Ohm my God! Christian yoga causes an uproar
Yoga’s been shown to be good for the mind and body. Now, devout Christians are making yoga good for their souls, too.
In order to feel comfortable taking to the mats, churchgoers have had to make the centuries-old practice gel better with their belief system. It’s been a long, slow process — a book called “Christian Yoga” was published in 1960, and the idea really took off in the mid-aughts — but it’s just recently come into its own.
Today, there are thousands of Christian yoga instructors plying their trade around the world, Vice reports. One, New Yorker Caroline Williams, recently raised more than $10,000 via Kickstarter to fund her Christian yoga tutorial videos.
Some Christian-friendly adaptations include swapping out Buddha statues for hardcover Bibles, incorporating Christian study sessions and substituting “Shalom” for “Om.”
Christian yoga’s heyday comes not a moment too soon for the pious practitioners: A 2011 Northwestern University study found that young adults who attend weekly church or Bible study are 50 percent more likely than nonreligious adults to be obese by middle age. Yoga can combat that health threat, among others: Research recently conducted by the journal Diabetology & Metabolic Syndrome found a link between practicing yoga and weight loss.
So Christian yogis have reason to be gung-ho about their modified Down Dogs. But others are skeptical of Christian yoga altogether.
‘The assumptions and consequences of yoga run counter to much of Christianity.’ - Rajiv Malhotra
Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, maintains that contradictions between Christianity and yoga are too blatant to reconcile.
“Most [Christians] seem unaware that yoga cannot be neatly separated into physical and spiritual dimensions,” Mohler writes in his personal blog. “When Christians practice yoga, they must either deny the reality of what yoga represents or fail to see the contradictions between their Christian commitments and their embrace of yoga.”
Rajiv Malhotra, yogi and author of “Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism,” agrees.
“The assumptions and consequences of yoga do run counter to much of Christianity as understood today,” Malhotra writes in a Huffington Post article. “While it is fashionable for many Westerners to say they believe in karma and reincarnation [cornerstones of yoga’s metaphysics], they have seldom worked out the contradictions with core biblical doctrines.”
As Suhag Shukla, executive director of the Hindu American Foundation, told Vice, the Christian spin on yoga isn’t enlightened — it’s “coming from fear and insecurity and a resistance to experience.”
But Christian yoga adherents don’t see it that way. According to Laurette Willis, creator of PraiseMoves, a so-called “Christian alternative to yoga,” her 150 postures are “really a way for people to have a closer relationship with God.”