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State of Research on Devotional Fitness

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Devotional Fitness

Part of the book series: Popular Culture, Religion and Society. A Social-Scientific Approach ((POPCULT,volume 2))

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Abstract

This chapter retraces devotional fitness as a focus of study, touching related phenomena and predecessors, and neighboring fields of research. In reviewing existing scholarly work I demonstrate where this project seeks to enter the academic conversation. This study is situated in different fields of research, such as contemporary US religion, religion and the body, the history of dieting and fitness in the United States, and the changing nature of US evangelicalism. This chapter evaluates selected studies from these fields, starting with literature that touches devotional fitness only superficially and proceeding to studies that concern the topic of interest more specifically.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The field of body studies was famously foreshadowed with Marcel Mauss’ Techniques of the Body (first published 1934). The rising attention paid to the body in academic discussions is not least due to Michel Foucault’s analyses of the genealogy of body discourses and the connections of power and body. In Madness and Civilization (1965), The Birth of the Clinic (1973), and Discipline and Punish (1977), e.g., Foucault looks at the body in regulatory and disciplinary discourse and at the ways discourse inscribes onto bodies. Critics note that he is not sufficiently dealing with “lived experience” (Shilling 2003, 71) and does not consider the body as a privileged medium of perception (Schneider 2012, 260). Foucault’s theory has nonetheless been widely received and applied to manifold social phenomena. Hoverd, e.g., has described the contemporary gym as a disciplinary institution in Foucault’s sense (Hoverd 2005, 7). In this study, I refrain from applying Foucault’s theory directly while acknowledging that it informed the discourse theories I intend to make operational (see Sect. 3.2).

  2. 2.

    I often use the terms “health” and “healthy” in single quotation marks to indicate their unclear semantic status, being subject to several interlacing discourses and negotiations (see also Sect. 6.4.2).

  3. 3.

    Further analyses of the Olympics as a religion of sports may be found in Herms (1993, 37) and Ulrichs et al. (2003, 9).

  4. 4.

    Along the same lines, to mention only two more examples, see Thomas (1996) and Gebauer (1999).

  5. 5.

    The study of religion itself has long been biased from this “Protestant legacy” with its emphasis on the cognitive, Birgit Meyer argues (2012, 11).

  6. 6.

    Griffith had already studied evangelical body images in God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (1997), a study on Aglow, an evangelical women’s organization directly connected to the field of devotional fitness because they published a Bible study entitled God’s Answer to Overeating (Thomas 1975). Agreeing with Seid’s argument, Griffith notes that such evangelical renderings of the slimness imperative import cultural values into evangelical reference systems by “investing them with the will of God” (Griffith 1997, 141–42)

  7. 7.

    New Thought was also connected with yoga, as Stefanie Syman points out (2010, 101). Thus emerges an intricate complex of evangelicalism, New Thought, and yoga that will make up part of the cultural substratum from which devotional fitness emerges (Sect. 4.1).

  8. 8.

    Similar criticism comes from Anderson (2005, 646).

  9. 9.

    The debate within evangelicalism on predestination is far from settled and usually circulates around two opposing beliefs: “(1) that all individuals are free to choose to believe in Jesus and thus be saved and (2) that some, but not all, individuals are predestined by God for salvation” (Malley 2004, 81).

  10. 10.

    The organization announced its closure on June 19, 2013, apologizing for the “pain and hurt” it had caused (Klein 2013).

  11. 11.

    According to Fraser (1997, 260), Susie Orbach was an early pioneer of the anti-diet movement with her 1978 book Fat Is a Feminist Issue (Orbach 1978). Significantly, the subtitle of Orbach’s book still promises The Antidiet Guide to Permanent Weight Loss.

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  1. Center for Religious Studies (CERES), Ruhr-University, Bochum, Germany

    Martin Radermacher

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Radermacher, M. (2017). State of Research on Devotional Fitness. In: Devotional Fitness. Popular Culture, Religion and Society. A Social-Scientific Approach, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49823-2_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49823-2_2

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