The Bible is for Yogis
By: Jonathan Poletti
Tags: Spirituality, Religion, Yoga, Christianity, Life

The Bible is for Yogis

Christianity conceals how “Eastern” the scriptures really are

I grew up an Evangelical community which saw the central spiritual act as sitting in a pew, listening to a man speak. I wasn’t too interested in that. I didn’t think he had much to say. But when I started to go to yoga classes—that was interesting.

It felt problematic. I wouldn’t tell anyone from church. Wasn’t it Hindu? Weren’t we good people at war with yoga? I’d see the stories. Back in May, some Baptist pastors got public schools to drop yoga for students.

Among the arguments they cite—Evangelicals doing yoga tend to stop being Evangelical.

I just know that, for me, yoga class felt…spiritual?

I’d walk into studio space, and be present with myself. I realized that for the first time, actually, I could think about nothing else, just being there. I could focus on being and becoming.

In church I’d been asked to pummel myself with talk of being a ‘sinner’, wicked, judged, evil. But in yoga class I was asked to focus on myself as opening and extending.

I guess that made me feel better, and if having to choose between “religion” and my feelings, I realized, I’d choose my feelings. I’d gone on to become interested in ‘energy work’. I took Reiki classes.

That felt spiritual too, but I suspected I’d left “Christianity” behind.

When I started to read Bible scholarship, I realized the case against yoga was pretty thin.

The anti-yoga Bible reference most often cited is a ban, in Leviticus 20:6, on . . . sorcery.

And there was quite a bit more material that I was surprised by, and for which the only context I had would be . . . yoga class? Like the lotuses.

I didn’t know the Bible is full of lotuses until reading a 2005 paper by W. Derek Suderman, “Modest or Magnificent? Lotus versus Lily in Canticles,” which claims that the the lily referenced in the Bible had been mistranslated. It was actually a lotus.

But this is a flower found often—like in the Song of Songs. As Suderman notes, it seems to be an emblem of biblical Israel (1 Ki 7:26; 8:19, 22; 2 Chr 4:5). The lotus was, he noted, was seen as a symbol in Egypt, in many places, as a sign of sexuality, and of resurrection.

I noticed all the incense and perfume in the Bible, though Evangelicalism would find both religiously unacceptable.

I’d noticed scholarship on the origins of yoga suggesting it wasn’t that old, and was substantially Christian.

As Mark Singleton details in a 2010 history, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice, what we’d encounter in a studio now is not that old.

‘Yoga’, in any recognizable form, was a development of 19th century colonial India. In the mix were Western and Christian influences: the YMCA, Swedish gymnastics, calisthenics, bodybuilding, and a theological movement called ‘muscular Christianity’.

And what was old, and Hindu, hadn’t been an exclusive practice of that spiritual path. James Mallinson notes the first yogic text to systematize a progression of postures offered them to all “wise men.”

I followed the fascinating story of yoga being developed in colonial India, and then used as a tool to help the Indian people recover from the British assault. So often called “effeminate” by the colonialists, yoga practitioners in India focused on strengthening physically and spiritually—an oppressed people learning, and asserting, personal power.

I began to wonder if the asanas of yoga, and Christian postures, were really that different.

Thinking about religiously approved poses—there actually were many of them—I realized there was sort of a similar yoga pose.

Does Christianity have a ‘child’s pose’? On the left is a Christian man doing a Christian activity. On right—a woman doing yoga.