Abstract
This article looks at the relationship between the U.S. military and CrossFit, a functional fitness training method and sport, and focuses on how their affinities coalesce around the idea of preparedness. CrossFit makes a sport and spectacle out of preparing for the “unknown and unknowable” challenges of life. This approach to life and fitness is attractive to service members, first responders, and average citizens alike who live in an age of constant anticipation, awaiting unknown threats. This article draws from fieldwork observations, interviews, CrossFit videos and articles, social media posts, and discussion board threads to argue that CrossFit, with its emphasis on preparedness, exhibits an evangelical temporality that is particularly symbiotic with American militarism. This article introduces two new terms, “evangelical temporality” and “generic evangelicalism,” to discuss a disposition towards time marked by a sense of expectation; by the anticipation of rupture and change that necessitates a state of constant preparedness; and by a firm conviction that time is running out. In three acts, this article explores how CrossFit, as a militaristic sport and a lifestyle centered on preparedness, benefits from and adds to the prevailing sense of uncertainty, expectation, and preparation that characterizes evangelical temporality in America.
Highlights
On a hot and muggy July day in Madison, Wisconsin spectators stand on the grass alongside an obstacle course, awaiting the start of the 2018 CrossFit Games’ fifth event
In this article I draw from fieldwork observations, interviews, social media posts, discussion board threads, and videos and articles posted by CrossFit Inc., to argue that CrossFit, with its emphasis on preparedness, exhibits an evangelical temporality that is symbiotic with American militarism
The affinity of the CrossFit community for Christianity, which I discuss at greater length in this article, may be enough to suggest that its culture exhibits an evangelical temporality, but I offer evangelical temporality here to invoke a longer history of pious expectancy that informs attitudes of the present
Summary
On a hot and muggy July day in Madison, Wisconsin spectators stand on the grass alongside an obstacle course, awaiting the start of the 2018 CrossFit Games’ fifth event. The affinity of the CrossFit community for Christianity, which I discuss at greater length in this article, may be enough to suggest that its culture exhibits an evangelical temporality, but I offer evangelical temporality here to invoke a longer history of pious expectancy that informs attitudes of the present Such a genealogy includes Millerites using numbers and dates in the Bible to predict the exact date of the end of the world, doomsday preppers, and Cold War evangelicals motivated to organize politically by the looming end times. Because anticipation and preparedness lie at the heart of evangelical temporality, as I use the term, each section will focus on how the CrossFit methodology and philosophy prepare practitioners’ minds, bodies, and spirits for the future, in a way that is attractive to military personnel. These various ways of referring to CrossFit indicate how the CrossFit community is heterogeneous, despite cohering around shared traditions, identity markers, mottos, and ways of being in time
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