Weight-training and Christianity

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One of the evil signs of the times is the increased prevalence of intensive weight-training.

This is part of a narcissistic, self-regarding, self-advertizing and physiologically- and psychologically-deranging package of extreme exercise regimes, extreme diets, and extreme chemical intake (especially androgen and growth hormones, but other drugs as well - continually expanding).

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The purpose of this strategy of self-remaking.

At its most focused, intensive weight-training is about the making of an extreme body - of a kind never before seen in human history - transhumanism.

But at every level it is about focusing the best efforts of your life on trying to look a certain way. A futile, vain and distorting activity.

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All this is self-consciously 'macho', but non-masculine.

Manly men just don't behave that kind of way, and they never have done.

The culture of intensive weight-training just is an epicene environment: dressing-up in muscles, posing in front of the mirror, parading oneself for admiration.

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It is anti-Patriarchal.

It is an adolescent activity - the product of excessive self-consciousness in the pathologically unattached - not the behaviour of the mind of a mature, married, adult family man who embraces responsibility.

It is also evidence of an anti-Christian mindset.

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Think of a Christian man you admire.

Then try to think of him engaged in a regime of extreme weight training - bulking up, seeking a sculpted physique, gulping supplements and drugs and all the rest of it...

In fact don't bother. The idea is absurd, obscene and impossible.

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Attitude to intensive weight-training is a litmus test on the political Right.

The secular Right have embraced the new world of intensive weight training as a focus for a lifestyle of strategic hedonism, aggressive posturing and promiscuous sexual warfare; the Christian Right ignore or are hostile to the whole thing.

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If you are an intensive weight-trainer wanting to become a Christian but finding this difficult: then quit.

Intensive weight-training is exactly the kind of rooted, habitual sin which makes it very difficult to become (or remain) a Christian.

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