This website stores cookies on your computer. These cookies are used to collect information about how you interact with our website and allow us to remember your browser. We use this information to improve and customize your browsing experience, for analytics and metrics about our visitors both on this website and other media, and for marketing purposes. By using this website, you accept and agree to be bound by UVic’s Terms of Use for web and social media privacy.  If you do not agree to the above, you can configure your browser’s setting to “do not track.”

Skip to main content
People Departments Maps Buildings Rooms A-Z
University
of Victoria
Apply Library
Sign in Online tools Sign out
Faculty of Graduate Studies

Leah Mernaugh Bergman

  • M.Sc. (University of Leuven, 2020)
  • B.A. (Seattle Pacific University, 2017)
Notice of the Final Oral Examination for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Topic

Embodied Evangelicals: Modernity, Authority, and Christian Yoga

Department of Anthropology

Date & location

  • Monday, August 24, 2026
  • 1:00 P.M.
  • Clearihue Building, Room B007

Examining Committee

Supervisory Committee

  • Dr. Daromir Rudnyckyj, Department of Anthropology, University of Victoria (Co-Supervisor)
  • Dr. Paul Bramadat, Department of History, UVic (Co-Supervisor)
  • Dr. Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, Department of Anthropology, UVic (Member)

External Examiner

  • Dr. James Bielo, Department of Religious Studies, Northwestern University

Chair of Oral Examination

  • Dr. Rachel Cleves, Department of History, UVic

Abstract

Yoga, despite being controversial within many evangelical churches, has nonetheless been embraced as a meaningful practice among groups of North American Christians. Based on ethnographic research in British Columbia, Canada, this dissertation explores a group of evangelicals who adopt and adapt the practice of yoga not only as a form of holistic wellness, but also as a Christian devotional practice. Christian Yoga both demonstrates a commitment to evangelical authority and offers a critique of contemporary evangelicalism, which is seen has not having adequately integrated the body into spiritual life.

Christian Yoga practitioners are a kind of embodied evangelicals: evangelicals who have grown tired of the fast-paced world in which they live and worship and are open to ways of engaging their Christian faith holistically. For the embodied evangelicals in my research, Christian Yoga enables a sense of repair, both to a ruptured self and to the perceived ruptures in modern Christian practice more broadly.

Because evangelicals, unlike their liberal Christian counterparts, value religious exclusivity, yoga’s entanglements with Hinduism and New Age spirituality must be accounted for. Using the metaphor of a “solvent of secularism,” I argue that yoga first becomes universalized through the secularizing language of science, psychology, and philosophy in order to be adapted into a Christian framework. Science becomes part of the discourse that authorizes a Christianized yoga. At the same time, just as Christian Yoga practitioners are evangelical subjects who are critiquing evangelicalism, they are also modern subjects who are critiquing aspects of modern science and healthcare.

Throughout, this study takes up and expands upon the argument that evangelicals in North America are "in this world but not of it,” modern subjects who also self-consciously critique aspects of modernity. The case study of Christian Yoga reveals the ways evangelicals must negotiate multiple authoritative voices. Using the model of an evangelical “nexus of authority,” I argue that evangelicals must navigate their religious subjectivity in relation to three primary sources of authority: religious authority, secular authority, and authority of the self. The particular issues around yoga taken up in this dissertation highlight the tensions that arise at their intersections, as well as the authorizing discourses (Asad 2003) that are employed to resolve them.

Back to oral exams