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)