Thanks to Hemant, I see that Mark Driscoll is on about yoga again. After the last time he and other conservatives called yoga “demonic,” there was a spike of interest in the history of the practice. There were several articles written about the history of what we currently call yoga. One that stands out is Meera Nanda’s Not as Old as You Think. Here’s the summary:

Lately, Hindus in America have started flying the saffron flag over American-style yoga, which consists largely of yogic asanas and stretches. The leading Indo-American lobby, Hindu American Foundation (HAF), has recently started a vocal campaign to remind Americans that yoga was made in India by Hindus. Not just any ordinary Hindus, but Sanskrit-speaking, forest-dwelling Brahmin sages who learned to discipline their bodies in order to purify their atman. The purist Hindu position, articulated by the HAF, is that all yoga, including its physical or hatha yoga component, is rooted in the Hindu religion/way of life that goes all the way back to the Vedic sages and yogis.

There is only one problem with this purist history of yoga: it is false. Yogic asanas were never ‘Vedic’ to begin with. Far from being considered the crown jewel of Hinduism, yogic asanas were in fact looked down upon by Hindu intellectuals and reformers—including the great Swami Vivekananda—as fit only for sorcerers, fakirs and jogis. Moreover, what HAF calls the “rape of yoga”, referring to the separation of asanas from their spiritual underpinning, did not start in the supposedly decadent West; it began, in fact, in the akharas and gymnasiums of 19th and 20th century India run by Indian nationalists seeking to counter Western images of effete Indians. It is in this nationalistic phase that hatha yoga took on many elements of Western gymnastics and body-building, which show up in the world-renowned Iyengar and Ashtanga Vinyasa schools of yoga. Far from honestly acknowledging the Western contributions to modern yoga, we Indians simply brand all yoga as ‘Vedic,’ a smug claim that has no intellectual integrity.

In short, what we now call yoga is a mish-mash of different traditions given a nationalistic gloss during the British control of India. The modern Americanized version is even more confused, but its popularity has led many Hindus to run a “Take Back Yoga” movement. The movement is historically inaccurate. Nevertheless, it seems that Driscoll has been taking it as authoritative, and in his latest piece he draws from it to make his argument that yoga is suffused with Hindu spirituality.

In the end, both Driscoll and the “Take Back Yoga” movement are committing the same fallacy. Andrea Jain describes it in her piece, Is Downward Dog the Path to Hell?:

Both the evangelical Christian yogaphobic position and the Hindu essentialist yoga-belongs-to-Hinduism position reflect religious fundamentalist tendencies to define ideas and practices not as human constructs that are subject to change over time, but as monolithic stable products that belong in specific traditions and accordingly do not belong in others.