Embodiment, Western Style
In Medieval Europe — and indeed all across Eurasia — people were practicing religion as people had long practiced religion. It was about both thinking and doing. Mind and ritual.
Then, Protestantism happened.
Now, here’s the thing — the Anglican Church in England bailed out of the Reformation early. Thus, Anglican and Episcopal tradition contains a good deal of embodied practice — including meditation practices.
But as the Protestant reformation continued, more and more embodied practices got jettisoned, until finally what we had was what some historians of religion call “Cognitive Christianity.”
And that was the Christianity that first came into the United States, as Puritanism. Then Presbyterianism. Then Lutheranism.
Cognitive Christianity: it’s only about the neck, up. In Cognitive Christianity, the body is evil and makes us do things that our minds don’t want to do.
Those New England meeting houses were wooden boxes — pews and a pulpit. Any candle lighting was for the purposes of light only.
There was no stained glass. There were no crosses. No paintings or pictures or carvings. No cute angels. No “bells and smells.” No symbolism. It’s all in your mind.
That was the Puritan way. It became the Congregationalist way. Then the Unitarian way. It became the mainstream Protestant way here in the US, and it became the Humanist way.
But a funny thing happened on the way to complete dominance by Cognitive Christianity. In Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1800, people gathered for what would become known as a “camp meeting.” This particular event went on for about a week.
People danced ecstatically, laughed uncontrollably, cried uncontrollably, barked like dogs, and fell down as if they were dead and remained that way for hours. (Though they did not speak in tongues — that would begin about a hundred years later, at the Azusa Street Revival.)
At the Cane Ridge camp meeting, women began to spontaneously preach — something not allowed at the time. Enslaved Africans began to spontaneously preach — something not allowed at the time. And, perhaps most miraculously, white men listened.
At one point, there were something on the order of 25,000 people gathered at Cane Ridge. (That was 10% of the entire population of Kentucky at the time. The equivalent crowd nowadays would be 450,000.)
At Cane Ridge, Protestantism stopped being a neck-up religion. But the people affected were the backwoods people, the poor, and the oppressed. The same with the Azuza Street Revival.
And things remained that way until after the Second World War.
Then, large numbers of people who had grown up in Cognitive Christianity began to explore alternative and embodied traditions — Buddhist meditation, Hindu meditation, martial arts, yoga, Tai Chi , Chi Gong . . .
Some left cognitive Christianity entirely. Others remained but pursued embodied practices outside of churches and the Western tradition.
That search was especially prominent among religious liberals, such as Universalists and Unitarians.
And today we have a situation in which most Americans claim to be Christian, but most Americans don’t go to church, though the situation is exactly as it was when the Cane Ridge Revival occurred — the rural, the poor, and the oppressed do go to church. Because . . .
You get the picture.
So what do others do? Yoga, meditation, yes. But also gardening, nurturing, walking, even fixing motorcycles. Anything can be an embodied spiritual practice — it’s all about the frame of . . . mind.
