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WASHINGTON — President Obama on Tuesday rejected an attempt by lawmakers to force his hand on the Keystone XL oil pipeline, using his veto pen to sweep aside one of the first major challenges to his authority by the new Republican Congress.

With no fanfare and a 104-word letter to the Senate , Mr. Obama vetoed legislation to authorize construction of a 1,179-mile pipeline that would carry 800,000 barrels of heavy petroleum a day from the oil sands of Alberta to ports and refineries on the Gulf Coast.

In exercising the unique power of the Oval Office for only the third time since his election in 2008, Mr. Obama accused lawmakers of seeking to circumvent the administration’s approval process for the pipeline by cutting short “consideration of issues that could bear on our national interest.”

By rejecting the legislation, Mr. Obama retains the right to make a final judgment on the pipeline on his own timeline. But he did little to calm the political debate over Keystone, which has become a symbol of the continuing struggle between environmentalists and conservatives.

Backers of the pipeline denounced Mr. Obama’s actions and vowed to keep fighting for its construction.

The House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, called the president’s veto “ a national embarrassment ” and accused Mr. Obama of being “too close to environmental extremists” and “too invested in left-fringe politics.”

Environmentalists quickly hailed the decision, which they said clearly indicated Mr. Obama’s intention to reject the pipeline’s construction. The White House has said the president will decide whether to allow the pipeline when all of the environmental reviews are completed in the coming weeks.

“Republicans in Congress continued to waste everyone’s time with a bill destined to go nowhere, just to satisfy the agenda of their big oil allies,” said Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club. “The president has all the evidence he needs to reject Keystone XL now, and we are confident that he will.”

Since 2011, the proposed Keystone pipeline has emerged as a broader symbol of the partisan political clash over energy, climate change and the economy.

Most energy policy experts say the project will have a minimal impact on jobs and climate. But Republicans insist that the pipeline will increase employment by linking the United States to an energy supply from a friendly neighbor. Environmentalists say it will contribute to ecological destruction and damaging climate change.

Mr. Obama has hinted that he thinks both sides have inflated their arguments, but he has not said what he will decide.

In his State of the Union address last month, Mr. Obama urged lawmakers to move past the pipeline debate, calling for passage of a comprehensive infrastructure plan. “Let’s set our sights higher than a single oil pipeline,” he said.

Republican leaders had promised to use the veto, which was expected, to denounce Mr. Obama as a partisan obstructionist. They made good on that promise minutes after the president’s veto message was read on the floor of the Senate on Tuesday.

“The fact he vetoed the bipartisan Keystone Pipeline in private shows how out of step he is with the priorities of the American people, who overwhelmingly support this vital jobs and infrastructure project,” Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, said in a statement .

In recent months, the environmental activists — who have spent years marching, protesting and getting arrested outside the White House in their quest to persuade Mr. Obama to reject the project — have said they are increasingly optimistic that their efforts will succeed.

“Hopefully the ongoing legislative charade has strengthened his commitment to do the right thing,” said Bill McKibben, a founder of the group 350.org, which has led the campaign to urge Mr. Obama to reject the pipeline.

The debate began in 2008, when the TransCanada Corporation applied for a permit to construct the pipeline. The State Department is required to determine whether the pipeline is in the national interest, but the last word on whether the project will go forward ultimately rests with the president.

Mr. Obama has delayed making that decision until all the legal and environmental reviews of the process are completed. He has said a critical factor in his decision will be whether the project contributes to climate change.

Last year, an 11-volume environmental impact review by the State Department concluded that oil extracted from the Canadian oil sands produced about 17 percent more carbon pollution than conventionally extracted oil.

But the review said the pipeline was unlikely to contribute to a significant increase in planet-warming greenhouse gases because the fuel would probably be extracted from the oil sands and sold with or without construction of the pipeline.

This month, environmentalists pointed to a letter from the Environmental Protection Agency that they said proved that the pipeline could add to greenhouse gases .

The question of whether to build the pipeline comes as Mr. Obama hopes to make climate change policy a cornerstone of his legacy. This summer, the E.P.A. is expected to issue sweeping regulations to cut greenhouse gas pollution from power plants, a move experts say would have vastly more impact on the nation’s carbon footprint than construction of the Keystone pipeline.

In December, world leaders hope to sign a global United Nations accord in Paris that would commit every nation in the world to enacting plans to reduce its rates of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. In the coming months, countries are expected to begin putting forward those policies for cutting carbon emissions.

While the Keystone pipeline is not expected to be part of the United States climate change plan, a public presidential decision on the project could be interpreted as a message about Mr. Obama’s symbolic commitment to the issue of climate change.

Until that decision is made, however, both sides of the Keystone fight are stepping up their tactics. Environmental groups are planning more marches and White House petitions, while Republicans in Congress are looking for ways to bring the Keystone measure back to Mr. Obama’s desk.

Senator John Hoeven, Republican of North Dakota, who sponsored the Keystone bill, said he would consider adding language requiring construction of the pipeline to other legislation, such as spending bills to fund federal agencies, which could make a veto far more politically risky for Mr. Obama.

A final decision by the president could come soon. Last month, a court in Nebraska reached a verdict in a case about the pipeline’s route through the state, clearing the way for construction. And this month, final reviews of the pipeline by eight federal agencies were completed.

However, Mr. Obama is under no legal obligation to make a final decision, and there is no official timetable for a decision. He could approve or deny the project at any time — or leave the decision to the next president.

Ali Huberlie , a 27-year-old education consultant in Boston, awakens at 4:45 every morning to go to her CrossFit “box,” or gym, where she spends two hours. When she and her boyfriend, whom she met through CrossFit, went apartment-hunting, they chose a neighborhood near their box. This year, as a student at Harvard Business School, Ms. Huberlie wrote a case study about a founder of CrossFit that was incorporated into the school’s curriculum. And when Harvard Divinity School researchers were studying spaces other than churches that function as spiritual communities, they interviewed Ms. Huberlie.

“CrossFit is family, laughter, love and community,” Ms. Huberlie told the researchers, who quoted her in their study, “How We Gather.” “I can’t imagine my life without the people I’ve met through it.”

A for-profit gym franchise founded in 2000 that now has 13,000 licensed operators serving at least two million exercisers, CrossFit — like television, sports fandom and health fads — has become the focus of study by researchers trying to pinpoint what constitutes religiosity in America.

After all, it’s surprisingly hard to say what makes a religion. Ms. Huberlie speaks about her box as others might speak about a church or synagogue community. The same is true of some 12-step program members, and devoted college-football fans. In an increasingly secular America, all sorts of activities and subcultures provide the meaning that in the past, at least as we imagine it, religious communities did.

Any criteria you choose to define religion will quickly reveal its shortcomings. Is it about belief in a deity? Judaism and Christianity have that, but many varieties of Buddhism do not. Existence after death? Mormons believe in that, but plenty of liberal Protestants do not.

Yet consider football. Religion scholars have noted that it brings people together in large crowds to “worship,” and has a weekly holy day and even annual holidays, like N.F.L. draft day and, of course, the Super Bowl.

Casper ter Kuile and Angie Thurston, the Harvard Divinity School students who wrote “How We Gather,” were hosts of a talk this month, “CrossFit as Church?!” with Greg Glassman, co-founder of CrossFit. About 100 people attended, far more of them local CrossFit enthusiasts than ministerial students.

As he spoke to the excited crowd , Mr. Glassman’s remarks at times sounded religious — “We’re the stewards of something,” he said — and salvific, even messianic.

“We’re saving lives, and saving a lot of them,” Mr. Glassman said. “Three hundred fifty thousand Americans are going to die next year from sitting on the couch. That’s dangerous. The TV is dangerous. Squatting isn’t.” He said he has refrained from marketing his own gym equipment because that would hurt his existing suppliers, which would be a “sin.”

In the classic 2000 essay collection “ Religion and Popular Culture in America ,” scholars argued that activities as diverse as “Star Trek” fandom, dieting fads and football could all constitute religions. But if anything that creates community and engenders passionate devotion can constitute religion, does the word lose all meaning? If everything is religion, then maybe nothing is.

For Joseph L. Price , who teaches religion and popular culture at Whittier College in California, the key criterion is whether a given activity establishes a worldview.

“To what extent is the worldview of the CrossFitters determined by their practices, their aspirations for the perfect body, or for the most fit male or female in the world?” Professor Price said in a recent interview. “Does their aspiration for fitness shape their view of how their world is ordered and organized?”

Using this logic, one can see how “Star Trek” fans, with their deep interest in science and cosmology, might qualify as religious. But members of a men’s breakfast club who meet weekly at a diner, by contrast, while they might derive great joy and comfort from their ritual, would not, by virtue of it, be religious.

Of course, that is just one way of answering the question of what a religion is. At the Harvard discussion with Mr. Glassman, Mr. ter Kuile, who plans a career in ministry to the “nones,” as the religiously unaffiliated are often called, offered other criteria.

“What really struck us was the way in which people were bringing their kids to their box,” Mr. ter Kuile said, “or the way different workouts of the day were named after soldiers who had died in battle. So there’s all of these things you would expect to see in a church — remembering the dead through some sort of ritual, and intergenerational community.”

Lindsey Carfagna , a graduate student in sociology, said that CrossFit helped her find another kind of community, that of “adaptive athletes,” or those who have overcome physical challenges.

“I lost my collegiate athletic career to concussions and have since struggled with long-term physical challenges,” said Ms. Carfagna, who competed in soccer and track as an undergraduate. “As an adaptive athlete, CrossFit has given me the voice in my head that says, ‘You’re not broken, you just have to adapt.’ It has given me the community of other adaptive athletes that are daily choosing to listen to that same voice, instead of the voice of limitation.”

Christian ministers talk about healing broken people, but it seems they would hesitate to focus on athletes, because, in Christian theology, all are fallen sinners, all are broken. Then again, groups like Athletes in Action do, in fact, focus their Christian gospel on athletes. If CrossFit is, for Ms. Carfagna, an even more specific community, one of adaptive athletes, that may not be so different.

Skeptics might scoff that CrossFit is just a gym. But in an interview this week, Mr. Glassman said that for many participants it is obviously much more.

“Down the road,” Mr. Glassman said, the core CrossFit values — which he defined as accountability, community and personal transformation — will “translate into, ‘I’m going to take my Camry into the Toyota dealer tomorrow, and will someone from the gym pick me up?’ And of course they will. ‘I’m going to move — will people from the gym help me?’ Of course they will.”

Ms. Huberlie described the CrossFit experience as an intimate, supportive one, in which cheering for one another to meet fitness goals was expected. It is a culture that can produce effects more often associated with church.

“There is something raw and vulnerable that happens to you when you go into the CrossFit gym,” Ms. Huberlie said. “A workout can bring you to your knees, so to speak.”