American Examples: New Conversations about Religion, Volume Two

By Samah Choudhury, Michael J. Altman, Prea Persaud and 9 more

Fresh new perspectives on the study of religion, ranging from SoulCycle to Mark Twain
 
American Examples: New Conversations about Religion, Volume Two, is the second in a series of annual anthologies produced by the American Examples workshop hosted by the Department of Religious Studies at The University of Alabama. In the latest volume from this dynamic academic project, nine scholars with diverse topics and methodologies vividly reimagine the meaning of all three words in the phrase “American religious history.” The essays use case studies from America, broadly conceived, to ask trenchant theoretical questions that are of interest to scholars and students beyond the subfield of American religious history.

Cody Musselman uses a Weberian analysis to explore questions of identity, authority, and authenticity in the world of SoulCycle while Zachary T. Smith finds commonality between the rhetoric and practices of scholarship and mixed martial arts. Erik Kline provides a new perspective on the psychedelic mysticism of the 1960s, and Brook Wilensky-Lanford takes stock of the cultural power of parody in Mark Twain’s last work of fiction. Christopher Cannon Jones examines the reciprocal relationship between religious texts and cultural contexts by comparing early Mormon missions to Hawai‘i and Jamaica and Lindsey Jackson explores what debates over circumcision can tell us about gender stereotypes and motherhood. Dana Lloyd uses the 1988 Supreme Court decision in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association as a case study in order to consider how Indigenous religion and sovereignty have been understood and adjudicated in the American legal system. Matt Sheedy studies the identity categories of “atheist” and “ex-Muslim” and Brad Stoddard uses ethnographic fieldwork to evaluate the role of religious pluralism in regulating and policing correctional institutions. Editors Samah Choudhury and Prea Persaud provide an introduction that reconsiders the trajectory of the American Examples project in light of the siege on the US Capitol in January 2021 and the continuing COVID pandemic.

Visit americanexamples.ua.edu for more information on upcoming workshop dates and future projects.

CONTRIBUTORS
Michael J. Altman / Samah Choudhury / Lindsey Jackson / Christopher Cannon Jones /  / Erik Kline / Dana Lloyd / Cody Musselman / Prea Persaud / Matt Sheedy / Zachary T. Smith / Brad Stoddard / Brook Wilensky-Lanford

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Dec 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9780817394288

Book preview

Preface

MICHAEL J. ALTMAN

In the preface to volume 1 of American Examples, I told the story of how this whole program began with the simple idea of just making something new. As I write this preface to volume 2, that something new continues to grow, despite very difficult circumstances surrounding it. The chapters in this book began as research papers shared and discussed in a research workshop on March 6 and 7, 2020. Five days later the shutdowns began due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, this volume is very much a product of the pandemic era of academic production. These chapters were all written before the arrival of the coronavirus, but they were revised, edited, assembled, and published during the pandemic. During the early months of the pandemic the American Examples mentors—and I should name them all: Steven Ramey, Vaia Touna, Richard Newton, Nathan Loewen, Russell McCutcheon, and Merinda Simmons—rallied together to reimagine American Examples over Zoom for the rest of 2020. The mentors and the participants called things on the fly and made the program work. I am thankful to all of them for this.

This volume also marks another era for American Examples, however: the era of bringing back AE alumni as volume editors. I am grateful to Prea Persaud and Samah Choudhury for their hard work as editors of this volume. The two of them were part of the initial 2019 cohort of American Examples and had chapters in volume 1. I am glad they agreed to be part of this second volume, and I am thankful for their excellent introduction to this book and their sharp editorial insights into its chapters.

And still, this volume marks yet another era for American Examples: the era of Henry Luce Foundation support of the American Examples working group. The 2020 cohort that produced this book were the first group in the newly expanded American Examples made possible by a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. The Luce Foundation not only gave us the funds to make this whole project and this particular volume possible, it also gave us flexibility as we adapted to the always changing circumstances of the pandemic. I am especially thankful to Jonathan VanAntwerpen for his encouragement and continued support of American Examples.

I am also thankful to our partners at the University of Alabama Press who shepherd into print the wonderful research being done through American Examples, especially Peter Beatty, Kristen Hop, and Dan Waterman.

What you hold in your hands is more than a collection of chapters or research projects. It is work that went forward amid fear and chaos. I am proud of what we have done in American Examples. I am proud of all the participants and all the mentors. And I am excited about what is to come in future volumes of American Examples.

Introduction

When Whiteness Is Example and Exemplary

SAMAH CHOUDHURY AND PREA PERSAUD

In this second iteration of the American Examples series, our collective conversations about the examples approach have slammed up against a year replete with episodes that were quickly characterized as uniquely American.¹ The hits kept coming: a bungled response across social sectors to the coronavirus pandemic; a demonstration-turned-siege of the US Capitol building; a near flatlining of a long-faltering academic job market; a colossal show of activist might and resistance against state-sanctioned police violence and systematized racism. Religious studies scholars joined the fray to explain the importance of religious literacy, the role of religious imaginations in behaviors and decision-making, and the overt participation of religious groups in and around these events. Only in America, many said, and indeed, we would be easily forgiven for nodding along.

The examples approach demands, however, that we take a beat before chiming in with agreement. Vaia Touna and Steven Ramey’s foreword in the first AE volume posits that the goal of American Examples has principally been to challenge the perception of the United States as a unique context.² Scholars who take part in AE workshops are encouraged to frame their inquiries not as localized exceptions, but with respect to, as Jonathan Z. Smith writes.³ Colleagues across the field of religious studies may then look to our American examples not as a singular description but as gestures toward a third thing. It is this third thing that makes our case studies portable—a model for others to redescribe how a given idea or concept is understood, and not simply what it claims to be. At the root of this approach is the value of comparison. "Comparison provides the means by which we ‘re-vision’ phenomena as our data in order to solve our theoretical problems, Smith declares. It is the scholar’s intellectual purpose . . . which highlights that principled postulation of similarity which is the ground of the methodical comparison of difference being interesting."⁴

The events of the last year have been cause for additional introspection. Indeed, the danger of comparison has always been how easily it can be reduced to generalities and essentialism, a weakness Smith works to resist through his use of double contextualization: requiring a second contextualization of both the subject and the scholar after redescription.⁵ The initial motivation behind American Examples indicated that while religious studies scholars have leaned heavily on historical approaches that center the United States, we should be careful not to swing too far in the other direction by ignoring a context that colors ideas of race, revolution, and resistance.

In following this counsel, we must continue to challenge the notion of American exceptionalism, while also attending to the social, racial, and religious dimensions of US history that have, in fact, brought about such distinct circumstances. The desire to ensure that these examples are engaging in larger questions that make them useful for other case studies must be balanced with the specific history of the United States. Has the examples approach, conceived in the pre-COVID times, continued to address this tension productively in COVID times? What about the authors who take part in the Examples model, and the readers who seek to learn from it? Perhaps—as all scripts, theories, methods, and models inevitably require—we redescribe and re-vision in light of the data before us and the experiences behind us.

To be an example, we might imagine, is not to be exemplary. The presence of something someone calls religion somewhere someone calls America does not necessitate a mirrored analog elsewhere. And yet, in the last year, the relationship between the example and the exemplary has shown itself to be less a binary and more an overlay. That one can inscribe both of these qualities onto a given subject at once is an opportunity. Utilizing this overlay, scholars may challenge the dearth of intersectional inquiry that pervades how our profession—religious studies—is traditionally taught and produced. What makes an inquiry intersectional? Within the framework laid out by Kimberlé Crenshaw, it is not sufficient to simply incorporate the form and function of race, gender, class, and so on into one’s analysis; these are not useful asides or thematic departures.⁶ It is their confluence and continued influence over and in one another that lead to particular outcomes. For those of us who locate our work in the Americas, what happens in the United States can then be doubly contextualized: a portable case study, but one also made particular to the racial, gendered, and classed dimensions of US history and culture. Attending to the confluence does not sacrifice the sought after re-visionary third thing; it re-visions it as one of many third things.

Through these terms of engagement we are able to more lucidly name what has centrality and even canonical status within American religions and why that inertia is difficult to break, even after a year like 2020. Critical theories of race and racialization strike us as a third thing that demands recognition within broader examinations of authenticity, authority, and power in American religions. If not explicitly, it should appear by way of interconnected terms, be they ethnicity, culture, appearance, aesthetic. This is not to say, of course, that every study of religion in the Americas need make race its central inquiry—far from it. The multiplicity of third things, rather, means that readers like ourselves—scholars with a vested interest in how race manifests in such cases—can draw on how a wide diversity of exemplary American examples that engage with the idea and presence of race even (and especially) when it is not being identified as the object of study. Does this variety of classification—ranging from no reference at all to the language of identity politics to a delineation of racial order within hierarchies of heathenism—ultimately reinscribe the notion that the category of American religions continues to operate in relation to white Protestantism? In not provincializing whiteness as an example, do we reinforce it as exemplary, even among nonwhite religious communities and actors? The explicit inclusion of racial formations dislodges that example/exemplary plait to loosen and make further room for research that is enduringly portable, cross-cultural, comparative, and theoretically driven. To not do so, even when we are ostensibly studying something else, keeps American religions white.

Despite these critiques, the chapters in this second volume offer probing questions that urge us to heed their arguments while using their threads to weave new trajectories of analysis when it comes to constituting an American example. Ranging from discussions as diverse as the carceral system in Florida to nineteenth-century Romanticism, the essays that follow take up notions of authority, authenticity, and the power to name and confer power onto individuals or notions that sustain particular system dynamics in the face of subversion. Three categorical streams emerge to guide these themes. Cody Musselman, Lindsey Jackson, and Matt Sheedy’s chapters deal with questions of identity and authenticity. Extending Max Weber’s analysis of the charismatic leader, Musselman argues that SoulCycle capitalizes on the charisma of its instructors to both spiritualize the fitness brand and manage public relations crises. As a tool of corporations, charismatic authority moves beyond the single individual to a group of people who then work collectively to foster and protect corporate authority. Jackson’s chapter uses Sharon Hays’s ideology of intensive mothering to argue that at the core of the debate surrounding male circumcision is the philosophy that women are caregivers and protectors of children. Focusing on Jewish communities, Jackson explores the guilt some women feel for choosing to circumcise their sons and what it reveals about gender stereotypes and ideas of motherhood cross-culturally. In his essay Are Ex-Muslims Atheists? Rethinking Secular Identity in the Age of the Alt-Right, Sheedy examines the identity categories of atheist and ex-Muslim through a study of popular authors like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the online spaces in which movement atheism communities find one another. He argues that anti-Muslim language authenticates these identities through an appeal to its ostensible opposite: Western civilization.

Christopher Jones, Erik Kline, and Brook Wilensky-Landford extend questions of identity and authenticity through their examinations of specific texts and their retellings. In his analysis of William Blake’s influence on Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, Kline challenges both the declension model and the turn East critique of psychedelic mysticism of the 1960s to argue that participants in the movement were working to remythologize contemporary American thought. Motivated by a desire to create a more harmonious social structure, participants also worked to develop projects of social justice. In her essay, Wilensky-Lanford takes the reader through the racial anxiety written into Mark Twain’s 1909 An Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, in which he details a heaven that mirrors the makeup of living people of Earth. This accounting for all sorts, as Twain says, betrays a profound feeling of ambivalence and isolation for heaven-dwelling white, English-speaking Americans. Diversity is the main charm but also a sour pill, reflecting Twain’s own parodic reflection on race, social similarities, and demographic changes at the turn of the twentieth century. Through her analysis, Wilensky-Landford demonstrates how the parody can work to actually authorize and legitimize the original rather than challenging or muting its power. Jones’s chapter examines early Mormon missions to the Pacific Islands and the West Indies as the missionaries sought to find scattered Israelites around the world. Through a comparison of the mission in Hawai‘i with that of Jamaica, Jones argues that Mormon missionaries read the heathens they encountered into Mormon sacred histories. In doing so, he demonstrates the reciprocal relationship between religious texts and the cultural contexts in which they are read.

Finally, Brad Stoddard, Dana Lloyd, and Zachary Smith focus on questions of authority and the construction of academic categories. Through an ethnographic study of multiple faith- and character-based carceral institutions in Florida (FCBI), Stoddard thinks through the political discourse of religious pluralism as it polices and excludes the participation of inmates in various faith-based or religious programming. A culture of religious pluralism sanctions and administers not an equally accessible space for all types of religiously inclined individuals, but specifically the theologies of the New Christian Right. Demonstrating how the lines between religion and state are often negotiated and reconstructed, Stoddard uses FCBI as an example of how religious pluralism functions as a political, regulatory, and ultimately discriminatory discourse. Lloyd’s chapter examines the 1988 US Supreme Court case Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association in order to consider how Indigenous religion and sovereignty have come to be produced, understood, and adjudicated through the American legal system. She argues that Justice William Brennan’s assertion that Native Americans consider all land sacred is a form of culture talk that distorts and collapses the Indigenous difference into a static and apolitical entity that ultimately maintains the interests of the settler colonial state. In the ethnographic research on Christian mixed martial arts presented in his essay, Smith considers how scholars construct and mobilize sentiments about culturally repugnant others and what that ultimately says about the collective. Intentionally likening the practice of scholarship to that of mixed martial arts, Smith interrogates what he terms scholarly affects, that is the contingent and multiple moods, dispositions, epistemic horizons, auras, passions, energies, and atmosphere of scholarship.

A clear advantage of the examples approach is that insider knowledge of religion in the Americas is not necessary in order to engage with the materials presented across the various examples. This allows for teachers of religion—from academic and public settings—to insert any of these chapters into a multitude of religion-oriented courses. Here, too, in a pedagogical context, we might consider what it would really mean to deconstruct the field of American religions. In Ciarra Jones’s Medium article, Not Just the Syllabus, Throw the Whole Discipline in the Trash, she urges academics to move beyond course reconstructions that merely inject a section (or more) on readings by or on Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities as a way of promoting inclusion. Instead, she stakes another claim: that the solution is a radical recanonization of the discipline itself.⁷ She writes: White academia’s obsession with holding onto outdated scholarship needs to be closely examined. It is time for academia to reckon with the way in which poor scholarship is part of the social crisis at hand. Academia is responsible for proliferating anti-Blackness, xenophobia, homophobia, and so much more due to its refusal to de-canonize texts that have been proven harmful. If we take seriously Jones’s call for recanonization, what would this mean for the American Examples project? The examples approach, with its emphasis on expanding the notion of America and moving beyond historiography, should be attracting and producing scholarship that interrogates racial categories, including the named/unnamed presumption of whiteness. The fact that applications submitted for the second round of this project were limited in how they took up that presumption, its presence, and its enduring logics, however, demonstrates the difficulty in moving away from the white Protestantism standard in introductory religion in America textbooks. It also indicates the enduring assumptions that continue to underpin the cateogories of America, American Religions, and Religion in the Americas. These problems are cyclical: getting BIPOC scholars to apply for programs such as this—in part because American religions has been coded to be understood as variants of white Christianity in the United States (with the occasional immigrant religious experience thrown in)—indicates the work that still needs to be done within the formative space of the classroom.

Being conflicted about the label of Americanist is something with which we are both intimately familiar. Despite doing American religion (in that we both are specifically interested in the development of religious traditions within the context of the Americas), neither of us can definitively claim American religions as our primary disciplinary home—and not for a lack of trying. These are boundaries that were subtly reinforced in classrooms, in conference acceptances, speaking invitations, and the academic job market. It is indicative of the often unchallenged boundaries surrounding this field that our own participation and welcomed admission within a program like American Examples marks an exception rather than the rule.

How might academics approach teaching Religion in America, a core course for many religious studies departments? Here we might think about centering voices and communities that have generally been taught on the periphery. What might an American religion class look like that focused primarily on subjects such as Indigenous traditions, Zora Neal Hurston, Hoodoo, and Islam, and would it be able to run as Religion in America? How can critical works on race and whiteness be coupled with the typical forerunners of American religions like Wesley, Finney, Edwards, and Whitman, and then incorporated into an introductory course? To do this work, scholars must continue pushing the boundaries of their scholarship.

Here we might follow the model of the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies (FCHS) Collective in their article Feminist Critical Hindu Studies in Formation and employ an interrogative methodology that reorients the field of American religions while holding scholars accountable for examining their own positionalities.⁸ This would require thinking more collaboratively during the process of both writing and teaching, rather than engaging in the singular presentation of research that most of us have been trained with. If American Examples is to have an impact on how we recanonize our subfield, not to mention the discipline of religious studies at large, then let us take the third thing of critical racial analysis and foreground its presence in our work. Those who conduct this research should reflect that work as well: a racially diverse set of scholars who are both reshaping our perspective on traditional historiographies and challenging notions of American religion by introducing new case studies, comparisons, and theoretical trajectories.

NOTES

1. Benjamin Young, The Capitol Siege Wasn’t Like the ‘Third World,’ It Was Uniquely American, Washington Post, January 25, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com; Nick Hanauer, Our Uniquely American Virus, American Prospect, April 14, 2020, https://prospect.org; Jennifer A. Richeson, Americans Are Determined to Believe in Black Progress, Atlantic, July 27, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com.

2. Steven Ramey and Vaia Touna, Foreword, in American Examples: New Conversations about Religion, Volume 1, edited by Michael J. Smith (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021), vii.

3. Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 51.

4. Smith, Drudgery Divine, 52–53.

5. Jonathan Z. Smith, The End of Comparison: Redescription and Rectification, in A Magic Still Dwells: Comparison Religion in the Postmodern Age, edited by Kimberley Patton and Benjamin Ray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 237–41.

6. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (1989): 139–67.

7. Jones, Ciarra. Not Just the Syllabus, Throw the Whole Discipline In the Trash. Medium, June 15, 2020. https://medium.com.

8. FCHS Collective. Feminist Critical Hindu Studies in Formation, Religion Compass 15, no. 2 (March 5, 2021), https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.

The Politics of Charisma and the Cohesion of SoulCycle’s #SoulFam Tribe

CODY MUSSELMAN

When billionaire Stephen Ross, the chairman and majority owner of the real estate firm the Related Companies, announced his fundraiser for the reelection of Donald Trump in August 2019, it was initially of little consequence to the boutique cycling company SoulCycle. That is, until the Washington Post published an article citing the Related Companies as owner of the high-end fitness chain Equinox, of which SoulCycle is a subsidiary.¹ This announcement left SoulCycle’s corporate team scrambling for an appropriate response, especially as calls to boycott the upscale cycling company began to trend on Twitter and other social media sites. SoulCycle’s challenge lay in addressing the company’s relationship to Ross and reaffirming its commitment to liberal causes, while successfully sidestepping any overt political statements that might alienate its customers. In the days following the revelation of Ross’s ownership of SoulCycle, the company relied heavily on its charismatic instructors to reassure and retain customers amid the tumult.

This essay examines the role SoulCycle instructors’ charisma played in mediating public opinion and consumer loyalty during a public relations crisis. SoulCycle, founded in 2006, is an indoor cycling experience that combines dancing on a stationary bike with spiritual and emotional breakthroughs.² The company describes itself as a cardio party that is challenging, spiritually uplifting and above all else, FUN. The instructor is central to this experience. On its website and across its various platforms, SoulCycle has referred to its instructors as magnetic and charismatic. They are said to be the pulse of SoulCycle. They are the talent. Their job is to motivate, challenge and inspire you to go deeper. Their role, the company explains, is to support and push us to feel like our best selves.³ They craft the experience inside the studio, where they lead the class by entertaining the crowd, construct the playlist, demonstrate bike-dance choreography, provide motivation, guide meditations, and wax philosophic about life, purpose, and self-worth. Outside the studio they are ambassadors of an aspirational brand, posting photos that express love and gratitude for their #SoulFam.

SoulCycle instructors are equal parts fitness trainers and entertainers. SoulCycle is explicit about its search for and recruitment of charismatic individuals. Fittingly, a large proportion of its instructors have backgrounds in theater and dance performance. Work does not end for instructors after they unclip from their stationary bikes and step down from the podium at the end of the class. After forty-five minutes of instruction, it is the instructor’s job to chat with customers who linger in the lobby, to check in with regular riders, and to solidify the bonds of community. The rewards of such efforts are the perks of small-scale celebrity: sold-out classes (resulting in a monetary bonus for the instructor), a large social media following, and brand partnerships. For customers, securing a bike inside a coveted instructor’s class—to cycle at the feet of a wise and fit teacher in hopes of recognition—can feel like an achievement and a privilege. SoulCycle trades on sweat equity, but it peddles most frequently the economy of charisma.⁴

This essay understands the charismatic leader as a trope within religious studies. Since Max Weber’s analysis of the charismatic leader as an authority figure in Economy and Society (1922), the idea that charisma is an inherent quality of an extraordinary individual has become pervasive in both scholarly work and popular parlance. In his adoption of the term, Weber alters the meaning of charisma, transforming a Christian word that connotes God’s bestowal of divine gifts to a community into a secular word denoting a certain quality of an individual personality that is extraordinary, exceptional, seemingly supernatural, and sets the person apart from ordinary men.⁵ As an ideal type unmoored from history, Weber’s concept of charisma became attractive to scholars from multiple disciplines in the twentieth century who could retroactively (and anachronistically) identify exceptional people and heroes as charismatic. The descriptive and analytical appeal of Weber’s concept of charisma persisted and has helped contemporary scholars analyze the here and now of an increasingly globalized, market-driven present.⁶

On the whole, twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship remains largely indebted to Weber. Charismatic authority remains a relevant category for twenty-first-century sociologists who theorize the role followers play in creating and sustaining a leader’s charisma.⁷ Political scientists use it to help explain the rise of dictators and revolutions.⁸ Business and management scholars formulate theories of charisma to shape successful managers and business leaders.⁹ The field of celebrity studies has embraced charisma as a quality of person intimately tied to the status, act, and existence of stardom.¹⁰ Finally, in religious studies invoking the charismatic leader serves as shorthand for describing the zeal of a leader and the rapture of a crowd; it gestures toward the fierce loyalty of followers and the mesmerizing powers of the leader.

Within the subdiscipline of American religious history, charisma remains a primarily uncomplicated term, used most frequently to justify biographies or single-actor profiles of unique individuals, or to describe the allure of new religious movements. Charisma explains the enthralling performances and celebrity status of figures like George Whitefield and Oprah Winfrey.¹¹ It rationalizes the mainstream appeal of someone like evangelist Billy Graham, who filled stadiums with born-again Christian worshippers.¹² It describes how people like Aimee Semple McPherson or Bill Bright combined the forces of the Pentecostal and charismatic movements with celebrity to gain large followings.¹³ Charisma explains the skillful relationship building, persuasive nature, and megalomania of leaders like Jim Jones, Marshall Applewhite, and Bonnie Nettles.¹⁴ The concept of charisma has served the field simultaneously as an analytical touchstone and as a scholastic justification. Charismatic figures invite and hold scholarly attention with the power they wield and the sociopolitical economies they produce.

This essay joins a small but growing sector of scholarship within American religious history that understands the charismatic leader and the entrepreneur as synonymous, both equally offering insight into the convergence of American religion and capitalism.¹⁵ Charisma and corporations have always had a codependency, Kathryn Lofton writes of the incorporation of Oprah the person into Oprah the brand.¹⁶ Lofton directs us toward the enduring association of a corporation with its founder. Take, for example, Sam Walton with Walmart, and Henry Ford with Ford Motors.¹⁷ Here, the charismatic figure, when attached to the corporation, not only leads but also sells. Charisma becomes a form of seemingly effortless marketing. It signals the corporation’s values, promises, and aesthetics. It hastens incorporation and drives globalization.¹⁸ When the distinction between the charismatic leader and the entrepreneur collapses, charisma is the grounds for incorporation—in the sense that there is something special to sell—and it incorporates in the sense that it brings you, the consumer, under its influence.

The goal of this essay is to examine how instructor charisma became a crucial asset for SoulCycle during a public relations crisis. The Trump fundraising incident prompts questions familiar to scholars of religion about how communities stay together and negotiate belonging in a time of scandal. This essay focuses on the power of charisma and the charismatic leader in unifying a group and maintaining a community, but it also raises questions about how SoulCycle’s status as a for-profit corporation impacts its calls for community solidarity. Through an analysis of social media posts, promotional materials, and news articles, I argue for an understanding of the charismatic leader as a both a critical node in corporate strategizing and a resource in a time of controversy. The argument proceeds in three acts. First, I discuss spirituality at SoulCycle and detail the liberal commitments central to SoulCycle’s brand identity. Then I examine the instructor response and consumer engagement in the wake of Ross’s Trump campaign fundraiser announcement. Lastly, I provide a close reading of several social media posts that not only illuminate SoulCycle’s reliance on instructor charisma but also reveal the company’s recourse to spirituality in a time of crisis.

Before proceeding, it is important to state up front that, in many respects, I accept and follow the definition of charisma that exists in popular discourse, as a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm, or as a special magnetic charm or appeal.¹⁹ I do this because this is how my subjects understand charisma. My goal is to show how charisma—as a special, mystifying, and inexplicable attribute—enchants the studio space and helps spiritualize the SoulCycle brand. Furthermore, I hope to show how this version of charisma operates as a mechanism of authority differently than the Weberian model. Over the course of the chapter, I examine the political and social ramifications this popular conception of charisma—this effervescent quality of the bright, smiling, motivating SoulCycle instructor—enables.

THE SOUL OF SOULCYCLE

On a Saturday in Brooklyn I approach a SoulCycle instructor as she dismounts from her stationary bike and stands on her podium. Dripping in sweat, I have just finished her cycling class. The music has been turned off. The room is still dark, and the candles that surround her podium have been blown out. The light-skinned instructor has long, dark hair and a nondescript lilting accent. She is a former dancer and was once a student of religious studies. In the course of our conversation, she tells me that I must go to Janet’s Sunday Service. This is the Sunday morning fitness class of a well-established SoulCycle instructor who preaches from atop her podium to a roomful of stationary cyclists. The religious analogy is curious, but it is not uncommon for a company that calls its studios sanctuaries and that at a marketing conference had its CEO sit alongside a pastor from the evangelical megachurch Hillsong and a representative from Harvard Divinity School, to speak about how brands could more thoroughly integrate spirituality into their consumer marketing and product offerings.²⁰ SoulCycle is a company that embraces religious analogy and relishes in playful comparisons of its fitness brand to established religion. Yet, silly proclamations of religious feeling accompany serious ones, as riders regularly testify to the spiritual and emotional breakthroughs they have in the studios.

SoulCycle is not an explicitly religious company, but it draws from New Age and Christian traditions to argue itself into the presumptively secular lives of its adherents as a religious option. If anything, SoulCycle would be more comfortable dealing in the language of spirituality over that of religion. For SoulCycle, spirituality acts a brand enhancer. This works, as Jeremy Carrette and Richard King note, by tapping into the cultural capital of religion but avoiding the politics of religion by using the word spirituality.²¹ The spirituality of SoulCycle is a pluralist (and at times appropriative) embrace of all religions, distilled to their essence: energy. There are variations, as some instructors may gesture toward a Christian God, while others recite yogic mantras.²² SoulCycle’s logo is reminiscent of Buddhism’s dharma wheel, which might suggest the occasional reference to Buddhist philosophy. However, more often than not the instructors, founders, and riders describe their particular spiritual currency as the energy in the room.²³ Energy is treated as an ur-entity. It is pervasive, infectious, and magical.

Some at SoulCycle opt to use more explicitly New Age concepts when talking about energy.²⁴ One instructor, for example, discussed energy’s vibes, or vibrations, and shared why it is vital to bring a philosophy of self-love into the studio. Once you start caring for yourself and loving yourself, you believe that you and your actions matter. That feeling of accountability vibrates throughout the class. This vibration exists from rider to self, rider to rider, rider to instructor and back. This vibration is everywhere.²⁵ In this description, feelings and energy work together, radiating from one person to another. After a Friday morning class on the Upper East Side in New York City, an Italian woman in her fifties confirmed that she absolutely believed in the power of energetic exchange happening in the studio. I feel the energy coming off from the people beside me and it feeds me. It makes me feel good, she remarked. The idea conveyed here is that human attitude is an invisible agent, able to infect others at a subatomic level, and that at SoulCycle the rider can have their attitude adjusted in a fundamental way through physical rigor and communion with others. The language of mind and energy at SoulCycle mirrors the principles of New Thought, a nineteenth-century movement of organizations and publications concerned with harnessing the powers of the mind to impact the material world. In the course of the twentieth century, New Thought ideas—such as manifesting a life of health and riches—spread through the culture at large, appearing in self-help books, Prosperity Gospel sermons, and New Age literature.²⁶ Talk of energy, vibration, and manifesting at SoulCycle suggest that it is another instance of New Thought’s modern ubiquity—a testament to its