American Culture, Charles Taylor, Church of Scientology, Commerical Advertising, Gold's Gym, Kenny Smith, Need Him Ministries, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Religion Nerd, Scientology, Tim Keller



By: Kenny Smith

Gold’s Gym and the Church of Scientology have recently featured some very interesting commercial videos on their websites, videos that have also (to some degree) ventured out into the broader culture. The Gold’s videos are shown regularly on the many television screens typically located throughout Gold’s Gyms, over treadmills, stationary-bikes, ski-machines, free-weights, and in locker rooms and rest areas. The Scientology commercials air occasionally on the SyFy cable television network.

Both sets of commercials are extraordinarily upbeat, offering clear paths for reinventing and revitalizing one’s self. At Gold’s, we are told, we can burn off junk food, deserts, beer, and bad habits, add a few years to our life, feel stronger and lighter, gain the respect and admiration of others, look better naked, and increase our sex drive. With Scientology, we can transcend past mistakes, realize our deepest desires, and discover our most authentic selves. For, we are assured,

You are not your name. You’re not your job. You’re not the clothes you wear, or the neighborhood you live in. You’re not your fears, your failures, or your past. You are hope, You are imagination. You are the power to change, to create, and to grow. You are a spirit that will never die, and no matter how beaten down, you will rise again. Scientology. Know yourself. Know life. (http://www.scientology.org/#/videos/scientology-commercial-you)

Oddly, though, it is only Gold’s Gym that refers to itself as a community, an institution to which one must commit oneself to receive the desired rewards. Amidst a continual stream of carefully selected images mostly of young, attractive, well-toned women and men engaged in weight lifting, yoga, cycling, running, mountain climbing, boxing, or some other competitive sport, interspersed with inspiring scenes from nature (e.g., two rams colliding on a mountain top), high energy rock music plays in the background and lines of gold script scroll across the screen, announcing:

This is more than a gym. This is a movement. A movement to redefine strength, commit to our goals, to prove we can do anything. This is more than a gym. It’s 44 years of strength, of success, of sweat. This is more than a gym. This is where you get inducted, into the strongest club in the world. KNOW YOUR OWN STRENGTH.

Scientology, on the other hand, while presenting itself as a profound source of self-knowledge and healing, expressly avoids any reference to itself as “a place where you get inducted,” an institution to which one must commit oneself in order to receive the proffered existential goods. This leads to a rather intriguing question: why does Gold’s Gym employ precisely the sort of language that Scientology avoids? Why does the secular commercial gym present itself as a movement, but the religious movement present itself as a highly individualistic endeavor that requires no commitment whatsoever?

The first part of this riddle is fairly easily solved. It is not difficult to see why Scientology does not emphasize its institutional aspects. These commercials hope to attract potential converts, and also improve Scientology’s public image. Since its emergence in the early 1950s with the highly creative religious efforts of founder L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology has been poorly received by the broader American culture. While Americans (if not human beings generally) tend to react negatively to new religious movements whose myths, behaviors, and modes of social organization differ significantly from those of the dominant culture, the Church’s policy of aggressive retaliation (typically through lawsuits) against those who have publicly criticized it have amplified negative public perceptions. ( Press button to continue reading)

Also, the highly individualistic nature of American culture encourages a preference for individualized, rather than institutionalized, expressions of religiosity. This is evident in the large numbers of Americans who self-identify as “spiritual, but not religious,” and evangelicals who see themselves as practicing the Gospel, rather than religion. Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, for instance, makes this distinction in an essay that can be found on any number of popular evangelical blogs: religion, he explains, is predicated upon fear, insecurity, selfish desires to “get things from God,” and a willingness to adhere to shallow institutional rules in order to be accepted into a community; the Gospel, on the other hand, begins with God’s acceptance of us as we are as sinners, followed naturally by a “joyful gratefulness” on our part, a sincere desire to obey, and a truly authentic relationship with Christ. (http://cccblaine.com/site/2009/05/14/tim-keller-on-religion-vs-the-gospel/) A similar sense of Christian identity is evident in a recent video commercial for Need Him Ministries (http://needhim.org/), also airing on the SyFy network. Entitled, “Something’s Not Right,” this video suggests “a way out of loneliness and fear,” and all of the ills said to stem from “separation from God.” This path to “forgiveness, hope, and freedom… is not about church or religion, but about a relationship (with Jesus), one you need, now and forever.”

Taken together, these factors go a long way towards explaining why the Church of Scientology advertisements sidestep completely its nature as a religious institution. The more difficult (and interesting) question is, why do the Gold’s videos emphasize the sort of community-based language that Scientology avoids? If Americans are as individualistic as we tend to think they are, wouldn’t we expect savvy advertisements to sidestep such potential minefields as well?

The work of Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher, shed’s some helpful light on this question. In The Ethics of Authenticity (1991), Taylor points out that, whereas in previous centuries the meaning and purpose of human lives was determined by the social and religious hierarchies into which people were born, in our age, the meaning and purpose of our lives is determined by us (rather than for us). This is what Taylor calls “the massive subjective turn of modern culture,” one in which an inner search for authentic selves and authentic lives has come to take on tremendous significance. One advantage of this historical shift is that people have a far greater range of options available to them. One disadvantage is that our lives can become rather isolated, largely disconnected from those around us, and we can also begin to worry that nothing has any real, objective, meaning.

Taylor’s theory helps us to see how the community-based language in the Gold’s commercials might actually prove successful in our highly individualistic society. If meaning in our culture is determined by looking within rather than without, what kinds of communities would we be willing to join? Typically speaking, those that required of us only what we already wanted to do. Anything suggesting that we go beyond this point, that we work towards goals transcending the intuitions of the self, may well be perceived as misguided, or even as somehow threatening. Citing an example of how intimately this cultural pattern plays out in our lives, Taylor writes,

It’s not just that people sacrifice their love relationships, and the care of their children, to pursue their careers. Something like this has perhaps always existed. The point is that today many people feel called to do this, feel they ought do this, feel their lives would be somehow wasted or unfulfilled if they didn’t do it.

Indeed, one suspects that much of the outrage over recent healthcare legislation requiring Americans to eventually purchase health insurance (albeit with significant financial assistance), as well as staunch refusals to fill out 2010 Census information (even by elected officials within the U.S, government http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-5095844-503544.html), finds its cultural origins in precisely these cultural dynamics: if the ultimate arbiter of meaning resides within me, how can I be justly required to purchase something I do not want to purchase, or, for that matter, to do anything I do not wish to do?

It’s not difficult to see why Taylor worried that our “ethics of authenticity” might well lead to profound levels of social fragmentation, and a culture in which we find it virtually impossible to commit to projects that transcend the narrow interests of our individual selves. If Taylor is correct, and we do in fact live in an age in which personal authenticity lies at the heart of our cultural ethos, then Gold’s Gym is certainly “more than a gym.” It is clearly “a movement,” one that thrives precisely because it asks of its members only what they already wish to give, and do, and be.