BY: Dr. Janice McRandal | November 13, 2025
A professional athlete secures an important victory. Naturally they are excited and want to celebrate. They post 8 pictures to their 105,000 followers on Instagram, each capturing a significant moment in their victory. One image shows her grappling her opponent, ready to pounce. Another shows a perfectly timed right cross to her opponent’s eye socket. A third has her pinning the opponent to the ground, the opponent’s head thrown back in anguish. Finally, a victory image with hand pumped in the air. She adds a caption to interpret this wonderful event. It begins, ‘Lord why do you love me so much?....you have opened the windows of heaven and poured into my life shows of blessings without measure!’
Women’s and girl’s participation in what we perceive to be violent sports has grown enormously in recent decades. From Rugby to Ice Hockey, Roller Derby and combat sports, women in droves are signing up for and asserting their flourishing in giving and receiving violence in the sporting arena. For many in the public, and for many different reasons, these accounts of women’s flourishing can be hard to understand or relate to. Especially when the experiences are said to be religious, a gift direct from God. This is no truer than when it comes to our current century’s most violent professionalised sport: Mixed Martial Arts (MMA).
The thesis of my project, Women in Mixed Martial Arts and Human Flourishing is that, for women who participate in MMA, giving and receiving violence is integral to their pursuit of flourishing, a flourishing that has complex relations to identity and gendered violence more broadly. Read from the discipline of political theology[i], these pursuits of flourishing can be read as always and already theological. The project brings together theological and psychological accounts of flourishing in order to account for women’s participation in sports that involve a consensual giving and receiving of violence,
One method used in the project was social media analysis from Instagram. Using a sample group of the top five ranked women from each official weight division in the UFC rankings[ii] from July 14th, 2025, pictures and captions posted within 48 hours following their last three UFC event fights were analysed. Utilizing grounded theory to code both the images and caption content, we were able to gather data on the amount and type of images fighters tended to post. These included images that showed ‘giving violence’ or ‘gushing blood’, or ‘victory and satisfaction’. Coupled with a textual analysis of captions that coded for ‘implies flourishing’, ‘speaks to identity’ and ‘explicitly religious’, the data yielded significant preliminary findings. Including what seems to be a very high (much higher than we would expect to see in comparable samples of professional women athletes in other sports) proportion of women athletes linking their flourishing and personal identity in violent sport to what might be categorised as evangelical theological identity and expression. Indeed, this correlation was at 60% in every weight division. On the other hand, there were almost no captions that spoke to other forms of identify, such as gender, sexuality, or political ideology – the type of captions we do expect to see from samples of professional women athletes in other sports.
While a second article of the full analysis of this data is being prepared for publication, the methodological use of political theology in this project has been instructive in bringing together and expanding theories of flourishing from theology and psychology. For example, while psychological theories of identity buffering have helped explain the role of high rates of religious proclamation for women participating in gender transgressive sport, tools within political theology such as psychoanalysis and critical theory have guided a discussion on the upbuilding role of giving and receiving consensual violence in bodily practices such as sport. In particular, it is the use of violence in women’s meaning making that forms the theological basis for new and enlarged notions of human flourishing that likewise renegotiate ideas about religious identity and gender and their role in women’s wellbeing.
[i] Theology here is used as a broad term that proceeds from the transference of the theological imaginary from the dominant Christian Church to the cultural institutions that develop into what are commonly conceived as “secular” cultural norms of western democracy.
[ii] The Ultimate Fighting Club (UFC) is the world’s highest professional league for MMA fighters. This is essentially the top 5 women in the world in each weight group.
