The New Religion of Body Improvement

— Jeremy Biles

 ¢â‚¬Å“The worldwide pursuit of body improvement has become like a new religion, ¢â‚¬ 
says photographer Zed Nelson in the introduction to his latest book, *Love
Me*. His photos therein depict in loving, lurid detail evidences of bodily
fanaticism around the globe  ¢â‚¬“ a preposterously muscled bodybuilder in Las
Vegas, prosthetic nose implants in Beijing, the winner of a
maximum-security-prison beauty pageant in Rio. But do these photos really
point toward a  ¢â‚¬Å“new religion ¢â‚¬ ?

There ¢â‚¬â„¢s reason to think so. In fact, though the pursuit of bodily
perfection is a global phenomenon, its roots may lie partly in American
religion. R. Marie Griffith argues that religion, specifically Protestant
forms of Christianity, has been a key influence on the conception and
creation of American bodies. Protestant ascetic expressions of Christianity
are invested in bodily  ¢â‚¬Å“indicators of faith, each steadfastly promoting
corporeal acts of devotion ¢â‚¬ ¦while affirming that signs of authentic spiritual
renewal [are] essentially grounded in the body. ¢â‚¬  According to Griffith, the
ideal of bodily perfection  ¢â‚¬“ present throughout American history  ¢â‚¬“ rose to
general prominence toward the close of the twentieth century, emerging from
the evangelical devotional diet movements that first cropped up in the late
1950s. Promoting the belief that inner goodness was apparent in one ¢â‚¬â„¢s outer
aspect, this vein of devotion was built on the doctrine that  ¢â‚¬Å“fat was sin. ¢â‚¬ 
A thin, firm, beautiful body, it was believed, was the visible reflection
of goodness and godliness. Contemporary body disciplines  ¢â‚¬Å“draw their source
and momentum from specific Protestant patterns, ¢â‚¬  which presume that  ¢â‚¬Å“fit
bodies ¢â‚¬ ¦signify fitter souls. ¢â‚¬ 

The sundry forms that such disciplines take  ¢â‚¬“ exercise, dieting, and the
like  ¢â‚¬“ have infiltrated the wider culture, permeating the American
consciousness with anxiety about the body while shaping beliefs about
beauty. Today the forces of globalization have propelled the American
conception of the perfect body into the world at large, where it has
inflected traditional Western ideals of beauty. Nelson notes an
 ¢â‚¬Å“increasingly prescriptive ¢â‚¬  standard of beauty that has given rise to ever
more anxious attitudes toward the body, and thus to increasingly fanatical
practices of bodily improvement.

Anxiety and devotional attention to the body are nothing new in religious
life. Caroline Walker Bynum claims, for example, that  ¢â‚¬Å“eating in late
medieval Europe ¢â‚¬ ¦was at the core of religious world-denial ¢â‚¬ ¦. [R]enunciation
of ordinary food prepared the way for consuming Christ in eucharist and
mystical union. ¢â‚¬  But today ¢â‚¬â„¢s body disciplines extend well beyond attention
to diet. Rebecca Mead compares the modern obsession with cosmetic surgery
to Christian asceticism. The surgery addicts she discusses describe their
fixation in  ¢â‚¬Å“the language of religious experience, with its wretchedness and
its sublimity and its consciousness of transgression. ¢â‚¬  They display all the
 ¢â‚¬Å“self-scourging rigor ¢â‚¬  of medieval ascetics. Like Christian asceticism,
Mead points out, cosmetic surgery is predicated on the possibility of human
perfectibility  ¢â‚¬“ although she notes,  ¢â‚¬Å“If for St. Teresa perfection required
transcending the allures of the material and the sensual, adherents of the
cult of plastic surgery undergo surgical mortification of the flesh in order
to embrace the sensual life more fully. ¢â‚¬ 

The new religion of body improvement shifts the aims of asceticism; the body
is no longer a means to spiritual illumination but an end in itself. For
today ¢â‚¬â„¢s ascetics, transcendence lies within a form of bodily redemption;
they seek to make of the mortal, corruptible body a perfect, youthful body.
The bodily modifications Nelson and Mead document are motivated by anxiety
about death and a corresponding longing for eternal youth  ¢â‚¬“ a desire for
immortality  ¢â‚¬“ but the location of eternal life has moved from the heavens to
the material world.

As the anxious desire for eternal youth increases, technologies and
techniques for restoring youth become more commonplace. Plastic surgery
procedures become rites of passage in the new religion of body improvement.
The surgical breakdown and reconstruction of the body correspond to the
symbolic dismemberment and reintegration of the body found in initiation
rites across many religions. Today ¢â‚¬â„¢s surgical rituals usher initiates from
the imperfect to the more perfect, from the humanly mortal to the deifically
immortal. There is something undeniably miraculous about such momentous
transformations. Plastic surgery heralds a transformation of the very stuff
of humanity. It portends a forfeiture of the  ¢â‚¬Å“natural ¢â‚¬  body  ¢â‚¬“ a wish to
transcend the mortal, aging body and a corresponding desire to be
resurrected as immortal, like a god.

David Chidester acknowledges the increasing plasticization of the human
body, noting that plasticity upsets the distinction between human and
God. Treating the body as malleable, transformable, and perhaps even imperishable is a
form of  ¢â‚¬Å“plastic religion ¢â‚¬  that gestures toward immortality. In some
sense, maybe this is just what it means to be human, and religious: to be
ceaselessly engaged in experimentation with the possibilities of existence.
 ¢â‚¬Å“Whatever else religion might be about, ¢â‚¬  Chidester writes,  ¢â‚¬Å“it is about
limits. ¢â‚¬  If so, then today ¢â‚¬â„¢s global obsession with exceeding the boundaries
of the possible  ¢â‚¬“ achieving perfect, immortal bodies  ¢â‚¬“ is a religious
phenomenon. Exalting and demeaning, liberating and lethal, godly and
infernal, the pursuit of perfection still and always remains part of the
religious project of testing human limits.

*References:***

The introduction to Nelson’s book can be found at his website:

http://www.zednelson.com/?LoveMe

Read Rebecca Mead’s *New Yorker* article, “Proud Flesh”:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/11/13/061113crbo_books

R. Marie Griffith, *Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American
Christianity*, (University of California Press, 2004).

Caroline Walker Bynum, *Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance
of Food to Medieval Women*, (University of California Press, 1987).

David Chidester, *Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture*,
(University of California Press, 2005).

Jeremy Biles teaches courses on religion, philosophy, art, and popular
culture at various institutions in Chicago. He is the author of *Ecce
Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form *(Fordham University
Press, 2007).

*Sightings* comes from the Martin Marty
Centerat the University of
Chicago Divinity School.

Attribution