Presumably because I am a yoga teacher (professionally), and Southern Baptist (ethnically), I've been the beneficiary of multiple links to the recent story regarding the compatibility of yoga and Christianity, as understood by Albert Mohler.

This story makes me think of my family reunion down in Mississippi this summer.  I hadn't been there, to the reunion, in 17 years, and not to Mississippi at all since I'd gotten into yoga, so the experience of saying "I'm a yoga teacher" to a Southern Baptist was new.  Some had questions, some didn't.  Most heard, "I'm an exercise teacher," which is, honest to pete, folks, the truth.  More on that later.  Anyway, one guy answered loudly and demonstratively, "WHAT A SHAME THAT YOU'VE CHOSEN TO WORSHIP A DEAD GOD."  First words he'd spoken to me since I was a teen.  He went on to explain that he done won hundreds of souls to Jesus on a mission trip to India, and he seen the Buddha statues, and so he knew first hand that the god I worshiped, the Buddha, was made of stone, and rocked his wrinkled eyebrows side to side to feign sympathy for my chosen path to hell.  Ben Bounds, if you're out there, I've always wanted to tell you that I think you're an asshole.  Furthermore, everyone I've ever known to experience a "conversation" with you has felt like they were held hostage by the rudest man on Earth.  And I'm talking about your fellow Christians, man.  My mom is going to be really mad at me for saying that, but only because she's embarrassed that she's never been able to deal with you either.  Anyway.  There are a lot of points to cover here so I better get to it.

For Ben Bounds: 1. Yoga and Buddha are not related to one another (you meant to reference Hinduism, probably, but yoga is also not Hindu, look it up), and 2. the man that came to be called Buddha is not a god, and he explicitly taught this to his students.  In fact, Buddha's primary historical achievement involved planting the seed for what would become the world's first (maybe only?) major religion which has no god or man at its head.  It is only called a religion, I think, because people don't know where to put things they don't already have a drawer for.

Now, one really interesting thing about "making arguments" for this or that thing is that it's got to be taken into account that not everyone values the same principles with the same priority, and so, for example, using reason to defend an idea will only feel right and true to someone for whom reason is regarded very highly.  I know some of you think I'm being snappy and making fun of the faithful a little bit here, by saying that they don't value things that make sense or something, but I'm not really saying that, and I am in fact one of those people that doesn't feel like the scientific method is the end all be all.  There are a lot of ways to "know" something.  In fact, I place a lot of value on the unknown, on failure and contradiction and mystery.  My point here is that you can say to Albert Mohler that Buddha, if Albert were concerned about Buddha, said he is not a god, but he is not going to hear that, because if there's one thing about Buddhism that is widely recognized, it's those cute little Buddha statues, and statues, a.k.a. graven Images, are an outright violation of the second commandment, end of story.  Reason and explanation, to Southern Baptist Christians, is (and should be?) secondary or even thirdiary or fourthiary to the word of God, meaning, the Bible.  (Interpretation problems are a big deal, I'm not ignoring that, but most Baptists agree that Buddha statues are out of the question, nevermind the fact that nobody is afraid they are worshiping GI Joe or whatever when they buy an action figure.  Nonetheless, this interpretation of the second commandment is why Baptists more often use  an empty cross to represent Jesus than, say, a statue of Jesus, in places of worship.  This is also one reason why Baptists get squirmy if they have to hang out with Catholics at pro-life rallies or wherever else they intersect.  Hard to be like-minded with someone who prays to all those damned plaster saints.)

I bring up the making arguments thing because I have to explain why Christians might not be into yoga even though there is no rational reason why they shouldn't be, but it's difficult due to the fact that there are a lot of different kinds of Christians.  For the sake of argument, I'm going to have to stick with the Baptist flavor in order to stay organized here.  Also, it is the one I am most familiar with, so that's a plus.  (If I were going to be talking to a Catholic, though, I'd have an easier time of it I bet, because they aren't as squeamish about foreign languages, chanting and ritual in general, and tend not to have trouble understanding symbolism, hence, the concept of one divinity expressed in multiple ways may not rub them as hard.  Who knows.  I don't, because I wasn't allowed to hang out with Catholics that much growing up.  Sigh.)

If I were speaking to a Baptist in their first yoga class, I would explain yoga to that Baptist as a practice like prayer is a practice.  Christians pray and Hindus pray and Muslims pray and they all do it differently and in accordance with their faith.  Who invented prayer first?  I don't know.  Yoga is the same deal except that we know who invented yoga, kind of.  Yoga grew up alongside Hinduism in India, but has developed into what we know of it today (the exercise part) only about 150 years ago, as an extension of some earlier attempts, we think, to be more comfortable while sitting in meditation.  The first yogic text, the Rig Veda, recently re-dated at 3,000 BCE, has no mention of asana (physical) practice as we know it.  The roots of yoga are meditation.  Pure and simple.  The idea was that people might sit and be quiet in order to be healthy, but also so that we might do so in order to be in contact with the divine.  Here is where Christians get flustered.  "Did you just say the divine?  There is only one divine, and He only wrote one book, so what impostor wrote this one?"

I get it.  It is hard to handle the idea that that one divine being could have inspired someone other than the dudes that penned the Bible.  But maybe these things will help unrattle your cage.  As far as I know, which isn't far, but it's something, no yogic text claims to be the word of god.  Neither do the earliest texts describe the divine specifically, or give him/her/it a name. The praises that are sung are sung to the teacher, in thanks for showing the students a good way of life.  Those praises, essentially thank you cards from students, are chanted (a kind of singing without pitches) in Sanskrit, which sounds "spooky" to Baptists because they are accustomed to singing in major keys on a Western diatonic scale in English.  I swear to you that there is about as much spooky stuff happening in Sanskrit chants as there is when we sing The Star Spangled Banner, a praise most of us agree to sing which is not a praise of anything holy.  That said, I do not often chant in Sanskrit in my classes because my classes are made up of English-speaking Westerners for whom the chants have zero meaning and seem artificial, like white kids getting tattoos of their own name phonetically in Chinese characters, even though they are not Chinese, have never been to China, and would not know if their tattooer inked "dumb ass" instead.  I'm all for multiculturalism, friends, and I don't think I should only be allowed to practice white people things because I'm a white person.  (Please, please Jesus, may I never be bound to the confines of white people things.)  I just find that there are places to go to chant in Sanskrit for folks that want to, and for everyone else, there's my class.

All that said, Albert Mohler's argument remains that yoga just isn't Christian, and to that I say, YES, SIR, you are absolutely right.  You know what else isn't Christian?  Christmas Day.  Jesus was born in the summer, says fact.  December 25th was chosen to compete with the Pagan Solstice celebration.  So cross that off the calendar.  Actually, cross the whole calendar off the calendar, because the names of the days of the week are all Pagan, and the months were named after Roman deities.  The fact of the matter is that, even if Jesus were the only true path to heaven, and let's just pretend He is for a second and we are all Christians here, we have a lot of things to do which aren't Christian.  The systems we must work with to accomplish the simplest daily activities are not Christian because we do not live in a Christian universe, we live in a universal universe.  There's lots going on in here folks, and Jesus, if the stories are true, never asked anyone to isolate themselves in a Christian theme park.  In fact, Jesus was really into hanging out with hookers and thieves, and you know what he didn't do while he hung out with them?  Give them shit about not being Christian.  To put it another way, Jesus was really influential because he didn't act like Ben Bounds.  (That was free advice, Ben.  You'll win more souls when you step off your self-aggrandizing pedestal and start acting like a respectful human being.)

There is some talk about being "in the world but not of it."  A lot of Baptists focus on the "not of it" part by disengaging from non-Christian ideas or activities, completely forgetting the "in the world" part.  To me, being in the world but not of it means that I am a participant, that I engage in my community, my environment, my government (maybe), but that I do so while maintaining a sharp and sturdy consciousness about who I am.  I've carried a lot of memberships cards, after all.  I have been and sometimes still am an American, a woman, a musician, a queer, a Southerner, a vegetarian, a smoker, a Christian, a member of the jury.  I have loyalty and responsibility to "my people," but my people are many, and not all of them are on the same team, which means I need to know what citizenship is primary to me.  For me, it is important to my spiritual health that my connection to the divine (whatever it may be) supersedes all other connections.  (I fuck this up a lot, for the record.)

As for me being an exercise teacher, the cat's out of the bag, folks.  I teach a group fitness class.  In fact, lots of times while I do it, I am not thinking about raising the consciousness of my students, I am thinking about making my ass look better in pants.  Hey, don't judge.  I have poor genes for ass-roundedness, as it turns out.  It's my cross to bear, so to speak.  I digress.  So, sure, there are deeper principles behind what I do which guide how and why I do it, but honestly, I can tell you that my dear friend Jose, a violin teacher, is at least if not more spiritually guided than I am in his teaching practice.  As is my other dear friend Rene, in her practice of selling out-of-doors-enjoyment products.  Yoga is not Christian (neither is this, btw), but it is spiritual, and so is everything else in the universal universe, friends.  Much love to Albert Mohler, and Patanjali, and all y'all who sent me all those ding dang links, and even some highly reluctant love to Ben Bounds, as if it would do him any good, the jerk.