What happens when yoga goes to church? From a word-centered to a body-centered religiosity?

Yoga in church is a relatively new phenomenon. From being a practice associated with “Eastern” religiosity and culture, yoga is today widespread in the Western world, and can be found in places such as gyms, schools, and health care. More recently, yoga has also traveled into new religious spaces, such as Christian monasteries and churches (Brown, 2018; King, 2022; Lundgren, Plank et al. 2023). This paper explores this phenomenon by taking departure in a qualitative empirical study of yoga services in the Church of Norway (CoN) and the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Denmark (ELCD). In the Nordic majority churches, yoga started as a pop-up event in inner city churches about a decade ago but has eventually become an everyday activity in a wide range of majority church congregations (Lundgren, Plank et al. 2023). We ask: What happens when yoga goes to church? A particular focus is on how discontinuities are simultaneously re-established and bridged, especially regarding bodily movements. We argue that in these services, a dual boundary process of bodily hybridization on the one hand and wordily purification on the other takes place, displaying how discontinuities are both re-established and bridged.

Methodologically, the study takes departure in a qualitative study of yoga services in the Church of Norway (CoN) and the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Denmark (ELCD). The material consists of participant observation and informal interviews of yoga activities in nine churches in ELCD and CoN. In addition, the paper draws on a survey with answers from 31 churches offering yoga activities. 

The paper places itself within the study of religion and sports, although yoga is only occasionally treated as sport. Still, the discussion of yoga in church is relevant for the study field of religion and sports, as it involves the question of how a bodily activity that today is often found in gyms suddenly appears as part of Christian worship services. This relevance may be further supported by the material of the study, where some of the informants reflect upon how doing yoga in church sometimes feels like being at the gym.

Theoretically, the study approaches yoga in church as a boundary practice, that is, as a practice bridging two different social practices, bringing about something new. According to Akkerman and Bakker, a boundary is ‘a sociocultural difference leading to discontinuity in action or interaction’ (Akkerman and Bakker, 2011). It nevertheless carries a ‘sameness or continuity in the sense that within discontinuity two or more sites are relevant to one another in a particular way’ (Ibid.). Thus, a boundary is characterized by both difference and sameness. A Christian yoga service may be seen as a boundary practice, bridging yoga and Church services as two different social practices, where yoga and Church services are made relevant to one another in some specific ways. We explore how this bridging of sameness and difference is negotiated. 

Thus, we are interested in what kind of negotiations that take place in such a meeting, especially regarding potential processes of hybridization and purification. The paper asks: What happens when yoga goes to church? What happens when the practice of yoga and the practice of a Church service meet? How are discontinuities simultaneously re-established and bridged? 

One of our main conclusions is that the yoga mat as a boundary object contributes significantly to destabilizing the boundary between church service and yoga as two different social practices. For example, the active use of the yoga mat to do typical bodily yoga postures, such as ´downward facing dog´ and ‘happy child’, introduces new ways of bodily movements in the church and contributes to bridging church and yoga. Furthermore, this use of the mat corresponds to what we in the survey identify as a main motivation of the yoga-service; to exchange a word-centered religiosity with a more body-centered religiosity. This strong emphasis on the body comes forth also in how the yoga-instructor and the pastor in these services typically encourage the participants to “listen to the body”. Thus, our first finding is that when the practice of yoga meets a Church service, a bridging hybridization process of bodily discontinuity occurs. 

However, processes of re-establishing boundaries can also be found. This concerns primarily how the yoga mat is not used. In the introductory part of the service, where the pastor conducts a brief liturgy, everyone sits on their mats. But, in this part of the service, the mats are used similarly to the pews, simply to sit on. Thus, the yoga mat is not used to transform the liturgy in a more bodily centered direction.  Instead, the spoken liturgy is rather traditional and contains a lot of words, and the same words as in a regular church service. Therefore, the liturgy part, which is centered around words, is kept intact and different from yoga practice. Demarcation lines are constructed through “silencing” the yoga mats. Hence, our second finding is that when yoga goes to church, difference is re-established by a word-centered purification process.

In conclusion, we argue that the dual boundary process of bodily hybridization on the one hand and wordily purification on the other, shows how discontinuities are both bridged and re-established. Further, we argue that this might help explain why yoga is uncontested and warmly welcomed within the Lutheran majority churches in Norway and Denmark.