Idaho gym is part of a growing Christian men-only fitness movement

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Idaho gym is part of a growing Christian men-only fitness movement

Forge Fitness in Eagle joins a small wave of “warrior for Christ” gyms nationwide. Boise-area pastors disagree on whether the model builds healthy masculinity or reinforces harmful stereotypes about women.

By Micah Yip | FāVS News Reporter

EAGLE, Idaho — “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.”

That’s Proverbs 27:17 — and the “creed” behind Forge Fitness, a Christian-based, men-only gym in Eagle, Idaho.

“We train not just for muscle, but for ministry,” Forge’s website reads. “Each rep, each challenge, each moment of perseverance is a reflection of our calling to be warriors of Christ — steadfast in body, mind, and heart.” Forge Fitness founder David Vargas did not return multiple requests for comment.

Forge isn’t alone. Similar gyms have opened or are opening in Oklahoma City and Denver. Their purpose is also to create a single-sex workout space built on masculine stereotypes and the reinforcement of gender roles. 

The Oklahoma City gym, called Proverbs 27:17, and the Denver gym, The Remnant, are both more explicit about the men-only intention: creating a workout space devoid of the “temptation” of women in gym clothes. 

Jeff Hambrecht, founder of Proverbs 27:17, called his gym a place where “there’s no temptations of women walking around.” Mitch Parsons, who’s opening The Remnant gym in Denver, with hopes to expand to more locations in Texas and Tennessee, said he was “tired of having nakedness shoved in my face every time I walked into a gym to train,” Baptist News Global reported.

Forge doesn’t use that language on its site. But the “warriors of Christ” framing and the broader movement the gym is part of raise the same question: What does it mean to build a healthy community for men and boys? The answer depends on who you ask.

‘Seems a little dark-sided to me’

The Rev. Adam Briddell, a pastor at Cathedral of the Rockies in Boise, Idaho, leads one of the men’s fellowship groups at his church. As a United Methodist congregation, Cathedral of the Rockies leans more progressive than their evangelical counterparts, and Briddell approaches gyms like Forge with both curiosity and skepticism — especially around the warfare language, view of women and hypermasculinity. 

Forge’s Instagram is filled with seemingly AI-generated images promoting the idea of a “godly warrior” and encouraging followers to become a “dangerous man” for God, ready to “bring violence to the doorstep of evil.”

Briddell cautioned against aligning Christianity with militaristic language, saying, “that has not served the world well in the last couple thousand years.”

“While I admire the focus on fitness and discipline, I’d be curious — how do we still honor some of our Jesus values, like humility, and ‘Blessed are the meek.’ God chose the weak to shame the strong,” Briddell said.

To the idea that gyms like Forge help men overcome sexual temptation because there are no women present, Briddell said that addressing “lust” by taking men out of the presence of women “seems a little dark-sided to me.”

“You are going to encounter women in the world, and you’re going to need the skill and the self-control to be respectful,” Briddell said. “So being able to be around women in a way that just honors their dignity and allows them to exist without feeling preyed upon, yeah, we should be helping guys get there. And I’m not sure if sequestering men away in men-only environments would be the right path to equip those men to function well in the world.” Briddell encouraged therapy instead.

Focusing on relationships no matter gender

Rather than teaching a specific model of what it means to be a man, Briddell’s men’s group focuses on the relationships — regardless of gender — that shaped them. When the men’s group first launched, they opened with a prompt: talk about your dad. After everyone had shared throughout multiple group meetings, they discussed a second prompt: talk about your mom.

“Our conversation is focused on building good relationships and then connection,” Briddell said. “So it is not about teaching a model of masculinity. That is not our objective — our objective is to build relationships that make disciples.”

But the question of gender and community isn’t lost on Briddell. In a society where close male friendships aren’t always as encouraged as close female friendships, giving men a place to build community is essential. But balancing that in the absence of women is tricky, Briddell said, and there’s no clear answer. Whatever shape that community takes, he said, will depend heavily on “the soil in which it is planted.”

That soil is a denomination that’s had to work through its own reckonings over race, LGBTQ+ inclusion and women’s ordination, Briddell said. And it’s one that, in his experience, tends to stay at the table rather than retreat. He sees that history as directly shaping what a men’s ministry could look like when it grows in that environment.

“What emerges tends to be healthier and not so reflective of what I still hope is a very small segment of the population and the culture that is indoctrinated in this hypermasculinity that is totally foreign to the New Testament and the ministry of Jesus,” Briddell said.

Working out ‘without the distraction or temptation’

Not every pastor approaches the Christian men-only gym conversation with Briddell’s caution. Pastor Stephen Duwe of Compass Bible Church Treasure Valley, a nondenominational church in Boise, leads a men’s ministry featuring events like breakfasts, sporting events and an annual fall retreat. His ministry runs on a clear theology of gender.

“God has given men and women different roles,” he said. “They’re equal in value and equal in importance, but through the created nature of men and women, he’s given them different roles and functions.”

For instance, he believes men are called to lead in the home, the church and society, while women are meant to follow — a dynamic he traces to the Book of Genesis, where the woman is described as a “helper.”

For Duwe, that gendered framework can extend to fitness. He pointed to 1 Timothy 4:8, which says, “While bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.” He said he’s recommended regular exercise to men he’s counseled through anxiety and depression. 

Like these Christian gyms, Duwe’s ministry uses similar warfare language, including a recent men’s breakfast titled “We Are Conquerors” and using phrases like “Brothers in Arms.” But he drew a distinction between the language and its theology. 

“It’s less theological that we use language like that and more culturally grabbing for our men,” Duwe said, adding that he cautions against “trying to be macho for the sake of being macho.”

But the real draw of Forge Fitness for Duwe is the exclusively male space. He said that while Christian women should dress modestly, there’s also an onus on Christian men to “avert their eyes.”

“Lust after a woman’s body is sinful, and when you go to normal gyms … half the people there are women and they’re wearing really tight, really skimpy clothing, and that’s why I personally would never get a gym membership here in town,” he said. “Part of guarding your eyes would be to not choose to go somewhere that you know is unwise or unsafe because there’s going to be temptations everywhere.”

Duwe said he’s “counseled many men who have struggled with pornography or other sexual sins, and in a handful of cases, being in a gym around women in that kind of an environment has been part of their sin problem. So I’m intrigued by Christian men’s only gyms mostly for the purity aspect of getting to work out without the distraction or temptation.”

‘Women might not be there, but their absence is palpable’ 

Lauren Sawyer, a Seattle-based professor whose work focuses on gender, sexuality and theology, challenged the basis that gyms like Forge are founded on: the idea that there’s a singular “biblical masculinity” for men to strive toward — a traditionally masculine warrior, provider and protector.

“In evangelicalism, there is this particular understanding of what it means to be a man, and that’s changed over time because gender is a social construct,” Sawyer said. “Even to try to say that there is a biblical masculinity to strive for is just not true.”

That evangelical view of masculinity, in Sawyer’s view, carries consequences. All-male spaces like these gyms can end up being very misogynistic, and what begins as a fear of lust or infidelity tends to evolve into the idea “that women are dangerous, that women are potentially out there to tear good men down.”

Sawyer pushed back on the “lust-free” framing foundational to gyms like Proverbs 27:17 and The Remnant and the idea that removing women removes temptation. She called it a way of dodging responsibility — that the impulse is to remove women from a man’s space because men believe they can’t control their bodies. She referenced biblical verses in Matthew, where Jesus said, hyperbolically, that if someone’s eye causes them to stumble, they should pluck it  out.

“The whole premise of women being a stumbling block — which is not the best reading of the Bible, to be honest — it’s sort of eschewing responsibility in saying that the problem is women, so if we remove women from the space, then it won’t be a problem,” Sawyer said. “That’s incredibly misogynistic and … removes [men’s] agency and their responsibility for lusting after [women] or sexually harassing women or cheating on their wives.”

Similar movements have preceded this current small surge of Christian men-only gyms. Sawyer referenced the “Muscular Christianity” movement at the turn of the 20th century and the Promise Keepers in the 1990s. 

“It was very similar — it was like, ‘Women are taking over our churches, we need to get back to what it means to be a Christian man,’ and that was about bodily discipline,” Sawyer said.

Both movements, she said, were responses to fears about white Christian men losing power in a time when society was changing. “Women [were] getting the right to vote and having more social power — all very similar things to what we’re seeing now with women,” Sawyer said. “So it’s this doubling-down of a certain kind of masculinity imbued within Christianity to kind of relieve some of that anxiety — to try to maintain some of that power that they feel like they’re losing.”

Sawyer said she isn’t opposed to men-only spaces on the whole. She cautiously likened them to all-white spaces created for anti-racist work, where the goal is processing without placing the burden on the non-white group being discussed. 

In a well-curated space, she said, there’s room “for men, including trans men, to engage in the fullness of their gender” without the space prescribing a single, narrow definition for how to be a man. But she added that she’s always going to be a little skeptical of men-only spaces, as more often than not they devolve “into some kind of manosphere, reinforcing these ideas about what it means to be a man that are ultimately harmful.”

“Women might not be there, but their absence is so palpable,” Sawyer said. “These understandings of who women are, these stereotypes or assumptions, they’re very present even if they’re not physically at the gym. And I wouldn’t want people to lose that when they’re reading about these gyms.”

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