Culture War Confessionals: Conflicting Accounts of Christianity, Violence, and Mixed Martial Arts

Abstract

The micro-foundations of the American culture wars can be located by investigating informal accounts, narratives, and other forms of public discourse. We focus on the accounts of self-proclaimed Christian believers who are Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fans in order to uncover the nuanced ways they address the internal conflict between their religious beliefs and their leisure practices. Because American culture consists of multiple moral orders, individuals seek answers to questions about right and wrong in a great variety of social fields, including popular culture. By analyzing the accounts of Christian MMA fans who purposively use the Internet as a confessional device for claims making, we show that the culture wars are as much about conflicts within individuals as they are about conflicts between them. The culture wars are experienced by individuals offering and being offered confessional accounts of morality. We argue that these accounts and related boundary work are externalized products of an internalized culture war.