Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on online muscular Christians and their meme accounts, aiming to answer how they use bodybuilding techniques and aesthetics to shape the religious belonging of muscular Christians in an online environment.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, especially since the pandemic, a particular religious group has emerged on social media such as Instagram. Members of these communities describe themselves as muscular Christians who practice bodybuilding while practicing the Christian faith, support conservative religious values, and oppose feminism. Besides their own personal accounts, they are also active on some social media accounts dedicated to related memes, many of which feature bodybuilding content. These meme accounts grow so rapidly that they can gain tens of thousands of followers within one or two years. This paper focuses on these online muscular Christians and their meme accounts, aiming to answer how they use bodybuilding techniques and aesthetics to shape the religious belonging of muscular Christians in an online environment. Through the analysis of the online content, this paper argues that by juxtaposing or merging bodybuilding techniques and aesthetics with biblical elements, the bodybuilding memes produced and published on these accounts attempt to lead audiences to believe that weightlifting or muscle training is inherently Christian, thereby enabling the potential of bodybuilding techniques in shaping identity to play out in reinforcing religious belonging in an online setting. By drawing upon Birgit Meyer’s concept of “sensational form,” this paper argues that these memes have created a (virtual) common sensational space that can promote the formation of sensational forms in two ways at the same time, thereby strengthening religious belonging: one is through the emotional resonance caused by instant online interactions such as comments and likes, and the other is through the common corporeal memories and experiential sensations of bodybuilding aroused by the representation of bodybuilding techniques and motivation. Through the analysis of this specific case, this paper also seeks to contribute to the theorization of the potential of online memes in shaping religious belonging through corporeal and material dimensions.