The return of Muscular Christianity Gym bros are repping for Jesus

For Graham, the links between faith and fitness are watertight, with the minister and personal trainer describing herself as a “sister in Christ who navigates fitness from a Christ-centred perspective”. Yet the relationship between the two is complex. For most of Christian history, the faithful were taught to de-prioritise the flesh, favouring spiritual might over physical prowess. And while more recent Protestants have placed sportiness near Godliness, the rise of Christian gymgoers remains a peculiarly 21st-century story — one speaking to the distinctive rhythms of a life lived between reps.

Christianity and fitness might seem like an awkward pairing. While gym culture is notoriously image-focused, bleeding all too easily into a fixation on the body beautiful, Christians try to steer clear of vanity and bodily obsession.

Graham concedes that many older believers shy away from fitness, dismissing the spiritual importance of physical discipline. That said, there is a striking shift among younger generations. Many Gen Z Christians of her acquaintance are cultivating a passion for movement, and talking openly about God between sets.

And while this may be predominantly an evangelical phenomenon — well-matched to the fervent, emotion-driven nature of their churches — other denominations do have their gym fans too. You don’t get too many High Anglicans pumping iron and praising the Lord on TikTok: their average age, and typical temperament, likely put paid to that. Yet there is a burgeoning scene of Catholic bodybuilders, including the Australian teenager Hugo Byrnes, who produces lift-wear emblazoned with Christian slogan; and Miami-based priest Fr Rafael Capo, who uses bodybuilding to attract young people into church.

Graham herself captions photo reels with Bible verses, and intersperses clothing launches with clips of herself delivering sermons. Workout videos, soundtracked to Christian rap music, talk about “drawing on Him for strength”. It’s a far cry from the supplements-and-six-pack promotions you’d associate with this corner of the internet.

So why are so many Christians rushing to dovetail “gainz” with God? Evangelism is surely part of it: now that Gen Zs encompass some 29% of gym joiners, it makes sense to meet them where they are. But converting others isn’t the whole story. Something has shifted in the Christian ethos. Early worshippers, after all, weren’t exactly falling over themselves to smash their marathon PB or cultivate a jacked physique. Influenced by Platonism, they instead subscribed to a framework in which the body is lesser than the soul, our animal urges in conflict with our more virtuous aspirations. Denying the animalistic, fleshy part of ourselves was seen as spiritually cleansing.

Later ascetics took this thinking to its logical extreme. These ardent believers starved themselves, fought sleep, and subjected themselves to a gory array of self-punishments. Among their ranks were Teresa of Ávila, a 16th-century Spaniard who liked to apply nettles to her infected sores. Or else there was Catherine of Siena, who self-flagellated with an iron chain three times a day, and Simeon the Stylite who lived on top of a pillar for 36 years, standing until his legs gave out.

While today’s super-fit believers may embrace physical punishment, their motivations stem from somewhere else.  Rather than treating the pleasures of the body as suspect — as per the 17th-century Puritans, who banned dancing, vaulting and football — they’re inclined to see their physical welfare as directly linked to their spiritual state.

“The body-mind-spirit interconnection is real, and training any one of them has a benefit for the others,” suggests Simon Lennox, CEO of The Word One to One, a UK-based ministry. “So you train the body and the mind is clear, and therefore you have more energy to cooperate with the Holy Spirit. Having the resolve to go to the gym builds a muscle that has transferability to other areas.”

These kinds of ideas have a more recent provenance. During the 19th century, a movement called Muscular Christianity emerged, in reaction to a prevailing ethic of bodily denial. Quite aside from the edicts of the church, physical jobs were declining and men were moving en masse to white-collar work. Amid concerns around masculine “enfeeblement”, thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic began promoting physical fitness as a corrective. Theodore Roosevelt’s “strenuous life” came to be seen as an expression of Christian values, patriotism and masculine vigour.

Around 1900, a new crop of Young Men’s Christian Associations (YMCAs) started teaching athletics. Churches formed their own sports leagues, and colleges and universities began fielding sports teams as a way to improve students’ moral fibre. One proponent of Muscular Christianity was Pierre de Coubertin, who founded the modern Olympics.

Over a century on, the links between sporting success and spiritual glory still resonate with many believers. “If you think of [American] football players or Olympians, a lot of them will have Bible verses on their arms,” says Jordyn Dean, a California-based entrepreneur, author and committed Christian. “And why do you think that is? Because it takes something larger than you to become an Olympic gold medallist; it takes something larger than you to get to that Super Bowl. That strength just can’t come from you — it’s something deeper.”

It’s tempting here to make the armchair sociologist’s argument that history repeats itself: just like our Victorian forebears, we live in a time when the concept of masculinity has been plunged into crisis. Through this lens, perhaps, lifting weights is a way for Christian men to reassert a sense of personal power and agency. Especially in the US, evangelical Christianity dovetails with conservatism — and conservatism, studies have shown, dovetails with getting ripped.

That said, the present iteration of muscular Christianity transcends both gender and political boundaries. Nobody I spoke to explicitly identified as conservative. And it’d be fair to surmise that, as women, Graham and Dean don’t harbour much anxiety about their manliness.

A more satisfying answer, I think, can be offered by returning to gyms themselves: and how the rhythms of contemporary fitness echo more longstanding habits of faith. Graham, Dean and Lennox all described adopting a posture of thanksgiving during tough workouts. They also discussed the obligation to take care of themselves in body and soul; and emphasised the importance of remaining disciplined under pressure. These points were all framed in Biblical terms, but they’re ideas any secular gymgoer would recognise.

Lennox also believes that, in some cases, gyms may fulfil needs that churches don’t. While you can just show your face at a Sunday service, a gruelling shared workout demands your full participation, and along with it a higher level of intimacy and honesty. In his view, gyms are places where people can be unusually open about spiritual matters. Through suffering side-by-side, you break down barriers and clear the way for deeper conversations.

He isn’t the first person to make this point. In 2015, two academics wrote a report called “How We Gather”, which explored the ways that secular people were meeting their social and spiritual needs. They noted that gyms had “become the locations of shared, transformative experience” — with the likes of SoulCycle and CrossFit functioning a bit like churches for the non-religious.

In part, that’s because of the communal nature of these workouts: they offer a forum for mass intensity, or even mass transcendence, that is otherwise hard to find in secular spaces. Many of these classes also have a ritualistic element that in some ways resemble the liturgies performed in churches.

But what does seem clear is that fitness culture itself is steeped in an ethic of self-improvement, something that neatly maps onto the Christian conception of spiritual growth. Just think of the slogans on any lifter’s T-shirt: “A champion is someone who gets up when they can’t”; “The real workout starts when you want to stop”. A Christian might identify the source of their strength as lying beyond them. But in both cases, it’s about tapping into a deeper, more resilient, part of oneself that may not be so accessible day-to-day. And while certain corners of the fitness industry remain heavily fixated on aesthetics, it seems there’s a growing cohort for whom my body is a temple means exactly that.