‘Strong and courageous’ but ‘constantly insecure’ : dialogical self theory, intersecting identities, and Christian mixed martial arts

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ‘Strong and courageous’ but ‘constantly insecure’ : dialogical self theory, intersecting identities, and Christian mixed martial arts © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published version Pauha, Teemu; Ronkainen, Noora Pauha, T., & Ronkainen, N. (2022). ‘Strong and courageous’ but ‘constantly insecure’ : dialogical self theory, intersecting identities, and Christian mixed martial arts. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 14(3), 428-443. https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676X.2021.1937297 2022 Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rqrs21 Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rqrs21 ‘Strong and courageous’ but ‘constantly insecure’: dialogical self theory, intersecting identities, and Christian mixed martial arts Teemu Pauha & Noora Ronkainen To cite this article: Teemu Pauha & Noora Ronkainen (2021): ‘Strong and courageous’ but ‘constantly insecure’: dialogical self theory, intersecting identities, and Christian mixed martial arts, Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, DOI: 10.1080/2159676X.2021.1937297 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676X.2021.1937297 © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Published online: 10 Jun 2021. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data ‘Strong and courageous’ but ‘constantly insecure’: dialogical self theory, intersecting identities, and Christian mixed martial arts Teemu Pauha a and Noora Ronkainen b a Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland; b Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland ABSTRACT Being a mixed martial arts fighter and a devout Christian seems to present an apparent contradiction that requires identity work to bring these identities into unity. We used Dialogical Self Theory and explored the autobiography of Ron ‘H2O’ Waterman, a professional fighter turned evangelist, to understand how the tensions between the different identities or I-positions were negotiated. We identified two I-positions, ‘Ron the Fighter’ and ‘Ron the Pater Familias’, which related differently to religion, sport, and masculinity. Importantly, the negotiations were not between MMA and faith, but between these two I-positions that served the different needs for self-enhancement and union with somebody else. The findings illustrate that some degree of narrative coherence is needed for maintaining psychological well-being, which in Waterman’s case was established by finding a third position that incorporated parts of both I-positions. We suggest that Dialogical Self Theory provides a promising perspective for understanding identity intersectionality in sport and how healthy and problematic stories are developed. Practical applications include supporting athletes in developing ‘meta-positions’ that can articulate the conflicts between incompatible I-positions and help identify ways to move forward. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 15 December 2020 Accepted 28 May 2021 KEYWORDS Autobiography; intersectionality; narrative theory; narrative coherence; masculinity; combat sports Introduction In the Sermon of the Mount, Jesus is quoted as saying ‘if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also’. The profession of a mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter, however, requires one to respond to violence with violence. Scholars (Borer and Schafer 2011; Greve 2014; Watson and Brock 2015), journalists, and church leaders have all been intrigued by this apparent contradiction and tried to make sense of it from their respective point of view. In this paper, we tackle this contradiction with the tools of narrative psychology. By applying Dialogical Self Theory (DST; Hermans 1999, 2001) to the autobiography of the MMA fighter Ron Waterman, we seek to understand how a Christian mixed martial artist integrates the message of Jesus with the brutal reality of the Octagon. In this paper, we aim to increase scholarly awareness of potential conflicts between athletic and other social identities and to propose DST as a fruitful approach for analysing such conflicts. Despite being well-established in the psychology of religion, DST has so far received less attention in the psychology of sport. Accordingly, our aim here is to extend the methodological landscape of the narrative study of sporting lives. Our research questions are as follows: (1) What conflicts and CONTACT Teemu Pauha [email protected] Faculty of Theology, P.O. Box 4 (Vuorikatu 3), 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN SPORT, EXERCISE AND HEALTH https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676X.2021.1937297 © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. tensions, if any, exist between the identities of a professional MMA fighter and a devout Christian? (2) How are the potential conflicts negotiated in narrative identity work? By background, the first author is a psychologist of religion and a long-time practitioner of martial arts. He has previously studied identity negotiation and conflict among young European Muslims. The second author is a researcher in human and social sciences of sport who also holds a Master’s degree in theology, and has previously published on sport and religion. She is also a practitioner of martial arts. Based on our shared interest in identity, religion, spirituality, and martial arts, we developed this collaborative project believing that our different academic backgrounds can provide a platform for exchanging ideas across disciplines and different lenses for interpreting the data of this research. Identity and narrative According to the grand old man of the psychological study of identity, Erik H. Erikson (1975, 18), identity can be defined as ‘a subjective sense as well as an observable quality of personal sameness and continuity, paired with some belief in the sameness and continuity of some shared world image’. Erikson’s theory has received criticisms, sometimes unfairly due to frequent misuses of his work (Hoare 2013), but continues to form an important foundation for many contemporary strands of identity research. Dan McAdams and Kate McLean (2013, 233) used Erikson’s work in developing a theory of narrative identity which they defined as ‘a person’s internalised and evolving life story, integrating the reconstructed past and imagined future to provide life with some degree of unity and purpose.’ A view shared by many narrative scholars is that people achieve a degree of subjective selfcontinuity by crafting life stories that bind together the various aspects of one’s life and the various roles that one plays in social relationships (for an overview of different perspectives on narrative identity, see Smith and Sparkes 2008 and Thorne 2004). However, there are on-going debates concerning the importance of, and the degree of coherence needed for ‘a good’ life story (McAdams 2006; Neimeyer 2006). As Linde (1993) noted, the very notion of a life story requires a sequence, and a temporal ordering of events is a crucial device for achieving coherence. She also observed that coherence is a social obligation that is required from storytellers for them to appear as competent members of their cultures. However, she stressed that stories are performed in a social context and many people are satisfied to live with many partially contradictory stories that they tell in appropriate situations to particular audiences. Hermans (1999, 2001) theorised ‘a dialogical’ self and emphasised that narrative identities tend to be constructed through several narrative voices rather than through one unified and coherent storyline. From this perspective, the self is defined as ‘as a dynamic multiplicity of relatively autonomous I positions’, where ‘the I has the ability to move, as in a space, from one position to the other in accordance with changes in situation and time’ (Hermans 1999, 1197). Several theorists have also noted that the different narrative voices, or I-positions, through which the identity is narrated tend to reflect different basic needs or motives. Particularly important needs in this regard are needs for agency and communion (cf. Bakan 1966) – or in the words of McAdams (1993), ‘power’ and ‘love’. Similarly, Hermans (1999) argued that self-narration is motivated, on one hand, by selfenhancement (S-motives) and, on the other hand, by contact and union with somebody else (O-motives). Thorne (2004) noted that Herman’s concept of the dialogical self is more ‘decentralised’ than McAdams’s life story approach, but both emphasise inner dialogue and self-reflection, rather than performative and situational elements of identity work emphasised in more socially situated perspectives on narrative identity. Several studies have explored the narrative structures and resources that athletes’ self-narratives rely on, as well as the psychological implications that particular narrative identities have for individual athletes (for a review, see Ronkainen, Kavoura, and Ryba 2016). The study by Douglas and Carless (2006) on professional women golfers provided a foundation for much of narrative research that followed in sport psychology by outlining three narrative types that elite athletes’ 2T. PAUHA AND N. RONKAINEN stories relied on. Briefly, (1) the performance narrative was the dominant narrative type where achievement and winning are centralised over any other concerns and dimensions of life; (2) the discovery narrative was a storyline where athletes experienced their sporting life as one affording possibilities for rich life experiences and exploration of the world and self; and (3) the relational narrative was a storyline where priority is given to connectedness with other(s) and not on the individualistic pursuit of achievement. Later work has added evidence on the dominance of the performance narrative plot in the elite sport culture and how athletes may limit other dimensions of their life and self to ‘live up’ to the narrative of what it means to be an athlete (Carless and Douglas 2013; Cavallerio, Wadey, and Wagstaff 2017). Although the life story has featured in a prominent role in the narrative study of identity, many scholars have also noted that a life story represents a somewhat artificial accomplishment that we are rarely required to construct in our daily lives. In the words of Gergen and Gergen (1988, 33; italics in the original): ‘Even though it is common practice to speak as if each individual possesses “a life story,” in fact there would appear to be no one story to tell.’ Following developments in narrative inquiry more broadly, sport studies scholars have increasingly placed analytic focus on situated, performative and sometimes contradictory identity constructions (e.g., Kilger 2017; Ronkainen and Ryba 2020). As Kilger (2017) noted, a criticism of research that focuses on identifying culturally shared narratives (such as performance or discovery) has been that these narratives have been sometimes approached as being monolithic and static, while even these fairly established narratives have their contradictions and contextually specific manifestations. Recent scholarship has also highlighted the importance of athletes’ various other identities in shaping their athletic identities and sporting experiences (Blodgett et al. 2017; Kavoura et al. 2018). The diversity of cultural identities in sport has been especially emphasised in cultural sport psychology (CSP) scholarship (Blodgett et al. 2017; Schinke et al. 2019). As Schinke et al. (2019) noted, a key term for conceptualising identity multiplicity is intersectionality. Shields (2008, 301–302) has defined intersectionality as ‘the mutually constitutive relations among social identities’, by which she means that ‘one category of identity, such as gender, takes its meaning as a category in relation to another category’. In other words, there is no ‘athlete’ in abstract, but an athlete is always a Black female athlete, a heterosexual male athlete, a working-class Muslim athlete, a disabled athlete, etc. Social identities do not exist in isolation but only as parts of complex and embodied identity constellations. The number of intersecting identities in every person’s life is too vast to be accounted for in a single study. Therefore, a scholar needs to make choices about the identity categories taken into account. In this study, we are focusing on how an athletic identity intersects with (male) gender and (Christian) religiosity. Researchers have demonstrated diverse ways that religious and athletic identities intersect. Studies exemplify how religion shapes meaning that athletes bring to their sporting experiences (e.g., Blodgett et al. 2017) and that some athletes conceive their athletic talent as a gift from God (Mosley et al. 2015), but also that some athletes at least partly segregate these two identities and are resistant to ‘mixing God with sport’ (Ronkainen, Ryba, and Tod 2020; Stevenson 1991). Stevenson’s (1991) study into Christian athletes illustrated three different ways that athletic and Christian identities interacted: (1) in the segregated type, sport and religion were kept separate; (2) in the selective type, religion intersected with sport in some occasions; and (3) in the committed type, Christian identity and values were at the forefront in all sporting situations. However, the ‘committed’ athletes often experienced dissonant goals and values to the extent that some decided to withdraw from sport. In reflecting on these findings, Stevenson (1991) suggested that ‘it certainly does not appear to be a simple task for these elite athletes to be true to their faith and true to their sport’ (376). QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN SPORT, EXERCISE AND HEALTH 3 Christian mixed martial arts MMA – or what is sometimes known as cage fighting – is a combat sport that combines striking, grappling, and ground fighting. In the 2000s, MMA has become increasingly popular, especially through the success of the key promotion UFC. Unlike aikido, shorinji kempo, and other martial arts that have a historical association with East Asian spiritual traditions such as Shinto and Zen Buddhism, MMA is not linked with any established belief system. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at several MMA gyms in the US, Green (2016, 435) described their general spiritual ethos as a ‘potpourri of traditional Eastern teachings, Western science, popphilosophy, and pop-psychology coalescing around the individualist focus on “living in the moment”’. However, there are also examples of MMA clubs with a more distinct religious profile. According to some estimates, approximately 700 evangelical churches in the United States have in some way included MMA into their activities (Greve 2014). One example is the Xtreme Ministries that used to operate in Clarksville, Tennessee, under the motto: ‘Where Feet, Fist, and Faith Collide’. The church also used to organise Vacation Fight Schools in which children could learn Christian morals and fighting arts. The few scholars who have touched upon Christian MMA (CMMA) disagree among themselves on how best to conceptualise the phenomenon (Greve 2014). Some have perceived it as a theologically thin and opportunistic attempt of churches to court a population group that is otherwise hard to reach – that is, young men. Others, in turn, have conceived of CMMA as a theologically consistent heir to the Muscular Christianity movement. Even a cursory look at how CMMA is discussed in the media reveals the deep disagreement surrounding it (see, for example, Watson 2016). For every commentator who finds CMMA theologically justified, there is another one who finds it in complete contradiction to the most basic of Christian doctrines. Watson and Brock (2015) have outlined various Christian positions to MMA and assessed their theological justification. Theological arguments against MMA include a view of the body as a gift from God and therefore as warranting special respect and protection. According to Christian theologians such as Augustine, violence is justified only if it is deployed by a rightful ruler in protection of the weak. However, Christian practitioners of MMA have defended themselves by claiming MMA to be their God-given vocation, an excellent context for spreading the gospel, or a way of cultivating virtues and positive character traits. Borer and Schafer (2011) analysed the accounts of Christian MMA fans and argued that the disagreement is not only between individuals but also within them. The fans experience and need to negotiate a mismatch between the moral orders of ‘[t]urning the other cheek’ and ‘knock him out’ (166). Being both a professing Christian and an MMA enthusiast involves cognitive and emotional dissonance that makes CMMA a rich context for studying the processes that people engage in to bring their various social identities into a unity. 1 The present study Theoretical perspective In this study, we apply DST to examine the identity construction of a Christian MMA professional. Despite being a less often used approach in the psychological study of sport, DST has become well established in the psychology of religion (see, for example, Belzen 2010b; Buitelaar and Zock 2013). Fundamental to DST is the view that, instead of a stable intrapsychic structure, the self is a dynamic process. Following William James, Hermans (2001) postulated an acting and experiencing subject that he refers to as ‘I’. The I does not have a fixed point of view from which it regards the world, but it may switch between several alternative perspectives, or ‘I-positions’. Hermans’s notion of I-positions has certain similarities to imagoes in McAdams’s (1993) theory. Like I-positions, imagoes typically personify the two key human motivations: power and love (McAdams 1993, 133), or in Hermans’s (1999) terminology, Sand O-motives. However, there are 4T. PAUHA AND N. RONKAINEN also noteworthy differences. According to McAdams, imagoes are characters in a personal myth that a person creates in order to infuse her or his life with meaning. An acting subject thus predates and is separate from a personal myth and its imagoes (p. 45). As a result, imagoes lack the agency that I-positions possess. We will discuss I-positions and other concepts central to DST in more detail in the following sections as they become relevant in our analysis. Den Elzen (2017) applied DST to study the multiplicity of subject positions in memoirs of young widows. According to her, autobiographical writing is, in essence, a ‘performative act of narrative identity construction’ (43), the function of which is to textually negotiate the potentially conflicting voices in the self and, ideally, to find an agreement among them. In a somewhat similar vein to Den Elzen (2017), we apply DST to make sense of identity multiplicity as it appears in an autobiography of a Christian MMA professional (on the use of autobiography in the psychology of religion, see Belzen 2010a, 2010b). Autobiography as data Qualitative researchers in sport and exercise are increasingly considering autobiographies as useful data for understanding sporting experiences and identities (Butryn and Masucci 2003; McGannon and McMahon 2019; McGannon and Smith 2020; Newman, Howells, and Fletcher 2016; Sparkes and Stewart 2016). However, as Sparkes and Stewart (2016) noted, sporting autobiographies have often been dismissed for being predictable, formulaic, driven by economic interest, and predominantly communicating gossip rather than insights about human experience. Furthermore, the issue of the ghostwriter’s input in shaping a ‘selling’ story has been considered a major threat to the authenticity of the account. This said, the defenders of autobiography as a valuable source of data have argued that all types of qualitative data have a performative element and also the qualitative researcher is a ghostwriter who selectively tells a particular story to a particular audience in their research report (Sparkes and Stewart 2016). Therefore, when qualitative researchers approach autobiographies in the same way as they approach other forms of qualitative data – that is, as partial, selectively crafted stories that are intended to particular audiences and to achieve certain outcomes – they can be a rich resource for expanding our understandings of how athletic careers and identities are constructed and negotiated over time. McGannon and Smith (2020) suggested that sport psychology researchers working with autobiographies and narrative inquiry could usefully expand the knowledge base by exploring a broader range of sporting contexts, identity intersections, and geographic locations. While our study focuses on a similar demographic as many previous studies using autobiography (a white, able-bodied, and heterosexual male athlete), we believe that our focus on Christian MMA and the use of DST as a theoretical lens can expand understandings of identity in sport both empirically and theoretically. The person whose life story we are going to investigate is Ron ‘H2O’ Waterman, a professional MMA fighter and show wrestler turned evangelist. Waterman has fought in several MMA promotions and holds a record of 16 wins, 6 losses, and 2 draws. Besides his career as a fighter, he has also travelled the world with Team Impact – a group of Christian bodybuilders who arrange revival meetings that combine evangelising with feats of strength. As material we are using Ron Waterman’s autobiographical account Tapped Out By Jesus: From the Cage to the Cross that was published by Bridge Logos in 2011. The book is relatively short, a little over one hundred pages, and it concentrates mostly on Waterman’s years as a professional fighter (ca. 1999–2008). However, for reasons discussed below, it is often difficult to pinpoint exactly when the events narrated in the book have occurred. The first striking feature of the book is its structure – or rather, the lack of it. Untypically for a biographical account, the book does not follow a chronological order but, rather, a train of free association. The chapters are short, usually only a few pages and they are connected by some common element rather than chronological succession. For example, in chapter 23 Waterman recounts a fight in which he came close to injuring his opponent which brings him to chapter 24 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN SPORT, EXERCISE AND HEALTH 5 in which he tells about the training sessions early in his career and how he then ended up injuring his brother while practising with him. This in turn leads him to chapter 25 in which he recalls his other early training partners. Another striking aspect of Waterman’s narrative is the marked changes in style and tone. It almost feels like Waterman’s life story was told by several completely different people. This, in turn, links the narrative to the DST, the idea of which is that the narrative identity, or self, is like a dialogue between voices, all of whom recount the same set of events from their own perspective. This impression is strengthened by the fragmented structure of the book. Time and again, Waterman goes back to events that he has already narrated and narrates them again – but in a completely different style and tone! Prior to publication, an autobiography goes through an editorial process that typically seeks to integrate the variety of life events into one coherent narrative. However, Waterman’s account is in this respect very exceptional. Unlike in published autobiographies typically, the copy editor has not harmonised dissonant voices, but Waterman’s various I-positions are all given space to express themselves. Tapped Out By Jesus does not present one coherent, temporally sequenced story of Waterman’s life but I-positions take turns in telling different stories of the same events. The I-positions engage in a dialogue not unlike the identity negotiations that occur in everyday interpersonal encounters (on the blurred boundary between interpersonal and intrapersonal dialogue, see Hermans 2001, 255). Data analysis After acknowledging the presence of several different voices, we started to analyse them more systematically by applying the negotiational self method (NSM) as outlined by Nir (2011). NSM has been developed on the basis of DST to provide tools for identifying and analysing conflicts that may exist between I-positions. As our primary interest is on the (potential) identity conflicts that are involved in being a Christian MMA fighter, NSM was for us a natural choice as a method. However, because Nir’s (2011) own use of the method involves interview or questionnaire data as well as an additional goal of resolving the identified conflicts, we made certain adjustments to make the method better suited for studying a written autobiography. NSM, as delineated by Nir (2011), involves several stages, the first of which is identifying a conflict and describing its ‘for’ and ‘against’ poles. Second, the poles are linked to I-positions. In our study, we conducted the first two stages as follows: We started the analysis with the first author reading Waterman’s book and looking for events that were narrated more than once and from more than one perspective. After locating such events, the first author compared the different perspectives on the same event in terms of narrative elements, such as tone or theme. Gradually, through the examination of several events and their different narrations, two main voices with markedly different characteristics emerged. The third stage in Nir’s (2011) NSM is the identification of needs and interests that underlie the various I-positions. In our study, and on the basis of the previous two stages, the first author wrote short descriptions of the two voices and the characteristics that distinguished them from each other. Then he read and reread the whole book, comparing each passage to the descriptions of the two main voices. The majority of the passages fitted one of the descriptions but may have introduced new details to it. When encountering a passage that was not congruent with either of the descriptions, the first author sought to adjust the descriptions to account for that as well as all the other passages. In this way, the descriptions became ever more elaborate and sophisticated. Nir’s (2011) NSM is originally designed for practitioners, and its aim is not only to identify inner conflicts, but also to help in resolving them. Accordingly, the fourth and final stage in NSM is the building of integrative solutions that address the needs of the different I-positions. Of course, in our study, we did not aim at offering solutions to Waterman’s conflicts, but at being attentive to solutions that present themselves in the data. In the previous three stages, we outlined two 6T. PAUHA AND N. RONKAINEN conflicting I-positions and generated descriptions of their central characteristics. However, despite adjustments, certain passages appeared to not fit either of the descriptions. These passages were compared with each other, and because they appeared to bear narrative similarities, they were grouped together and seen to represent a third distinct voice. Despite the first author bearing the primary responsibility of the data analysis, the authors discussed the interpretations with each other throughout the analysis process. In the following sections, we outline the key I-positions that make up Waterman’s dialogical self. Results ‘Ron the Fighter’ and ‘Ron the Pater Familias’ In the case of Waterman, we discerned two main I-positions which we have dubbed ‘Ron the Fighter’ and ‘Ron the Pater Familias’. To ‘Ron the Fighter’ belongs the voice that takes the primary responsibility for narrating the parts that deal with Waterman’s fighting career. It is the traditionally masculine voice that emphasises competitiveness, autonomy, and self-reliance. ‘Ron the Fighter’ is strong and competent, the iconic alpha-male who is able to bend the other men to his will: I was confident the fight would not go three rounds, but if it did, I would be ready. As the Bear entered the cage, I stared into his eyes with confidence and determination. He tried to glare back but quickly turned his eyes away, which only increased my assurance. (Waterman 2012, 2) ‘Ron the Fighter’ is a simple and straightforward guy who does not dwell on the past or engage in introspection. Instead, he cherishes the moment and the adventures that life brings. In comparison to the other I-positions, what is typical of ‘Ron the Fighter’ is the meticulous description of the external events of the situation at hand: We walked into a small locker room that smelled of baby oil, cooking spray, and smelly knee pads. I was a little surprised to see 12 wrestlers in this tiny room, changing right alongside a handful of women. (Waterman 2012, 19.) The main thread in the identity narrative of ‘Ron the Fighter’ is perhaps best captured by his own selfdescription (Waterman 2012, 29): ‘I was intense, physical, and powerful, but almost always a nice guy.’ Fittingly, his ‘life verse’ from the Bible is Joshua 1:9 (Waterman 2012, 12): ‘Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.’ Contrast this self-confident openness to the present moment with the voice that narrates especially Waterman’s life back home. Waterman’s other main I-position, ‘Ron the Pater Familias’, is anxious, even brooding. Instead of what happens in the present moment, he ruminates on the past and worries about the future: My past failures have created a constant burden on me that I pray will someday be forgotten completely. I am overly-paranoid now when I’m in a relationship and have insecurity which I know is not of the Lord but of my flesh. I believe it stems from my past, and even though it’s not a part of my life now I still constantly have to get insecure thoughts and feelings out of my mind. (Waterman 2012, 109.) The difference between the I-positions stands out most clearly when analysing chapters in Waterman’s life that are narrated by both ‘Ron the Fighter’ and ‘Ron the Pater Familias’. As mentioned previously, Tapped Out By Jesus contains several episodes that are narrated more than once but with a different style and focus. For example, Waterman’s first year in WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) is initially described as a childhood dream come true (Waterman 2012, 16 & 18). Typical of ‘Ron the Fighter’, the focus is on the outside; the narrator shares his diet and exercise routine, praises his training partners, and marvels at everything new. The overall tone is positive, and the strains and frustrations are redefined as ‘learning experiences’ (Waterman 2012, 21). QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN SPORT, EXERCISE AND HEALTH 7 Concluding remarks The present study used DST to extend understandings of intersecting identities in sport with a particular focus on how a Christian MMA fighter engaged in narrative identity work to resolve the potential tensions between his religion and sport. Using DST as an analytic framework helped in discerning two I-positions, ‘Ron the Fighter’ and ‘Ron the Pater Familias’, which related differently to religion, sport and masculinity. Our analysis shows that some degree of narrative coherence is needed for psychological well-being, which can be a challenging task for Christian MMA fighters. We hope that future studies will continue exploring the value of DST for understanding intersectionality and identity negotiations in sport. In particular, it can provide a promising framework for understanding how healthy and problematic stories develop over time to inform applied work to support healthy identity development in sport. Notes 1. Of course, there are also biblical and other Christian traditions that justify or even encourage physical violence, at least in some restricted context (e.g., Exodus 21:23–25, Leviticus 24: 19–21). However, the CMMA scene is predominantly evangelical, and as such, very centred on the person of Jesus Christ (Greve 2014). In line with the popular slogan WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?), many Christian MMA fighters emphasise Jesus as a role model that they seek to emulate (see, for example, Waterman 2012, 53). As a result, they need to somehow come to terms with sayings of Jesus such as Matthew 5:39 that call for offering the other cheek to the aggressor. 2. For a theological critique of both arguments, see Watson and Brock (2015). Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). Notes on contributors Dr Teemu Pauha is a psychologist and religion scholar whose work has focused on religious identity, interreligious relationships, and Islam in Europe. Dr Noora Ronkainen is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work has focused on meaning in sport, athletic identity, ageing, and informal learning. ORCID Teemu Pauha http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2922-7538 Noora Ronkainen http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3785-0458 References Bakan, D. 1966. The Duality of Human Existence: An Essay on Psychology and Religion. Chicago, IL: Rand McNally. Belzen, J. A. 2010a. “Religion and Self: Notions from a Cultural Psychological Perspective.” Pastoral Psychology 59 (4): 399–409. doi:10.1007/s11089-009-0204-z. Belzen, J. A. 2010b. Towards Cultural Psychology of Religion: Principles, Approaches, Applications. Amsterdam: Springer Science + Business Media. Bird, S. 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