Almost two hundred years ago there was a very popular Presbyterian. Sylvester Graham was a Presbyterian minister who became so popular that an entire industry was built around him. Hotels and boarding houses and other business became extensions of Pastor Graham’s brand. I read of his story in a recent book on the wellness industry. The book identifies similarities between salvation promises of religion and salvation promises of wellness
In Evangelically Departed, I hope to point out some of the places where news sold as “good” might actually be quite terrible. The word “evangelical” itself has been translated as “good news.” Karl Barth observed, decades ago, how the word can so quickly be co-opted to describe something quite bad, he called this “dysvangelia.”
I do not think any claim that most people who have ever lived are somehow separated from God or worse that most people who have ever lived are eternally tortured can, in any way, be considered good news. If you happen to survive a devastating natural disaster or an attempted genocide your moral and spiritual development might, rightly, be called into question if you called such a scenario “good.”
Sometimes, if you are hoping to emerge from such cognitive dissonance, it can help to notice how various claims outside of evangelicalism trade in similar tendencies. That is, they stamp words such as goodness and freedom and light and wholeness all over products and programmes that turn out not to be entirely, or even mostly, good.
Such is the subject of the book called “The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop and the False-Promise of Self-Care” by lifestyle journalist and former disciple of the wellness movement, Rina Raphael. I have started listening to the audiobook and in it I heard the story of the popular Presbyterian minister.
Here is a summary of the story as Rina Raphael tells it;
In 1837 business owners in Boston, referred to as a mob, surrounded a hotel demanding to confront a guest. Bakers and butchers and other business owners had seen a steep drop in business due to the popularity of the hotel guest, Presbyterian Minister Sylvester Graham. The mob was so angry and insistent that Graham had to be barricaded in the hotel dining room. He and his followers, some of whom were at the hotel, decided to fight back and made their way to the hotel roof. They began pelting the mob with bags filled with limes. The mob dispersed.
The mob was angry because Graham had been including in his preaching injunctions that certain foods should be avoided for a healthy life. His message became very popular during a time when cholera was epidemic. Graham said that health problems were, in part, due to overconsumption of meat and “unnatural store bought foods.” He said that overindulgence corrupted body and soul and preached that diets should be bland and that flavourful condiments such as mustard and ketchup could cause insanity. He promoted natural foods as promoting health and as reducing what he said were corrupt sexual tendencies.
As Raphael comments, “It was plain eating with a dose of repression.”
In a precursor to what we now know as clean eating or plain eating, Pastor Graham railed against the filler that was often part of various foods at the time. He promoted whole grains and fresh ingredients, even providing a recipe for a basic cracker made with unsifted whole wheat flour. This cracker bears little resemblance to the current incarnation of the Graham cracker, but it is the genesis.
Raphael’s examination of the wellness industry insightfully draws parallels between the purveyors of supposed good news in religious circles and in the current self-care industry. She shows how, in both cases, what is on offer is salvation. While she admits that the wellness industry has helped many people, she presents people like Gwyneth Paltrow as current day examples of religious leaders of old who convinced followers to part with their money in order to achieve promised salvation. For Raphael, what is most often produced by the wellness industry is another stress-inducing programme that demands devotion and constant vigilance. The people preaching the wellness gospel in some cases acquire vast amounts of wealth and millions of followers.
Pastor Graham’s diet promoted followers weighing themselves on a daily basis. Unlike most of today’s diets, the idea was to maintain a certain body size that was far from small or tiny. Cultural ideals of the fashionable body were different back then. Raphael points out that some historians consider Graham’s diet to be the among the first to connect eating with weight. Previously food restrictions had to do mostly with religion or with indigestion.
Sylvester Graham died at 57 years old from “complications from multiple opium enemas.” The popularity of the Graham diet waned.
If you grew up in a highly structured religious context that clearly defined what was holy and what was profane, you might see that highly defined programmes of belief and behaviour can turn out producing fear and stress rather than promised rest. Sometimes you can spot how such promises are preached and sold today and sometimes it is possible to see how Gwyneth Paltrow might just resemble Pastor Sylvester Graham.
You are so right in this. Some parts of the "wellness" industry do anything but promote wellness. Instead, they create mindless followers who live with the stress or the fear of doing anything wrong. I know some folks who are so worried about the food they eat that they can't enjoy dining at all.