One surprising development since the turn of the 21st century has been the popularising of evangelical fighting ministries. For years now popular culture has been used in church social programming in urban Brazil. Using the concept of compartmentalisation, the author analyses how these evangelical fighting ministries demarcated their practices into emotional and physical forms of intimacy, thereby finding different ways to achieve what they perceived as personal contact with God in their intense interactions with each other. During their Brazilian jiujitsu training, they were encouraged to feel God's presence as they grappled with each other at very close contact.
During moments of worship they shared emotional intimacy, granting each other opportunities to make outwardly perceivable their internally felt relationships with God. Yet they also believed their relationships with God were meant to be witnessed and experienced by others. In training with and interviewing the members of these ministries in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the author found that as evangelical Christians, many struggled to establish and maintain the primacy of their personal relationships with God over their interpersonal interests. The author discusses what she learned from her participation in evangelical fighting ministries, paying special attention to how these communities sought to connect with God through interacting with each other. Evangelical fight ministries provide an opportunity to see how evangelicals can use voluntarism to adopt and imbue almost any transaction with moral significance. Both practices require a struggle and expressed consent. Likewise, evangelicalism without evangelism or conversion is merely mainline protestant Christianity. Combat sport without consent is merely assault. Each individual’s willingness to participate determines the moral status of every action taken in the name of combat sport or evangelicalism. However, my auto-ethnographic research with evangelical and fight communities showed me that the more ethically fraught principle of voluntarism-which ascribes moral transformation to any consensual interaction-actually provides the moral common ground between evangelical Christianity and fighting for sport. Christian fighters, like most fight scholars, feel arête (excellence of any kind) is the moral basis of combat sport. These programs bookend Brazilian jiu-jitsu sparring sessions with thirty-minute Christian worship activities, such as singing and praying.
In evangelical fight ministries, pastors combine worship and close-contact grappling to teach people about God. In this dissertation, I analyze the practices of two large evangelical churches in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, that use combat sport for social outreach.
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