Cultish

and has announced that he doesn’t want children because he already has seven billion.

By and large, new religion experts are not terribly concerned that the drawbacks of cult fitness stack up to the likes of Scientology, either. “I definitely think some of these workouts are ‘culty,’ but I say that with scare quotes,” commented Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann. The main “cult” symptom Luhrmann finds in fitness buffs is the belief that if they attend classes regularly, their lives will dramatically improve overall. As long as they attend class five times a week and say the mantras, then that will change the way the world unfolds for them. It’s that sense of excess idealism again—that conviction that this group, this instructor, these rituals, have the power to accomplish more than they probably can.

It is no accident that the studio fitness industry blew up so suddenly and powerfully in the early 2010s—a time when adults’ trust in both traditional religion and the medical establishment took a sharp decline. An unshocking 2018 poll by the Multiple Chronic Conditions Resource Center found that 81 percent of American millennials are unsatisfied with their healthcare experience, due to everything from high insurance costs to institutional race and gender bias. Not to mention the US’s lack of public fitness programs (like, say, Japan’s “radio calisthenics” broadcasts, which folks are free to follow at home or together in community parks each morning at no cost). Younger Americans feel like they have no choice but to take their health into their own hands.

Combine this withdrawal from mainstream medicine with young people’s disillusionment with traditional faith, and cult fitness exploded to fill these corporeal and spiritual voids. In a 2015 study called “How We Gather,” ter Kuile explored the ways millennials find community and transcendence beyond conventional religious communities, and found that studio workout classes were among the ten most profound and formative spaces. At least for a certain demographic . . . because as soon as people began coveting fitness so intensely, they started to crave more exclusivity, too.