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What does White Christian nationalism have to do with yoga?
In his new book, Stewart Home analyzes the wellness-to-fascism pipeline.
Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists, and the New Order in Wellness
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About ten years ago, I got yelled at in a hot yoga class. Though my misdemeanor—giggling with a friend over our attempted postures—didn’t seem serious, the instructor separated us and made us do our poses in secluded corners. Afterward, we laughed loudly, but the experience was unsettling. I’d signed up for an invigorating physical workout but gotten a flashback to the authoritarian, far-right religious leaders from my teen years.
Today, many in holistic living circles who practice yoga and eat organic have made common cause with the far-right MAGA movement. As a former eco-grower who grew up largely off the grid, I have spent years trying to understand what is often called the wellness-to-fascism pipeline, having seen it happen in real time. In the United States today, fascism is often found among White Christian nationalists, who are less likely to practice yoga than to demonize it. Yet in Fascist Yoga, Stewart Home—who has observed strands of fascism in the British radical arts counterculture—provides insight on how it connects with Western yoga trends.
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The practice of postural yoga, according to Home, is mostly a modern invention, despite some yogis’ claims to tap into ancient Eastern wisdom. Yoga as we know it in Western culture got its start in the early 20th century, a time of widespread fascination with all things “oriental,” as well as of cultural elites turning to secret societies like the Theosophical Society or the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as an escape from fin de siècle ennui. Often this involved indulging in unrestrained hedonism in the guise of spiritual enlightenment.
It was in this environment that various eccentric and unsavory characters helped popularize yoga. Pierre Bernard, who founded the Tantrik Order in America in 1906, may have invented the modern postural practice of yoga, though he attributed his learning to a (probably imaginary) guru. One of Bernard’s disciples, Francis Yeats-Brown, was a fan of Hitler and Mussolini. Several leading Nazis were also taken with yoga, which they associated with pure “Aryan” spirituality, in contrast with “Semitic” religions. The SS even recommended yoga to death camp guards, to help them relax after the rigors of genocide.
In 1937, notorious occultist Aleister Crowley—who dabbled in various esoteric rituals, including blood sacrifice and sex magic—showed up as one of the first people to teach yoga in England. And let’s not leave out the literary avant-garde: modernist poet and fascist sympathizer Ezra Pound promoted yoga as a cure for drug addiction and an antidote to communism.
Many of the gurus Home describes sound like cult leaders. They employed patterns of manipulation, abuse, and sexual assault that carried on through various stages of yoga’s development throughout the 20th century. Contemporary yoga practitioners will recognize the name of John Friend, inventor of Anusara yoga, who was at the center of multiple scandals involving inappropriate relationships, drug abuse, and nude rituals. And Bikram Choudhury, the inventor of hot yoga, was charged with a series of sexual assaults.
Other characters intertwined with the history of modern yoga emerge as just plain grifters. In the first half of the 20th century, Indra Devi, for instance, made outlandish claims about yoga’s restorative benefits. She also introduced yoga to Hollywood and became the personal trainer for several stars, including Greta Garbo. Home describes Devi as “an occult crank,” but she lived to be over 100—in contrast to other health gurus who touted yoga’s miraculous powers and then died in their middle years.
While Home does not argue that yoga itself is fascist, he calls attention to the many fascists involved in popularizing it. He notes that many “rune-loving, tarot card-reading, spiritualist-inclined, Hitler-obsessed racist reactionaries” associated with the “underground neofolk scene” are yoga enthusiasts.
Home doesn’t argue that practicing yoga will make you a fascist, either. But his research suggests that practicing yoga with certain expectations might predispose you to fascism—because many ideologies associated with fascism are also woven into the rhetoric around yoga.
“The combination of essentialism and anti-empiricism that is prevalent among modern yoga practitioners makes them particularly susceptible to both occult delusions and fascist conspiratorialism,” Home writes. For instance, the authoritarian relationship between gurus and their students mirrors the “fascist ideal of the relationship between the Führer and the masses.” Home also addresses the yogic focus on purity, whether spiritual or physical. Additionally, yoga that’s marketed as a path of spiritual enlightenment for initiates appeals to those craving membership in a special in-group. Alt-right manosphere influencers who hawk weird purgation diets and practice mixed martial arts to tap into their “warrior spirit” also tend to be drawn to yoga.
It’s worth noting that many of these mindsets also appear in strains of Western Christianity. Home observes that yoga can encourage individualistic self-absorption, a “focus on personal transformation at the expense of genuine social change.” To me, this sounds a lot like the evangelical Christian prioritization of a “personal relationship with Jesus,” or traditionalist Catholic emphasis on personal holiness—to the neglect of Christianity’s communal dimension.
Home’s research looks largely at the history of yoga in the West, and readers seeking clarity about the practice’s deeper cultural roots may emerge from Fascist Yoga a little bewildered. This is partially because the term yoga is ambiguous, referring, as Home clarifies, both to a “physical culture system that is slightly more than a century old” and to “a set of religious practices whose origins pre-date those of postural yoga”—and which was itself already a cultural hybrid.
What’s missing from Home’s research is a sense of context. I came away with a clearer understanding of fascism’s relationship with yoga and other countercultural practices. But I’m uncertain how much of this is true of all yoga everywhere, given its many permutations. In Home’s view, the postural practice of yoga can’t be salvaged, but I’m not ready to give up my handy (and free) five-minute morning sessions on the mat. Plus I’m already a practitioner of Christianity, which could use some salvaging itself.
Even for those without a stake in yoga, Home’s book is enlightening. Recognizing elements of fascism in the culture around yoga, with its self-absorption, pseudoscience, penchant for authoritarianism, and embrace of conspiracy theories, can help clarify how fascism finds a toehold in other communities, including Christian ones. And it can help us see the flaws in any movement offering secret knowledge or miracle cures denied to the ordinary application of reason or use of the senses. Such movements almost always turn out to be, at best, silly—and at worst, life-destroying.
Rebecca Bratten Weiss is digital editor at U.S. Catholic magazine and the author of the forthcoming The Books That Made Us: Deconstructing the Modern Christian Classics.
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