Gold’s Gym & Scientology in an Age of Authenticity

 By:  Kenny Smith

Gold’s Gym and the Church of Scientology have recently featured some very interesting commercial videos on their websites, videos that have also (to some degree) ventured out into the broader culture. The Gold’s videos are shown regularly on the many television screens typically located throughout Gold’s Gyms, over treadmills, stationary-bikes, ski-machines, free-weights, and in locker rooms and rest areas. The Scientology commercials air occasionally on the SyFy cable television network.

Both sets of commercials are extraordinarily upbeat, offering clear paths for reinventing and revitalizing one’s self. At Gold’s, we are told, we can burn off junk food, deserts, beer, and bad habits, add a few years to our life, feel stronger and lighter, gain the respect and admiration of others, look better naked, and increase our sex drive. With Scientology, we can transcend past mistakes, realize our deepest desires, and discover our most authentic selves. For, we are assured,

You are not your name. You’re not your job. You’re not the clothes you wear, or the neighborhood you live in. You’re not your fears, your failures, or your past. You are hope, You are imagination. You are the power to change, to create, and to grow. You are a spirit that will never die, and no matter how beaten down, you will rise again.  Scientology. Know yourself.  Know life. (http://www.scientology.org/#/videos/scientology-commercial-you)

Oddly, though, it is only Gold’s Gym that refers to itself as a community, an institution to which one must commit oneself to receive the desired rewards. Amidst a continual stream of carefully selected images mostly of young, attractive, well-toned women and men engaged in weight lifting, yoga, cycling, running, mountain climbing, boxing, or some other competitive sport, interspersed with inspiring scenes from nature (e.g., two rams colliding on a mountain top), high energy rock music plays in the background and lines of gold script scroll across the screen, announcing:

This is more than a gym. This is a movement. A movement to redefine strength, commit to our goals, to prove we can do anything. This is more than a gym. It’s 44 years of strength, of success, of sweat. This is more than a gym. This is where you get inducted, into the strongest club in the world. KNOW YOUR OWN STRENGTH.

Scientology, on the other hand, while presenting itself as a profound source of self-knowledge and healing, expressly avoids any reference to itself as “a place where you get inducted,” an institution to which one must commit oneself in order to receive the proffered existential goods. This leads to a rather intriguing question: why does Gold’s Gym employ precisely the sort of language that Scientology avoids? Why does the secular commercial gym present itself as a movement, but the religious movement present itself as a highly individualistic endeavor that requires no commitment whatsoever?

The first part of this riddle is fairly easily solved.  It is not difficult to see why Scientology does not emphasize its institutional aspects. These commercials hope to attract potential converts, and also improve Scientology’s public image. Since its emergence in the early 1950s with the highly creative religious efforts of founder L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology has been poorly received by the broader American culture. While Americans (if not human beings generally) tend to react negatively to new religious movements whose myths, behaviors, and modes of social organization differ significantly from those of the dominant culture, the Church’s policy of aggressive retaliation (typically through lawsuits) against those who have publicly criticized it have amplified negative public perceptions.  ( Press button to continue reading)

Home Shrines for American War Dead: Are They Just About remembering?

 

 By:  Kenny Smith, Guest Blogger

In a recent series of photographs and essays for the New York Times Magazine entitled, “The Shrine Down the Hall,” Ashley Gilbertson, Dexter Filkins, and Miki Meek, offer “a look at some of the bedrooms America’s young war dead left behind.” The photograph above, for instance, comes from the childhood home of U.S. Army First Lieutenant Brian N. Bradshaw, age twenty-four, from Steilacoom, Washington, who was killed June 25, 2009, in Kheyl, Afghanistan by a roadside bomb. In all, the article shows nineteen of these “war memorials with neatly made beds.”

Gilbertson began this project in 2007. While his coverage of the war in Iraq has received numerous accolades over the past seven years, “he has stopped photographing combat zones because the American public isn’t responding anymore… [He] is now concentrating on showing the aftereffects of war, including post-traumatic stress disorder… [and] looks at bedrooms as a way of memorializing the lives–rather than the deaths–of young combatants.”  As Gilbertson himself explains, “[y]ou walk into these rooms… and you feel like these are the kids you used to hang out with…. It’s powerful to look at where these kids lived, to see who they were as living, breathing human beings.”

 A number of families have chosen to preserve, virtually untouched, these highly personal spaces, “to which young American service members will never return.” The bedroom of U.S. Army Pfc. Karina Lau, for example,

 has not changed. A stuffed teddy bear and floppy-eared rabbit sit on top of her floral bedspread. Angel figurines and framed family photos line her bookshelf and dresser. The only thing missing is her. Private Lau was killed seven years ago when insurgents shot down her helicopter in Fallujah, Iraq. She was 20 years old. Her mother, Ruth, usually keeps the bedroom door closed and the window shades drawn, but when Mr. Gilbertson came to her home in Livingston, Calif., she opened them up.  

Nor has the bedroom of Pfc. Jack Sweet (Alexandria Bay, N.Y. ), who was killed by a roadside bomb in Jawwalah, Iraq, on Feb. 8, 2008. This practice extends also to items returned to families by the military. “In Private Sweet’s bedroom are two trunks that the Army sent back from Iraq. Next to them is his laundry hamper. The clothes inside, still carrying his scent, have never been washed.”          

 The authors interpret these actions as attempts on the part of family members to “resist” and “wrestle with” what has happened; this is “how they will cope and how they will remember.” No doubt this is the case. Still, this view has trouble explaining why so much personal space, and so many personal possessions, remain intact and untouched, even to the point of clothing, still “carrying the scent” of the person who was killed, remains unwashed. If we think about these sacred spaces as if they really are shrines, what else might we learn about them? More, what might we learn about the larger culture in which they take place, or about the war in which these persons died?

 In the Western sense of the word, shrines (from the Latin scrinium, meaning a box or receptacle) serve as “places or containers of religious presence.” As Paul Cartwright, writing for the Encyclopedia of Religion, explains,

 One of the distinctive features of religion is that its objects do not “exist” in the ordinary sense of the word. Deity, spirit, soul, afterlife, and other familiar categories of religion lie outside the realms of everyday objects in time and space. However, human beings across multiple cultures experience the presence of these religious realities at particular times and places and in relation to material objects. Much of the work of shrines is to provide habitations for sacred presences within the everyday world. As places having a particular shape and materiality, shrines give particular density to complex sets of religious associations, memories, moods, expectations, and communities. Shrines may be seen as sites of condensation of more dispersed religious realities, places where meanings take on specific, tangible, and tactile presence. (p. 8376)

A shrine, then, is a very special kind of sacred space, in which we can experience heightened forms of intimacy and relationship with those who exist only in religious worlds. Bob Orsi defines religion itself in similar terms. Religion, he argues, is best understood not as an intellectual model of reality, but “as a network of relationships between heaven and earth involving humans of all ages and many different sacred figures… I can think of no religious world,” he writes, “that does not offer practitioners opportunities to form deep ties with saints, ancestors, demons, gods, ghosts, and other special beings”(2005).   (Click on Read More Button Below)

Keeping the Eostre in Easter

By:  Kenny Smith, see bio at Guest Blogger                                             

As Lauri Lebo recently noted in her March 23, 2010 Religion Dispatch post, “although most Christians assume that the ideas and practices surrounding the Easter holiday are native to Christianity, Easter’s historical origins in fact lie in the pre-Christian, pagan religious worlds of Northern Europe. “The word ‘Easter,’”  Lebo explains, “is actually the name of an ancient, heathen goddess who represents fertility, springtime, and the dawn.”  Contemporary Pagans, Wiccans, Heathens, Druids, and other such communities working to re-create, preserve, and practice various pre-Christian traditions (whom I will group together here under the term “Neo-Pagan”) agree entirely! Popular websites such as Covenant of the Goddess (http://www.cog.org/), Witches Voice (http://www.witchvox.com/), and Witchology (http://www.witchology.com/), discuss the ancient roots of the Easter holiday as grounded in Germanic goddess-figures alternately known as Eostre or Ostara. Some have also begun to suggest that we “not forget the REAL reason for the season!,” and work to “Keep the Eostre in Easter.” (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Keep-Eostre-in-Easter/308394504493) 

Now, we know that new and alternative movements, over time, typically grow more and more like the larger culture in which they live. A good example of this process (which scholars refer to as “accommodation”), can be seen in the Unificationist Church (popularly known as the Moonies).  As Barbara Bradley Hagerty reports in a recent story for NPR, with its membership “dwindling,” the Unificationist church has brought some of its teachings into greater alignment with the larger Western culture. For example, although marriages with the Unificationist community have been traditionally (and controversially) arranged by the movement’s founder, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, parents have now been granted the authority to arrange marriages for their own children. While past generations of converts were expected to sacrifice their careers and dedicate their lives to laboring on behalf of the church, personal achievement and financial success are now explicitly encouraged: “[t]oday, the church wants college valedictorians, not dropouts… [it] wants the second generation to fit into society — not fight it.”(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123805954) 

This raises a very interesting question about the direction in which American Neo-Pagan traditions are headed. When we think about 

 

Christian communities insisting that the Christmas holiday be configured in explicitly religious terms, rather than, a more secular holiday defined by bright and colorful lights, decorating a tree, giving gifts, the myth of Santa Claus, and spending celebratory time with fiends and family, images of a religious militancy seem as if they are not that far behind. Indeed, while I sometimes grow weary of Christmas shopping, I always dread the shrill religious voices demanding that I observe a Christmas defined along certain pre-approved, sectarian lines. 

Are American Neo-Pagans taking on some of these characteristics in their gradual accommodation to the larger culture? Can we expect increasingly shrill Neo-Pagan voices demanding adherence to sectarian understandings of Eostre over and above all competing others?  I would argue that this is unlikely to be case, and that efforts to “keep the Eostre in Easter” differ significantly from those to “keep the Christ in Christmas.” This is so for at least two reasons.   

Firstly, the positionality of Neo-Pagans within the broader culture differs radically from that of most Christians. While Christian communities often perceive themselves as a persecuted minority, as living in a time when all things Christian “are being discouraged and swept away,” this is a very difficult argument to sustain. As numerous sociological studies have shown, most Americans (72%) continue to self-identify as Christian, and most seats of political, economic, and social power are filled by those who see themselves as Christian. One suspects that, within some Christian communities, “being persecuted” has come to be mean “no longer enjoying an hegemonic presence” in American culture.  Neo–Pagans, however, occupy a very different position. While their numbers continue to grow at impressive rates, if grouped with all other “new movements,” they only represent approximately 1.2% of the adult population. (http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2009-03-09-american-religion-ARIS_N.htm) Consequently, they are much more likely to experience not only discrimination in various forms, but social invisibility.     

Secondly, unlike most Christian communities, Neo–Pagan traditions are not at all evangelical. They do not assume a mandate to make their worldview everyone else’s worldview, and so they do not actively seek converts. To the contrary, many such groups rebuff those who seek to join them and require the completion of lengthy periods of study (a year and a day is not uncommon), tests of competency, initiations, and group consensus as to the appropriateness of applicants, prior to admittance. In such contexts, rates of attrition may run as high as 90%.  Neo-Pagan traditions, then, tend to regard their own teachings and practices as suitable only for a small number of persons with particular interests and temperaments.   

Taken together, these differences suggest quite varied frames of reference for Christmas and Eostre purity concerns. Christians who seek to police the ways in which Christmas is conceptualized and lived are hoping to reestablish clear cultural control. For many, this is not simply a matter of preference, but a cosmological and eschatological necessity.   

For Neo-Pagans, who are better understood as a religious species recently returned from the brink of extinction, and who practice a largely esoteric religious craft, Eostre purity concerns represent an act of resistance and a struggle to assert one’s cultural identity within a culture where such Neo-Pagan identities are often demonized or unrecognized. 

Still, when we consider the sustained rates of growth with this community, the diffusion of its symbols into popular culture (e.g., in the Harry Potter novels and films), and the tendency towards accommodation over time, one wonders whether Neo-Pagan traditions 

Eostre

might come to resemble more closely the dominant religion in ways that could shift Eostre purity concerns in a different direction. In my own research with Wiccans, more than a few have expressed concerns about precisely this issue. “I’m not sure I would be comfortable,” a Wiccan priestess remarked to me several years ago, “if Wicca became the dominant religion in our culture, the way Christianity is now. I’m not sure I would it would remain ‘Wicca’ anymore.” 

Note – Read a complimentary article from the Religion Nerd’s archive:   Easter – Christian, Jewish, or Pagan?

“Christian Militias” and the Unpredictable Nature of Religious Diversity

 By: Kenny Smith,  See biography at Guest Blogger menu

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus is said to have taught that, “you cannot step into the same river twice,” because a river (like everything in the physical world) is continually changing and hence never the same. The implication of this insight for the study of religion can be profound: religions are also constantly changing, developing, becoming something new, and, to some degree, one can never step twice into the same church, synagogue, mosque, or temple, or religious tradition.

It is especially difficult for Westerners to think in these terms about religion.  Religions tend to have a great deal invested in the view that they represent unchanging truths, and so pointing to evidence of historical change may well be interpreted as an assault. Protestant ideas about a coming Rapture in which faithful Christians are plucked up and out of a hostile secular society, for example, are relatively new, arising in the late 19^th century.  Though many Rapturists read this theology back into the Bible and conclude that such teachings can be traced to the days of Jesus of Nazareth.  Also, as a culture, for the past three centuries or so we have tended to imagine the religious landscape in terms of distinct, walled-off religious institutions, such as “Christianity,” “Islam,” Buddhism,” “Judaism,” and so forth.  Taken together, these factors lead us to expect unchanging and uniform religious traditions where none in fact exist.   

Take, for example, what we call “Christianity.” There are currently some 2.5 billion Christians worldwide. About 1.1 billion are Catholic, 800-900 million are Eastern Orthodox, and 500-600 million are Protestant.  There are enormous theological differences separating these three branches (to say nothing of the many differences in language, culture, ethnicity, economics, politics, and history). For many Catholics and Protestants, it is Jesus’ death that makes salvation possible.  In this view, he is thought to have “paid the price” for all human sin, thus wiping away even the “original sins” of Adam and Eve.  In many Eastern Orthodox Christianities, however, notions of “original sin,” which first emerged in the 4^th century in Western Europe, never caught on.  Eastern Orthodox traditions tend to place much greater emphasis upon the birth of Jesus, in which God is thought to have taken physical form, and thus seriously “upgraded” human nature in important ways.

Catholics and Protestants, of course, differ profoundly as well.  In traditional Catholic teachings, the ideal (if not the only) path to God is through the religious institution that God Himself created and ordained, the Catholic (or “universal”) church, whereas for most Protestants one can go directly to God for forgiveness, atonement, understanding the Bible, knowing  how best to live, rather than relying upon an institution.  This may seem superficial, but it’s actually a very important difference about where religious authority (to determine what the Bible says, how to relate to God, how to live, how society should be structured, etc.) resides.  There is of course a great deal of diversity within each of these three branches.  Protestantism, for instance, is comprised of virtually thousands of denominations, Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Pentecostals, being some of the largest and most well-known.  The concept Protestant” (like “river”) may lead us to expect a unity of belief and practice, but there are in fact enormously important differences here as well, differences so profound that one kind of Protestant might have serious doubts about whether other kinds are really Christian at all!  In many Pentecostal churches, for instance, one cannot be certain that one is “saved” (going to heaven after this life) unless one displays the “charismata,” (“gifts of the Holy Spirit”) such as publicly speaking in tongues (usually in a church setting). The very loud, frenetic, highly emotional, and seemingly out of control behaviors associated with this religious experience, however, would for many other Protestants be regarded as a sign of mental illness, or even demonic influence, certainly not the salvific power of the divine.

Within Baptist denominations, one debate that has been going on for centuries involves fundamental notions about God’s power and human free will.  Some (often called Predestinationists) argue that, because God is in full control of everything that happens, he must have already determined, from the very beginnings of time, who will be saved and who will be damned.  Others, however, argue that because God is infinitely good, he would surely leave human beings free to decide for themselves, rather than determining in advance everyone’s fate.  My purpose here is not to resolve such disputes, but only to point out why one kind of Protestant might fail to recognize other kinds as not properly Christian.       

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