Substacks

Can You Find God in a Bikini? Olivia Reingold

Published

10 months ago

September 20, 2023

About a dozen members of Secular Sabbath take a break between cold plunges at Voda Spa in West Hollywood. (All photos by Philip Cheung for The Free Press)

LOS ANGELES — A woman dressed in a kimono tiptoes between the tattooed limbs of about fifty influencers, musicians, and yogis lying on the floor of a spa in West Hollywood. They’re in the homestretch of a breathing exercise that’s lasted twenty minutes. By now they’ve become one organism, breathing to the rhythm of a jungle beat on the stereo, their stomachs rising and falling like a hive mind.

“At the end of this,” the instructor prepares the crowd, “we’re going to have the opportunity to create sound—to move what needs to be moved.”

The participants, which includes one of Demi Moore’s daughters, a DJ with face tattoos named Diablo, the singer Kesha, and “Krotchy,” a model known for her two differently colored eyes, breathe more deeply into their white robes, creating a song on top of the song with their huffing: Oh-ah, oh-ah-oh.

Then the instructor, wearing silver hoops the size of cantaloupes, gives a quick countdown: “Three, two, one.”

Suddenly everyone is screaming.

Girls arch their backs and howl up at the ceiling. When a few run out of air, they almost moan. That’s when some start to clap; others cheer. And one man breaks through with the staccato call of a dolphin.

That last sound is emanating from Diplo, the Grammy award-winning DJ, supine on the floor with one hand draped across the chest of his musician pal Rhye, who has 2.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

“I started doing some animal noises at the end,” Diplo later explains when we’re in the sauna together. “The energy was strong.”

Scout LaRue Willis meditates with foam noodles.

Welcome to Secular Sabbath, the members-only club that hosts bimonthly events, usually in Los Angeles but also in Iceland and Mexico City—and, at the end of the year, Antarctica. Colorful images of its young, beautiful (and sometimes famous) adherents have quickly spread the word of its mission on Instagram. For Genevieve Medow-Jenkins, the community’s 32-year-old founder, Secular Sabbath is a continuation of her youth spent at The Esalen Institute, a wellness retreat in Big Sur, California, which was famously portrayed in the final scenes of Mad Men.

Her parents were “bodyworkers” at Esalen, where her mother developed a new kind of massage “based on the atmosphere” and her father meditated, sometimes for days at a time. And even though she says most people raised in Big Sur never leave, she knew she had a higher calling.

“I knew that I had to share my upbringing with the world,” Medow-Jenkins tells me. “And Secular Sabbath is this chrysalis of what Esalen was in the ’90s, when I was growing up.”

She says Esalen has since become “commercialized,” selling workshops that last a few days but can cost upward of $10,000, unless you snag a “sleeping bag space” for a few hundred bucks. In 2016, she started distilling its spirit for a new audience, offering pop-up experiences at spas, Joshua Tree, and private homes. A $180 annual membership fee allows anyone to purchase a ticket to her events, which generally cost $75 to $400, and feature breathwork, cacao ceremonies, and soundbaths, often played by Rhye (real name: Michael Milosh).

Three hours into the event, there’s no mention of God, but plenty of people are feeling the love.

The purpose of her Secular Sabbath sessions is to connect her “couple hundred” members to a higher power, at a time when attendance at religious services across the country is dwindling.

“I hope that they connect with a sense of purpose, through God or something greater than just themselves in this world,” she told me.

In other words, even though Americans are increasingly giving up on church, they’re still looking for God—even in a sauna with Diplo. Medow-Jenkins, who was raised Jewish, says she rarely goes to temple now, but still finds God all around her.

“The other day, I was upset about something. And in that moment, I asked God for help,” she says. “In moments of vulnerability, it always does in some way come back to God.”

The Secular Sabbath began with a 30-minute breathwork session.

Since the 1990s, the number of Americans who describe themselves as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular” has more than doubled from 9 percent of the population to 21 percent, where it stands today. If the trend continues, Pew predicts that religious “nones” could represent a majority of the country by 2070. Part of what’s pushing people away from religion, Medow-Jenkins says, is its dogma—something that briefly soured her on Judaism when she was young.

Once, while visiting her Orthodox relatives in the Midwest, Medow-Jenkins remembers them asking her not to eat with them, because her Subway sandwich wasn’t kosher.

“It was so negative for me because it was so rule-bound,” she says. “And I knew when I created Secular Sabbath, I didn’t want it to have many rules. I wanted it to feel like you could be any version of something and still be included.”

There are no rules listed on the Secular Sabbath website. Though drugs or alcohol aren’t provided or encouraged at her sabbaths, Medow-Jenkins also says she won’t “take it away from them.” (And judging from the pure ecstasy of today’s crowd, it wouldn’t surprise me if the vibe is pharmaceutically enhanced). Her events don’t even have to occur on the Sabbath—this event, for example, is happening on a Tuesday night.

But she does try to steer clear from any connections to Western religions like Christianity, and instead borrows from Eastern traditions, because people are “more open to it.”

More than anything, she wants to dispel the idea that God is uncool.

“In American culture, we are so disconnected from feeling passionately about things—because it’s terrifying to care,” she says. “People are afraid to feel into spirituality.”

Inside the West Hollywood spa, women swaddled in robes are drawing a giant rainbow slug on a piece of paper laid out like a rug. Nearby, Juliana King, a blonde 37-year-old acupuncturist, says there was a time when the word God made her bristle.

Diplo, toweling off after a cold plunge, says Jesus is his biggest spiritual inspiration. “He was a perfect person. His ambition was to be the best person you could be.”

“I had to reclaim the word God,” she tells me, sitting by the pool, listening to Rhye, who’s ten feet in front of her humming into a microphone. “Because God felt like this man in the sky that tells you how to be, and so I was uncomfortable with the word for a long time.”

King, who has a hint of mascara smudged beneath her eyes after a cold plunge, tells me she grew up in Texas, by the Mexico border, in a small city of about 150,000 called McAllen. There, she attended a Presbyterian church.

“I technically went to church,” she says. “But it was just a place I showed up.”

Now, she says she’s a “cafeteria spiritualist” who picks and chooses which practices work for her.

“I want to find God and know God in my own way,” she says. “I don’t want anyone to tell me the quality of God or how to worship or anything, I want all that to be my own experience.”

Macy Baker with her plant symphony.

Around the corner, a woman is tending to a “plant symphony”—a group of potted ferns and succulents attached to sensors, which track the movement of water through their systems, turning it into sound. The result is like the single note of an organ ringing out, punctuated by the twinkle of a chime.

“It feels like a natural high,” says the woman, who is wrapped in a spa robe, her light hair draped across her shoulders.

She tells me her name is Macy Baker, and she says ten years ago, when she was 18, she probably would’ve been at a bar by now, but the beauty of Secular Sabbath is it gives attendees an alternative to booze.

“I feel like we’ve put a lot of emphasis into unconsciousness, with alcohol and drugs and things, to ensure that we stay lost,” she says. “Like people could be out at bars, and instead they’re here at a spa, listening to plants generate music and doing breathwork and sipping cacao. How awesome is that?”

Then Baker meets my eyes in the dim light: “But now, we’re in this new great awakening.”

Three hours into the evening, there’s been no mention of God in the official programming. It feels more like Coachella than church. A brunette chases a man into the hot tub, asking, “Are you my soulmate?” Over in the pool, Scout LaRue Willis is floating atop six foam noodles, meditating with her eyes closed. A crowd in the steam room, led by Rhye, is singing variations of one line for thirty minutes: “Somebody to love.” They’re all drinking canned water, which one man describes as “magic.”

“This is, like, take off the clothes of your day and be more you,” says Tamara Rodriguez.

Tamara Rodriguez, a 33-year-old actress who was born in Mexico, watches the scene as she dangles her feet in the water. She says she knows how this all looks.

“Oh, these are just some Hollywood kids living their yoga life,” she imagines a stranger might say.

Hell, she even thought that when she came to her first Secular Sabbath, held at Joshua Tree. But then she dispensed with her judgment when she realized how good it all felt.

“The first time I saw pictures of this, I was like, mostly everyone is white, so you’re like, ‘What is this yogi community that’s trying to create—some sort of cool kids club?’ But then you go into it with an open mind and see through it.”

Now, she says, she considers Secular Sabbath a “church,” but the kind where no one has to say anything specific or meet a certain dress code to belong. In some ways, it’s similar to Hillsong, the evangelical megachurch in Hollywood that once attracted Justin Bieber, Kevin Durant, and Kylie Jenner with its emphasis on rock music and a party atmosphere. Although that movement died down after its pastor became the subject of multiple scandals, including cheating on his wife, its lesson prevails: people will come to church, if it’s a place to be seen.

“This is, like, take off the clothes of your day and be more you,” Rodriguez added. “Be more human, authentic, so you can return to the world and something more truthful to you.”

DJ Diablo, front and center, prepares to scream with the crowd.

Back in the sauna, I’m sitting in the dark on a wooden bench with Diplo, who is still in his khakis, Crocs, and t-shirt. He tells me that he grew up attending an Episcopal church back home in Daytona Beach, Florida, when he was still known as Thomas Wesley Pentz, and even now, at 44, he looks to Jesus Christ as an inspiration.

“He was a perfect person. He was kind. His ambition was to be the best person you could be.”

Since his mom and sister passed away recently, he says he’s been back in church. But he doesn’t believe God can be found only there.

“Everyday is church for me,” he tells me. “I’m always like, at the club”—then he cocks his head to think. “That is the church because people go there to deal with their problems.”

He adds: “Anything that makes you feel like you’re celebrating life is a church.”

Olivia Reingold is a writer for The Free Press. Read her dispatch from the Asbury Revival, “Why Students in Kentucky Have Been Praying for 250 Hours.”

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Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

9 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Substacks

TGIF: The Week Unburdened by the Week That Has Been Suzy Weiss

Published

16 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Pro-Palestinian protesters gather outside of Union Station to protest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States. (Probal Rashid via Getty Images)

Oh, no, it’s the sister again, for another slow news week. Let’s get to it.

→ Biden dropped out: Six years ago emotionally, but technically this past Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. He did it via X and promptly threw his support (and cash) behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Then he got Covid and hunkered down in Delaware—or depending on what hooch you’ve been drinking, died and was reanimated so he could appear before the cameras on Wednesday to address the nation. Joe’s family, including Hunter, sat along the wall of the Oval Office as he spoke. The president talked about the cancer moonshot, ending the war in Gaza, putting the party over himself, and Kamala’s tenacity, as Kamala’s pistol dug ever-so-slightly harder into his back. Right after, Jill, the First Lady of passive aggression, who apparently wanted to outdo her heart emoji, tweeted a handwritten note “to those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed.” I respect a First Lady who stands by her man and her energetic stepson. A First Lady who sees the high road way up there and says to herself, “If they want us out of here so bad, they can clean out the fridge and strip the beds themselves!”

→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way—and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant—that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.

That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened but what has been”—as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.

And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.

Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool.”

→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk Boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-11. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe. . . well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story.” The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.

Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the Boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

20 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Momentum continues to build behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and the national narrative as a whole has shifted.

Democrats appear to be generating significant enthusiasm among younger Americans. Yesterday, for the first time in their history, the March for Our Lives organization endorsed a presidential candidate: Kamala Harris. Students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, organized March for Our Lives after the shooting there in 2018. Executive director Natalie Fall said that the organization “will work to mobilize young people across the country to support Vice President Harris and other down-ballot candidates, with a particular focus on the states and races where we can make up the margin of victory—in Arizona, New York, Michigan, and Florida.”

Andrea Hailey of Vote.org announced that in the 48 hours after President Biden said he would not accept the Democratic nomination, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote. That meant a daily increase in new registrations of almost 700%.

People are turning out for Harris in impressive numbers. In the hours after she launched her campaign, Win With Black Women rallied 44,000 Black women on Zoom and raised $1.6 million. On Monday, around 20,000 Black men rallied to raise $1.2 million. Tonight, challenged to “answer the call,” 164,000 white women joined an event that “broke Zoom” and raised more than $2 million and tens of thousands of new volunteers.

Another significant endorsement for Harris came yesterday from Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, who wrote on social media: “I’m committed to beating Donald Trump. The only vehicle left for me to do that with is the Democratic Party. If that requires me to vote for, speak for, or endorse [Kamala Harris] then count me in!” Duncan’s public announcement offers permission for other Georgia Republicans to make a similar shift. In 1964, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond similarly paved the way for southern Democrats to vote for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Harris’s appearances are generating such enthusiasm from audiences that when she delivered the keynote address this morning at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, Texas, the applause delayed her ability to begin. After a speech defending education and calling out the cuts to it in Project 2025, Harris ended by demonstrating that after decades of Democrats being accused of being anti-American, Trump’s denigration of the country has enabled the party to claim the position of being America’s defenders.

“When we vote, we make our voices heard,” Harris said. “So today, I ask you, AFT, are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight, we win! God bless you and God bless the United States of America.”

Today the Commerce Department reported that economic growth in the second quarter was higher than expected, coming in at 2.8%, thanks to higher spending driven by higher wages. The country’s changing momentum is showing in media stories hyping the booming economy Biden’s team tried for years to get traction on. “Full Employment is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” was the title of a story by Zachary Carter that appeared yesterday in Slate; CNN responded to today’s good economic news with an article by Bryan Mena titled: “The US economy is pulling off something historic.”

With Harris appearing to have sewn up the nomination, the question has turned to her vice presidential pick. That question is fueling the sense of excitement as potential choices are in front of cameras and on social media advocating Democratic positions and defending the United States from Trump’s denigration. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro listed the economic gains of the past years, and said: “Trump, you’ve got to stop sh*t talking America. We’ve got to start standing tall and being patriotic and showing how much we love this amazing nation.”

The vice presidential hopefuls appear to be having some fun with showcasing their personalities, as Minnesota governor Tim Walz did in his video from the Minnesota State Fair where he and his daughter went on an extreme ride. So are social media users who have dug up old videos of, for example, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explaining how he would pilot a small starfighter that had lost its auxiliary shields, or Arizona senator Mark Kelly’s identical twin brother Scott pranking a fellow astronaut on the Space Station with a gorilla suit Mark smuggled on board.

That sense of fun is an enormous relief after years of political weight, and it has spilled over into making fun of the Republican ticket, most notably with a false story that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance wrote about—and I cannot believe I am typing this—having sex with a couch. The story is stupid, but worse are the denials of it, which have spread the story into populations that otherwise would likely not have seen it.

Just two weeks ago, Vance appeared to be the leader of the next generation of extremist MAGA Republicans, but now that calculation seems to have been hasty. Vance is a staunch opponent of abortion—the key issue in 2024—and he has been vocal in his disdain of women who have not given birth, saying in 2021, for example, that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to say that people who don’t have children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.

Republican commentator Meghan McCain noted that Vance’s “comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian.” Actor Jennifer Aniston, who tends to stay out of politics, posted: “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States.” Vance had called out Harris by name in those 2021 comments, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff took to social media to defend Harris from Vance’s attacks on her as “childless,” calling her “a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” Harris’s stepdaughter chimed in: “I love my three parents.”

Vance also ties the Republican ticket firmly to Project 2025. The Trump camp has worked to distance itself from Project 2025—not convincingly, since the two are obviously closely tied, but it turns out that Vance wrote the introduction for a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who was the lead author of Project 2025. The book appears to popularize that plan, right down to its endorsement of a “Second American Revolution,” and according to the book deal report, proceeds from the book will go to the Heritage Foundation “and aligned nonprofits.”

Now Vance’s words praising Project 2025 will be in print, just in time for the election. Yesterday, Trump posted: “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25 [sic]. The fact that I do is merely disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs. Do not believe them!”

Trump is clearly aware of, and concerned about, the changing narrative. This morning, he called in to Fox & Friends, saying, “We don’t need the votes. I have so many votes. I’m in Florida now…and every house has a Trump-Vance sign on it. Every single house…. It’s amazing the spirit…. This election has more spirit than I’ve ever seen ever before.” Tonight the Trump campaign proved their worry by backing out of debates with Harris, saying debates can’t be scheduled until she is the official nominee, although Biden was not the official nominee when they met in June.

The larger narrative shift has affected the media approach to Trump, who is accustomed to shaping perceptions as he wishes. Now, 12 days after the mass shooting at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, there is increasing media attention to the fact that there has still been no medical report on Trump’s injuries, although he wore a large bandage on his ear at the Republican National Convention and said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday that he “took a bullet for democracy.”

Yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that it is not clear whether Trump was “grazed” by a bullet or by shrapnel, words that former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance called “FBI speak for, ‘it’s unlikely it was a bullet.’”

CNN chief medical consultant Dr. Sanjay Gupta noted last week that the people need a real medical evaluation of Trump’s injuries, explaining that “gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren’t immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma.” But, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has noted, much of the press has kept mum about the story.

Media outlets have reported Wray’s testimony, though, and in a social media post today, Trump called on Wray, whom he appointed to head the FBI, to resign from his post for “LYING TO CONGRESS.” Tonight, he reiterated that “it was…a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard.”

Perhaps eager to get back to their districts, House Republicans canceled their expected votes on appropriations bills scheduled for next week and left town today for their August recess. The House will not reconvene until early September. The government’s fiscal year 2025 begins on October 1.

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/opinion/trump-lies-charts-data.html

https://marchforourlives.org/in-a-first-ever-endorsement-march-for-our-lives-endorses-kamala-harris-for-president/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-economic-growth-regains-steam-second-quarter-inflation-slows-2024-07-25/

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/biden-economy-employment-inflation.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/entertainment/jennifer-aniston-jd-vance/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/economy/us-economy-gdp-second-quarter/index.html

https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/jd-vance-wrote-foreword-book-project-2025-architect-kevin-roberts-and-proceeds

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-might-not-shot-1930037

https://people.com/was-trump-struck-by-bullet-or-shrapnel-fbi-director-testifies-8683340

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-wants-fbi-director-resign-immediately-chris-wray-rcna163641