fightpastor.com, accessed December 12, 2011.

91. Ibid., “Fight Church.”

92. Mark Driscoll, “A Christian Evaluation of Mixed Martial Arts,” Pastor Mark Driscoll, November 9, 2011, http://pastormark.tv/2011/11/09/a-christian-evaluation-of-mixed-martial-arts, accessed November 30, 201 l.

93. “Ben Henderson: Warrior of God.”

94. Quoted in Jesse Holland, “Fedor Emelianenko Is an Orthodox Christian Fighter and Whether or Not He Retires Is ‘God's Will,”’ July 21, 2011, http://www.mmamania.com/2011/7/21/2287291/fedor-emelianenko-is-an-orthodox-christian-fighter-and-whether-or-not, accessed November 12, 2012.

95. Ibid.

96. Holthuysen, “Embattled Identities,” 40.

97. Ibid., 273.

98. “MMA @ Life Church in Troy,” posted by lifechristianchurch, October 8, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼GlZUpGkr01g&feature¼related, accessed December 1, 2011.

99. Holthuysen, “Embattled Identities,” 192.

100. For more on authenticity among turn-of-the-century evangelical preachers, see Lofton, Kathryn, “The Preacher Paradigm: Promotional Biographies and the Modern-Made Evangelist,” Religion and American Culture 16 (Summer, 2006): 95–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar To the muscular Christians, improvement of individual bodies was a key to both individual and social salvation. See Green, Fit for America, 182. For a broader examination of the role of individualism in evangelical Christianity, see Hollinger, Dennis P., Individualism and Social Ethics: An Evangelical Syncretism (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983).Google Scholar

101. According to a study by Cheever, MMA fans are overwhelmingly young (97 percent of her sample was under 40), white (73 percent), male (98 percent), and have some college education (80 percent) (“The Uses and Gratifications of Viewing Mixed Martial Arts,” 34). I have not noticed that Christian fighters are disproportionately white, but churches that host MMA events or use the rhetoric in sermons seem to have largely white congregations.

102. Savran, David, Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 5.Google Scholar

103. Ibid., 9.

104. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, U.S. Religious Landscape Survey “Religious Affiliation: Diverse and Dynamic,” Pew Research Center, 2008, PDF on Pew website, http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/report-religious-landscape-study-full.pdf, accessed August 26, 2012.

105. Ibid.

106. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, 13.

107. Bederman, “‘The Women Have Had Charge of the Church Work Long Enough,’” 438.

108. Lindman, “Acting the Manly Christian,” 398.

109. David Murrow, “Why Do Men Hate Going to Church?” Church for Men, n.d., www.churchformen.com, accessed November 5, 2012.

110. Sam Barrington, “UFC: Something Worth Fighting For,” June 21, 2009, http://livingstoneschurch.podbean.com/2009/06/24/june-21-2009-ufcsomething-worth-fighting-for/, accessed September 20, 2012.

111. The web text accompanying the embedded audio file of a UFC-themed sermon series at Living Stones Church declared that the messages were “unapologetically aimed at dudes” (though “ladies,” of course, “may listen in”). Sam Barrington,“UFC: Something Worth Fighting For,” June 21, 2009.

112. Hoffman, Shirl J., “Evangelicalism and the Revitalization of Religious Ritual in Sport,” in Sport and Religion, ed. Hoffman, Shirl J. (Champaign: Human Kinetics Books, 1992), 117.Google Scholar

113. Ladd and Mathisen, Muscular Christianity, 218.

114. Ibid., 217–19.

115. Jeff Neal, video titled “Team Impact” on Team Impact website, http://www.team-impact.com/about, accessed August 26, 2012.

116. Ladd and Mathisen, Muscular Christianity, 227. If the preaching of modern muscular Christians resembles pop psychology, perhaps past preaching did, as well. Lears writes that, in the early twentieth century, religion became part of a “self-centered” “emerging therapeutic culture” that he finds in “much (though not all) of the resurgent evangelicalism” of today (Lears, No Place of Grace, 176, 305). In any case, the concept of “folk theology” seems somewhat problematic. As Glucklich observes in Sacred Pain, individual believers develop their own interpretations—“folk theory”—of religious experience. “Academic theologies,” she says, “are simply more elaborate versions of such conceptualizations” (9). Scholars of sports and religion do not adequately differentiate “biblical” from“folk” theologies or “religion” from “pop-psychology.” It seems to me that such concepts cannot be clearly distinguished, nor ever have been.

117. Quoted in Prothero, American Jesus, 51.

118. Ibid., 148.

119. Bartkowski, The Promise Keepers, 36.

120. Roof, A Generation of Seekers, 146. David Lyon suggests that the shift in focus from mind to body and an interest in identity and experience are characteristic of the postmodern era (Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times [Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000], 47, 94).

121. The study of religion and the body is becoming an everricher theoretical, sociological, and anthropological field. Some texts that have particularly helped shape my thinking on this subject include: Lester, Rebecca J., Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005);Google Scholar Orsi, Robert A., Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006);Google Scholar Gerber, “My Body Is a Testimony”; and Tanya Luhrmann, “The Art of Hearing God: Absorption, Dissociation, and Contemporary American Spirituality,” Spiritus 5 (2005).

122. Geertz, Clifford, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 90.Google Scholar

123. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 74.

124. Chandler, Timothy J. L., “Manly Catholicism: Making Men in Catholic Public Schools, 1945–80,” in With God on Their Side: Sport in the Service of Religion, ed. Magdalinski, Tara and Chandler, Timothy J. L. (London: Routledge, 2002), 104 Google Scholar.

125. Holthuysen, “Embattled Identities,” 120.

126. Shirl J. Hoffman, “Religion in Sport,” in Hoffman, Sport and Religion, 134.

127. Hoffman, Good Game, 14.

128. Ladd and Mathisen, Muscular Christianity, 222.

129. Holthuysen, “Embattled Identities,” 60–61, 104.

130. Ibid., 106.

131. Spencer, Dale C., Ultimate Fighting and Embodiment: Violence, Gender, and Mixed Martial Arts (New York: Routledge, 2012), 8 Google Scholar. See also Holthuysen, chap. 3, “Controlling the Body and Its Representation: Fat Guys Have to Prove It,” in “Embattled Identities,” 86–121, for more on the athlete's body as a way of knowing.

132. Meredith McGuire, “Embodied Practices: Negotiation and Resistance,” in Ammerman, Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives, 194.

133. Quoted in Schneiderman, “Flock Is Now a Fight Team in Some Ministries.”

134. Danny White, profile page, Anointed Fighter, n.d., http://www.anointedfighter.com/profile/AnointedFighter, accessed December 4, 2012.

135. Glucklich, Sacred Pain, 15.

136. Wacquant, “The Pugilistic Point of View,” 507.

137. Wacquant, Body and Soul, 17.

138. The particular video I am referencing can be found at: “‘Will of a Warrior’ A Ben Henderson Highlight,” posted by eclipse30, September 2, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼0SMcF4qvcSM, accessed December 4, 2012.

139. Wacquant, Body and Soul, 17.

140. Wacquant, “The Pugilistic Point of View,” 513.

141. “Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill Church, on MMA UFC,” from the documentary Fighting Politics, posted by Fighting Politics, March 17, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼ddFbELpXTcg&feature¼related, accessed November 11, 2012.

142. When athletes praise God for victory, they suggest a connection between belief and victory. Longtime MMA star Ken Shamrock says in an interview on The 700 Club, “I’m a Christian. I believe in God. And that is the reason why I am successful. That is the reason why I’m still here doing what I’m doing.” (“Ken Shamrock: Inside the Lion’s Den—The 700 Club,” posted by theofficial700club, December 6, 2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼X60RZ6zm8LU, accessed November 12, 2012.) However, fighters realize that believers are not guaranteed victory and do not seem to see losing as a sign of moral failure. Christian fighter Vitor Belfort tells fans, “Don't worry, you’re going to lose, you’re going to win, you’re going to lose, you’re going to win.” The important thing is “to purify the goal,” that is, to fight for good reasons and with a godly spirit. Vitor Belfort, I Am Second website, http://www.iamsecond.com/seconds/vitor-belfort/, accessed December 7, 2011.

143. Boyd, “Ultimate Fighter—Week 1.”

144. “Spiritual MMA—‘The Christian MMA Missionary’— (Audio Interview–PART 1 OF 2),” posted by SpiritualMMA, September 4, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼z72w_W¼MX1U, accessed December 1, 2011.

145. “Spiritual MMA—(Episode 1–PART 1)—‘Is MMA compatible with Christianity?’—Brandon Logan,” posted by SpiritualMMA, September 4, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼t9giFQpsBCI, accessed December 1, 2011.

146. Schneiderman, “Flock Is Now a Fight Team in Some Ministries.” This language closely resembles the “body, mind, spirit” language adopted for use on the YMCA logo in the 1890s (see note 51).

147. John and Helen Burns, “Why Have a MMA Event in a Church?” John and Helen's Weblog, June 20, 2009, http://pjhburns.wordpress.com/2009/06/20/why-have-a-mma-event-in-a-church/, accessed December 1, 2011.

148. “Pastor Mack,” “Embraced by a Macho God? The Church/ Cagefighting Debate,” Pastor Mack's Place, February 9, 2010, http://pastormack.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/embraced-by-a-macho-godthe-churchcagefighting-debate/, accessed December 6, 2011.

149. Corey M. Abramson and Darren Modzelewski, “Caged Morality: Moral Worlds, Subculture, and Stratification among Middle-Class Cage-Fighters,” Qualitative Sociology (October 24, 2010), springerlink. org, accessed May 8, 2012.

150. My understanding of “hard bodies” shaped through physical discipline and representative of solid spirits comes from Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, esp. 163, 171.

151. Abramson and Modzelewski, “Caged Morality.”

152. Vineyard Community Church, “Vineyard Church MMA Event Promotional,” June 28, 2012, www.vimeo.com/44873274, accessed August 22, 2012.

153. Ibid.

154. Boyd, “Ultimate Fighter—Week 1.”

155. Abramson and Modzelewski, “Caged Morality.”

156. Ladd and Mathisen, Muscular Christianity, 215.

157. Quoted in Ryan Owens and Alyssa Litoff, “Fighting in the Name of the Lord,” ABC News “Nightline,” March 24, 2010, http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/FaithMatters/warriors-christ-fight-gods/story?id¼10180581, accessed August 13, 2011.

158. Boyd, “Ultimate Fighter—Week 1.”

159. Hoffman, “Evangelicalism and the Revitalization of Religious Ritual in Sport,” 120.

160. Danny White, “Jesus Didn't Tap,” Anointed Fighter, October 28, 2009, http://www.anointedfighter.com/profiles/blogs/jesus-didnt-tap, accessed December 3, 2012.

161. All posts appear on the Anointed Fighter blog in August 2012, http://www.anointedfighter.com/profiles/blog/list?promoted¼1, accessed December 2, 2012.

162. Hoffman, “Evangelicalism and the Revitalization of Ritual in Sport,” 117.

163. Boyd, “Ultimate Fighter—Week 1.”

164. Boyd, “Ultimate Fighter—Week 2,” n.d., http://aviatorchurch.com/derby/ultimatefighter/, accessed September 21, 2012.

165. Hughes, The Manliness of Christ, 39.

166. Mangan and Walvin, “Introduction,” in Manliness and Morality, 1–6.

167. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 227.

168. “Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill Church, on MMA UFC.”

169. Matt Morin, “The Confessions of a Cage Fighter:Masculinity, Misogyny, and the Fear of Losing Control,” theotherjournal.com, June 28, 2011, http://theotherjournal.com/2011/06/28/the-confessions-of-a-cagefighter-masculinity-misogyny-and-the-fear-of-losing-control/, accessed December 1, 2011.

170. Spencer suggests that “the asceticism prominent in MMA focuses on particular masculinized notions of bodily management and consumption” (Ultimate Fighting and Embodiment, 65).

171. Barrington, “UFC: Something Worth Fighting For,” June 21, 2009.

172. Ibid; Rev. Josiah Strong, quoted in Putney, Muscular Christianity, 41. Strong lamented that “‘there is not enough of effort, of struggle in the typical church life of to-day to win young men to the church’ … for a ‘flowery bed of ease does not appeal to a fellow who has any manhood in him.”’

173. Barrington, “UFC: Something Worth Fighting For,” June 21, 2009. In talking about a “masculine spirit,” Barrington echoes the language of Charles Kingsley, who used the Platonic concept of “thumos or ‘spirit”’ to refer “to the combative righteous indignation which could provide the social reformer with energy, an energy of the spirit arising from a judiciously balanced mixture of the rational and the passional faculties in man” (Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, 6).

174. Schneiderman, “Flock Is Now a Fight Team in Some Ministries.”

175. Barrington, “UFC: Something Worth Fighting For,” June 21, 2009.

176. Boyd, “Ultimate Fighter—Week 1.”

177. “Spiritual MMA—‘The Christian MMA Missionary’— (Audio Interview–PART 1 OF 2).”

178. Maybe the need to make Christ a better man—that is, to emphasize his heteronormative manliness—is partially because these groups also emphasize the need for Christian men to be good fathers, a task that some might see as less than manly due to its association with caretaking and children. By talking about becoming a better father and stronger man together, evangelicals are able to promote a worldview that is both family oriented and male headed.

179. Quoted in Kimmel, Manhood in America, 243.

180. Though I do not believe that pastors or fighters consciously consider race in their references to singing “Kumbaya,” they may be drawing on nineteenth-century evolutionary discourses about civilization, gender, and racial progress. If “Kumbaya” evokes images of peaceful tribal society, the proponents of MMA may be setting up a contrast between modern, civilized men (who embrace aspects of their animal nature) and less-developed ones who are too sentimental and, thus, effeminate.

181. Barrington, “UFC: Something Worth Fighting For,” June 21, 2009; Driscoll, “A Christian Evaluation of Mixed Martial Arts.”

182. Quoted in Keegan Hamilton, “Church Plans ‘Easter in Octagon’; Says Pastor: ‘Jesus Didn't Tap Out, He Was an Ultimate Fighter,”’ blog of the Riverfront Times, April 3, 2009, www.dailyrft.com, accessed August 26, 2012.

183. Lindman, “Acting the Manly Christian,” 398.

184. Driscoll, “A Christian Evaluation of Mixed Martial Arts.”

185. Holthuysen, “Embattled Identities,” 176.

186. Connell, R.W., Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 194.Google Scholar

187. Quoted in Hamilton, “Church Plans ‘Easter in Octagon.”’

188. Barrington, “UFC: Something Worth Fighting For,” June 21, 2009.

189. Ibid. (first and last quotes). In week 1 of his “Ultimate Fighter” series, Joe Boyd reads aloud one of David's Psalms and suggests setting it to a heavy-metal beat. Pastors and MMA fighters frequently reference David: an ultimate fighter with ultimate faith.

190. Hoffman, Good Game, 192.