For this World Religions class I'm teaching, I troll the web for good stuff to put on Blackboard--extra credit stuff for the students. Last week I put up this indictment of yoga that Albert Mohler, former President of Southern Baptist Seminary, penned last fall. Riffing on Stefanie Syman's book The Subtle Body, Mohler maintains that yoga as exercise is inseparable from Hindu spirituality. For Mohler, either you aren't doing yoga or you're dabbling in the occult:
To a remarkable degree, the growing acceptance of yoga points to the retreat of biblical Christianity in the culture. Yoga begins and ends with an understanding of the body that is, to say the very least, at odds with the Christian understanding. Christians are not called to empty the mind or to see the human body as a means of connecting to and coming to know the divine. Believers are called to meditate upon the Word of God — an external Word that comes to us by divine revelation — not to meditate by means of incomprehensible syllables.
Um, there's actually this thing called the Christian ascetic tradition. They never really were down with Origen's theology, but they were totally in the tank for his "the body is the workbench on which the Christian could fashion a heaven-bound soul" meme. But monks, by and large, weren't Southern Baptists, so Mohler can safely ignore them.
In a rather smug-sounding follow-up post, Mohler notes that his anti-yoga screed resulted in an inbox of hate mail, none of which addressed the biblical or theological issues, most of which was composed by women.
Did you notice that misogynist bridge linking observations one and two?
It does seem necessary to bring a bag full of proof texts to any debate with a Southern Baptist. Here's my two, Ephesians 1: 9-10 and Exodus 12: 36. Regarding the first, I assume that all means all, thus there is nothing that, in principle, cannot be integrated into the kingdom of God, although all things will certainly have to be modified a bit. Including yoga.
That second text is most helpful and has a long history of being applied to just such situations. Just as the Hebrews plundered the Egyptians, Christians can appropriate non-Christian cultures and intellectual traditions for their own purposes.
A case in point is the doctrine of the Trinity, which Mohler would certainly affirm, but which cannot be read straight off the pages of the Good Book (just look in your concordance for the word "Trinity"). The Cappadocians and Augustine constructed a doctrine of the Trinity out of Neoplatonism, which was basically mysticism for pagans, without undue damage to their immortal souls. I'm sure today's Christians can use yoga to accomplish the far more modest goals of relaxation or weight loss without skating too close to the edge of the abyss.
Bear with me for one more historical example. Pope Gregory once wrote a letter to another Augustine who was busy converting the Angles and Saxons in Briton. He advised Augustine not to tear down pagan temples, but to fumigate them with holy water and incense, and re-open them under new, Christian management.
Now what the Pope didn't know was that Angles and Saxons didn't worship in temples, but he can be forgiven for assuming so since he lived in a city full of 'em. But the point is that the exterior form is irrelevant. It's the interior substance that counts.
In the end, what makes anything Christian or not is the God to whom it is referenced. And that's why Christians can do yoga.
Mohler's real fear is multiculturalism. He assumes it leads to syncretism and finally to apostasy. And Mohler's denomination has roots in a regional theology that equates Christianity with white supremacy. True, the Southern Baptists have formally repented of their institutional support for slavery, but I suspect they're the opposite of the Anglo-Saxon Christianity Pope Gregory was trying to create: they've changed on the outside but not within. So white Americans contorting themselves like brown-skinned Asians must be disturbing.
It's in this light that we should ponder Mohler's inclusion of Syman's anecdote about Michelle Obama incorporating yoga into the White House Easter Egg roll. People who already think that a black guy with a Muslim name in the White House is the abomination that causes desolation will get the point: the First Lady is a Jezebel, polluting the city on a hill with foreign deities.
These people already pray for the President in a highly ironic sense. So I wonder if the end of 2 Kings 9 will be the new obscure but highly significant proof text for fundamentalists. It's just not Prayer of Jabez times we're living in.
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