The Narrowing of American Bodies: Christian Fitness Culture and the Politics of Body Size Reduction

Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity. By R. Marie Griffith. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 323 pages. $55.00 (cloth). $21.95 (paper).

In Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity, R. Marie Griffith points out a major irony: in the United States, the practice of Christianity "correlates positively with obesity" (8) at the same time that a burgeoning portion of the Christian self-help best-seller list focuses on weight loss. In other words, practicing U.S. Christians are likely both to be overweight by medically defined standards and to be fixated on changing their body shapes into tighter, leaner, more slender entities. This paradox should come as no surprise to those familiar with the U.S. landscape in general: the United States has the largest diet industry in the world—nearly $40 billion a year by some estimates—at the same time that nearly 60 percent of the population is, according to Center for Disease Control statistics, overweight or obese.¹ This "epidemic of obesity" has spawned numerous studies, ranging from those exploring the reasons for what has become known as our national embarrassment, such as Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal and Greg Critser's Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World, to those like Sharron Dalton's Our Overweight Children: What Parents, Schools and Communities Can Do to Control the Fatness Epidemic, whose alarmist title is indicative of an entire group of authors and educators working to persuade Americans to stem the tide of fatness threatening to engulf the United States.²

As Griffith is quick to point out, however, all biological crises are also cultural crises. From the plague in the Middle Ages to hysteria in the nineteenth century to AIDS in the twentieth century, biological and medical problems are also cultural sites, where social power and ideological meanings are played out, contested, and transformed. The obesity crisis is no different. For the most part, however, the most visible popular works in the field of obesity studies—Critser, Schlosser, Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me—take at face value the biological significance of obesity, ignoring both its cultural implications and the need to interrogate the definition of the "problem" itself.³ As a field that always explores the links between culture and biology, the social and the political, the public and the private, however, American studies should be less interested in these works—except perhaps as cultural texts constituting evidence of a particular historical moment—than in those that explicitly explore the cultural development of ideas about fatness and thinness, and their links to cultural constructions of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and nationality. The key theoretical work of this type is, of course, Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. More recently, Jana Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco explored the cultural and ideological meanings of the stigmatized fat body in their excellent edited collection Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression. Less theoretical but rich in evidence and detail are studies such as Hillel Schwartz's Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat, which this year will celebrate its twentieth anniversary, and Peter Stearns's Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West.⁴

R. Marie Griffith's Born Again Bodies should be placed into this latter camp, books essential for American studies scholars who want to explore the ideological, cultural, and historical landscape of body size "management" and obesity in the United States. Griffith, associate professor of religion at Princeton University and author of God's Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission, explores the reasons why Protestant Christianity in the United States has such a stake in the "superiority" of the thin body, and, conversely, the extent to which Protestant Christianity has shaped the...