CrossFit, a popular workout regimen featuring high-intensity movements practiced daily, has been called many things in the media, including a business, a brand, a community, and a cult. Anthropologist and a professor at Brooklyn College Katie Rose Hejtmanek (pronounced hate-monik) became fascinated with CrossFit as a cultural phenomenon. She spent two years doing its exercises and seven years studying its philosophy as well as the near-religious devotion people feel for the purportedly secular fitness practice and what it says about America and cultural Christianity. PW spoke with Hejtmanek about her book, The Cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American Exercise Phenomenon (NYU, out now).
How do you explain CrossFit to someone unfamiliar with it?
Everyone seems to know what it is, at least in the U.S. And it's interesting, because they'll quickly say, “Oh, it's a cult.” There is a lot of lore around it—it’s been in the media a lot. At the barest of bones, it’s a fitness regimen based on functional movements done with high intensity.
How is it like a "church"?
CrossFit is kind of about fitness, but really, it provides so much else to people. It builds a community with the same values, norms, ideologies, and hierarchies. The training is linked to disaster, war, and survival—for facing the Apocalypse, which is a very Christian concern. It exemplifies how American culture today operates under the same Christian values as the time of white settler colonial expansion.
Is this like a religious testimony that you need to be "fit" to be "saved?"
A testimony is a particular kind of religious authoritative speech where you were lost, you found Christ, and then you are saved. This template of storytelling is also very American—we like to be redeemed. In the U.S., our understanding is that we need to live a purposeful life and that life needs to have a redemptive arc. It’s a story that has deep Christian roots and we continue to tell that story. It’s the story you find at the gym.
What surprised you the most during your research and writing?
The thing that really blew me away was coming back from the cross-cultural fitness research and seeing how hard it is to examine our own cultural context. I spent six months in CrossFit gyms in India and Australia, where I realized what I had been missing in my analysis. Australian and Indian interlocutors kept telling me about the American CrossFit stuff— including the Apocalyptic, salvation-based approach. What most surprised me was all the white American Christianity that was planted hundreds of years ago that is still blooming. We almost can't even see it; it’s in the air that we breathe.
What's the most important thing you want readers to learn from the book?
It’s not just about CrossFit and it’s not a critique or a takedown. I want it to help us make sense of American culture. If we understand it, we better understand American society and history. Through CrossFit, we can see so much about what our society values, our sense of our lives, and where we find meaning and connection.
