Following up on my previous post, New York Times, F3 (Fitness, Fellowship, Faith): A Cure For Middle-Age Male Loneliness?: New York Times Op-Ed: The Church of Group Fitness, by Jessica Grose:
The last installment of my series on Americans moving away from organized religion was about the sense of community as the one inarguably positive attribute of mainstream houses of worship that can be tough to replicate in the secular world. After that story ran, I heard from readers about ways they’ve been able to form close bonds after they’d stopped attending services, and group athletics came up over and over as a way that people are creating community in the 21st century. … [M]any … talked about replacing their weekend worship with SoulCycle, CrossFit or Orangetheory, and finding friends and even some spiritual solace in those activities. …
Jeffrey Johnson, 62, who lives in Illinois just north of St. Louis, first heard about CrossFit from someone he met on a church mission trip to Haiti. He and his wife tried a few different churches, but stopped attending services because the ones they had joined felt too cliquish. But they found community — and more — in CrossFit, a group class that involves a variety of high-intensity exercises and weight lifting. “The one thing I feel out of CrossFit is, it’s kind of goofy, but it’s unconditional love,” Johnson told me. “Like, my coaches, even if I don’t hit the mark, whatever that mark is, they still care for me.”
Casper ter Kuile, the author of The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities Into Soulful Practices, studied CrossFit and SoulCycle when he was a student at Harvard Divinity School, and told me that he observed some of the “mutuality” that Johnson experienced when he talked to CrossFit devotees. CrossFitters write down their fitness goals on a whiteboard and, whether a goal is comparatively big or small, “goals are honored with the same amount of dignity and celebration.” There’s a feeling that you have the agency to meet your goals and that the community is also involved in your success. There’s also a lot of evangelizing for CrossFit that can parallel the outreach or recruitment aspect of religious worship. …
For those who might dismiss all this out of hand — I can hear some of you scoffing at the idea that riding a stationary bike can push the same emotional buttons as traditional worship — there’s evidence that doing the same movements in a group can open you up to prosocial behavior.
David DeSteno, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and the host of the “How God Works” podcast, told me that when people are engaged in synchronous activity, “think of pedaling bikes together, think of lifting weights together, dancing together, whatever it might be, that is a marker to the mind that these individuals are part of a larger whole.” …
I have no dog in the fight of whether people are religious, or how they incorporate spirituality in their lives. I do think it’s important for people to feel a sense of purpose and fulfillment, and the people I spoke to were getting that out of their group classes. Johnson described it as “getting fed.” The megachurch he last attended wasn’t feeding him the way CrossFit does. “I always felt like going to the service was like going to a performance,” he said, and that just didn’t hold meaning for him anymore.
Father Mike, Five Things the Church Can Learn Fromm CrossFit:
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