Devotional fitness: aspects of a contemporary religious system

The aim of this paper is to describe some more or less representative groups within the area of devotional fitness in the USA, to compare their ideas­ to those held in Christian congregations in Germany and to extract some of the most important features of these movements. The descriptive section, ‘Examples of fitness in US evangelicalism’, will have a short look at three of these movements and then examine one of them more thoroughly, namely, the concept of ‘Shaped by Faith’. The next part of the descriptive section (‘Aspects of religion and fitness in Germany’) will look into the connections between sports and religion in Christian congregations in Germany. In the third section, some of the historical trajec­tories which have influenced contemporary body ideals in both ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ contexts in the United States and Germany are briefly described. In the analytical section, the material is screened for striking similarities and recurring motifs and a preliminary definition of ‘devotional fitness’ is suggested. One particular feature of these currents, the blurring of genres, is dealt with more thoroughly in section ‘The blurring of genres in devotional fitness’. The article ends with some ideas as to how these concepts of devotional fitness could be researched within the analytical frame of cultural semiotics