Faith, flesh and the rise of the iron cult

By Vincent Pilling

At Minnehaha Academy, the search for meaning isn’t theoretical—it’s visible in people like senior Emmanuel James-Lejarcegui, who plays football and spends much of his time in the gym. He told me, “the gym is a sacred place… it’s the place where you can find home.” What makes it special, he said, is that “it can be people that have very different interests, and then they come together and meet up in the same place to better themselves.” 

There’s something quietly profound in that. It’s not just discipline or community—it’s a kind of faith. Lejarcegui’s words capture what many young people are increasingly now searching for: a space where effort still matters, where body and mind align, where belief is practiced through repetition. What looks like training becomes a philosophy. A proof that change is still possible, that transcendence can be earned, rep by rep.

Bodybuilding isn’t just about muscle anymore. It’s about order—about carving something unshakable out of a life that feels digital and weightless. In the West, where faith has gone soft and institutions have lost authority, the gym has quietly become a church. The clang of iron, the ritual of repetition, the mirror moment: young men are embracing lifting like a sacrament.

The boom is real. A Men’s Health article reported that boys and young men are increasingly driven by “intense social pressure, questionable supplements, and disordered eating” in the name of bulking up. It’s not just fitness anymore; the body becomes a project, identity, even myth. One 15-year-old described back pain, tears in his eyes, because his body felt wrong from overtraining. [For more on overtraining see page 7.]

To see where this comes from, look back to mid-19th-century England and Muscular Christianity—the belief that athletic vigor was both moral and spiritual. “A man’s body is given to him, to be trained … and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth,” wrote Thomas Hughes, a writer heavily associated with the movement. Churches and schools soon adopted sports as moral formation.

The parallel is obvious. Today’s gym-faith world treats physique as scripture. “Trust the process.” “Discipline = freedom.” “No pain, no gain.” They sound like slogans but act as creed. The body becomes a site of meaning when meaning elsewhere collapses.

A 2019 study in the journal Societies found a strong correlation between muscularity and young men’s sense of purpose and self-worth. The mirror becomes altar; the barbell, liturgy.

Still, just as with religious extremism, what starts as discipline can slide into pathology. Men’s Health notes rising muscle-dysmorphia rates and the flood of steroids and testosterone “maxxing” that crowd what once was simple strength building.

Then there’s ideology. Wired described how right-wing fitness content has dominated “the manosphere” for years—where lifting isn’t self-improvement but posture. VICE summarized a University of Arkansas study showing that “physically strong men who regularly go to the gym are more likely to be right-wing and support social and economic inequality than weaker men.” 

The aesthetic of strength—power, hierarchy, purity—fits easily into reactionary narratives. When institutions fail to offer meaning, the body takes their place. The gym becomes proving ground; aesthetic becomes ethic. Posting a six-pack isn’t vanity—it’s creed.

But not every lifter is political. Many are just trying to feel real again. In a culture that commodifies the body and drones on about self-care, the call to become something solid resonates. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han captured it: “The achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom—that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement.” What once was prayer is now performance; what once was salvation is self-optimization. Lifting becomes religion when nothing else is sacred.

The dangers are tangible. Searching for transcendence through muscle often ends in burnout, injury, hormonal collapse, or identity loss. A fitness influencer admitted in a 2024 Men’s Health profile, “I’m shredded, but I don’t feel real anymore.” The mirror promised truth but revealed emptiness instead.

This craving for something solid mirrors a wider cultural desperation for embodied conviction. Kristin Kobes Du Mez notes in Jesus and John Wayne that post-war evangelical culture fused faith with a kind of muscular certainty, writing that evangelicals came to believe “the world was a dark and dangerous place, and only rugged, aggressive men could be trusted to protect faith and nation.” That impulse toward toughness as truth didn’t stay in the church; it migrated. Today it animates much of gym culture, where physical hardness becomes a moral category and strength feels like the last trustworthy virtue. The gym promises what modern life withholds: resistance that means something, a struggle you can touch, a chance to remake yourself in a world that otherwise feels ungraspable.

Yet that emptiness might be the point. In a world allergic to silence and suffering, the gym is one of the last places where consequence still exists. You lift, you fail, you grow—or you don’t. No algorithm to save you. Just iron, gravity, will.

As Lejarcegui described it, the gym becomes “a sacred place… the place where you can find home,” not simply because it is a location, but because it is where bodies and minds align in ritual-form and community converges across differences. In this respect the weight room is not so far from the cultural phenomenon described in Jesus and John Wayne, where Du Mez explains that “the unspoken mantra of post-war evangelicalism was simple: ‘Jesus can save your soul; but John Wayne will save your a**.’”  That slogan reflects a faith not of passive belief but of embodied struggle, of discipline and muscular virtue. Finding meaning not in soft surrender but in the active forging of self. Lejarcegui’s account echoes this: the clang of iron, the ritual of repetition, the gathering of disparate people in one space—here is faith lived, effort made manifest, transcendence earned rep by rep. In a culture where the sacred has retreated into abstraction, the gym revives it in physical form.

Bodybuilding’s rise is more than a rising aesthetic trend. It’s a cultural symptom—faith in a world that no longer believes, meaning in a world that says everything is optional, sacrifice in a world that worships comfort. The question isn’t whether bodybuilding is political or religious; it’s whether the West can survive without the things it now substitutes with the gym: ritual, struggle, community. The weights aren’t the disease—they’re the symptom. The barbell is seen by many as the last honest thing in a dishonest world. When everything else feels fake, there’s still iron. And iron never lies.