Spiritual Bundling

From Peloton to QAnon

Michelle Boorstein wrote a fascinating article on Christianity + Peloton.

With hundreds of thousands of new riders streaming into Peloton’s virtual community during the pandemic, it has become a prime testing ground for certain questions: How does a modern-day meaning-making community work? And is there room for old-school religion?

The CEO, John Foley, calls these spiritualized health gatherings “our identity, community, religion.” If you don’t know what Peloton is, it’s a stationary bicycle that allows monthly subscribers to remotely participate in classes that are streamed from the company's fitness studio. But the classes can take a deeper meaning for participants: “Demands quickly flip from how high to crank your hill to how honest you’re willing to be with yourself to how thankful you are. There are frequent, if general, references to forces bigger than one’s self.” They play music from rapper J. Cole to worship songs by Steven Curtis Chapman, using language familiar to religious communities like “moments of grace” and calls to “surrender yourself.”

Tara Isabella Burton elsewhere describes this phenomena as “unbundling”:

Suspicious of institutions, authorities, and creeds, this demographic is less likely to attend a house of worship, but more likely to practice the phenomenon Harvard Divinity School researchers Casper ter Kuile and Angie Thurston have termed “unbundling”: a willingness to effectively “mix and match” spiritual, ritualistic, and religious practices from a range of traditions, divorced from their original institutional context. 

But Boorstein makes the point that the things that use to bring us transcendence (worship, scriptures, social justice, life transitions) we find now is several different places, unlike in previous generations that found these things in one congregation. The irony she observes is that the resistance of “institutional religion” has transitioned to a growing level of comfort for cult-like activity. Casper ter Kuile notes this irony: “They’d trust Peloton as a cult but not the Catholic Church as a religion.”

Read that quote again.

Gym brands, he added, often embrace the cult label with “a wry smile. Like: ‘Oh, it’s a cult but I love it.’”

I found this article interesting for two reasons:

One, it absolutely makes sense of how I experience my neighbors, that they have a distaste for organized religion but articulate their experiences in their clubs and groups they associate with in transcendent and meaning-making terms.

But it also makes sense of other’s fascination and obsessive, cult-like behavior towards Q-Anon. Peloton tends to bring in more progressive cult-like behavior, while Q-Anon far right. But both are looking for transcendence and to be a part of something bigger themselves. You could say about far corners of conservative communities, “They’d trust Q-Anon as a cult but not the Catholic Church as a religion.”

Even more, both see transcendence as an enhancement to their lives rather than something that forms and obligates them. In previous generations or societies, transcendence or religion was what formed our behavior, worldviews, and habits. Now we see it as an enhancement to our already formulated behavior, worldviews, and habits. Modern people want transcendent, meaning-making things to be an extension of their identity rather than a God who creates it. Instead of a covenant that binds us, we use a login and password.

This is secularism and the dangers of it are not partial to either left or right.

---

Last week I spent a few hours in the morning walking around a deserted Coney Island. I’ve never been there in the Winter and the boardwalk was freezing. It’s such a fascinating place. And no, I did not swim.