In 2006, the book The Secret came out and I remember the excitement about the "law of attraction," how positive thinking will manifest good things. Its focus on personal success, however, felt like a repackaging of Prosperity Theology: those who prayed reap the rewards of health and wealth, while the poor and sick are those without faith–no need to consider systemic and structural dynamics.

The cosmology of The Secret simmered in wellness circles until it bubbled over with the pandemic and our considerable crises. In fitness spaces there was a similar rise of "optimization," the personal-technocrat drive to control all of one's biology and routine in the pursuit of health and wealth. Manifesting and optimization are entangling within wellness/fitness culture, now the new “church” of Prosperity Theology. It proclaims a path away from the dread of late-stage capitalism by offering the promise of becoming so fit and able, that we will no longer be (or never become) dependent. It’s the individualistic quest to live so carefully and cleanly (in purity), that we transcend all the pain and potential sufferings that terrify us. Of course, this pursuit is for the select few–those who can afford it.

Crucial liberal critiques of this doctrine point to the need to take science seriously, account for the social determinants of health (SDH), and honor BIPOC legacies of health and medicine. Yet, as Prosperity Theology grows in wellness/fitness culture, Liberation Theology offers additional ways to interrogate wellness/fitness culture. Following the Quaker tradition of valuing questions that invite us into living the answers, I offer the following queries:

In the Politics of Jesus, Obery Hendricks argues that we must call the demon by name. How can we do a better job of calling out the presence of the SDH, which the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation reports may account for up to 80% of health outcomes, and to name disparate impacts of SDH as structural violence (as Paul Farmer does)? How might we understand wellness/fitness in the presence of this violence?

• How can the Preferential Option for the Poor, and all those who are crushed by empire, help us understand health and wellness today? How healthy are we really, if we're only as healthy as the most vulnerable and oppressed? How can they lead our efforts to communal health?

• How might the gifts of wellness/fitness be shifted away from individualistic escapes and into what Dorothee Sölle, in The Silent Cry, calls a democratic mysticism, where sacred practices that connect the body and spirit are accessible to all?

• When working with a wellness/fitness practitioner, consider how their work may support the vulnerable people. How does the practitioner respond to structural violence against people and the planet? Do they have a sliding scale approach to fees? Do they provide free community classes? Do they partner with community workers and healers? Do they support organizations advocating for systemic change? Are they advocating for healthcare for all?

• What messages around wholeness and purity are in the subtext of wellness/fitness offerings? Do the messages push a sense of deficiency or contamination? Are health, fitness, and wellness collapsed into morality? Is being well/fit portrayed as a more moral way to live?

The current trends in wellness/fitness crush health into an individual characteristic and commodify well-being as seemingly just within our grasp. By embracing that our wellness is dependent upon each other, we can understand our bodies and pains not just problems to be solved but opportunities to connect in vulnerability and gentleness as we tend to one another and organize for collective health.